In late summer 1988 I was training to drive a truck. I had a class A learner’s permit. My trainer was my brother-in-law.

One sunny day we were going through Hanover Pennsylvania, on our way to Quaker Oats, when I got a sick feeling in my gut. I was passing a large gravel lot on my left. Billy didn’t notice it from the passenger seat. It was old, with dirt mixed in. On the lot was an old produce market. The kind mostly made of plywood, only bigger than most. Enclosed, not open.

I snapped as if going back in time, seeing the inside strung with rows of naked lightbulbs and wooden bins on 2×4 legs. I saw two men, and suddenly the lights were off, the building dark. The two men were dressed in overalls and one even had something like a straw hat. One was tall and stout, the other shorter and thin. While both were menacing, I can’t tell you which was worse. But both were dead long ago; I knew that much. They were drawing me, aware of my presence out on the road. As if they knew me and wanted to draw me to my death.

I also felt as if I had known them. I forced myself to snap out of it and drive on.

On the return trip, I looked, and could not find the lot again. Several more trips later, I still have never seen it.

And this is a weird enough story, but one thing makes it worse.

I didn’t mind small, open produce stands by the road, but had never, since I was a child, liked big, enclosed produce markets. A coincidence?

I can’t buy that.

Almost ten years later, after a few fruitless trips fishing at Liberty Reservoir, I bought a fishing map. I was looking for prime spots to angle for catfish. It was a funny place, and although beautiful, I always felt unsettled there. Kind of like I didn’t belong, and when you feel that way, you don’t catch anything. You can’t get comfortable enough to let yourself go and read the terrain. Choosing points where steep dropoffs were, after a slight shelf where bait fish would be, is impossible. You can’t tell the difference between those or sheer drops. Depending on water and air temperature and sunlight, it makes a big difference.

I bought the map out of desperation. I was looking to catch some prime catfish. The four pound range. But on previous visits I’d had some weird images, and worse, bad feelings, wash over me for no reason. Still very unaware of how sensitive I was, I had no frame of reference to reconcile these experiences with. Therefore I tried to ignore them. But one image kept hitting me: an old car, very old, driving on a dirt road, raising dust. There was a river beside this road. The car travelled with the river on its left, then turned right, into an unpaved driveway. The house had a screened in porch. It was an old house, with not much else along the road, but it was hardly alone. I saw other places, but none so clearly. There was emotion attached to the scene, very negative, feelings that I knew were not my own. Anger, misery, fear.

On the map, nothing remarkable stood out. I saw only that I had acres of ground to cover, multiple access points, and that locating likely spots was going to be a long process. Bank fishing where crowds seem to gather wasn’t a thing I liked at all. Those are high-pressure spots where fish can be caught in short stretches of time and then nothing remains. People making noise, eating and drinking, leaving a bunch of trash, taking illegal fish, that’s what happens on crowded banks. I wanted solitude. Quiet.

On the reverse side of the map there was another one. In this, the image was ghosted and overlaid with aerial photos like a Google Earth display. No gaps that I recall, although that’s not impossible. It made up an intricate view of the area before Liberty Dam existed. And sure enough, I found that same car parked in the driveway of a house that I was sure I’d seen in the vision of the car turning into the driveway. I’m sure I could look all of this up online, and refresh my memory, and give you more details. I’m not up for that. The impression I got was that people in the area were happy where they were, and had been forced to leave. Before the Patapsco River was dammed, it must have run through a beautiful, lush valley. It took years for the reservoir to fill. I had the impression that many people in the 1940s had resisted vacating homes, because the car I saw was definitely from the earlier part of that decade. I’ve seen cars like it in newsreel footage of the time around World War Two. It’s haunted or cursed ground beneath that water and I never cared which; I never went back.

I’d fished lots of places in Baltimore County, and had been on chartered boats out of Severna Park and Annapolis, trolling for rockfish (striped bass) on Chesapeake Bay. There’s nothing like it. A bad day on the water can sometimes be the best therapy; even going home with an empty cooler is fine with me.

But it wouldn’t be the last time I’d see into the past. And I hated it every time it happened. I thought I was going crazy.

One afternoon I was driving south on Belair Road, U.S. Route1. I passed a very old house that reached into my mind, and I don’t know how I kept driving without being in an accident. I was in someone else’s body, looking through a window. The sky was darkening either by dusk or overcast. I’m not sure which, as the details fade with time.

