death

Glimpse of a Reaper

~ Tara Theresa Hill ~ 2 Comments

One of the things that bothers me about being psychic is the inability to control it or the type of information that I receive. I am not a psychic consultant or spiritual practitioner like my mother who makes her living from her abilities, so in many cases, the information just gets dumped into my head without much warning. Perhaps this is something every person with psychic abilities deals with.

I have had premonitions of death before. I knew that there was something wrong with my Grandfather months before he started showing any signs of illness. Loved ones have visited me in dreams to tell me that they are getting ready to pass. Again, I have no control over this. Sometimes I get messages and sometimes I don’t. It’s as simple as that.

Years ago, I was doing the dishes while my husband was taking care of our sick canary, Tweety. As I was running the water over my hands, I got an image of Tweety dying. I started to shake it off, only to hear my husband scream out the bird’s name from the other room. I dropped the dish I was washing, turned the water off, and ran into our living room. Tweety had passed away in my husband’s hands.

Over the past six months, I had started to worry about our pet parakeet, Skye. He was already seven years old, but seemed healthy enough. I put it down to my own anxiety and dismissed the worries as much as possible, but the ominous feeling kept nagging at me from time to time. Then a few weeks ago, Skye started losing his feathers on his lower quarters and seemed to have a protrusion of some kind, so my husband and I took him to the vet.

After the examination, the vet told us that there were two possibilities. Either, Skye was overweight and that was causing his feathers to fall out or he had a tumor. The vet explained that if it was a tumor, Skye would probably die from complications or shock from the surgery. If it wasn’t that, he was just too fat and losing weight would help. He advised us to change Skye’s diet and keep him as comfortable as possible.

We took Skye home and followed the vet’s instructions. While Skye’s feathers started to grow back, he also began having issues with his balance. He didn’t move around the cage as much and he stopped talking. Losing balance and being on the bottom of the cage were two of the things that the vet had warned us could be signs of a tumor, which again was inoperable.

Our apartment has large bay windows that look out over the small courtyard and pathway that runs through our housing complex. Last week, my husband and I were talking to my mother on speaker phone, when I spied a dark, hooded figure standing in the garden. The figure looked to be at least six or seven feet tall and was wearing a black cloak. It was around 6pm, but there was plenty of light coming from the lamp posts and the neighboring school’s soccer field. As I turned to get a better look, the apparition walked through the wrought iron stair railing by our house and vanished. The figure had appeared completely solid one minute and then dematerialized. I do not recall seeing a face of any sort, just blackness beneath the dark hood.

I told my husband that someone had been in the garden. He checked, but didn’t see anyone. I couldn’t get a reading on the spirit to figure out if it was benign, malevolent, female, or male. Freaked out, I closed the blinds and did a cleansing of the house. I had seen shadowy figures before, but never anything like that. I called my mom and told her about the apparition. I said that it reminded of an entity, rather than a ghost. The figure had immediately made me think of Death.

I felt a little better after the cleansing and decided to go to bed earlier than usual. For some reason, I didn’t want to be up alone by myself. This is odd for me since I am naturally a night person. Skye chirped at me when I came into the bedroom. He had taken to telling me off for disturbing him in the middle of the night as he got older. I fixed his cage cover and told him to go back to sleep.

The next morning, I woke up and found Skye lying dead at the bottom of his cage. He had passed sometime in the night. Up until this moment, I didn’t believe in the Grim Reaper. Now, I’m not so sure.

Have you ever experienced a premonition of death? Share your experiences and thoughts in the comments.

If you have a real ghost story that you would like to share with The Ghost Post, send me an email to theghostpostreporter@gmail.com to set up an interview.

I’m always in the mood for a good ghost story! 

For more ghost stories, paranormal phenomena, and updates, follow Tara Theresa Hill on Facebook and on Twitter at @TaraTheresaHill.

 

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The Banishing

~ Tara Theresa Hill ~ Leave a comment

While this story is my own, I have changed the names of those involved to protect their privacy.

