BORLEY GHOST SOCIETY

I do a little editing for my husbdand David at Plan Nine Publishing, and occasionally help with orders, but I have another full-time job.

I'm not a psychic investigator, or a famous psychic, and I can't even claim unequivocally that I've seen a ghost (though I think I might have seen a thing or two that I don't dismiss completely as mere hypnagogic hallucination). My three-year-old brother saw my grandmother about two weeks after she died, and called my mother into the room to see her. My mother saw nothing, but believes strongly that my brother was telling the truth. He was quite upset when he no longer saw Grandmother.

I have a moderately large collection of ghost books, a collection of small rocks and other mundane items I've taken from reputedly haunted sites, and at times, I would give a great deal to see or hear a ghost. I've slept in a haunted room (I saw and felt nothing), and slept in a rectory in Ireland where my best friend had a ghostly experience -- again, I felt nothing. But, I'm also afraid that being so eager to have a supernatural experience might attract a darker kind of spirit, so I've never mucked around with Ouija boards, automatic writing or seances.

I had never even read The Most Haunted House in England prior to joining the Borley Ghost Society. I'm afraid I'd dismissed Harry Price as a fraud, because that is how he is depicted in most of the books I've read which mention Borley, and I had no interest in a falsified account of a haunting. Because of what I've discovered through the BGS, I'm willing to give him much more of the benefit of the doubt.

I'm fairly leery of many "experts" in the field, because I know some of them exaggerate or make up their "supernatural experiences." I was bitterly disappointed to find out that one pair of 'ghosthunters' in particular encouraged a writer working with them to embellish their stories, to make them more exciting.

I have finished reading Borley Rectory: The Ghosts That Will Not Die. It is a very useful and organized compilation of the reported facts on the Rectory hauntings, and I appreciate [the] non critical presentation of them, not trying to either justify or debunk what others have experienced/theorized.

I spoke on the phone with a Maryland antique dealer who has come across several "haunted" items in his career, and he spoke at length about the positive "activity" that attaches to religious items which were treated reverently by their former owners. His words really rang true with me -- I have since come to realize that a cross in my possessing, owned by a friend who died of cancer 15 years ago, had been troubling me ever since I "inherited" it. I had always assumed that my feelings of sadness and some distaste on handling it were the result of having watched her slowly die over a period of fifteen months. Now, I'm not so sure. I held the necklace, toying with a broken and displaced link in the gold serpentine chain, and burst into tears at the thought that a part of my friend's spirit might be unhappily connected with it still. Despite all my efforts, the link refused to settle back into place. Giving up on "fixing" the long broken link, I prayed for her release from any "lostness", hoping to help any hurting part of her spirit return to God. I finished the prayer, opened my eyes, and found that the link had settled back into place -- it was "fixed."

Now, I'm quite aware that there could be simple non supernatural explanations for the repair of the jewelry. After all, I had been turning it this way and that, and simple gravity may have helped it settle back into place. However, I think that a degree of faith is called for in some possible experiences of the supernatural, and seeming coincidences may mean something more. Of course, my interpretation of this experience is quite suspect, not least because I have so desperately wanted to have an encounter with a spirit. Nevertheless, I will be treating the necklace with a great deal more respect now, and will wear it to church (which I had been unwilling to do before, because the cross is bejeweled and a tad ostentatious). I placed it near two religious statues on a tiny shelf above my bed, and twice felt tentative touches on my hair that night. Again, there are simple explanations for all this which include no "taint" of the supernatural, but my instincts tell me that my friend is still connected with her necklace.

I live about an hour and a half from Duke University. They have a truly amazing "chapel" there, done up in cathedral style, which is very European in feel. It's a lovely campus. . . .I've always been fascinated by the Rhine Center, and wonder how significant their research results are with regard to telekinesis. From what I've read, they *have* proven that certain subjects (when concentrating on mentally manipulating tiny steel beads as they flow through a sorting apparatus) produce an effect which is slightly higher on the percentage scale than that which can be ascribed to chance, but unfortunately, the percentage is so slight that the scientific world has taken little notice. It seems such a shame that we have no circumstances under which a poltergeist phenomenon has consented to manifest itself under laboratory conditions!

I applaud all the Rhine Research Center has done -- they have produced the only laboratory-based, replicable evidence for psychokenesis, for all that the scientific community considers it negligable. I would love it if they could just get one firestarter in there, under laboratory conditions, because several well-documented pyrokinetic folks have come down the pike in modern times, and convinced all observers that there was no trickery involved.