Story From A Ghost Hunter
By Alexandra Chauran

A friend of mine contacted me out of the blue. She told me that a friend of hers just had her husband commit suicide at home, and she had to continue living in the house full of negativity with the kids for a while. My friend requested that I come and do a sage smudging for her, and provided some sage to me for the job. She was willing to pay me for the work, but I explained that I would accept no money for this particular service. Though I can accept free-will donations, my oaths as a Priestess forbid me from requiring money for my magical arts, under which this clearly fell in my opinion.

On the day of the working, my mother came along. She is extremely sensitive to energy, and got a stomach ache from the negativity flowing out of the house as soon as we drove up. It was a split level home, with a floor plan eerily similar to that of the house in which I grew up. Several small dogs were noisily announcing my arrival as I climbed the steps. The woman who answered the door had grey hair, but a youthful face. Her eyes, distractedly adrift in torment met mine briefly as she invited us in. She recognized me from a party that I attended at the home of our mutual friend, but I didn't remember her from the crowd.

A cold wind blew from the hallway as I automatically asked in what room of the house he died. She indicated the bedroom, and I asked her to put the dogs away as we would need to leave doors open during the ritual. My eyes wandered across what would be a pleasant home without this pall of death and unrest. A stylish set of mirrors decorated the walls in the dining room, and that's where I first saw the angry face of the deceased glaring behind me as I walked up to see my own face. "This is a strange question" I prefaced, "but do you have any garlic?" I turned to the home owner as the warmth of kindred understanding danced briefly across her eyes. "That's not such a strange question!" She said, and went to the kitchen to fetch me some pressed garlic from the refrigerator.

I went down the hall and unpacked my bag of supplies in the bedroom as the dogs continued their cacophony from an enclosure in the garage and I asked my mother to begin opening all of the doors and windows in the house. I could feel his rage pressing in on me as I heard his voice echo down the hall. "This is all your fault!" I briefly wondered if he were replaying an argument with another from when he was living or talking to himself. I blessed the salt and exercised the water and sage that I had brought with me, then began a slow march counter-clockwise around each room, fanning the thick smoke everywhere, in each closet, out each window and door as I hummed a chant. As I crossed the hall towards the children's room, I saw him angrily storming past me, his gait strangely hobbled. As he pushed past my shoulder I could feel the song pressing out of my throat louder as I relaxed into a familiar trance state comfortably like a dreamer pulling a blanket around the shoulders.

I released his spirit safely on it's way to where he needed to go and blew it straight out the front door with a force that was noticeable to myself, my mother, the troubled woman having a cigarette out on her back porch and even the dogs who immediately ceased their barking. The spiral of my journey through the house ended in the garage, where the door had been opened and the dogs sat still and staring at me with wide eyes silently. I returned to the bedroom and handed off the sage to my mother asking her to duplicate my actions. I took up a bowl of holy water and the garlic and sprinkled the water and salt along the path that I had smudged. At each window, door and mirror I marked each corner with a ward to prevent his return. As I passed my mother I saw the steely resolve in her face as she waved sage out a window. She later told me that she was thinking to him "shame on you!" When I finished sealing the home with a sigh of relief, I went out to the porch to tell her that the work had been done. She thanked me and I left her with the remaining sage to burn as she was enjoying the scent. After I left, our mutual friend told me that my work had been the turning point in her life and in the life of her children, and never again did he return.

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