A woman I loved was outside getting into an open carriage pulled by two horses. She was leaving me. It wasn’t her choice, though. A big man in very old clothing, I suppose eighteenth century, with a hat not unlike a tricorn, and a long coat, climbed in beside her and took the reins. He had a smug look on his face and sneered at me. He had pulled some kind of trick to get her to go with him. I felt bullied and very frightened of him. He turned the carriage around in the half-circle driveway and left. And I felt so broken of heart that I didn’t want to live another second.

Actually, this happened more than once in the northern parts of Baltimore and Harford counties.

Seeing into the past always had a negative aspect in emotion, very intense emotion, always of anger or loss. It was never positive or particularly revealing, as I never gained knowledge of names or nailed down any specifics. There was no reason for the these events. They just left me sick, drained and depressed.

But I had not learned my lesson. I had no idea that I was a sensitive. I didn’t even know what a sensitive was. I had no idea why this shit was happening to me. I felt like I was just nuts. I had no idea what I was doing when one night, after reading a book on psychic abilities, I decided to do an experiment. The book had a chapter on astral projection. It instructed me to meditate to the point where I went into a trance. I was a skeptic but wanted to try. It said I should pray and ask for permission and an angelic guide, then go wherever I wanted. While deep in a meditative state, I would find myself “walking” down a long hallway. At the end would be a door. I would kick it open and be exactly where I’d asked.

I was vague and just asked for a visit to the past. That was a big mistake which followed the bigger mistake of doing this crazy shit in the first place.

It was freezing. I was on a dirt road that gave way to a brick pavement encircling a brick building surrounded by black wrought iron fencing perhaps 7 feet tall. It was a Colonial period government building, not huge, perhaps a town or city hall. I looked to my right and saw a dirt road running parallel to the direction my body faced, but behind the building. On the other side of the road there were big houses with big yards and big shade trees. What I could see of the homes told me it was all antebellum. I was definitely far into the past. The trees were green and full, but it still felt cold, like winter, and the sky was unusual. I saw sunlight hitting the ground, but the sky was a weird color.

I became aware that I was not alone. To my left there was a spirit but I couldn’t look at it. It said, “Do you want a closer look?” I nodded. Without walking we were suddenly next to the fence, looking through it at large wooden crates stacked around the back. As I stared, a pair of feet on the ground in shiny black shoes with the toes pointed down, resting on the ground, caught my attention. The socks were really stockings. The legs were between rows of crates and I couldn’t see them.

Then something happened in the space of a second or less. Just a blur of movement. But the shoes were now toes-up, and I could see the knees of the legs. The body, obviously dead, had beige knee-length leggings and were bloody. The voice beside me said, “See what you have done!”

Well that was it for me. Whether it was my imagination or a real astral event, I wanted out. I was back on the sofa, wide awake.

At the time I was staying with my daughter for a few weeks. Her son Antony was almost a year old. And all of the sudden, he began waking up at night crying.

One other thing. The book had a bunch of stuff about colors and what they did. I think orange was energy, green was healing…and so on. I’d learned psychic self defense, which one used when in the presence of people who drained you, like psychic vampires, something I believed in then (but thank God for medication).

Somehow I was brought to the idea that envisioned energy coming from Heaven, going through me, and then to whomever I was trying to help, could calm down Antony and help him sleep. And somehow I remember thinking the color blue was calming. It made everything worse. Soon his room was full of flies. He would only go in there to pull toys into the living room. He couldn’t fall asleep in there. He was scared silly of his room.

Only later did I realize after earnest prayer that something I did was behind it. I asked God to show me the problem. Mind you, I prayed in the living room, but after asking the question and meditating quietly, I saw Antony’s room. Two walls were on the outer corner of the house. A longer and a shorter wall. The longer wall had two huge, jagged, gaping holes through which a hippo could enter. The shorter wall had one hole. With my experiment I had brought back a demon. It was my guide. I realized that God doesn’t loan his angels out for evil things we’re forbidden to do. The occult is forbidden, so what went with me was demonic. And it came back with me. It allowed him to blow holes in Antony’s walls so other demons could torment him. Demons love tormenting children; as I had done when I was a child, Antony could see these things but not yet describe them. He couldn’t even voice his fear except to cry desperately. Now of course these holes and what came through them weren’t part of the visible world, but they were revealed as I had asked. I then repented the stupid act and asked for the holes to be fixed and for Antony to be protected. In another vision I saw that the damage was not repaired. The holes remained. Instead, three angels stood in them, facing the outside, so I could see only their backs. These didn’t glow. I imagine that if physically manifested, they may have. But I was seeing the spiritual, and they looked like men. Possibly because seeing an angel in its true form is dangerous to mortals?