Growing up with Wiccan high priestess, Lady Rhea, for a mother made for an interesting time.  Aside from glittering Enchanted Candles, crafting perfumes, and giving clients psychic advice, my mother occasionally performed banishing rituals to remove negative energies from close friends’ houses.  This was much different from the spiritual cleansings that she did to purify a space.  These spells involved deeper, older magick.  For those of you who don’t know, Wiccans and Pagans often spell magick with a “k” to differentiate from the stage “magic” that magicians use as entertainment.

When I was a teenager, a close family friend of ours, started experiencing a lot of problems.  Anne had a big house with several people living there.  Over a few months, her family experienced a slew of bad luck with illnesses, financial setbacks, and a rise in heated arguments.  While various circumstances could lead to this happening, Anne felt that something in the house was “off,” so she asked for my mother to give her a reading to see what was going on.

Mom shuffled her cards and turned them over.  Taking a final drag of her cigarette, she shook her head.  “Oh, no…This is not good.”

“What is it?” asked Anne.

Mom turned over more cards.  “What I’m going to say might sound ridiculous, but I need you to listen to me.”  Anne nodded.  My mom paused before continuing, “The cards indicate that there is something inside of the house that is causing the problem.  It’s a negative entity of some sort.”

Anne’s adult son, Peter, who was also seated at the table turned his head at this news.  He said that he had recently woke up and saw an apparition of a bat-like creature with a human face hovering over his bed.  He hadn’t mentioned it before because he thought it was just a nightmare.  Mom looked back at the card reading.  She turned to Anne’s son.

“Can I see your room?”

He nodded.  Even I tagged along upstairs.  After hearing Peter’s story, I didn’t want to be left alone.  Mom entered the room.  After a minute or two, she nodded.  “Yes.  Whatever it is, it’s upstairs and it generally stays in this room.”

We went back downstairs.

“What can we do?” asked Anne as she made more coffee.

“You can light some white candles and incense to help cleanse the space, but ultimately, I’ll have to do a banishing spell for you,” said my mother.

I almost choked on my soda.  Mom always prescribed candles, prayers, incense, that sort of thing.  She only spoke about conducting rituals for serious problems.

“Great,” said Peter.  “I’m staying downstairs on the couch until this thing is gone.”

After Peter went to hang out with some friends, Mom asked Anne about the history of the house.  A large, three-story, white, Victorian house, it was the kind that you see iced with snow on picturesque Christmas cards.  The house had been remodeled in the years following an older relative’s death.  Mom asked if there were any strange events that had happened in the house.  Anne said that there was one.

The last owner of the house had met a tragic end.  Two hours before his daughter’s wedding, he had excused himself saying that he would be right back.  While everyone was in the house getting ready, he left the car engine running and sealed himself inside the vehicle with the windows shut.  Without any warning to his friends or family, he had committed suicide on the day that his daughter was to be married.

“Why’d you even buy the house?” I asked, after Anne was done telling the story.  I was about fifteen then.

“TARA!” Mom glared at me.

Anne laughed.  “It’s okay, Rhea,” she said.  “We didn’t find out until years after we bought the house.  Some neighbors told us.”

Later on, I shivered as we got into the car.  Even though I had been over Anne’s house hundreds of times, I was afraid that the ghost of the dead man was going to jump out at us in the driveway.

“Could Anne’s neighbors have made up that story?” I asked.

“Perhaps,” said Mom, “But I don’t think so.  That negative spirit has caused trouble before.”

“What are we going to do?”

“It’s okay,” said Mom.  “We’re going to get rid of it.”

“How?”

“You’ll see.”

The first thing Mom did was call our coven members.  She told them that she needed their help doing a special favor for a dear friend of hers.  They all knew about Anne and were happy to help.  I had already been initiated and since we needed as many people as possible, Mom decided to bring me along.

