Psychic Telephone · 35
Cheyanne
Cheyanne knows this sounds ridiculous, but she’s never been a skeptic. Her whole life she has believed in ghosts and psychic abilities and the supernatural, all that. She was never raised to be a skeptic—she’s more skeptical of humans than of the supernatural. Her mother’s family was all Slavic-Hungarian, and even though they were Christian they were very—she wouldn’t say superstitious, they just believed. Her family life was very Old World, in a sense. Just the old-school way of thinking and believing. Things pertaining to spirits and the dead, using plants and herbs for healing, things like that. Not skewed by a lot of modern things. She’s not saying they didn’t have TV and all that, but spiritually. Things weren’t squashed that maybe would be in a typical, normative Christian household. They were embraced.
Things like, there was a lot of paranormal stuff going on in the house she lived in with her mother. Like over the top. It was near San Jose, California, in a little town with train tracks going through. And it was an older house, with additions—the bathroom was an addition, because it had had an outhouse before. It had skeleton keys and everything. And that house had a lot going on. One thing was, they were the type of family to leave papers and stuff on the kitchen table, because they didn’t sit at the table. Then they’d come home and it would be cleared and set, with silverware and plates. So it was pretty intense, right?
And things would go missing from the spare room. And their toothbrushes would go missing from the bathroom at the back of the house and they’d find them in the front guest room, which was always ice-cold even when the house was hot. Or there was this thing going on in the shower. Her mom worked a swing shift, so she’d shower at night after work, and when she did she could hear a man and woman screaming. It sounded like it could be on TV, so she told her boyfriend, You could have turned off the TV before bed. And he was like, I did. And it turned out that he was hearing it too when he was in the shower. It was at that level.
Cheyanne’s mom didn’t ignore these things, because of course there are spirits everywhere. She knew it was real, and she took action. She had been going to the Baptist church next door for a while, because she’d had a really hard time with Cheyanne’s dad and they’d had to leave him. Cheyanne was really young, maybe three or four. And her mother got worried because the church told her that spirits love children. Spirits like little kids because they’re too young to know to be scared of them. So it can be dangerous.
So she went to the preacher and told him she needed some help. And they gave her some cloths that were blessed—that was their belief as Baptists—and told her to tie them to Cheyanne’s bed for her protection. Cheyanne had a really old-fashioned bed, almost like a hospital bed, with a metal headboard. So her mom tied like twenty holy cloths to the rails after she went to sleep. And when she checked on them in the morning before Cheyanne woke up, they were all untied, lying around the bed on the floor.
When Cheyanne got a little bit older, in middle school, she found out they weren’t the only house. All her friends would talk about the activity in their houses. Everyone had activity. It was in the neighborhood. And they learned later that the area where they lived was a stagecoach stop, and they lived right in front of the train tracks. So if you think about that energy. Spirits are pure energy. And thinking about it now, she thinks maybe the spirit that untied the holy cloths was just saying, I’m not here to harm anybody. She doesn’t know, who knows. She thinks a lot of ghosts, they’re like us, they’re harmless. They’re just existing.