Second Sight (8 page)
My job on the project was to relate the psychic impressions I received while in the house. The greatest challenge was to distinguish my emotional reactions from a definite influence that existed outside myself. As a psychic, I was discovering how to separate the fine points. True, everyone present was tense and on edge. But also, apart from this, I sensed a buzzing and swirling energy, chaotic and disturbing, pushing in on me. Physically, it was a dull pressure, a tightening band around my head, fading in and out. The odd part was that within moments of leaving the house, I would feel this oppressive sensation lifting. Other psychics had similar responses. Unfortunately, though I'd been excited to encounter the lights and faces that many researchers had observed, I wasn't there for these occurrences. Barry and the others were staked out at the house, whereas I was only able to visit a few times. I learned that this type of phenomenon doesn't happen on command. You have to be there at the right time to catch it.
Aside from the question of what team members saw or did not see, many of our energetic perceptions were consistent. Furthermore, there was the house itself—dilapidated, twice condemned by the city—and the family, terrified by events they couldn't explain. Although they didn't complain, it must have been a burden, all these strangers in their home lugging around massive amounts of equipment. I barely spoke in a personal way with them; I simply conducted an interview about the facts. Actually, I was afraid to get too close, lest what was happening there might somehow rub off on me.
Barry believed that in the vast majority of ghost cases, even if the manifestations were authentic, they were misinterpreted. The unexplained activity, he felt, generally had little to do with a specific house. Rather, it was an outgrowth of the anger or frustration within a family, an unconscious by-product of human emotions that created physical manifestations (psychokinesis), such as objects flying around the room and lights going on and off. Just as the mind can affect our bodies, so too can it affect our environment. It was Barry's opinion that, for the most part, people are haunted, not houses. His theory was supported by the fact that when this family moved out of their home, the phenomena followed them. They, however—and others in similar situations—tend to be unwilling to accept the problem as a psychokinetic product of their own minds. If they did, they would be forced to take responsibility, to make the necessary steps to change. Most people who experience such disturbances, not surprisingly, would rather remain victims.
The experiences in this house, and others like it, were invaluable. They forced me to sift through and identify the true authenticity in circumstances that I would normally write off as sensationalized. Most convincing was the information I psychically perceived. I didn't know if the energy I picked up in Culver City was a ghost, but I was sure it was real—there was a presence there. Even so, as Barry suggested, it might have simply been an extension of the family's angst. Imagine what anxiety would be like if it were magnified a thousandfold and took on an external life of its own. This is what I was sensing. Still, as a psychic, I was in virgin territory, feeling my way. Visually I never saw much as I worked with Barry, but I was beginning to discern presences. Step by step, I was being primed to accept that many different kinds of beings exist—spirits included, a reality I came to embrace fully later on. For the time being, I wanted to keep an open mind, to view new situations without prejudging, to leave room for all possibilities.
This didn't mean that I was going to walk around with blinders on or ignore common sense. It's just that previously my psychic abilities had been discounted by well-meaning parents, teachers, and friends who were unwilling to accept what they couldn't understand. This had really hurt me. I was now determined not to repeat the same mistakes. I'd become so sensitive to people not listening to me while growing up, that I now made a special attempt to listen to others. There was nothing wrong with healthy skepticism, but I also sought to maintain a healthy sense of awe, and the humility to remember that there was much I did not know.
Complete silence. I could easily have been in a space capsule orbiting a million miles away from earth. If I listened hard enough, I could almost hear the faint sound of blood pulsing through my body. I was glad I'd brought my sweater. The maintenance people had once again turned the air conditioning on way too high. It was getting chilly in here; I had goose bumps on my legs.
Every Tuesday at four o'clock I would lock myself in the sensory-deprivation chamber and develop my Kirlian photographs. I've always had a touch of claustrophobia, so simply getting myself in there was a major accomplishment. The handle on the outside of the door, a big circular steel wheel that looked as if it belonged on a meat locker, had to be slammed shut with such force I was afraid it would never open up again. When the rubber lining inside the door hit the surrounding metallic frame, there was a horrible sucking sound. It felt frighteningly final. What if I were locked in there forever? Over time, I got used to it; the magic available within the place far outweighed my feats.
Thelma had assigned me a plant experiment in which I would use Kirlian photography to monitor the seasonal changes of five specific plants over a period of a year. I had been attracted to plants as long as I could remember, and I surrounded myself with them at home. My boardwalk apartment in Venice was a one-room jungle with flowerpots everywhere; plants were hanging from ceiling hooks, draped over the bathtub's rim, and took up every inch of floor and window space. I did more than talk to and touch them; I communed with them, actually felt their spirits. Nobody taught me how. I just started doing it on my own, a private habit that felt completely natural. Not surprisingly, I relished this chance to work with plants more closely. From my abundance of plants at home, I carefully chose a few to use for the project: a creeping Charley, a geranium, a ficus, an African violet, and a wandering Jew. I got to know each of these plants so well that I began to think of them as friends.
The first time I saw a Kirlian photograph of a plant, I was touched by its fragile beauty. It was even more beautiful than the human corona, which, in a black-and-white photo, shoots off the edge of a fingertip like the flame of a magnificent white fire. A Kirlian photograph of a single leaf reveals the details of its entire inner structure, each vein outlined by a border of tiny gray bubbles with a white speck in the middle, similar to the nucleus of a cell. When shot in color, these bubbles light up like a string of brilliant Christmas lights stretched out over the branches of a tree. The image is two-dimensional but appears to be in constant motion, contracting and expanding as though taking a breath. Filtering off the outer edges of the leaf is a radiant, purplish blue discharge, the intensity varying according to species and season.
