After last week's encounter with Daniel Boone, I wasn't really sure where to go next. Do I keep working through the list of Kentucky properties that were suggested to me? Is this whole project really about my own ancestral healing and education? I wasn't really sure so I decided to wait and see where I was pointed next rather than push forward with my own agenda.
And I didn't have to wait long.
This week's message isn't a story from the land, per se, but I realized it needed to be written. Through a series of unexpected events this week, the light bulb over my head went off. What happens when we move to a home or piece of land and then realize that it isn't the right fit for us? Or worse, the spirits of the land (or something else) really doesn't want us there?
What happens when you begin to ask yourself…Is my house haunted?
On occasion, I'm given the opportunity during a property reading to do some energetic cleanup of ghosts and the like, but I typically deal more with what's happening energetically on the land and that may or may not resolve an issue that humans are experiencing.
There are so many different possible energies present in the place that you live. And in shamanic terms, we live in the Middle World. The Upper World is the angelic realm and also where you find spirits (including family members) who have crossed over. In other words, they are your healthy ancestors. In the Lower World, you'll find earth and animal spirits or your animal totems. There is much guidance and wisdom available in these two worlds.
The Middle World can be a little more confusing. It's our physical plane, along with the spirit plane kind of sitting on top, or intertwined with the physical world.
Spirits who haven't properly transitioned are here, along with lots of plant and earth spirits, the keeper of the land and any number of other entities and energies.
I'm not trying to scare you off here. To be honest, I have a very specific protocol for how I protect my energy and interact in the Middle world, since that's where I do most of my spiritual work. I can typically detect whether something communicating with me is “healthy” or not and if there is something “not so nice” going on, a spirit who is friendly and helpful can usually give me the details without my needing to interact directly with that energy.
So, I'm prefacing this week's story with these details to let you know that you don't just want to call in whatever energy is present in an area and start asking questions. Energy hygiene is important for this kind of work. Okay? Okay.
So….on with the story!
Earlier this week, a friend of mine asked me to tag along to visit a few houses she was looking at to rent. Although she had already seen them, she basically wanted me to check out the vibe of each place and let her know if anything was odd. I'll also say that she's slightly suspicious of my “abilities” but clearly trusts them enough to count on me to help her find a good place to live. Plus, I love looking at houses so I'm always up for this kind of excursion.
We head out to the first place and it's literally lake front property. I mean….I would never get anything done if I lived in this house because I would just sit and look out the window all day. It's that stunning.
But it was also the most affordable place she was looking at. And that seemed strange.
So we make our way down the ridiculously narrow, rutted and steep driveway and I'm already not feeling good about it. Never mind the spirits, who the heck is going to want to plow this driveway all winter?! And if it's icy? Forget about it.
We pull up to the house, hop out of the car and I realize that there is a huge waterfall right next to the driveway. As in, there is so much water naturally coming down from above this property, that at some point someone had turned it into a water feature. It looked beautiful, but from an energy standpoint, this is a whole bunch of water flowing right towards the house, under the driveway and out to the lake. However, it didn't seem to be directed straight at the house itself so I kind of forgot about it when we went inside.
The inside of the house LOOKED beautiful, but it didn't FEEL beautiful. And that's always a strange thing. You feel like you want to say “What a beautiful home!” but you can't. Something is off.
By the time we got upstairs, I realized something was really wrong. I finally said, “I feel like I have vertigo, do you feel that?”
I stood still for a few minutes and couldn't identify exactly what it was, but I'm going to say that it felt like it was related to all of that moving water. I was loopy and woozy and really just wanted to get out of there.
The feeling lasted for probably 10 more minutes after we left. It was really strong. My friend felt it too, but I'm not sure she would have trusted her own intuition. I mean….it was a beautiful, affordable lake house.
But I'm going to guess that everyone feels it. That's why it's affordable. The owners are likely having a very hard time renting it because people know that something doesn't “feel” right about it. And when energy like that makes you feel that physically weird in just 15 minutes, just imagine how you'll feel if you live there. And trying to sleep there every night? That would be a nightmare.
