A Family for Eric

So an investigation this weekend really hit home for me.

For those of you that don't know, a group of friends and I run a group you might call a paranormal investigation group (http://houstonghost.com).

A man emailed us last week, who obviously seemed very stressed by what his family had been experiencing. He was approaching our group for help, which is ultimately why our group exists. Working with clients is always a learning experience for us, that's what we get out of the situation, but more importantly our group facilitates a much needed support / consultation function for families having this particular issue.

After gathering some initial information it was apparent the family really had an issue (you might be surprised how many hoaxes/idiots we get emails from). The information he provided in our initial online "interview" form contained some subtle hints that this was a family in genuine need, not someone looking for entertainment.

Initially we offered them an investigation spot/schedule a few weeks out, but they asked if we could meet sometime sooner since they were experiencing some fairly traumatic events. Among them were disembodied voices calling the names of family members, kids (pre teens and teens) afraid to sleep in their rooms or go into certain parts of the house and both the mother and father experiencing a sensation of being held in place while their whole bed shakes violently. The father had begun to verbally challenge the entity to call it out and demand that it leave his family, especially their children alone. In response, the entity had started to toy with him by opening every cabinet in the kitchen on a regular basis so that only he saw what was going on.

When we arrived early Saturday afternoon we had a little trouble finding the house because of lack of house numbers, but we had a strong suspicion what house was involved, because you could literally feel something was going on in the house from the street. Our medium, a very very talented woman, was already a bit on edge that morning because she had some very disturbing dreams about the client's house the night before centering on some fairly disturbing issues/imagery involving the elderly.

We eventually found the client, introduced ourselves for the first time and our group split up, as has become our normal procedure. One group member sits the clients down and interviews them, going over their initial report, our procedures, how our group works, what the client can and cannot expect from us, etc. while the mediums and note takers that accompany them tour the house on their own, getting their impressions and readings.

During this investigation I served as the interviewer / case working talking to the clients and essentially keeping them busy while the rest of the group does the job we came there for, figuring out what's going on. The clients mainly re-iterated their initial complaints about the bed shaking, cabinets opening on their own, little things in the house being molested/moved, a general feeling of being watched and a few other of the usual complaints for cases like this. Chief among them was the obvious concern for their children and the wife was newly pregnant so they felt they needed to get a handle on the situation now, before things got out of hand. In talking with them my heart really went out to both of the clients. I know what it's like to feel like something may be threatening your children and you feel almost completely powerless to protect them. Truly, that's one of the worst feelings a parent can ever experience.

Once the rest of the team was finished touring the house we all sat down in the living room and the mediums shared what they were getting. Keep in mind that our group has a VERY strict policy of not allowing the mediums to have any background knowledge on a client or activity happening in the house at all until after the medium has finished sharing their readings with the client.

As the medium started talking about one event after another that the family had been experiencing in great detail (without any previous knowledge i might add) and what/who was behind it you could literally watch the borderline fear, worry and anxiety on the faces of the clients melt into understanding and compassion. The medium started talking about the long black haired girl named Samantha that was hanging out with and talking to the teenage girls in the family. She would follow them back and forth between their house and client's X wife's house. The clients had just described her in our interview not an hour earlier and their own children had described just such a girl named Samantha. There the medium was telling them about a girl with the exact same description named Samantha that was just hanging out to be out with girls her own age. Samantha knew the girls in the family could see (the children were also mediums, which is very common) her and she apparently enjoyed that interaction.

Then came the story of Eric. Eric was a 9/10 year old little boy who was just essentially pissed at the world because nobody was paying any attention to him. He could see everyone, but apparently nobody could see him. He was so upset he was almost to the point of wanting to hit and scratch people to get attention. We strongly suspect that Eric is responsible for the bed shaking incidents the family had described and was doing nothing more than trying to get someone to acknowledge him, to the point that he was literally screaming at the mediums. When they initially asked him what his name was his response was, "what does it matter? nobody pays any attention to me anyway?!"

He could see the father in the family and had started what Eric described in his own words as a "tit for tat" confrontational game with the father. Eric would do something and the father not wanting to acknowledge that what was happening may have been the spirit would blame whatever was happening on the cats. This, in turn, would only make Eric more angry so that he would act out, eventually doing things like opening all the cabinet doors in the kitchen, but only when Chris would see it. It was sort of their own little Father/Son war, only the father wasn't really aware he was playing the game with the equivalent of a ghostly son.

We explained that there was nothing inhuman in the house and that though there were multiple spirits involved there wasn't much to worry about. Their best practice was to address the spirits when they were being bothersome just as they would address one of their own kids. The only difference being it was a little more difficult to ground the kids without a physical body. The point though was to talk to them and acknowledge them and also to take up a few spiritual practices like smudging the house to keep any negative spirits from just wandering in and trying to make a nest.

Once all this was explained and we identified and fixed a few other issues in the house that was contributing to the anarchy in the house the family seemed much more at ease, if not a bit overloaded. It was a lot of information to take in, even for a family that had been dealing with these events on a daily basis for months. The group shook hands and exchanged hugs with the family and we went our separate way to have dinner and a few rounds of margaritas. I was happy that we had brought the family some measure of relief to what was initially a very tense situation.

I gave the clients about 24 hours to process the information they were given and I gave them a follow-up call on Sunday just to see where they were at and if anything had developed. The father said our visit had indeed helped them understand that there wasn't anything to be afraid of in their situation and in fact their hearts went out to the little boy in their house. The father confessed that he had cornered himself in a bathroom and had a conversation with the boy, somewhat of a father/son talk.

He asked that if Eric could hear him and wanted to pray with him then to move the left curtain in the bathroom for no and the right curtain for yes. Low and behold a few seconds later the right curtain moved ever-so-slightly. The father took that as a sign for yes and began to pray. At some point the father felt an icey chill on his left hand and he took that to mean the boy had taken his hand. The father said that from that moment on the whole atmosphere in the house had changed. He even told Eric that if he wanted to he could come to work with him whenever he wanted. How's that for some interaction for Eric? :)

As I'm about to go to bed tonight I sit back and think how blessed I am to be in a position in such a team of friends in our group that we are able to help a family achieve understanding in their difficult situation. Not only have they made a major step toward resolving their problem but in a very real way their family just got a couple of souls bigger. I'm happy and very thankful I could be a part of that.

Note: incidentally, the medium's dreams about the elderly being abused and housed in deplorable conditions was confirmed. The family had bought the house they were living in VERY cheap because it used to be an assisted living facility. The family had remodeled it extensively, but in the father's own words, "There was blood and feces all over the walls when we moved in." You should have seen the medium's face when he said that. It was like everything she had seen the night before made sense. I wonder now if Eric didn't somehow find himself abandoned in that house somehow when it was a nursing home, or perhaps he was one of the previous residents that had simply regressed to the state of a 10 year old. Maybe he was just wondering by and found himself there one day. Who knows.

James S. -

And I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference