Readingground Blogazine

by Tomi Tsunoda

This article is a continuation of The Gathering of 100 Ghostly Tales, Part One: Tales 1-11 from the last issue of Readingground.

PART TWO (12-21)

12.

When I moved back to the U.S. a few months later, things died down. I broke out the Ouija board once at a party that first year, but threw the board away afterward. Bringing the séance home to the U.S. felt off somehow. Like talking to a stuffed animal and knowing it can’t hear you.

After a time, ghosts and mid-reading games became less of a priority than the new social survival game of high school. As my life in Japan faded into the background, so did my interest in spirits and powers of the mind, and I basically forgot about them until many years later.

Once I got to college and had some distance from these experiences, I started to become curious about whether it had all been real.

Sophomore year, lying in a friend’s room as he talked on the phone, I picked up his ring and closed my eyes, trying to read it. Almost immediately, I saw a very specific street vendor in the neighborhood of the dorm. I casually asked my friend where he’d gotten the ring, and he confirmed that it was at that exact sidewalk vendor.

I’ve tried this again only one other time since, with another college friend later on. This attempt was less successful – all I could see was a beach. I couldn’t get anything else for a long time. Suddenly, the picture in my head started changing, and I could see letters being written out in the sand. I kept asking, “Were you drawing in the sand, or writing in the sand?” She insisted they hadn’t been. The image wouldn’t go away though, and I kept asking again. Finally, she said, “What does the writing say?” and I found that if I looked closer, I could see that the letters were “D –A – R – K.”

She said, “Oh my god.” I opened my eyes and saw her staring at me. “What?” I asked. She said that she had started trying to help me, was trying to send me hints with her mind. She had been saying to herself over and over again, “It was dark out, it was dark. It was dark. It was dark outside. It was dark. Dark. Dark. It was dark.”

13.

And then after college, there were stories like this:

I used to work, briefly, as a phone psychic. It’s not something I’m proud of. I was just out of college and constantly broke, but didn’t want to work retail or any other kind of “real” job. I wanted to sit in my apartment while my roommate was at work, smoke marijuana, stare at the wall, and daydream about my art.

I was a little lazy. I knew how to read Tarot Cards.

The phone psychic thing paid $20 per hour. I could work from home and set my own schedule. I didn’t have to prove that I was psychic to anyone; I just had to make a phone call, sign up, and go. Checks came in the mail.

This seemed like the perfect scenario for me.

What I didn’t realize was how little I’d want to do it. Every call was like torture. I couldn’t get through more than two without wanting to ditch work again for a week.

People who call phone psychics fall into 3 categories:

(1) Housewives who are bored, watching T.V., and convinced you are full of shit. They call to give you a chance to prove yourself within the first 3 toll-free minutes, then hang up on you, disgusted.
(2) Curious and hopeful teenage and pre-teen children who call during sleepovers, but without parental permission, and hang up after the first 3 toll-free minutes so they won’t get in trouble.
(3) Genuinely Desperate People. These are people with good sense, strong hearts, strong minds, who call because they don’t have anywhere else to turn. They have tried every possibility, walked every road, turned every stone, and are calling you as a last resort in a cold and very unfair world.

This job sucked.

For me, The Call That Ended It was from an adult man. He was living in a trailer with an ailing wife. They’d both been employed and had lived in a house, but she got very sick and was unable to continue working. On top of that, her medical bills ate through every asset they had. She was on prescription medication that was expensive, that she took daily, and that was keeping her alive.

Then he suffered an injury and had to stop working. They lost their health insurance. His medical bills sent them further into debt. They had no family that could help them, and every loan he’d gone after had been denied. If he could not find a way to make money, he would not be able to buy his wife’s medication, and she would die. They were behind in their rent, and she was on her last two pills.

With his voice barely keeping stable, he explained that he was calling me because he was at the end of his line, and couldn’t think of anything else to do. He was hoping I could tell him what to do, because I was a psychic.

I told him the first thing he should do is hang up before his 3 toll-free minutes ran out, and not to waste a cent more calling psychics on the phone.

14.

There was an afternoon some weekend just after college, living in Brooklyn, when Sharon came over to pick me up. This is before we lived together. We were going to get brunch I think, or maybe see a movie. She walked in the door and looked terrible. She had eaten a multi-vitamin that morning without food, and was nauseated as hell. I went to get her a piece of bread, but before I could deliver it, I heard her puking in the bathroom.

I ran into the bathroom and held her hair while she puked up the vitamin. At one point, she lifted her head away from the bowl, and I saw thin blooms of blood in the toilet water. I pointed them out to her and said “Sweetheart, I think you’re puking up blood, maybe we should get you to a doctor.”

Her response was bizarre. She sighed a little and said, “No, that’s my nose bleeding.” I said, “Oh my god, you puked so hard your nose bled?”

“No,” she said. “This happens. It’s because Edward’s sick.”

This is how I found out about Sharon’s nosebleeds. Her on-again/off-again/out-of-town boyfriend Edward had had some kind of heart trouble the night before. Sharon found this out because, the night before, she’d had a nosebleed, and called him to see if he was okay. Apparently, Sharon used to have chronic nosebleeds when she was younger, and got the blood vessels cauterized. Ever since, her nose only bleeds when someone she knows is sick or in danger. Each nosebleed in her life had been paired with a confirmed instance of unwell-ness for someone she cared about. On that particular weekend, it was Edward.

I felt bad for her. What a particularly shitty sixth sense to have to live with.

This was the beginning of a new bonding point for Sharon and me. In addition to the nosebleeds, Sharon had experienced dreams she believed were pre-cognitive, or somehow about helping a stranger get somewhere. She felt fairly certain that she was helping souls cross over in her dreams.

Finally, I had someone in my life again to talk to about pre-cognition and the spirits of the dead without either being judged or having to prove something.

When Sharon and I moved in together in 2000, we had a conversation about what we thought would happen when we were both living under one roof. We wondered if our weird brain occurrences would somehow align, like the way girls who live together get onto the same menstrual cycle.

We didn’t have to wonder long. It was as though by having the conversation, by having a genuine curiosity and desire to experience something, we opened up a door within ourselves and invited the experiences in.

15.

Sharon and I not only lived together, but waited tables at the same restaurant.

One weekend in early October, Edward was in town visiting for Sharon’s birthday. I was working the morning shift while Sharon and Edward hung out during the day, and then Edward came and picked me up from work when Sharon came in and relieved me at the restaurant.

I was walking up the stairs from the basement into the main kitchen at the end of my shift when I was struck with an intense déja vu. Or at least, I thought it was déja vu for a moment, but then realized I had actually dreamed of this exact image before – the exact kitchen, the view coming up the stairs, meeting Sharon, where people were standing, what was being said, everything. This wasn’t a flash sense of déja vu, it was a memory. I remembered actually having the dream years before, dreamt that Sharon and I worked in a restaurant together, and that I was walking up these exact stairs. I had forgotten about the dream entirely until that moment when it began playing itself out in front of me.

16.

In 2003, my brother Kudo took me to Europe. He flew out to NYC and spent a night here before we flew together to Paris. Somehow he had lost his camera, and had to go shopping for a new one before we left town.

In Paris one night, we’d gone out for dinner. I’d ordered a dessert that got set on fire at the table. As we were leaving Kudo turned back to me and said, “By the way, I totally dreamed this.”

He said that some time back, before we’d ever planned on going to Europe, he’d had a dream that he and I were traveling together, and that we’d had dinner at that very restaurant. He recognized it from the dream, though we’d both only heard of it for the first time that evening. Early in the dream, he had also lost his camera, and much of that part center around searching for a new one. He said, “So keep your eyes open, because according to the dream, you’re supposed to get laid tonight.”

Sadly for me, that part didn’t come true.

I asked if that was the first time he’d ever had a dream that came true like that before. After a moment, he said simply, no. I said, me too.

17.

After Edward picked me up from work, he wanted to go buy a birthday present for Sharon. Sharon loved home and garden stuff. There was a gardening shop nearby with plant-hangers Sharon liked, and Edward wanted to buy them for her as a surprise. He and I walked over there together, talking all the while. We were good friends and were doing a lot of catching up.

We talked as we moved through the store, only half-shopping because we were distracted by our own conversation. At the back of the store was a raised wooden platform, and off the platform was a glass door and windows leading out onto a patio. We stopped at the platform when we got there and continued talking. The door to the patio was closed – not just shut, but closed and latched.

As we talked, the door swung open. There was no breeze coming in from outside, and no one else was in the back of the store. It was weird enough to stop both of us in mid-conversation. She stared at the door, then silently at each other.

Edward said, “I guess we’re supposed to go outside.” I agreed.

We walked out onto the patio and talked some more. There was nothing much back there – larger plants, outdoor gardening tools and supplies, and a tall fence – made from pointed slats of wood and painted green. When we hit a lull in our conversation, we came back indoors. Edward found Sharon’s gift, bought it, and we left. Neither of us told Sharon about our shopping trip, since the gift was a surprise.

The next morning, Sharon said she’s had a weird dream. She’d dreamt that Edward and I were talking to each other alone outside on some kind of patio or back porch. There was a fence surrounding the patio, but she couldn’t quite figure out where we were.

We asked her what the fence had looked like, and what else she remembered seeing on the patio, and she described where we’d been almost exactly.

18.

I’ll save whatever stories are left from those years for my upcoming podcast interview with Sharon.

What’s important to me now is this:

I remember, vividly, walking home one night down 7th Avenue with Sharon. She had had a nosebleed, I think a day or two before, and we still hadn’t figured out who it was about. We weren’t sure we were going to figure it out. This nosebleed came at the tail end of a series of cryptic events and shared dreams that were unmistakably paranormal, and the stress of not being able to decode or validate all of it for myself became more than I was willing to deal with. I did not feel in control of what my mind was doing, and I didn’t like it. Even when it wasn’t threatening, it was overwhelming.

