Psychic Telephone · 65
Steven
Not sure what Psychic Telephone is all about? Check out our first and second posts for an introduction to the project. Read our first post about Steven here.
Nakénuŋla waúŋ, Steven says. In other words, be ready for anything. And he is. He doesn’t get taken by surprise. There come times when he’s asked to clean a house. Cleaning spirits. But he’s got to have Lisa explain it. She and Steven do that, she says, with his spirit helpers helping them, and with the herbs they use, that they burn. Essentially, they push the spirits through the house with the smoke. Because there’s no way the spirits can be where they have done the smudge. And they smudge the entire house—they open every drawer, every cabinet, every vent, every drain, and if it has multiple floors, they do all of those. They start in one room, usually the one where you walk in, and they end in that room. All the way through the entire house. And then at the end, they take the spirits away.
They got to a house and Steven said it didn’t feel good. He told Lisa and his little brother Ben, Be ready. They were in Phoenix. And that house was icky. Really bad. You could feel a heaviness just walking in. It was actually a very new house, not even a year old at that point. But they found out later it had been built on Tohono O’odham burial grounds.
So Steven was right behind Lisa and Ben, and they were in front with the smudge of cedar and sweetgrass. They walked into a bedroom and the temperature dropped. This was Phoenix—it was a hundred and something outside. And in this one room, they could see their breath. Lisa was getting sick to her stomach. She was walking around with all her hair sticking up, on her arms and all over her body. Then they went to go into the bathroom. And Steven said, Be ready. It’s in there. He already knew. He could feel it.
Well, Lisa had no idea what to be ready for. Fanning the smudge in front of her, she took literally one step. And Ben, at the same time—they were going into the room together. She took one step into the room and it felt like something took two fingers and literally, right at the front of her neck, picked her up and threw her physically out of the room. And Ben too, who’s six-four and like three hundred pounds. Picked them both up by their throats and threw them out of the room. Because they were angering the spirit, because it knew they were going to make it leave. It didn’t want to leave. That was scary.
But they kept going. They couldn’t stop. They were pushing it, you know, all the way through the house, back to the living room. And they started to sing a song they sing to make the spirits leave. Steven was singing very loudly, and his brother was playing the hand drum, and Lisa was just singing along. And this black shroud-like thing came along the floor, kind of snake-like but not snake-like, along the ground. Then it went right into Steven’s chest. And he couldn’t sing anymore. He was choking, quite literally. Ben was singing louder, and she started singing louder, and they finished the song. And then they watched it fly out Steven’s back and out the window. And then all the dogs in the neighborhood started howling and barking and going crazy. And the people outside waiting for them were like, What’s going on? What’s going on? Then Steven trapped it, and later he had to go off into the desert and get rid of it. He sent it back to the other side. And his spirits, his helpers, are the ones that took it.
And nothing’s compared to that one. That one was the worst. But they learn lessons from that, from stuff like that. That was a learning experience. He’s constantly learning all the time, always.