Eerie on Lake Erie This Year

There's been a strange atmosphere since early spring here on the Marblehead peninsula. Contractors excavating more boat channels for more housing developments unearthed a cemetery of human remains. Believed to be sacred burial grounds, the project was immediately canceled.


Talk of accompanying, strange incidents went without further explanation. Then there were some who began to believe that the spirits there could bless people. Folks could be seen with heads bowed standing along the cordoned off area. After a while, the whole ordeal went hush-hush, and the land was said to have been purchased by a Native American organization.

Although everything was quiet on the burial site, nothing seemed to return to normalcy. Even the garden was slow to produce, with the exception of the corn. Some of the peppers were misshapen, and the tomatoes came up small. Quite a few of them were animated with little distorted outgrowths.

So this is the setting for most of the season until the late part of summer. In late August I'm opening up the used book store where I volunteer every Sunday morning. Forty other volunteers participate in our mission of this place becoming a real library for Marblehead. Housed in a 150 year old, two story building, this place holds a scariness all of its own..

With all of the enthusiastic helpers, the store is usually very tidy. It's really quite noticeable if anything is ever out of place in there. As a result, when I open the door I'm instantly drawn to a book left out on the counter. Set at a casual oblique angle, it felt almost as though it was left there for me.

Its dark cover is immediately haunting. There are translucent, delicate illustrations swirling against a dark blue sky background. Bold capital letters say, OTHER LIVES, OTHER SELVES by Roger J. Woolger, Ph.d.

Then I see a front cover reference to Carl Jung, whose psychoanalytic work has always held my interest. While I turned a few pages into the book, I'm become inundated in a sense of malingering ghostly spirits that seem to have been here all summer. There's also a nor'easter blowing in from the lake.

With the next turn of the page, something else chilling and unexpected grabbed my attention. Other-life sequels, revealed through hypnosis, upturn passages of macabre and horrifically bloody scenarios.

Leaping out in the dim light of the morning, my mental picture of the author's words dwarfed any passing interest of who's who in the psychoanalytic world. The Halloween like imagery detailed past- life hypnotherapy involving of a variety of Dr. Woolger's patients whose former lives ended in violence.

I'm stuck, absolutely pasted into this book, when I should be counting the cash drawer or stocking books, but I can't quit reading. I'm wondering how revisiting scenes of mutilation, and violence from past epochs relate to psychotherapy. I go on.

Soon, as I read through these notes on hypnotic regressions, I find myself imagining the dark ages. After that I go to the days of slavery in ancient Egypt. Then I'm taken to the days of slavery in the U.S. prior to the civil war. All of these are places where patients remembered their past lives taking place. Humanity is so full of barbaric events

The Dark Continent is the location for the following transcription which describes attempts at ferreting out causes of female maladies believed to be carried from a prior life. The author describes his observations of the patient while she is regressed in a hypnotic state:

"A middle- aged woman in one of our workshops had successfully borne three children but had suffered terrible premenstrual cramps. In exploring the pains, she relived a fatal childbirth scenario as an African woman. In the midst of an extremely difficult labor her very clumsy mate attempts to help with the delivery. . .The woman dies in terrible pain. The memory apparently imprinted for future lives in the region of her uterus. . ."

He later tells of seeing bazaar photographs displaying manifestations of violent events remembered. The photos reveal imprints that mysteriously appear in a patient's skin while in hypnotic recall. One man who had been tied up and killed in a previous life showed rope imprints on his arm. A woman remembering a past trauma of being beaten all of a sudden developed welt marks all over her body.

This whole time, I'm finding it curious that I just stumbled onto this book lying out on the counter. I'm under pressure to break away from it. Customers may be showing up any minute.

Although it's the time of year that cornstalks rustle in stormy discontent of their own bareness, and the end of a season where a previously friendly garden thing becomes scary somehow, I think I'm discovering more about the spirits inhabiting the burial site.

With senses alert to what the noreaster may blow onto shore, I've entered a new understanding of why I feel the presence of malingering spirits around here. At least I can see why there is a certain something that drives a shiver of apprehension about unknown, unseen beings.

Maybe that's what we all seemed to be feeling around here on this isolated neck of land embraced by the great mother - Lake Erie. Maybe it's a distant memory of her other lives. . . other places, many of which are dark and frightening.

They are like the recesses of the mind where scary memories dwell, but are triggered to come out from hiding when the corn rustles, and the north wind blows. These are the scary places-the stuff that nightmares are made of - and these are also the reason why this year's autmumn is especially eerie on Lake Erie.