I recalled the conversation we’d had before moving into together, and said out loud, “I don’t think I want to know anymore.”

That was that. The conversation, the genuine curiosity, the desire for experience all dissolved, and somewhere in the depths of my mind, the switch turned to OFF.

I didn’t experience much after that. There have been occasional coincidences that make me wonder; there have been strong impulses or instincts, moments when (as I like to say) it feels as though my Spidey Sense is tingling.

But that’s it.

It was a little sad. It’s like I’ve been to Narnia and back, but now the wardrobe is just a wardrobe again.

19.

At some point in the last couple of years, I found myself gravitating toward the pursuit of spirits. It was unconscious at first – like, I found out my apartment building used to be a Vaudeville house, and that the Marx brothers performed here, and that our apartment is actually exactly where the stage floor would have been.

I began researching the building, digging up whatever I could. I wouldn’t admit it to myself at the time, but I think I was wishing the place was haunted, hunting up some possibility of a ghost to talk to.

Our DVR fills up every week with formulaic and unsubstantiated shows on the paranormal: Ghost Hunters, Ghost Hunters International, Medium, Paranormal State, A Haunting, Lisa Williams: Psychic, America’s Psychic Challenge, Crossing Over with John Edward.

Whether or not the shows are real – which, you know, isn’t likely – they are not my experiences. They are inside the little box in my living room. They are TV. And yet I record and watch them obsessively, like I’m chasing some kind of spiritual dragon.

I brought it up in therapy.

Actually, I found this therapist through a friend of mine. He had mentioned to her in session one day that he had always had this imaginary friend, but that it felt like more than an imaginary friend, it felt more real. After many questions and assessments, she decided it wasn’t schizophrenia, and asked him if he wanted to see a medium, and that she’d go with him.

The medium told my friend that he did indeed have a spirit following him, and that the spirit was a close friend from many past lives, and that their spirits would follow each other, dead or alive, in every lifetime, and it just so happens that in this lifetime, this spirit’s body died before they ever met.

She asked if my friend wanted the spirit to pass on and leave him be until the next lifetime. My friend said yes. The medium performed a ceremony, and from that point forward, my friend never felt the “imaginary friend” sensation again.

There had been a couple of occasions when I’d been in this friend’s apartment by myself, to pick something up or drop something off. Each time, it was like there was a roommate home in the next room, even though no one was there. I always felt compelled to speak out loud and say something like, “Sorry, I’ll be out of your way in a second, I’m just dropping something off.” I could never shake the feeling that someone was watching me move through the house.

I was completely sold that, if I ever decided to get into therapy, this woman was the therapist for me.

20.

That time finally came (for a variety of reasons…), and fairly early on in our sessions, I got up the nerve to Say It Out Loud To My Therapist.

She asked how I deal with it now, and I said, “I shut it out.”

Her response was, “Well. You’re going to have to stop doing that.”

Then she told me a story about hiking in the desert with her friends as a teenager – how they’d gone for a hike that they found out pretty quickly they shouldn’t have gone on; how they got lost; how long they wandered around looking for water; how sure she was that she was going to die. Then she saw, suddenly, a Native American man walk out from behind a large rock in the middle of the desert sand. He looked directly at her and pointed off to the left. She became sure all of a sudden that he was showing her the way to water. She didn’t know how she knew, but she was sure. They followed his finger and found a source of fresh water not far away.

She said she believed that the man was a spirit, and that he meant to save her. She shrugged. She added that, sometimes, this kind of thing happens.

21.

Somehow I think my Gathering of 100 Ghostly Tales is a way to prove to myself that what I’ve experienced is real.

Since I decided to start collecting stories, the eerie synchronicity of things has become more and more frequent in my world. Dave and I went out for a movie date a few weeks ago. We were waiting for the bus home when I looked up and noticed that the clock tower on Atlantic Avenue was finished being restored and was working again. This was the first time I’d seen it lit up in years.

I laughed and told Dave how, when I first moved in with Sharon, there was no clock in the living room. I’d asked her why, and she’d said that whenever she wanted to know what time it was, she just looked out the window at the clock tower. I squinted out the window and said, “Yeah. Well, I’m near-sighted, so I’m buying a clock.” I’ve never been able to look at it without thinking of Sharon.

Then I told Dave about the podcast I had decided to do, interviewing people who had had first-hand experiences with ghosts or pre-cognition, collecting their stories and talking about what they thought it all added up to. I mentioned that I’d been thinking of interviewing Sharon for it, of talking to her about her nosebleed and strange dreams, and about the things that happened while we lived together.

On the bus ride home, we passed our favorite dessert locale, and on a last second impulse, decided to jump off the bus at the next stop and walk back for some brownies and ice cream. We sat down and immediately heard someone say hello from the next table. We turned and there were Sharon and her husband Stu. They hadn’t even ordered yet.

*****
To Be Continued. Check back in two weeks for Tomi’s podcast — The Gathering of 100 Ghostly Tales — premiering Monday, March 31 on Podia: breedingground’s portable entertainment network.