Anyway, they wore long robes, white but dirty, as if they had been fighting. They were serious beings, guarding my grandson’s room from further attacks.

I found out the hard way that a book, no matter how beautifully illustrated, can be dangerous. I found out that you don’t need a Ouija board to bring true evil into your home. And I learned that irresponsible actions can hurt the innocent even if you have good intentions.

That was 2004. I’ve never meditated once since then.

Today I talked to a very nice lady at FiOS customer service. She was patient and sorted out my problem. Her name was Lee Ann. I swore she had a Pasadena (MD) accent. She reminded me of the girl I knew in third grade. The one I fell in love with at first sight. The one I’ve loved ever since.

Customer Service Lee Ann reminded me of good things in life. That there’s still kindness and decency. She reminded me of a girl I haven’t seen since 1972, who still has my heart. And even though I never told her, it doesn’t hurt. It’s perhaps the most positive and decent thing I have left.

Seeing into the past, whether you want to or not, will happen. We have to deal with it. But today, thinking about Lee Ann, I discovered that sometimes, yes. There are demons in the rearview mirror.

But there are angels back there, too.

Note-

I can’t say where flashes of the past come from, nor can anyone else. Scholars would have us believe that there’s some sort of misfire happening in some area of the brain. But that doesn’t explain accurately placing a house and a car on a map long before you see the map. It utterly fails to account for the emotions you feel in close proximity to certain places. Or seeing people in period dress appropriate to a carriage and feeling as if you’re in someone else’s body.

There’s much to guess with here. Much to debate. Are we seeing bits of past lives?

I’ve never been one to fully believe in reincarnation. I have had stray “memories” not triggered when traveling, and one that’s haunted me since I was a child is a fragment, a bit of memory of walking up to a single-story house, not a large one, at dusk. The temperature suggests a cool but not cold evening in late spring. I “remember” approaching the place on a small road with thick woods close on both sides. I could see a light in the distance, shimmering through the trees as a light breeze blew branches. Up close, it is impossible to see the house as I’m suddenly at the front door. What bothers me the most is the window set in the door. Square but with diamond shaped panes and frosted or textured amber glass. The glow of light on the inside is bright but I have a feeling I don’t want to go in. I don’t want the door to open. A random thing, for sure. So what’s behind all this?

I have an idea, and you won’t like it. I said in another post that since I was very little, there was a shadow on my walls that I could see moving. I could feel its malevolence. It terrified me.

I know it was a demon. These come or appear in many forms, from black smudges in the air without form to shadow snakes to shadow “people” to “ghosts” of dead relatives to fully manifested animals and people. Since demons have been here longer than us they have interacted with billions of people. And since they are spirits, we can easily be influenced by them. We suddenly feel angry or afraid. Remember those scenes from Blue Bloods, Leave it to Beaver and the Brady Bunch where the family all sit down and eat supper together? Well that’s how families took their evening meals, not merely here but the world over. But did you ever notice that, TV aside, sometimes arguments break out suddenly over small things, and quickly escalate? Demons love to interrupt and interfere in everything we do, and take particular delight in causing division in families, business, even church. They can pass into your dining room without being seen. Their presence is extremely disruptive. They may not stay. They may not claim your home as theirs but they can certainly visit.

If they can do that, and given that we know their numbers are great, imagine what happens when they are accidentally too close. Like when you pass a house where one has a claim to the territory. The spiritual can, purposely or otherwise, see and feel us, our memories and likewise, even have their memories transfer to us.

And it’s not just them. They retain memories and emotions from everyone they’ve ever come into contact with. That’s why these flashes are almost universally negative and come with emotions you otherwise wouldn’t be feeling. This is what I believe is happening. American families who eat dinner together are growing rare. Communication is always a problem. The demonic divide us, making a whole into weak fragments. God is left behind, making the demons more powerful and influential. It can even cause them to take up residence in your home. Some people never experience these things. Some do but don’t think about it because it’s too frightening. Everyone is a potential target.