When Ghosts Speak - Mary Ann Winkowski [36]
Nevertheless, on the occasions when a homeowner refuses to let me release the spirit, I do not make the Light. Again, it’s because I believe in free will—for both the living and the dead—even if folks want to continue to make their own lives difficult by allowing a spirit to remain attached to their property.
However, I will mention, out loud, that if ghosts in fact wanted to cross over, it was entirely possible for them to seek out a funeral home and simply use the Light of the recently deceased. At least this way, I figure the ghost is free to take my advice and find a way to cross over if that is what they wish.
On the other hand, there are the ghosts who are unwilling to leave. Most often these are folks who are nursing a grudge—sometimes decades old. These ghosts are fully aware of the discord they are causing, but are usually getting a sense of satisfaction from making the existence of the living as miserable as their own ghostly existence.
One family in particular suffered from the resentment that a dead brother held toward his living brother. The family had called me after years of incidents that centered on the boys of the family and their vehicles. The father who called had five sons. All of these boys had horrible luck with cars: electrical malfunctions, mechanical failures, a tendency toward fender benders. When the father called me, it was because four of the five boys had recently been in fairly serious auto accidents. Gradually, each admitted that right before each accident, he’d been distracted by a glimpse of a kid sitting in the previously empty backseat. What was even weirder, they all agreed, was that the kid looked just like their father had when he was young.
“Could it be my dead brother?” the father asked me over the phone. “He’s been gone for almost forty years.”
I met with the whole family at their home. The father was around sixty years old, and the “boys” ranged in age from thirty-five to twenty-one. In addition to the father and his sons, there was one very surly-looking ghost who appeared to be about eighteen or nineteen. I asked the father to tell me how his brother had died.
“He was just eighteen,” he said. “I was twenty-one. We were drag racing and he flipped his car and hit a tree. I never should have let him try.”
I noticed that the ghost was shaking his head in disgust.
“He always thought he could tell me what to do,” the ghost spat out. “But I would have beaten him fair and square if he hadn’t swerved and tried to run me off the road.”
“He says you tried to run him off the road,” I told the father.
The man’s expression was pained. “I remember my car swerving,” he said, closing his eyes. “I thought I was going to lose control, but I didn’t. When I finally stopped, Joe’s car was already wrapped around the tree.”
He opened his eyes and looked right at me. “I never should have let him race,” he repeated.
The ghost snorted. “You’d think he’d at least say he was sorry for killing his only brother,” he said sarcastically.
It was clear that even after all these years, and even after the harm that the ghost had tried to inflict on the family, his living brother was still horribly broken up over his death. It was also clear to me that this ghost had such an attitude—so much resentment, and even hatred, for his brother and nephews—that he was never going to give up causing them trouble.
I went through my usual arsenal of arguments as to why he should go into the Light. But this guy was having none of it. And so I turned my attention to the family. Now, when I clear a house and am sure there are no more spirits present, I give the homeowners special quince seeds that are sent to me by my relatives in Italy. The quince is a fruit related to apples and pears. And to this day I don’t know what