But people ignore their intuition all the time, especially when it comes to beautiful homes or properties.
And that fact was underscored to me the very next day.
On Tuesday, Election Day, I went to vote at our precinct a few miles away. It's actually not the correct precinct for us, but after three years of attempting to change our address with the county (trust me, we've tried everything), they cannot seem to get it corrected, so we still vote at the little school around the corner from the house we rented when we first moved to Montana five years ago.
Since moving out of that house, I haven't had any need to be in the neighborhood, so I haven't driven by. But I had a little extra time after voting and decided to swing by and see how it looked.
That was the house and the neighborhood I was in when I started learning so much about working with nature spirits and the spirits of the land and where I lived when I started this blog.
I learned a lot while living there, but towards the end, it was clear that it was time to go and the spirits there were sending us on our way.
While we were renting the house, it had been on the market for nearly a year with no takers. It was a large and lovely home on nearly an acre, immediately across the road from a lake. But the trees were thick and tall. There was no lake view from the house and the entire house and property never received any sunshine. I struggled to keep any plants alive and winters were pretty depressing and dark. I had to leave the house to see the sun.
Towards the end of that year, a woman came to see the house multiple times and seemed especially interested in purchasing it. On one of her visits, she told us she thought the property would be perfect for her horses.
Horses?!
We were horrified. Plants didn't like to grow there, horses would definitely not be a good idea. And we told her so. The back of that property was so shaded, her horses were likely going to stand up to their knees in snow all winter and mud in the spring and fall. This was not the place for horses. But she was undeterred.
The whole move out of that place was traumatic – our rental company didn't give us proper notice of when we needed to leave and the new owner threatened to sue them if we didn't get out on her schedule. We couldn't get into our new rental until the day she was scheduled to close, so we had like 24 hours to move. In a snowstorm. It was a disaster.
But what did I see when driving by this house for the first time since we moved out nearly three years ago?
A For Sale sign. Seriously.
I looked the listing up online and she's asking nearly $250k more than she bought it for. Yeah, good luck with that.
She could be selling it for any number of reasons, but I'm just going to go out on a limb and say that her horses are probably miserable. The listing even mentions the canopy of trees and how “shady and cool” it is in the summer months. Yeah, well….we only have two summer months here in Northwest Montana. The other 10, you'd really like to see some sunshine. So I can guess what the problem is.
But in her case she ignored it. And less than three short years later is hoping someone else will take her problem off her hands. Maybe she'll get lucky and find someone with a whole bunch of money who loves living in the dark. Stranger things have happened I suppose.
What's funny though, is that in our frenzy to find a place to live on a short schedule on a holiday week, is that we ended up (knowingly) moving into a haunted house.
That place was straight up full of ghosts. There also seemed to be some kind of portal on the stairwell too.
But I knew it when I drove past it from the street. It looked a little spooky. And when we went to see it, I could feel the ghosts in the upstairs bedrooms. Ghosts, to me, feel like a buzzing energy in my stomach. But they didn't feel particularly bad and we needed a place to live, now, so I didn't worry about it.
As it turns out, it was mostly ghost children that lived up there. They played a lot of games with the cat, who seemed entertained by them, and we didn't use that space much so we all kind of minded our own business (remember how I said the spirit plane is kind of layered on top of the physical plane?). That's how that works sometimes.
But the house was energetically noisy. And often actually noisy. Things going bump in the night, footsteps up and down stairs, that kind of thing. I didn't realize when that landlord called 8 months later so say that she wanted to move back into the house and we needed to move out how energetically frayed my nerves were. Moving into a “quiet” house after that one was a welcome break.
Plus, my husband had fallen down the stairs to the basement three times in the last few months we were there.
Strange things were happening and it was time to go.
However, as I cleaned out the last of the items upstairs and I was sweeping the floor to leave, one of the little children up there ran up to me and asked where I was going. Time for me to go, I said. And he was confused.