A few days later, our coven met at Anne’s house.  We went upstairs to the second floor where all of the bedrooms were located.  My mother turned off the lights and then lit some candles.  She and her partner cast circle to help protect us during the ritual.  Then we all started running clockwise to create a cone of power while chanting a Wiccan banishing spell that is sacred to my mother’s coven.  As we did this, we were running past the bedroom doors which were all standing wide open.

At one point as I was running past Peter’s room, I saw a pale face glaring back at us from the dark.  The apparition was about three or four feet off of the floor.  The face glowed white and had three dark spaces where the eyes and mouth should be.  I didn’t dare break the chain and by the time that I had come around again, the thing was gone.  After the ritual was done, I mentioned the incident to my mother.  One of my older friends who was also in the coven turned to me.

“You saw it too?”

In addition to the banishing spell, we also said prayers that night to help the previous owner’s spirit move on to the light.  After the ritual, everyone was much more at peace in the house and Anne’s family life returned to normal.

If you have a real ghost story that you would like to share with The Ghost Post, send an email with your contact information to Tara Theresa Hill at theghostpostreporter@gmail.com to set up an interview. 

I’m always in the mood for a good ghost story! 

If you enjoyed this article and would be interested in supporting my work, please check out my Patreon page. 

A Medium’s Rite of Passage

~ Tara Theresa Hill ~ 2 Comments

Thanks to my friend, Regina, for sharing her story about coming into her Mediumship.

Being a medium and having psychic abilities can be an overwhelming experience.  Psychic abilities manifest in various ways.  Some people know right away that they have these talents, some hide it or try to ignore it, others fear it, and some have it pushed onto them through circumstances beyond their control.

Regina was sixteen years old when her father died.  She hadn’t seen her father that morning, which was unusual.  On the way home from school, she noticed police cars on her block.  She learned that her dad had gotten into a horrible fight and had been rushed to the hospital.   Regina stayed home with one of her sisters, while her mother and two other sisters went to the hospital to check on their father.  At 7:06pm exactly, Regina let out a tremendous gasp as if she had suddenly lost her ability to breathe.  The terrifying moment receded as quickly as it came on, but Regina has never forgotten that event.  Unknown to her at the time, Regina’s father’s throat had been cut during the fight.  His official time of death was recorded at 7:06pm.  This was Regina’s traumatic introduction into the psychic world.  Years later, she would receive another grim prediction of a family member’s death.

One day, Regina’s brother and one of the sisters was messing around with the Ouija Board when he asked the oracle when he was going to die.  Regina scolded him, “Why in the world would you ask something like that?”  The board had answered him that he would die at age twenty-five.  Her brother brushed it off as a joke.

More years passed.  Regina was now in her twenties and had a job in a Punk Rock clothing store.  She was home in bed with a severe headache.  The pain was so bad, that she picked up a Bible that her friend had given her and started praying for relief.  As she lay down in the bed, she noted the time.  It was 3pm.  Later that day at around 5pm, she got a call from her sister that their brother had been hit in the head with a baseball bat and had been rushed to the emergency room.  The attack had happened at the same time that she was experiencing her strange headache symptoms.

Regina’s brother was hospitalized for months after the attack.  One day, Regina was at work when for no reason at all, a mirror fell off the wall directly behind her and crashed to the floor.  Regina was spooked as her eyes met the clock.  This time it was 4pm.  Her mother had taught her that falling mirrors were signs of impending death.  Regina pushed this thought out of her head.  Her mother was just superstitious.

Sometime later, her sister showed up at her job.  She asked to speak to the manager about Regina.  Thinking that they were out of earshot, Regina heard her sister ask the manager if Regina could please leave work early.  “Our brother died today,” her sister said.  Regina couldn’t believe what she was hearing.  Her manager walked over and nonchalantly said that she could take the rest of her shift off.  Regina tried to politely refuse, but he insisted that she leave for the day.  With a sinking feeling, Regina left the store with her sister to find out that after months of battling the injuries caused by the attack, her brother had died at 4pm.  He was 25 years old.