The theory behind Kirlian photography is that it records a subtle energy field that surrounds all forms of life as well as inanimate objects, energy not detectable by ordinary means. This field extends as far as a few feet or more beyond the body and is as much a part of us as our arms or our legs. Some psychics can see it or feel it but most people can't.
The notion of energy fields sparked my interest and put into words something I had intuited for a long time. It explained why, as a child, within seconds of meeting someone I knew whether or not I liked them. This “knowing” wasn't about how nice a person was acting or what they looked like. Rather, it was a clear impression in my gut. At times I could almost sense invisible tendrils reaching out to me from a person that conveyed information about them. It would happen before we'd even exchanged a word. Some people just felt good; others didn't. I did not think to question myself until it bothered my mother when I made what she called “snap judgments” about her friends. She felt I wasn't giving them a chance, but I couldn't help it: What I felt was perfectly obvious to me. And later on, my initial impressions were often shown to be accurate.
At the lab, wanting to prove myself to Thelma, I set to work determined that the plant project be perfect. The photographic technique I used was simple. Once inside the chamber, I would place a single leaf directly on top of a one-foot-square photographic plate and press a button. That was all there was to it. Once the picture was developed, it was done. I would take about ten separate photos of the front and back of each leaf, compare the results, then mount them in a notebook. My recordkeeping was meticulous. I never missed a week. At two o'clock on Tuesdays, I would carefully collect fresh leaves from my plants at home, seal them in envelopes, and bring them to UCLA. I would then organize them according to day and month, with each species having its own separate section. Kirlian photographs in color are breathtaking, but they were far too expensive for the lab's budget, so my plant notebook was primarily done in black and white.
Doting on my plants, I felt like a mother watching her children grow, noticing every little thing. The days passed. I saw shifts. The leaves seemed to be bonded in some way, responding in unison to seasonal changes. During fall and winter, the energy fields around the leaves began to shrink, as though they were pulling into themselves. By April, a few tentacles of light would gradually extend beyond the body of each leaf, stretching out like the arms of someone who was awakening from a deep sleep. June produced the most dramatic changes when, suddenly, each leaf would bust open into a full bushy halo, remaining that way until September.
Plants, I noticed, reacted not only to seasons but also to people, their energy fields showing observable changes. One day a well-known psychiatrist from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore visited the lab. He was an unpleasant man, arrogant and loud. It was clear to us that he was closed to out experience: The purpose of his visit was to put down our research, not to learn from it. Thus we decided to play a little trick on him. First we photographed a species of ivy and measured the diameter of its field. Then, with a pretty good idea of what would ensue, we asked him to place his index finger beside the plant. Surprised, he watched as the corona of the ivy shrank to about half its original size and recoiled. Our sentiments about this psychiatrist matched the ivy's: At the end of the day we were all relieved to see him go.
As I became absorbed in the plant project, I also became frustrated with my inability to duplicate the “phantom-leaf effect” that Thelma had reported in her research. The phantom leaf was the ghost of the whole leaf or “energy imprint” that stayed intact, even though part of it was cut away. It was similar to “phantom pain,” which many amputees describe soon after the surgical removal of a limb. The arm or leg is gone, but they still feel pain in the place where it used to be. Month after month, I photographed at least ten different varieties of leaves but never captured the outline of the missing portion on film. Thelma said that some people just had a knack for it, that the phantom leaf had less to do with the photographic apparatus or the actual leaf than it did with some aspect of the photographer. There was a college student named Ron from UC Santa Barbara who was great at getting the phantom-leaf effect. He used to come down on weekends to work in the lab. Many of us had a chance to observe him—there were no tricks. Thelma said he had a gift; there seemed no other way to account for it. I agreed that Ron took some stunning pictures.
The longer I worked with Kirlian photography, the more I wanted to find out about it. For over a year, I would spend hour after hour locked inside the sensory-deprivation chamber. No human voices. No telephones. Just the distant buzzing of the fluorescent lamp above my head. Only the plants and me. I developed a rapport with them. When I placed my hand just over the leaves, I could feel an energy current running through them, palpable waves of heat, an increased pressure and mass, a buzzing vibration, that made my palm tingle even when I raised it as much as a foot in the air. Eyes open or shut, it was all the same. Eventually, with practice, I learned to sense these fields intuitively, without having to use my hand at all. By simply looking at them, I could accurately trace the location of the leaves' extended borders. At times I would see a golden glow around the leaves and correlate that with the feeling in my palm. But more often, the extent of the field simply registered in my body, a quite physical sensation.
There was no scientific explanation for Kirlian photography that parapsychological researchers agreed upon. It might have been true that energy fields were not photographed at all, that the beautiful pictures we were seeing were only the artifacts of something as mundane as the moisture content of the object on film. This, however, was less important to me than the psychic impressions I picked up during the Kirlian work. There lay its greatest value. Photographs or not, I was beginning to trust my own experience.
It was during this time that many things I couldn't previously explain started to become clear, like the afternoon in the airport when I was picking up so much sadness from the man sitting beside me that I couldn't concentrate on the magazine I was reading. I thought to myself, You're crazy. You're just imagining it. But when I moved to the other side of the room, the sadness disappeared. I'd always wondered why plants and certain people were so healing to be around. It wasn't anything that they did or said: It was how it felt to be with them. Through my plant research, I realized that when I was younger I hadn't been making things up, nor had I been trying to be “purposely disagreeable.” I was simply noticing qualities about people that others couldn't perceive. To a psychic, a person's energy field is as real as the scent of her perfume, her smile, or the warm red color of her hair.
This work had validated what I'd felt for a long time: There was more to human beings than their physical qualities. A palpable essence extended outward. Before, I had no way to confirm what I sensed to be true. But now another missing piece of the puzzle was falling into place.