Strangely this week was my first experience with a haunted house! I have seen ghosts in several houses, on the streets, wherever, in fact there was a ghost in my house. I live in a house not an apartment. One of the bedrooms had a resident ghost. Just that one point in the corner, an Indian servant who was killed by his British master, quite a mutilated body. Apparently his remains are somewhere below the foundations of the house, below that room, and he is still attached to them. Even spirits have free will I guess, if he doesn’t want to go I wont waste my energy. But I could not have him in the house, so I slightly tweaked stuff (I used a pendulum), now that spirit stays outside the gates and I keep a bowl of sea salt crystals over this point in my bedroom to keep it ‘clean’.

But back to the point, this was the first time I actually saw a family in trouble over a ghost in their house. This is an old friend whose husband in the army, so they had locked up their house and the entire family was living at the husband’s place of posting. Now they had come back after several months to stay here during the children’s winter vacations. They found a messed up house, naturally rats and insects had taken over, they cleaned up everything and then I went over for tea and chit-chat. Found the auras of the husband/wife/2 children completely drained, black streaks and even their complexion had turned ‘grey’. There was a massive entity, a ball of negativity residing with them in their house. This negative entity had further attracted the rats with their variant of negativity thus manifesting its filth in the physical environment too.

Hauntings do happen for real. Not only houses, but even old furniture and jewellery can be ‘haunted’. The usual suspects are spirits, possession, suspicious deaths and ghosts from the past. But if looked into deeply, haunting is basically a concentrated chunk of rather negative energy, which may be conscious or not conscious. Some of us can sense these haunting energies easily and be influenced by them. We naturally feel scared, this is something not of the normal world, cannot be located by the senses but still is very much there, affecting us on the sub-conscious levels. Our own mind also plays its part and adds to the scare. These hauntings are nothing serious if we dont let our imagination run away with us.

There are mainly 2 types of these haunting energies and two different ways of dealing with them.

The conscious energy We call this world ours, but we have invited and uninvited guests from the other dimensions here with us. These are quite rare but yes they happen.

• Actual departed souls who for some reason remain trapped in this world of ours. See when a body dies in this world/Martyalok, the soul is directed to leave the body and travel to the other world/Pitrulok. The energies of the fire/Agni of the cremation/Anteyshti are necessary as they power the soul for its travel. Later the immersion of the ashes in flowing water or the sea ensures that the soul safely reaches its destination, does not stay back. But if for some reason the spirit does not move forward, it creates an energy disturbance, haunting
• Then the invited guests are the spirits who are called in this world by tantriks/witches and not sent back properly. Books like Goetica tell budding witches how to make sigils of entities and leave them around in this world!
• Your house is a conscious thing, it links to the energies of its residents to make itself habitable. Your movements in every room energise them. So always buy a house that you can fill with your energy, a family of 4 should not have a house bigger than 5-6 rooms. Empty rooms or rooms which no one uses for days will attract negativity.

My friend had left her house empty for too long. It would have been preferable if she would have rented out a couple of the rooms in the house so that there would have been some humans powering it with their energies. If you leave your house shut for months like this it will soon exhaust its energies and become an open invitation to anyone who can ‘occupy’ it, from which ever dimension. Now this family was being drained in 2 ways. The house was energy-deprived for months and was demanding. And the negative entity was also happily sucking away at their auras!

So if you ever have to re-activate such a house this is what you need to do,

1. Dress up the house – Put a bunch of mango leaves and marigold flowers on the front door. (called toran in marathi). Draw a rangoli/kolam. Keep a lighted oil lamp at the front door in the evening twilight. Sprinkle the charged water from your puja/Gangajal all over the house. Keep an arrangement of fresh flowers, house plants, living energy in your house.
2. Do your basic puja in the puja ghar. Blow your conch in the morning pujas and during the evening twilight. Take the Camphor arti all around the house.
3. Some pujas – call a pandit, get a basic Satyanarayan Katha or whatever you like done in the house, call all your neighbours, distribute prasadam. Having people in your house for 5-6 hours like this will make your house happy!
4. Throw a party – for the not so spiritually inclined, throw a mini house-warming party. Call your neighbours, friends and the caterers, karaoke and dance. Lots of energies for the house.
5. If there are actual ghosts they will have to be removed actively. You can do this yourself. On the twilight of an amavasya, cook some fresh rice and take some fresh curd, in front of your puja ghar/altar mix them in a bowl with a spoon. Take an incense stick, light it. And now recite the siddhakunjika once in your puja ghar and then walk all through your house reciting the mantra, “Om aing hreeng kleeng chamundayi vicche”, and as you recite place a small tea-spoonful of this curd-rice at every door and window of your house, including the toilets and the front door. Or if you are more drawn to Shiv, use the Kaalbhairavashtak. Or if you are more drawn to Hanuman use any of his stotras. This is a very easy method to remove the negativity from the house. The oldest in the family does it, my Dad has been doing this since I can remember. In the next morning, the dried out curd/rice should swept out with the normal dusting, cleaning.
   • Kaalbhairavashtak
6. And if you are scared to do this simple thing with rice/curd, it would be best to call a pandit and get a puja/ritual for Devi, Shiv or Hanuman done asap. Living with an energy-sucking ghost in the house will make the family members physically ill within 6 months.

The non-conscious energy – These are not the actual spirits but fragments of their energies which are left behind. The spirits have moved on to the Pitrulok. This is more common.

• You must have sensed this. You have an ancestral house in your village where your grandparents lived. After they passed away this house was cleaned up and closed, with the furniture, mattresses and kitchen stuff that they used. Now when you go there once a year, you can feel your grandmom’s presence or hear your granddad’s voice. This is not a haunting.
• The tiny fragments of their energies trapped in the furniture, the imprints in the mattresses and curtains are activated by your living presence in the house. You by your living energies are animating the remnants of your grandparent’s aura/energy adhering to the objects used by them.
• So what do you do about these fragments of energy? If you can afford it, give away their stuff to poor people who can use it. There will naturally be some items which you cannot give away, so clean them thoroughly, air them, put them in the sun and then use them yourself for a few days so they take on your energy impressions. The gold jewellery should be ideally remade into new designs and the gemstones cleansed. This will solve these type of ‘hauntings’.

I could not have the tea and snacks made in my friend’s kitchen that day, the energy was not good. And neither could I sit inside, we took a couple of chairs and sat outside.

Do take care of your house and its energy. Keep your surroundings ‘clean’. It will be reflected back at you manifold.