Liz Baumann

When I was in high school, a good friend of mine was Native American and lived on the nearby Lac Courte Oreilles reservation. She claimed her house had been built on an American Indian burial ground and was haunted. She had some stories of physical manifestations of these spirits, but I don’t remember all the details. While this sort of thing has always interested me, I don’t recall really thinking much of it, until one night. I was staying at her house, and we had just settled in in her room. I think I was on the floor, and she was in her bed. We were chatting on and off about things, not yet tired enough to sleep.

All of a sudden I had a very strange feeling, like someone else had just entered the room. But the door was closed and had not been opened. Before I really had any time to think about what it might be, Jennifer exclaimed: “Oh my God, they’re BACK!!”

Nothing manifested itself physically, and the strange feeling departed, but Jen did confirm that it was sensing the spirits or ghosts that caused her to make that remark.

If this was not a case of spiritual activity, the only other explanation that fits is that one of us read the other’s mind. Either of those things are unbelievable to most skeptics. I wonder what a skeptic would say if he/she experienced something like that.

I will always remember that moment as one of the most awesome experiences of my life. Not really very dramatic, I know; something like that would never make it into a TV show or movie. But it was very real and personal to me.

At other times in my life I’ve tried seeing if I could send or receive psychic energy (telepathy). With another childhood friend we tried a crude type of concentration exercise on each other using a deck of playing cards. I could not receive at all, getting almost none right, but she did get more than a few cards right when I tried sending / her receiving. I also took a class once when I lived in Greensboro, covering various phenomenon including past life regression, clairvoyance, etc. We did the card thing there too. Again, I was lousy. The instructor was very good though, getting most of the cards right. I suppose he could have found a way to “stack the deck”, so to speak, but, it seemed genuine.

Some things have happened to me lately, making me question whether I am sending and/or receiving telepathically. Maybe I spent too much time playing Spider solitaire this past summer and that had some sort of strange hypnotic effect. Or maybe I simply spent too much time in Boulder (maybe it’s good I moved to Lafayette, out on the plains a dozen miles away from that wonderful hippie town). But at least twice I think I have received. Maybe once I sent. I was trying not to; I was really just trying to be observant, thinking maybe I’d find an answer to a question, not influence anything. I’m not real sure, and I may never know.

In physics there is something called quantum entanglement (Einstein mockingly called it “spooky action at a distance”), and I wonder about whether it has anything to do with otherworldly phenomenon. (Actually… I just realized I’m not alone in thinking that.) In college I minored in physics but I only did well in it because I could do the math; I didn’t really care about or grasp what the theories were. Now, I can’t do the math, but I want to know more about the theories, because there’s actually some really intriguing stuff there. Around Halloween I picked up a book called Quantum Reality and read a few chapters, but I’m a procrastinating reader so it is now just gathering dust on my headboard. I’ll probably get back to it someday though, and give a report here.