When Ghosts Speak - Mary Ann Winkowski [11]
“I did it,” I said, turning to my grandmother. When I looked back at the garage, the Light was gone.
Eventually, with practice, I could make the Light appear at will, and over the years I have learned how to make it bigger, brighter, and steadier. The more I made the Light, the more I learned how to keep it present for longer periods of time, and the more I appreciated and understood the power that it held.
From the first time I made the Light, and every time I made it after that, it was purely a matter of visualizing. I don’t experience any particular sensations as I make the Light—no tiredness, no headaches, no feelings of warmth or cold. I simply see it. It’s easier for me to make the Light against a solid surface such as a wall or a floor or a tree, or even the ground.
These years were a time when I really began to understand what I was able to do. And I believe this knowledge came at a critical point. From when I was seven to around eight or so—the age that experts call “the age of reason” and the church calls “the age of discretion”—my grandmother took special care to reinforce that although my gift for talking to spirits was special, in every other way I was simply a normal girl. She never told me that the spirits I saw were figments of my imagination or that I was too old to be talking to people whom no one else could see. To this day, I believe her positive encouragement nurtured my gift.
Of course, I also learned the valuable lesson that not everyone was as open to and understanding of the spirit world as my grandmother. When I kept seeing a menacing male spirit walking behind my friend Lizzie, I decided it only made sense to tell my teacher, Sister Mary. After all, as we prepared to make our First Holy Communion during second grade, the nuns talked frequently about the Holy Ghost. Surely if they couldn’t see what I could, then at least they believed in it, I reasoned.
“Sister, there’s a bad man following Lizzie,” I told her.
Sister Mary glanced toward Lizzie, and, obviously seeing no one, turned back to me. “It’s her guardian angel,” she said.
Now, I had seen pictures of guardian angels in picture books, on the walls of my classroom, and even in framed photos in houses, and they were beautiful creatures, with golden halos and snow-white wings. The swarthy, dark-haired man who slouched around the playground looked nothing like them at all. But I wasn’t going to argue with a nun, so I let it go.
A few weeks later, when he appeared again, I felt like I had to speak up.
“Sister Mary, that man is standing behind Lizzie again, and I don’t think he is an angel,” I announced.
Sister Mary took me by the shoulders. “Mary Ann, you stop this right now! If I hear any more from you, I’ll send you to the priest. You’re not going to make your First Communion if you continue to talk like this.”
When I went home that afternoon, I told my grandmother what had happened. “It is better not to tell people unless they ask,” she said. “People can be frightened by things they don’t understand; it can make them angry. Let people ask you.”
To this day, I don’t volunteer information. I notice spirits all the time, and over the years I have been privy to more private and personal information than I care to know. But that early lesson has stuck with me: Unless someone asks me a direct question, I don’t share what I see or hear.
Of course, as I grew from a young child who was flattered by my grandmother’s attention and praise, into a typical teenager, I naturally rebelled against my ability. It seemed less a gift than an incredibly weird impediment to my social life. I had better things to do on a Friday night than to go hang out with my grandmother at a funeral parlor for a viewing. So when I was around fourteen or fifteen years old, I made a conscious decision that I wasn’t going to see spirits anymore.
Looking back on this period, I realize that it was a typical teenage rebellion against the living, not the dead. After all, if I told my grandmother that I just didn’t see ghosts anymore, how could she prove me wrong? Of course