I had given the spirits living there the opportunity to cross over in the months that we were there and they weren't interested. They weren't bothering me (much) so I didn't push. But my leaving seemed to change this one's mind. He was suddenly interested and so I (and my guides) helped him out, while I stood in the empty hallway, broom in hand. I'd like to think that it was one good deed accomplished while living there. A little energetic house cleaning in a house they had all been allowed to live in for so long. But I was happy to move on.
So why am I sharing these stories with you now?
Because when I asked you all to share land who may have a story to tell, many of you wrote to tell me that you have “problem” properties. Land where plants won't grow or you tried to live and couldn't. Unwelcoming energy or spirits who have chased people away.
So now what? What do you if you think your house is haunted?
Let me preface all of this by saying, please, when you're looking at homes and property, use your intuition. I promise that if you take a few minutes to be quiet in any home, you'll know if something feels strange about it.
You know how they say, “When you find the right house, you'll know it”? Well the opposite is true too…when you've found the wrong house, you'll also know it. Don't ignore your intuition. I don't care if it is lakefront property with a dock. You might not be able to fix it. It might not be your job to fix it. It might not want to be fixed.
And then you're screwed.
I mean, maybe not, but it's going to be a real pain in your ass to resolve because resolution might just be that you've got to move out. As is the case with all that water energy at that lake house, it is doing an important job. And it's already been tampered with to “manage” and direct it. You can't just decide that it's problematic for you and that you're going to fix it. It's part of a much larger spiritual landscape that will be affected by your actions.
Let's go through some of the things that could be happening in your home and on your land and what you may or may not be able to do. This is nowhere near a complete or exhaustive list and in many cases, there's more than one thing happening (like ghosts AND a portal in that house we were living in).
First up, ghosts.
In general, this is one of the simpler issues and one you're more likely to be able to resolve. A ghost (typically) is a person who died but for some reason or another has not crossed over into the light. Most of them are harmless and confused and don't realized that they've passed on. They're still in the same place as they were in life, doing the same activities.
Why?? Because our culture, by and large, does not have a process for dealing with the dead. We don't want to let them go, we don't understand how and why it's important for them to go and we're not taught what we need to do when it's our time to go. But that's another subject for another day.
In this context, if you've got a ghost (or two or 100), it is compassionate work to help them transition. It's referred to as psychopomp work if you want to do more research on the subject or find someone to help you with this.
Furthermore, if you have an unused space in your home or shed or garage or basement, it's a likely place for them to gather. That's why dark basements are spooky. Yes, it's likely there are ghosts throwing a party down there.
Because nobody told them they weren't allowed to do it.
So at the very least, you need to claim your home and the buildings on your property. Especially sheds and garages and barns. That's usually where I find ghost parties going down when I do readings. Open everything up. Let some light in. Try to clear out clutter if it's a mess and hasn't been cleaned up in years. Burn some sage. Set boundaries and let anything hanging around know that they don't have to go home, but they can't stay here. This is your home now.
Not every ghost is confused. Some believe they have a purpose and they don't want you getting in the way. And they certainly are not interested in crossing over. It will likely take someone who specializes in this work some time to work with a spirit like this. I once encountered the founder of a town I used to live in and he was MAD about how some things had worked out in his life. And he was not going to let go of this town or his anger easily.
I pushed the issue with him because his behavior was detrimentally affecting an entire community of people, but it took me about a month (off and on) to convince him and I had two different people help me out to make sure I was understanding what was going on and that I had permission to intervene in the first place.
So, if you're not sure what you're dealing with, start with boundaries and sage and see if that fixes your problem. You may need to do it a few times and then keep it up on a semi-regular basis. Get help if you need it.
Now, onto the spirits present on the land.
This is where I spend most of my time and I have written plenty of posts about my experiences. However, if you are having an issue of some kind with the land itself, it can be any number of things, but I don't typically find these spirits to be very problematic. They're either working with you, or ignoring you, but not usually against you.
