Haunted Houses

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’.

Haunted Houses

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.

Haunted Houses

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.
  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.

Haunted Houses

Seances, planchettes and departed spirits

In the West, 31st October is Halloween where people believe that all the departed spirits come back for spending the night on the Earth. However, I have not felt anything different energy-wise, happening on 31st Oct date that allows such mass movement of spirits through the dimensions.

I observe that in the Western civilisation is quite obsessed with death and the dead. There is a whole industry focussed on catering to the dead, from selling cemetery plots, funeral parlours to making diamonds out of the ash that remains! Even Halloween seems to be a children’s game of trick/treat or carving pumpkins and putting on garish make up and attending parties. Then again calling seances, planchette and inviting the dead to talk via mediums is quite common, and people are counselled to maintain a relationship with the dead. This in my opinion is needlessly morbid and in fact dangerous.

Seances, planchettes and departed spirits

In my experience with the dead,

  • Never call the dead for any reason unless you are sure that you can send them back. I had a client who went to carry out the funeral etc rites for his departed mother and came back with several thousand departed spirits accompanying his young child. Have written about this episode earlier.
  • Never expose young children to such energies. They may get an ‘imaginary friend’ in the process who will drain their energies also also implant unsavoury negative ideas in their impressionable minds. These imaginary friends are not friends and certainly not ‘imaginary’.
  • The departed are denizens of another plane of existence. The parent you knew in this life does not exist in that form now. Accept it and let go. Eg. One of my clients was scared of spirits and there was actually a bound spirit chasing her, carrying ill-will sent by her mother-in-law. We dealt with the ill-will quite easily. But why was she afraid? We did a guided mediation session for her and found out that in some past life she herself was trapped into being a carrier of ill-will, a bound spirit slave trapped by a tantrik. And to our utter shock that long-ago tantrik was her present mother! And her mother now was quite sincere, strict but fair, nothing to indicate such a happening past! But just see the karma, and how it gets balanced! That tantrik hurt my client so deeply that he had to become the mother, get pregnant, give birth to her, nurse her, nurture her, change her diapers, pack her tiffin, take her to school etc. This client changed my perceptions completely. The one closest to you, has the most karma to resolve with you and not all of it pleasant. After the living is done, better not call them again of your own violation.
  • The departed one, even if it was your dear mother in this life, is not just that one person. When we are born we limit ourselves to the birth horoscope. When we leave the body, we again become our higher self and remember all our past lives, and our priority becomes the pending karma, nothing else. Example. My client’s mother departed, she was good to him and thus he was missing her terribly. Then she started coming in his dreams and scolding him, forcing him to go out of his way to do something for her brother/sister which would cause him significant loss. We contacted her and she clearly said that her karma with her son was complete, she had no feelings for him. But she had significant karma left with her brother/sister and wanted him to willingly take it on for her so that her account gets lighter. She knew that he still loved and missed her so was hopeful that she could force him to take it on!
  • Some departed ones think that even if they have departed their children should still follow their wishes. Eg. My client’s mother wanted him to marry a woman from his caste, she died, and after her death he got married to a woman from a different caste. So his departed mother actually started haunting his house and his dreams. She was clearly visible in a largish-ballooned type of form inside the house and was so irritated, continuously talking! Finally we had to stop her entry using the Chamunda mantra. Then bundle her up and send her back through the dimensions to Pitrulok.
  • Planchette can easily turn bad – One of my close friends as a teen, loved playing with planchette. It quickly became an addiction and he would call spirits for his and his friends entertainment. Till one day, the spirits realised that he could hear and see them. After that they started taunting him, talking to him continuously, threatening him, laughing at him to the extent that they now would not let him sleep. This went on for 2-3 days, till he started thinking that he should now commit suicide. Luckily for him his grandfather had recently died and in despair he thought that he could ask for help. His grandfather was willing to help and instructed him to burn the planchette board in a specific style to get rid of the spirits.
  • And there is one more example I must tell you! I had gone to visit my colleague, she is a very good Shaman/tantrik. One of her clients walked in on us. And suddenly the client’s recently departed mother-in-law’s spirit entered into her and started begging her forgiveness. This departed MIL was also my colleague’s client. It was so extraordinary. The spirit would speak through the client’s mouth, then depart for a minute during which the client would speak, then again she would be possessed! The gist was that the MIL was saying sorry to the client for mistreating her while she was alive. The shaman was scolding the spirit for not listening to her advise and mis-behaving. The client was crying because she was unable to understand what was happening to her. And then the MIL spirit was also in deep contrition and crying because her routes into the other worlds were blocked because of her karma of harassing her daughter-in-law. It was such a scene!
Seances, planchettes and departed spirits

In India, the Sarvapitri Amavasya, the no moon day falling in the month of Bhadrapad which falls in sometime in Sepember/October, is the day when pretatmas/ancesteral spirits cross over from their dimension, Pitrulok, to our world, Martyalok. I think that once in the ancient past, the Vedic Sarvapitri Amavasya must have coincided with the 31st Oct of some year and got stuck. Thus the Western civilisation perhaps got its Halloween.

This day of paying respects to the ancestors is a very serious day. It is the culmination of the dark fortnight of Bhadrapad month. Throughout these 15 days the routes between the 2 dimensions are gradually opened and on the no moon day the day is extremely heavy with tamasic energies. The food for the rites on this day, is prepared by the woman of the house, which in addition to all the other items has to have a pumpkin dish, black sesame seeds and a milk/rice sweet dish. These food items have the highest potential of absorbing the energies of the tarpan/rites and transferring that to the spirits. The oldest male of the house does all the rituals. The pandits engaged to perform the rites/tarpan have to perform 2 activities, first to call the ancestors to accept the energies offered to them and send them back too. In case they do not know what they are doing it can lead to trouble.

In India, we think of the departed ancestors only and only during this fortnight/no moon day. We have a very pragmatic approach to death. When the person dies, the rule is that the body should be offered as a Anteyshti/sacrifice to the fire/Agni on the same day before sunset. In case the death occurs in the night, the cremation is done the next morning itself. The ashes/asti collected are not even brought back to the house but the earthen pot is tied to a tree standing outside the house. On the third day these are put in the nearest river or the sea with more mantras and rituals. We then give away all the clothes and everything used by the departed person. We are very thorough about this, as generally nothing is kept even as a keepsake. Even the gold etc jewellery is recast into new designs and gems are cleansed. On the 13th day some more rites are performed and a feast is given to the neighbourhood people as a token of gratitude for helping out during this moment of departure. Then once every year, the departed are remembered and offered energy through rituals.

We know that the soul takes on several lives till it attains the final Moksha and this cycle of birth-death-rebirth is going on since the Universe began. We also do not think of the departed, as we know that the spirits in the Pitrulok are active in their own work and if we remember them again and again they get disturbed. So we go on with our lives and express our gratitude to them only once a year.

Back to what I was writing about, its is always advisable to never contact departed souls. It can be quite dangerous in unexpected ways. And you might be successful in calling them, they enjoy coming here, its like a picnic, they get free energy! But then they don’t go back. There are very few people who can actually deal with such energies, and clean up their effects.

In my practice I have seen such examples that I almost never directly contact departed souls. There are better and safer ways to counsel the clients.