When Ghosts Speak - Mary Ann Winkowski [26]
The ghost told me that the caretaker had been having a lot of trouble with equipment lately, specifically the lawn mowers. When I mentioned this, the two directors looked at each other.
“Has Charlie over at the grounds mentioned any trouble with the lawn mowers?” the man coolly asked his colleague.
“Perhaps he said something . . . ,” the woman who was with him replied.
“If by something they mean that the lawn mower crashed through the office walls last week,” the ghost muttered to me.
I related what he’d said. Apparently the story of the runaway lawn mower had been circulating among the different directors and cemeteries, because more than half the room burst out laughing. The two skeptics who had been such cool customers made sure that they’d be seated at my table when we later moved to a restaurant.
Before we could adjourn for dinner, however, I had one more order of business. One of the ghosts was a woman who was extremely unhappy with her burial plot. When the mausoleum we were standing in was built, resting places were created both on the inside and outside of the structure. Mrs. Tobin’s earthbound spirit had been hanging around the cemetery, hoping to be able to get someone’s attention. Her family, at the last moment, had ignored her wishes to be buried inside the mausoleum, choosing an outdoor spot for her final resting place.
I explained her concerns to the manager in charge of the mausoleum; he promised to contact the family and offer to move the body inside. When he did so later on, the family asked to meet with me first. After asking their mother’s ghost several questions, they apologized for being cheap and requested that her body be moved. With a very satisfied expression, Mrs. Tobin’s earthbound spirit was only too happy to cross over into the Light.
Although funeral directors and cemetery caretakers interact with the dead all the time, they do not tend to bring ghosts home from work. Most earthbound spirits go into the Light after the funeral. Those determined to stay usually follow a family member home. But certain types of businesses are definitely at high risk for attracting earthbound spirits. In the final part of this book, I’ll talk more about this issue, but here is a partial list of some very common places for earthbound spirits to spend time: shopping malls, supermarkets, carnivals and amusement parks, concerts, hospital emergency rooms, bars—the seedier, the better—nursing homes, dentists’ offices, theaters, airplanes, law offices, publishing offices, rehab facilities, and police stations.
Basically, ghosts will gather anywhere they are likely to find sources of physical and emotional energy. Think of a movie cineplex, for instance, with all the emotional energy generated by a crowd gasping at the latest thriller or horror film, or sobbing their way through a heartbreaking love story.
For most ghosts, drawing on this emotional energy is enough, although I’ll never forget one who had apparently decided to up the ante by wreaking havoc in a movie house. Ted and I had gone out on a Friday-night date to see a popular film in a theater near our house. We loaded up on treats from the concession stand and found seats toward the back of the crowded theater.
As people began filing in to take their seats, I noticed a woman appear to stumble, her popcorn flying out of the tub and showering back down around her. As she turned and studied the floor, trying to figure out what she might have tripped over, I noticed that she paid no attention to the teenager standing in the aisle slightly behind her. The kid had a huge grin plastered across his face. As I watched, he stepped out in front of another woman who was also carrying a large tub of popcorn and quickly tapped on the bottom of the tub. The popcorn went flying as the startled moviegoer jumped back and lost her balance.
I have to admit that at first I was somewhat amused as I watched him pull this same prank on several more unsuspecting