At the end of my Paranormal TV panel at Convergence, an audience member called on the panel to give their opinions on psychics. I started to answer, realized I was rambling worse than usual, and gave up.

Maybe I was just tired. It was 12:30 AM. Yes, that sounds like a good enough excuse.

In truth, I have had several good experiences with psychics. I know medical intuitives who can look at your picture and tell what ails you. I have known very accurate mediums. I have been read to my satisfaction by palm, tarot, and intuition.

Here are some good experiences I’ve had with psychics:

A medium friend of mine did a reading for my mother. During that reading, she said that my grandmother was coming through wearing a red polka-dot apron. My mother didn’t remember such an apron, but later found one looking through a box of my grandmother’s belongings.

I had two very accurate readings with a palmist (I know, it sounds just as ludicrous to me.) At the end of the second reading, she warned me that my father was working too hard. I laughed it off because my father is retired, and mostly putters around in his yard. A few days later, I found out that he was working 12 hour days helping a local farmer get in his crops.

I was working a paranormal investigation with two psychics who had never before met. Before we all met up, one of the psychics, who had been in the building previously, told me about a residual of a rape which had occurred in the basement of the building. When the new psychic, who had not heard the rape story walked down to the basement, she immediately picked up on it and described the same event.

Here are some caveats:

While I’ve had good luck with psychics I admit there are well-documented charlatans out there.

I have met many psychics who are “hot”  one day and “cold” the next. I myself fall into this category. I often get intuitive impressions, but I can’t guarantee I’m more accurate than someone guessing randomly. Also, I have met powerful psychics who get caught up in their own ego trip and start imposing their own opinions on their readings.

There is a good deal of psychology which tells us that we find patterns that aren’t there.

I’ve never met a psychic with the ability to pick lottery numbers.

I‘ve had psychic readings and experiences which have blown my mind. I’ve also had some which couldn’t blow my nose.

I know some great people who think they are psychic and seem to get good information most of the time. They aren’t trying to rip anyone off, and they spend most of their time trying to help people for free. So, until proven otherwise, I am going to choose to believe in their talent–up to a point. If one of them calls me up and tells me to move to Calcutta, I’m not going.

On his radio show a couple weeks ago, Father Mike asked me why I got into the paranormal. I gave the simple answer that I started because my wife was into it. This was because I thought my real answer would take too long.

For the sake of sanity, I’m going to organize this chronologically. 

When you farm, you are tied to the land, which meant my family didn’t move around. However, we were not the only ones in the house I grew up in. I was born late, my sisters were in high school by the time I came along, and even before I was born, they had experiences in our house.

I’ve heard stories about my sisters’ experiences. They would catch glimpses of people out of the corner of their eyes. Once they saw a full bodied apparition of a man in white wearing a helmet. On another occasion, my mother witnessed them both get repeatedly pinched by an unseen force. My dad didn’t believe anything was in the house, but my mother insisted they sleep in the small, downstairs bedroom.

When I was a child, I always felt unwelcome in the upstairs, where I was supposed to sleep. Every night, I would get up after about an hour, come downstairs and sleep on the sofa. I eventually took over a small side room in the upstairs, but whenever I needed to go into the other areas, to grab something out of the storage room  or a dark closet, I always felt nervous, like I was intruding on someone. I could feel people watching me. I used to bargain. “Okay, I’m just here to get a couple things, and I’ll be as quick as I can.”

When my wife and a close friend told me they were going to start a mediumship group, I was scared out of my mind.

I started with a mediumship group around 2 years ago. We intently tried to develop our ability to speak to spirits for over a year. Some of us were better at it than others. I have to admit, I was a slow learner. I was also afraid to get anything. It was also in this group that I met the members of Quantum Psi Paranormal.

One of the group members suggested we watch a program called Psychic Kids, a History Channel reality show where psychics would spend a week or two with children whose psychic gifts were troubling them. While my abilities were not as strong as many of these pre-teens, I was amazed at how much the stories of these children paralleled my own.

I’m going to preface this next segment by saying that I have never done much religiously or had more the a cursory interest in the bible. However, one day, a certain bible verse popped into my head so I looked it up. The verse explained that the dead had no power over the living. For some reason, this message changed my outlook entirely.