Where I tend to find issues is with residual trauma on the land, especially if there were native people separated from the land in the area. There's no “one size fits all” resolution to trauma. I typically ask my guides if it's something I have permission to heal and if so, how I am to do it.
One time, I found a Chief who had energetically separated his people from the land hundreds of years ago. It's like there were two simultaneous timelines happening on this piece of land and the current-day people could sense an issue and felt that there was an angry native spirit present. But really, he just didn't want his people to be harmed and so they were in a different dimension at the same place. So yeah, it felt weird there.
The Chief actually wanted to reintegrate everything and there was some healing work that needed to be done, but he and his people wanted to do the work. They wanted me to hold space and bear witness. So I did, and it was beautiful to see. But it wasn't my job to just “fix it”, which is why it's so important to ask questions before doing any spiritual work.
And finally, there are the actual energies of the earth.
Grid lines, water lines, portals, vortexes, and the like. These are the most difficult to make adjustments to because they are doing important work for the earth and all of us living on it.
I have (with permission) moved a portal that's acting like a drain underneath an office I used to work in at least five times. But it doesn't really want to be anywhere else. It tells me I can move it, but then keeps moving back. I finally had to stop working there because I couldn't deal with the energy. Plus, it's hard to find a nearby location to move something like that where it won't have some other kind of detrimental affect.
One time I did a reading and there was a house on top of a vortex and I asked the keeper of the land what we could do about it. It said….move the house! And then laughed. Very funny. It knew the house couldn't be moved, but it was also making a point.
Humans don't like how it feels to live in a vortex? Don't put a house on top of a vortex, then.
Yeah. Got it. Thanks.
This is why it's so important to use your intuition when house or property hunting. Other people before us have made some big mistakes when selecting house locations and we don't want to inherit that problem. There are plenty of things that real estate agents have to disclose when listing a house, but the fact that people feel dizzy in that one back bedroom isn't one of them. And that's a good sign that there may be something going on underneath the house.
A vortex on a piece of property? Fine. Let it do it's job and leave it alone. A house on top of a vortex? Things just got a lot more challenging.
Water is also super tricky like that. It needs to be allowed to flow properly. And if that includes into your basement, you're not going to like it. And your remedies to keep your basement dry aren't going to make the water spirits happy.
The earth energies have a way of resolving their own issues so again, unless I'm asked to do some specific energy work to assist them (because frankly, they're pretty annoyed with us humans when we ignore the work they're doing), it's not a good idea for us to decide that we need to mitigate or move an element to improve our personal situation.
So what can you do if you're in that situation?
Ask the Keepers of the Land. Or ask me to ask them. Even in the case of the house on top of the vortex, the spirits suggested some work that could be done by the homeowners to mitigate the issues they were having. Sometimes it's just as simple as asking the energy if it's possible to still accomplish it's work by shifting slightly to another location. And sometimes it says…sure, no problem, thanks for asking!
Sometimes it just wants to be honored or recognized or appreciated for its work and then it will work with you. It's not all impossible, but this is why we need to remember that we are not the only ones on the land and we need to treat the energies present with reverence and not seek to impose our will, thinking that it won't have any consequences.
For those of you who have sent me notes about problematic properties to tell their stories, I'm working my way through the list. I typically attempt to get a quick read when I first receive an email to see if there is any information I can give you right away that could be helpful.
If you feel you are being significantly and negatively affected in a home or on land, like repeated illnesses or injuries, or feel like you are in danger somehow, please get yourself out of the home and reach out for assistance. Depending on what exactly is happening, I may be able to offer energetic work and/or refer you to another healer that can help your specific situation.
For instance, if your issue is related to an attachment spirit or ancestral karma, my working with the Spirits of the Land won't resolve the issue. But there are many healers that specialize in that work and between us, we can help you identify the root of the problem.
Remember that this is a ongoing education for me too. The more of this work I do, the more I learn and understand. What I have learned is the importance of understanding that we are a part of the natural world and not separate from it. Once we grasp that, it's easier to see how some of these issues have come to be and how we can (or can't) resolve them.
