I’ve found that I no longer have to “hunt” for ghosts the way I did when I conducted paranormal investigations. These days, no matter where I am, they seem to find me. For the most part the ghosts don’t bother me. At best, they go away on their own in a few days, or they get sick of me ordering them to leave me alone and move on to someone more interesting. Occasionally, though, one shows up and nothing I try to do can get rid of it. It’s frustrating and, I confess, a bit scary.

My friend Joni had her first experience with a bad attachment a couple of years ago. I watched her go through it all (and it was a truly frightening thing to see). Only with the help of some powerful psychic mediums was she freed of it. We both vowed to be more careful and to learn whatever we could about protecting ourselves. Obviously what we had been doing hadn’t worked, so we set about finding someone who could teach us.

I heard about a psychic medium a few towns away who knew a lot about protection. I contacted her, and she agreed to give us a few lessons. Meanwhile, a second negative entity had found Joni and attached itself to her. And one night, when I met her for a movie, it latched on to me as well. I’m all for sharing, but really!

This entity would stay with Joni during the day. Then at night, when Joni went to sleep, it would come to me. I’m a night person, so I’d be reading and feel it suddenly swoop in on me. I’d note the time, then call Joni in the morning. “You went to sleep about 11:20, didn’t you?” I’d ask. “Yup,” replied Joni. In the morning, it would sense when Joni woke up and leave me snoring to go bother her again.
Unlike any other ghost who followed me home, this one clearly had an agenda. Sitting in bed, I could feel it drawing on my energy and turning me ice cold. It felt like it was feeding on me, not the best image to fall asleep with.
Time for some action!

When we met with the medium, we told her what had been going on. The medium, who had been trained in Santeria, assured us she would help us. I learned a lot from her about discovering my spirit guides and my guardian angel, things that have become more and more important to me on this journey. As for specifics about protection, she drew on her practice of Santeria. I knew nothing about Santeria, so I looked it up. Here’s a concise summary of Santeria that I found useful:
“Santeria is, in fact, not one set of beliefs, but a “syncretic” religion, which means it blends aspects of a variety of different faiths and cultures, despite the fact that some of these beliefs might be contradictory to one another. Santeria combines influences of Caribbean tradition, West Africa’s Yoruba spirituality, and the Catholicism. Santeria evolved when African slaves were stolen from their homelands during the Colonial period and forced to work in Caribbean sugar plantations.

Santeria is a fairly complex system, because it blends the Yoruba orishas, or divine beings, with the Catholic saints. In some areas, African slaves learned that honoring their ancestral orishas was far safer if their Catholic owners believed they were worshiping saints instead – hence the tradition of overlap between the two.

The orishas serve as messengers between the human world and the divine. They are called upon by priests by a variety of methods, including trances and possession, divination, ritual, and even sacrifice. To some extent, Santeria includes magical practice, although this magical system is based upon interaction with and understanding of the orishas.” Source: Patti Wigington
(http://paganwiccan.about.com/od/pagantraditions/a/What-Is-Santeria.htm).

Because Joni and I shared this attachment, the medium told us that we needed to perform a ritual together to get rid of it. She advised us to do the following: Purchase two brown eggs before noon. Then, that night, come together to perform the ritual as follows: Each person rubs an egg over herself (to capture and contain the negative energy in the egg). Then go together to a cemetery. Each person must bring 9 pennies, as payment to Baron Samedi, the Baron of Cemeteries. The Baron is a loa of Haitian voodoo, I found out. Not sure why he played a role in a Santeria ritual, but it didn’t seem important. We just knew that the Baron is the guardian of the place between the living and the dead and master over the dead. We were to stand in front of the gates to the cemetery and call on the Baron to take the negative attachment away from us and back to the land of the dead. Then we were to turn our backs to the cemetery and throw the eggs over our left shoulders into the cemetery. Then we could leave our payment and go.

Although we had qualms about tossing eggs into a cemetery – it just seemed disrespectful – we were desperate enough to try just about anything, so we agreed on a night to meet at a parking area near a local cemetery. I was in charge of bringing the eggs. I didn’t make it to the market until several hours after the noon deadline directed by the medium. How much could it matter, I asked myself rather defensively. First mistake: When someone tells you to something specific in a ritual, do it, don’t fudge it.

When I met Joni at the parking area, it was pouring rain, of course – the kind of downpour that soaked us to the skin almost immediately. We were both so sick of the attachment by this time, though, that we agreed to go ahead. Now I’m a big advocate of saging. I try to do it whenever I’m involved in an encounter with spirits, and this time was no different. I took out a brand new 6″ long sage stick and we both surrounded ourselves with its comforting smoke. I didn’t want to leave it at that, though. We were about to do something really out of my comfort zone, so I decided I needed to keep the sage stick lit and with us at all times. Not that easy to do in the rain, but I was determined.

We set out for the cemetery, about a quarter mile away. The cemetery is on a well-traveled road, so even though was rather late in the evening, cars still drove past us as we tried inconspicuously to walk down the side of the road. Brief aside: Have you ever smoked a joint? I had a few in my wayward youth, long ago, and the chief thing I remembered about the experience, aside from the munchies, was that dope made me incredibly paranoid. Well now, walking down a road to a cemetery with the world’s biggest doobie in my hand, I began to flash back to that paranoia. Every time a car passed, I’d scramble to hide the lit sage stick under my jacket and act natural. Believe me, there’s nothing natural about hiding a 6″ burning stick under a nylon windbreaker in the pouring rain, heading nowhere on a country road. I looked ridiculous. It set Joni laughing, and every time I did it, she’d laugh more hysterically, which got me going, too. By the time the fourth or fifth car had passed us, we were doubled over in tears, laughing uncontrollably. Second mistake: Laughing uncontrollably during a ritual is probably inappropriate. It certainly didn’t help us get into the spirit (so to speak) of the situation.

We finally made it to the cemetery, weak from laughter and looking like drowned rats. We still had our eggs, though. We stood at the gate and called on the Baron to come and take this nasty ghost away from us and into the realm of the dead. Then we turned around and tossed the eggs. We could hear them go splat against the ground, which only set us into hysterics again. The doobie had gone out, at long last, and fearful of being spotted hanging around the cemetery at night looking suspiciously like egg-tossing troublemakers, we hurriedly piled up our pennies at the gate and flew out of there.

I’d love to report that when we got home the attachment was gone, but sadly that’s not the case. It showed up as usual and continued to bounce back and forth between us, sharing the joy, until we were helped by a wonderful medium friend in Maine, who removed it permanently. I did return to the cemetery a few days after we performed the ritual. The rain had washed away all signs of the eggs, and the pennies were gone.

Lesson learned:
Santeria and voodoo are powerful, and I respect those practices. But I was ignorant of Santeria, and looking back on it, I realize that I lacked both the knowledge and the belief that I needed to make that ritual work. It was too far outside my experience for me to really believe it would work for me, and belief is absolutely essential in matters of the supernatural. Unless I believe that something is going to work, it won’t. If I focus my belief and intent on something, then I have a good chance of it succeeding.

I’m still not attachment-proof, but I’m better at shielding myself than I was. I don’t know what it will take to get me to the point where I feel confident that I can keep ghosts from disturbing me. That’s part of the learning that comes with being sensitive. I think I’m going to be half-baked for a good long while, but I’m hoping that I have some fun along the way.

P.S If you’re interested in just how bad a negative attachment can be, you can read Joni’s book about her experiences with her first attachment: The Soul Collector.

Scary stuff.