You’re probably thinking Stephen King’s “Carrie,” starring Sissy Spacek / John Travolta, right about now.
Or perhaps “Firestarter,” “The Fury,” or the later Travolta project, “Phenomenon,” where an ordinary man sees a bright light descend from the sky, and discovers he now has super-intelligence and telekinesis.
Maybe the recent PK-packed thriller “Push” about group of young American ex-pats with telekinetic and clairvoyant abilities – hiding from a clandestine U.S. government agency –
forced to utilize their different talents and band together for a final job enabling them to escape the agency forever.
No … this story is about me, Carla Baron, and some of my earliest encounters with the paranormal.
For as long as I can remember, I have had this “electromagnetic field” around me.
(Of course, I had absolutely no idea that’s what it was called back when I was a bright-and-curious-about-all-things-ghostie teenager.)
Anyone who has had even a rudimentary training with the paranormal knows the terms EMF (electromagnetic field), poltergeist, telekinesis (TK), and the collective psychokinesis (PK).
Breaking it down further, we have Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis (RSPK) – A term suggested by parapsychologist W.G. Roll to denote poltergeist phenomena.
(RSPK – believed to be the source of most poltergeist activity, this is the term for when unexplained events happen repeatedly in the vicinity of an individual or “agent.”)
Ok… back to me.
This all started when I was 14.
I’ll never forget that day. Ever.
It was after school in the afternoon around 4pm, and I was sitting at my desk doing homework upstairs in my bedroom. (I was given my own room, as it became quite clear early on to my parents I should have my own space away from my other siblings.)
For some reason, I just couldn’t concentrate on the homework in front of me. I had become agitated all of a sudden, growing increasingly overwhelmed by emotion, frustration, pressure building in my head – it felt like my head was about to explode at one point – like I was having a mini meltdown or something. (More on these ‘psychic events’ here .)
It felt as if I had no control over this whatsoever. The pressure – the burst of tears flowing down my cheeks – the pain in my head – was just building … and building … and building until —
TERRIFYING HUGE CRASH !!!!
I was literally frozen.
I was so frightened I could not move for 5 minutes.
The double panes of my bedroom window had been shattered to the right of me.
A golf ball had come sailing through BOTH window panes spilling onto my bedroom carpet.
(You must understand – we lived on top of this hill in a heavily wooded area. A golf ball was not what you would expect. Apparently, the teenager down the street was practicing his golf swing from his front lawn.)
It felt as if I had manifested this CRASH somehow to break the ‘spell’ that had overtaken me. (I mean .. ok, maybe it was just a freak accident. But where my bedroom window happened to be located on the side of our home provided a trajectory scenario only befitting the JFK assassination. The odds of hitting MY window were a zillion-to-one.)
Shaken pretty badly, I ran downstairs to tell my dad what happened. After they repaired my window, I kind of forgot about it for a while.
Bender suggests that poltergeist effects, or RSPK (as we now also call these phenomena), are partially to be understood in terms of transpersonal structures, the archetypes of C. G. Jung. It seems clear to us, too, that the poltergeist performs on a larger scene than any single mind or brain could supply. It also seems clear that some of the features of the poltergeist are related to psychological or physiological conditions in the central person or “agent.”
Aside from these analogies we have noticed several features that seem to be the same for RSPK and PME (psychomotor epilepsy): the two phenomena both peak in the early teens; they involve equal proportions of males and females; they are worldwide in distribution; they involve displays of energy; they consist in recurrent effects; they are triggered spontaneously or in response to arousal; they are often associated with altered states of consciousness; and they often express emotional states, particularly violence.
Ever since psychical researchers discovered a relation between RSPK occurrences and specific individuals, it has seemed possible that the human brain or mind may be involved in these incidents.
More recently, when it was found that the central person often suffered from organic or functional disorders (such as epilepsy, headaches, and hysteria), the possibility was enhanced that the secret of the poltergeist in part may lie in the human brain.
