Also continuing with paranormal things a few years ago my mom, me, and I think my two younger siblings were headed to school on morning and then we seen a green flare thing in the sky. Like it was a pretty green thing that look very close. We just assumed it was nothing. Well says after we find out that multiple people across the country had seen it. And then people were saying "it probably was a flare" but come on. If we seen it in Louisiana and it looked very close how did someone in like Wyoming see it and think the same thing??
Hello! I have learned so much from your blog and the resources you’ve provided. Thank you for maintaining this space. For a while, I’ve been grappling with belief or faith in the existence of deities, spirits, and other spiritual beings. If it’s not too intrusive or personal, could you share any examples of supernatural occurrences that really demonstrated to you: wow, these things are really real? I apologize if my request is inappropriate or poorly phrased. I’m just searching for answers.
Hello!
I’m glad you have found the blog helpful–beyond just writing about my own experiences, that’s kinda been the whole point!
Faith is a hard thing. There’s no easy on and off switch and we can’t just have it transplanted into us or magically just show up. It’s something I struggled with for a long time because I am a natural skeptic and sometimes a bit of a pessimistic skeptic. I had to learn for myself that faith was a muscle that I needed to exercise to make it work. I think that’s a hard thing, especially in a world and (often) culture that has us explicitly or implicitly looking for proof of things that can often be unseen.
How I worked through a lot of that for myself was really ‘fake it ‘til you make it’. I acted as if things were of course absolutely one hundred percent as real as the person sitting next to me on the Subway, and, for me, that opened a door for those things to really manifest. Like, I am stubborn and I decided to be stubborn in that way and it worked for me. It was like I was meeting the spirits at least halfway and it gave them something to work with. For me, it worked. The spirits sort of kicked that door in and here we are. YMMV, of course, but really looking at things with open eyes can show you what there is to see. We often say in the religion that Ginen is open for all those who have eyes to see it….a lot of starting out in Vodou is learning how to see.
I am always happy to share a good story. Sharing makes me happy because it fulfills my idealistic desire to give people what was and continues to be given to me: when I was just starting out, people spent hours telling me stories about how they came to be where they were with their spirits. Now stories teach me specific things about the nature of spirits, the nature of spiritual work, and how I operate as a priest. Story-telling is a huge way we learn things in Vodou, since it is a primarily orally-passed religion, and it is how we connect with each other and form bonds.
On the other hand, stories can be incredibly personal, and some of the meaning of stories can get lost without personal context, so don’t hold what I say as the be all end all of faith. That being said, the faith I have developed in my spirits over time has become the foundation for my life and I hope it can give a little hope to others.
On with the stories! Not all are distinctly Vodou-related, but most are. Have three:
When I was a small child (no more than 5 or 6), I had a nightmare that I woke up screaming from. I had it a few times, but it stuck with me. I don’t have a lot of clear memories of my childhood, but I have always remembered this dream:
I was playing in the backyard of the house I grew up in and my father was doing yard work. Behind a sort of stone platform was this grinning skeleton who looked at me and laughed, and that terrified me because I was young and scared of scary things. My father was near me, and all of a sudden, the skeleton took out a gun and shot him in the stomach. I watched the blood spread on my dad’s tshirt and he asked me to go and get him a fresh tshirt to wear (normal request for him).
I woke up absolutely terrified from this and it stuck with me basically forever, without me thinking much more of it….until a fete just before I went to Haiti the first time. It was a fet Kouzen and Gede showed up randomly while Kouzen was eating, and I was tending to Gede.
All of a sudden I had this world-crashing-on-my-head moment of clarity and I looked at Gede and said ‘it was you in the dream, wasn’t it’. He started cackling and patted my cheek and told me I had always been his child. Gede had protected/saved me from my father, who has never been a good person. He watched over me while I was small and kept me as safe as was possible.
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For a long time, I worked third shift in various human services settings. At one program, I worked with a co-worker who I came to know pretty well, and we had a good rhythm to our shifts: for the first four hours, I sat upstairs monitoring the clients while they slept, and she stayed downstairs. We would switch halfway through the night.
