Conversations With the Devil

Marsha and I heard the voice again. It sounded like a child singing a tuneless melody somewhere in the vast, dark hallways of the old hospital. We recorded it and played it back later, many, many times. That night, as we strained to hear the child’s voice, Marsha became very, very sad and asked, “why would God allow a child to be alone in a place like this?” I came up with some theory of consciousness, reassuring her it was just a fragment of a mind, lost in time and space, not a whole personality, not a person as we understand people to be. She didn’t respond. We continued to listen for the oddly terrifying sounds echoing in dark. Why was I so frightened, if this was a ‘child’ spirit, or even a fragment of one?

In other lost places we heard ‘her’. The same, sing-song voice, sometimes attempting to speak, sometimes singing that same, wandering tune. We had many recordings of that voice before we started to ask ourselves who this might be. This child seemed to be traveling with us from one site to another. She started showing up even in our homes. I have recordings of her in the living room of our old house. Had she followed me home? I have recordings of her at Marsha’s house, too. It was always the same pitch, the same tone, the same vocal pattern. I asked many questions of myself, but they were always the wrong questions. “Who is this poor, lost soul?” “What can I do to help her?” “How can I ‘send her to the light’?”

My life during this time period was falling apart at a dizzying pace. There was financial distress, physical illnesses, mental illness, job loss and painful ruptures in my closest relationships. I continued recording voices and communicating with the spirits until, gradually, I realized that I was probably not communicating with spirits only. The answer hit me fairly recently: God would most certainly not condemn a child to eternity in a dark vacuum of empty space in a mental hospital or a jail.

This plaintive voice was produced by something with evil intent. I won’t debate the existence of evil or even that entity we call the ‘devil’, because I’ve done that before in previous posts. Evil has certain characteristics that are now quite clear to me. It disguises itself as the one thing you can’t resist, whatever it is that involves you emotionally; it then confuses you, causing you to doubt the existence of an all-loving God; after that, it chips away at your life relentlessly until you are at your breaking point. When you reach that soul-crushing moment, the decision is yours: you either humble yourself completely and give yourself–heart and soul–to who you understand God to be, OR, you continue to pursue those practices, beliefs and values that led you to self destruct.

There was no little girl, crying in the dark. The devil found an ingenious way to draw us all in, to make us doubt and question everything good and holy in the world. I went back to these accursed spaces and places without giving myself completely to God first. I made myself available to the confusion and manipulation of evil. I allowed evil to lead me further and further down the dark hallways of my soul until I was in communication with something that wanted to kill my spirit. Don’t talk to me about ‘coincidences’; during this time, evil tried to hurt my own child. That’s when I drew the line. No one and nothing hurts my child.

The result of my brush with ultimate darkness was illumination. I understood how evil operates in the world: it pretends always to be something else, something attractive, something you really, really want. It often seems logical, understandable and promising. It justifies its existence. It makes people rally around it. It loves the violence, hatred, misery and suffering that it produces. Most people don’t see it for what it really is; they think its presence is natural, necessary and inevitable. Evil appears to everyone, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or any other identifying characteristics. It worms its way into politics, culture, social media, news media, institutions; it’s everywhere.

You can recognize it by its effects on you and your loved ones. If you feel crazy, disoriented, confused, aggressive, even violent: it owns you . . . or it’s starting to. Be very, very careful before you give in to hatred and anger. It may feel righteous. It may feel really, really good on a basic, instinctual level; but trust me. It lies. It will find a way to destroy you, and you may not see how it works on you, changing you, hurting you, creating divisions and dissent.

God does not condemn child spirits to the dank misery of the worst places on Earth. God does not play with your emotions or hurt your family and friends. God waits for us to fall on our knees and ask for love, for help, for light, for hope. We can spin forever in a web of insanity, or we can break free and admit that we don’t know what we think we know. Love someone today who you have not dared to love before, and you will see evil twist and scream in pain. Love like you have never loved before, and your spirit will forever be in the Light, blessed for all eternity.

In peace,

Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD/PHW

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Drama and the Paranormal: Why Can’t We Just All Get Along?

The above photograph was taken in my office. There are several things I could point out here: I am bordering on official hoarder status; at least half of these books are on the general subject of the ‘paranormal’; I have a morbid fascination with death; and maybe it’s time to buy another bookcase.

The reason I include this photograph has to do with some recent Facebook (ugh) fights among minor celebrities in the paranormal, and how we might avoid them in the future. These fights are typically about the same general issues, namely:

• Who is and is not an ‘impostor’ (translation: who does and does not have the academic credentials, experience and training to make any definitive statements on the existence of psi effects) in the general field of paranormal investigations;
• Who is a celebrity-seeking, arrogant, self-serving megalomaniac and who is a genuine person/researcher/investigator;
• Who is flaky and New Age and who is a real scientist (in other words: who functions as a medium/psychic or anyone who uses their intuition as a tool for divining information from the non-material realm).

I have a unique position in all of this infighting. I have academic credentials, but not in the sciences (Humanities, Literature and Languages); I was courted along with the other PHW by Hollywood for a brief time, and I did not refuse the attention. I could be accused of chasing celebrity for a couple of years, but that was a difficult time fraught with self doubt and the general feeling that I was betraying myself. I have been criticized for abandoning the Scientific Method in favor of New Age chicanery, because I discovered some intuitive abilities that allowed me to garner verifiable information from non-local, non-material sources (read: ghosts). However, to my knowledge, nobody has labeled me an egomaniac, a narcissist, or an arrogant twit.

Why all of this ugliness in the paranormal? It comes down to one word: EPISTEMOLOGY. Roughly speaking, the term refers to “ways of knowing.” How do we know what we think we know, and how to we communicate it? With what authority do we make statements such as “I have contacted the dead, and this is what they had to say”? Do we pretend to speak for everyone, or simply for ourselves? Is our “knowing” the truth about life after death based on our training in the hard and/or soft sciences? Is there any academic grounding to what we are claiming? Are we our own scientists? How do we prove that we are using a universally accepted methodology for collecting our EVP and other anomalous information? How do we interpret that information? Why should anybody else believe that our interpretations are correct? Why should we believe that someone is incapable of fraud, exaggeration, misrepresentation or simple self delusion?

Ways of knowing:  What seems so clear cut is anything but. Why do people NEVER, and I mean NEVER, listen to my damn audio clips where I state, breathlessly, that I have caught paranormal voices of great import? The answer is simple: other investigators weren’t there, they didn’t record it, they may not trust my methods, they don’t believe that there aren’t one hundred alternate explanations for what I think I’ve caught. My anomalous information is PERSONAL. The audio clips did not enjoy the blessing of any institutional controls. In the end, the general field of the paranormal seems almost unknowable in any absolute sense, even with the backing of academia. That makes it all the more imperative to read and study what others have to say on the subject.

All you can do is read. Then, read more. You can start with the books below, but there are hundreds to choose from. Before we can blithely expect others to ‘believe’ us and take our ‘evidence’ as truth, we have to have a very solid grounding in the work that others have done before us. Education is the only route out of the maze we are caught in as investigators. The insults, mud-slinging and ugly accusations will continue as long as we ask each other to ‘trust’ us, to ‘respect our authority’ and to believe that we really, truly know what we are doing; what we should be doing is engaging in conversations on the previous and ongoing research that scientists/academics/professional mediums and others are engaged in, UNDER and VIA the controls that academic institutions impose. Failing that, we should at least be talking to one another. We aren’t speaking to each other; we aren’t learning from each other. In general, we stake our territories and defend them as if our work were under attack.

But our ‘work’ means nothing if it is carried out in isolation.

–Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD/PHW

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