THEN …
I was home one summer a few years later (still in my teens) when I went down to our mailbox to find a handwritten letter from an ex-boyfriend. Wishing for some privacy while I read his words, I decided to drive halfway down the hill to a cemetery. (Yes, a cemetery. I would go there a lot just to be alone with my thoughts, and read, or just think.)
When you enter the cemetery, it’s a narrow single lane road with headstones placed to the left and right. I stopped the car to catch some of the shade from a 100-yr.-old oak at the top. I began reading the letter which precipitated one of my mini ‘psychic events’ – tears were torrential, my head feeling like it was about to BURST once again with the pressure building inside. Right at the apex of this severe episode –
CRACK … LOUD CRACK…
CRASH!!!!
My heart stopped beating. (For at least a good minute. )
While reading the emotionally-charged love letter, I hadn’t noticed that a severe lightning storm had come out of nowhere as the pressure was building up and up and up in my head. The 100-yr. oak tree was struck by a massive bolt of lightning, missing the front of my car by only a couple inches.
(Again – what are the chances of this happening in just this way?)
I was forced to BACK my car out of the cemetery on this narrow single road as the tree was completely blocking the road ahead. This I had to do on a twisty little lane while avoiding headstones left and right all the way down for a MILE.
In a freak electrical storm.
Needless to say, I made it home safe. (Took an hour, I lived 3 minutes away.)
Tried to push this thing again to the furthest recesses of my mind ..
UNTIL –
It was winter, and I was visiting my grandmother near the Poconos region in PA. My grandfather had died, and my grandmother was still heartbroken – he was the absolute love of her life. While staying there for the week, she had me sleep in the master bedroom – in fact, she insisted. (I was her favorite, and she always treated me special. She was the one who took me to see my first psychic.)
It was the 3rd or 4th night, I remember, and I was sleeping erratically, with one of my ‘psychic events’ coming out of nowhere. All of a sudden at the height of my crying, head almost feeling like it’s going to burst – this music started coming out of the other side of the bedroom, it seemed – it was playing what I (half-asleep) thought was “Silent Night.” It was crazy. Christmas was already over – it was March. But I could have sworn it was playing that song!
I get up the next morning, and tell my grandmother over breakfast about the weird music playing in the bedroom the night before. She said, “No, Carla… that’s impossible. There’s no stereo, or radio, or anything that would have music playing. Nothing, my dear.”
But I was insistent that this was not an hallucination. It was “Silent Night.” I was sure of it.
So we went to the bedroom to inspect the situation, and see what we could find, if anything. My grandmother looks everywhere, and we are stumped as to what that could have been. Then she finally opens the closed cabinet on the other side of the room – looks around, then says, “Is this it? Could this be it?”
It was a music box. But there were NO BATTERIES inside.
We went to the kitchen to find a couple new batteries to place inside the box just to see.
It played “SILENT NIGHT.”
OMG. It played “Silent Night.” It really did! But there were no batteries in that music box the night before, so how did it play anything ?!
(Side note: My grandfather’s birthday was March 6.)
Could this have been a signal from the grave … kick-started by a little PK
from yours truly?
I realized what these mini ‘psychic events’ were capable of then. Other situations arose in the following years where the exact same pattern catalyzed some extremely formidable PK. When I would film on location for any one of the paranormal television productions we were shooting – I would completely drain brand new camera batteries on brand new cameras within the first 5 minutes.
If in ‘psychic mode,’ I would notice I could not be around any electrical, or magnetic equipment – even clocks, wristwatches, laptops – these would continually malfunction if near me. (Hence, this was most likely the reason they would set Trifield ® meters next to me, as they would always manifest off-the-chart readings in my presence.)
Well, I’m quite sure they would have had me institutionalized if these ‘psychic events’ had occurred in some other century. But fortunately, we have more of a pioneering spirit prevailing these days when it comes to the supernatural.
We are much more informed, realizing the human brain is capable of incredible feats – outside the realm of what used to be conceivable or considered ‘normal.’
par·a·nor·mal
adjective /ˌparəˈnôrməl/
Denoting events or phenomena such as telekinesis or clairvoyance that are beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding.
Psychic Carla Baron 