One night, I am sitting upstairs and everything is quiet. Co-worker is napping, I am reading, clients are all asleep. All of a sudden, there is this enormous, deafening crash down in the kitchen. I call down and ask my coworker if that was her and if she was okay, she says it was not her and goes to investigate. Nothing is out of place, except a locked cabinet that she left locked was now unlocked and wide open. I didn’t unlock it, she didn’t unlock it, and she is freaked out.
When I come downstairs for a moment, we hear footsteps on the opposite side of the house (same floor) that we are on, but there is no one there--we can see where we hear it. At this point, every light on the first floor is on and we have checked every door and window on the first floor. They’re all locked. More strange sounds and coworker is very unhappy. She’s from a traditional culture and is on the phone with her sister in her home country talking about how to cast the devil out.
We switch spots for the night, and I go to take a nap on one of the couches in one of the living rooms. It’s post 3AM and as I am falling asleep, I am jolted away by a creepy male voice in my ear and breath on my cheek saying ‘are you ready?’. I leap off the fucking couch and flip on the light, and there is no one there (of course). Like, I am not easily frightened but I expected to turn the lights on and find a man with a knife standing over me. What’s worse is that I could feel the presence of a gross man. I lay there the rest of the night with the lights on.
Around 5:30AM, the first person for the day shift came in. She usually left us alone and had her coffee another room. At about 6AM, I hear what sounds like one of the clients overexuberantly crashing down the stairs. It’s too early for them to be downstairs, so I go to investigate...no client to be found, early coworker saw no client, and upstairs coworker confirms no client is out of their bed. Everyone heard it, but we have no idea where it came from.
As I am crossing the landing at the bottom of the stairs, I can feel someone looking down on me from the landing above where the stairs turn, and, out of the corner of my eye, I see a large dark figure. Of course when I turn to look, there is no one there...but this huge sense of malice was sort of hovering and I know for a fact, if I had been coming down those stairs right then, I would have fallen and broken my leg.
Early coworker confirmed that she thought the place was haunted like a motherfucker, and talked about the shadowy figure she has seen and the fact that any clients that were placed in one of the back bedrooms always went a little nuts, because there was something definitively wrong with that bedroom.
I went back the next night and had a ‘look, motherfucker’ conversation with Mr. Murder and told him that if he didn’t leave me alone, I would evict him and it would not be fun. I had no more problems there, really, but it shook me up because it was so tangible and so damn nasty.
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When I was preparing for kanzo, a lot of unexpected things happened including me packing to leave my apartment the day before I left for Haiti. It sucked quite a bit, but it was definitely for a reason and I don’t regret it.
It was about 1AM the night before I was scheduled to leave, and I had spent the day bringing stuff over to a friend’s house since I was using their basement as free storage. I realized that I had not brought any of my clothes over to storage. Like, two giant garbage bags sitting in my room full of all the clothes I was not taking, and I nearly had a breakdown. I had sold my car that same day, and I had to get across the city with very little cash and two giant contractor bags full of clothes. I called a cab, and it never showed and so I sat on the curb outside my apartment trying not to cry, and I called an Uber.
Happily, the Uber came. A cute little silver car pulled up, and out jumped a Haitian man dressed in jeans and a blue plaid shirt. He grabbed my two giant bags like they were nothing, tossed them in the trunk, and away we went. We chitchatted and I told him I was going to Haiti the next day, and he was SO EXCITED, particularly when I told him I was going to Jacmel...because that’s where he was from! He kept saying over and over, ‘oh, you are going to have a great trip..it will be just what you need!’.
When we got to my destination, he grabbed these two giant heavy bags of clothes and basically levitated them up the stairs to the front door of the house I was dropping them off at. Big grin and superhuman strength, and I knew Kouzen (who comes from Jacmel and wears denim and blue and plaid) had come to rescue me.
