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My Cat Sees Dead People

I love a good ghost story as much as the next guy, but I've never given too much credence to the paranormal. I'm not much on casting runes or waving a diving stick, so the fact that I recently found myself standing in my bathroom, peering into a linen closet with two psychics is something that is going to require some explaining.

Like any good horror story, it begins in the bathroom. A few months ago my roommate and I started finding our cats' collars lying unbuckled in the linen closet upstairs in our 150-year-old Richmond house. Mystified, we combed the closet for nails the collars might be snagging on, and even checked the kitties for opposable thumbs. Then I began to notice that the straps on my bag, which I usually left in the general vicinity of the closet, were being unbuckled and rebuckled in bizarre configurations by some unseen interloper. To make matters worse, one of the cats began to claw feverishly at the closet door throughout the night. Slowly my wits began to unravel like a ball of yarn. At night I would lie in bed and stare at the closet until I was completely haunted, frozen in terror at nothing. Eventually I would drift off to nightmarish sleep and dream that the entire house had been unbuckled -- cat collars, purse straps, shoes, belts -- the whole deal.

After a few weeks of this absurd fear, I finally decided it was time to figure out if my bathroom really was possessed, and if so, find someone to dispossess it. Enter Terri Chenault , psychic to both man and beast. Terri had been recommended by a co-worker, who had enlisted her services to help with a misbehaving cat. In addition to her abilities as an "animal communicator," Terri has also been a people psychic for the past 30 years at the Aquarian Bookstore in Willow Lawn. With my spooky bathroom and troubled cats I figured she was a perfect fit. So on a Wednesday evening Terri came over with her husband, John, also a diviner. And we settled in to a night of ghostbustin'.

Upon entering the bathroom for the first time Terri exclaimed, "Oh, it's real funky in here." My eyes quickly scanned the room for dirty socks or stray hairballs. "The energy," she said. "There's nothing in the bedroom but then you step down in here and it feels really funky. I just want to shy away." While Terry was examining the bathroom, my cat, Pearl, began to rub herself all over her legs and meow imploringly. Then she jumped up onto the windowsill in the bathroom and started scratching the window feverishly. "See, this kitty is very sensitive," Terri said. The way animals communicate, she explained to us, is through a series of images projected telepathically. Terri scooped Pearl up and began speaking in a voice slightly higher than normal. "She sees people walking in and out of the space between the houses in the backyard. Pearl says she sees them whenever she is in the window. They're walking double file, walking toward something." Pearl was now purring ecstatically, lost in her portrayal of Haley Joel Osment in "The Sixth Sense." I wasn't buying it. This was the same cat who would writhe on the floor, yowling like she was being eviscerated by hungry wolves. Or jump into the shower and frantically scratch the walls. Just the other day I had caught her sitting in an old bowl of spaghetti in the kitchen sink. The cat is a bona fide nut. It didn't surprise me at all that she was seeing dead people in the backyard.

"This part of the house is the oldest part," Terri continued. "Something burned out here. I think this house was part of the underground railroad, and part of it was burned in a fire. It doesn't feel peaceful here. It feels more heavy. My attention is constantly drawn to this window." She stood there a few moments, looking out the window. I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. Please don't tell me you see dead people lined up two by two out there, I prayed. I have to shower in here. "It feels like to me that this was once a playroom. What we're dealing with in here is a little child, probably caught in the trauma of what happened here. It's a playful spirit. It's nothing you have to worry about." Sure, no big deal. My bathroom is possessed by a small child who likes to unbuckle stuff. Things could be worse. "Can you get rid of it?" I asked.

"I'll do what I can," Terri said. "I didn't bring any materials with me, but there are some things I can do." With that she faced the closet, closed her eyes, and placed her hands out in front of her, palms up. Taking a deep breath, she then made a swirling motion with her right index finger, casting it up, swirling again, and casting it down. After a few moments Terri opened her eyes and turned to her husband.

"John, can you check my closet?" she asked. John stepped forward and put his hand in the closet.

"You got it," he concluded. Suddenly I felt confused.

"What did you just do?" I asked.

"Well first I ask permission to clean it. Then I do what I do to dispel it. Usually I would go through the house with a smudge stick and do an energy sweep, with John following behind me.

"Channeling is a spiritual gift. You learn to control it so that it doesn't control you. I can't just go out into nature and dispel whatever. I'd be in one of the mental institutions because it is so overwhelming." She paused and then added with a smile, "I don't want people to think I'm a nut case."

I knew the feeling. I was the one who brought Terri over here to cleanse my bathroom of evil spirits. Who was I to judge? Besides, there was something about Terri's gentle voice and serene demeanor that made me feel bad for entertaining cynical thoughts. I felt my skepticism creeping back in guilt the longer I stood there.

Moving out of the bathroom and bedroom Terri and John both stopped at the landing on the stairs, facing the wall. "Do you feel that?" John asked her.

"Yep."

John called us over to feel the space in front of the wall. First my roommate tried it, closing her eyes and placing her hands a few inches from the wall, moving them up and down, and telling John where she felt the most energy. I tried doing the same thing, but my hands felt as perceptive as two dead fish. Embarrassed by my utter unclairvoyance, I mumbled something about feeling some heat somewhere near the middle.

"You know what that is?" John asked. We didn't.

"That's your guardian angel," he said. "And I'm not telling you where you were just touching him!" He burst into jubilant laughter. Terri just smiled and shook her head.

As we made our way through the rest of the house, John and Terry would stop periodically and point out different pockets of funky energy to each other. There was negative energy in the downstairs bathroom (What is it with our bathrooms?), in the office area, the downstairs foyer and even in front of the refrigerator. Each time Terri would perform her cleansing ritual, asking John to check her work afterwards. While she was doing this John would teach us useful tricks, like how to channel our negative energy into trees, or how to compact energy into the form of a ball and pass it back and forth. To demonstrate, John made an energy ball and passed it to my roommate. With the two of them slowly rolling invisible balls in their hands I suddenly felt like the only sober person at a Dead show. "You gotta try this, it's awesome," my roommate said, handing her bundle of energy over to me gingerly. I pretended to kick it across the room like a soccer ball.

I believe that channeling, or at least being sensitive to spirits, requires a certain amount of solemnity which I had kept disrupting. Still, I was happy that Terri and John kept the mood lighthearted while they did their thing. Far from feeling spooked, I was actually enjoying myself. I told Terri this when she was leaving at the end of the evening.

"It's fun, but you've got to make sure you protect yourself," she said. "I've gotten sick from channeling. Because when you channel you release your body to something else. There's a tradeoff."

I hope our house of funky energy didn't make Terri ill. Or our jokes. I asked her if she comes across a lot of skeptics in her line of work. "I do, but the skeptics end up being my best advocates," she said.

It's been a few months since the Chenaults visited and we have found nary a cat collar in the closet. My purse straps have been left alone, too. It seems that Terri helped whatever it was that was in the house find its way back to the light. Consider me an advocate, crazy as that sounds.

Now on to the next dilemma ... does anyone know a good cat exorcist? Discussion Forum: Do you believe in ghosts?