During the next few months, our mediumship group changed focus to any kind of psychic development. People drifted away and came back, like they do in any group, but things seemed to be going pretty well. Then one night, we suffered what some call a demonic attack, what some call trickster energy. No matter what you call it, one thing was clear, the group would never be the same again. We split down pretty even lines, those who did not want to deal with negative forces and those who wanted to fight them.

They say that trickster energy is transformative, making people question their base assumptions. Some people that night were scared. Some people were angry. I was overcome that night with the feeling that I wanted to fight dark forces. Where I once felt fear, I felt a bottomless well of calm.

At this point, I was in close contact with Darcie McGrath, leader of Quantum Psi. My wife had done some investigations with her, and I had already gone on an investigation with Johnson County Paranormal. Darcie had recently experienced some turnover, and because of my wife’s association, I was essentially drafted into the group.

So, I didn’t really go seeking contact with the paranormal, it’s just been with me my entire life. I’ve just decided I no longer need to be afraid of it.

My paranormal group was featured last night on Spiritual Spectrum with Father Mike.

Going into haunted houses–no big deal. Talking on Internet Radio–terrifying.

Yesterday morning, I got a call from my wife, Stephanie. My friend Cat Sinclair, who is a psychic and paranormal investigator, needed our help to clear a negative entity from a building she had investigated. Cat usually handles this type of job herself, but she wanted some backup because this entity was particularly nasty. At the time, I didn’t know if we were even dealing with an elemental, a standard haunting, or the demonic. Of couse, I said I was in.

Five of us met on the north side of Iowa City, Cat; Stephanie; Kim, a psychic I’d worked with once before; Darcie McGrath, head of Quantim Psi Group; and me.  We travelled to a small town not too far away. On the way, Cat filled us in on the situation. The entity involved was an earthbound spirit, who didn’t originally belong to the property. Cat felt that during his life, the earthbound was a psychopath and a murderer. He had been lurking in the basement for thirty years and gaining in strength. During a previous investigation, the paranormal team felt sick to their stomachs and heard growling.

We met the owner of the property in the town park and he filled us in on some of the things that had happened to him, including the story of two stone masons who were injured in separate incidents within weeks of working in his building. We went through a few shielding, grounding, and vibration-raising exercises.

We also tried consecrating the elements, an idea that Stephanie and Darcie got after meeting with Father Michael Sherbet. Stephanie took the lead on this, asking angels to bless each of the five elements for us, so the negative entity could not use them against us.

Then we walked to the property, an old-fashioned main-street style building, with a stone basement and apartments upstairs. The building was undergoing extensive renovation. Even as we approached the building, something felt odd. The basement seemed to have a greasy, oppressive darkness to it. I felt like there were eyes in every window.

We filed down the stairs of the exterior basement entrance and made our way in. While the property owner set up a circle of chairs for us, I felt like we were being pushed back, like the entity was pushing us all into the entryway, so I purposefully pushed back by crossing the room, both because I don’t like being stuck in a crowd, and I don’t like being pushed around. Because the entity was particularly strong and we were in a construction zone, Kim also asked the property owner to move some floorboards that were precariously stacked nearby.

Then we sat in a circle and Cat led us in a ceremony/visualization to cross over the spirit that rested in the basement. This actually went quite smoothly, which I think is more of a testament to our preparedness than the spirit’s ability to fight back.

When the ceremony was done, Cat smudged the building with white sage, a native American method for neutralizing negative energies, stinky but effective, while performing a blessing on the property. And Stephanie called on the angels to raise the vibration.

When we were in the upstairs apartments, we experienced some additional activity, something Cat had also experienced in her previous investigations. Because none of these entities seemed to be causing trouble we offered to let them cross over but did not force the issue.

As we were checking out the final apartment, Kim sensed an energy peeking out of a back bedroom. She believed it was the spirit of a little girl. Kim felt that the girl was ready to cross over. We set up an impromptu circle in that bedroom and went through the crossover ceremony again, and she crossed peacefully.

While all this was happening, Darcie had her full spectrum camera running, so hopefully, we’ll get some corroborating evidence. However, if we don’t, that’s just kind of the way it happens.