Revisiting the Straight Pins

In 2010, we posted a story called The Ghost & the Straight Pins. It was also in The Synchronicity Highway. As you’ll see, there was recently an oddball synchro associated with this story that happened to poet Sharlie West.

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During my (Trish) last year in college, I lived in a small apartment on the third floor of an old building in Utica, New York. My roommate, Linda, and I, shared our cramped living space with a tabby cat. Early in the school year, Linda’s grandmother passed away. One day not long afterward, Linda’s mother found a straight pin on the grandmother’s tombstone. A few days later, our tabby, Tigger, was about to jump into a chair where I was reading when she suddenly did a 180 in midair and tore into the bedroom. Linda and I just looked at each other, wondering what that was about.

The next morning, I found straight pins scattered around the living room – a pin stuck in a couch cushion, pins laying on the rug, a couple more straight pins on the kitchen table. This began to happen consistently. When Linda mentioned it to her mother, she sort of laughed and said it was Linda’s grandmother. “Nana G loved to sew. I’ve been finding straight pins all over the house, even underlining passages in the bible.”

I didn’t have any problem believing in ghosts  and was certain that Tigger had seen Nana G the night she did that 180, but straight pins? How did a ghost manipulate physical matter, even matter as small as a straight pin? But one weekend when we visited Linda’s parents, her mother showed up the straight pins underlining passages in the bible.

“How does Nana G do that?” I asked Linda’s mom.
“I have no idea,” she replied. “But isn’t it amazing?”

The straight pin phenomenon continued consistently for several months,  then gradually stopped. About ten years later, I was visiting St. Augustine with Linda and her mother. We were in that fort featured in the photo, Castillo de San Marcos. The Spanish began construction on this fort in 1672 to protect the city. It’s the only existing 17th century fort in North America.

There’s nothing in this place, just stones and empty hallways. Our footsteps echoed in the emptiness. The whisper of the past was everywhere. But everything was bare – the thick walls, the well-worn floors, not even a piece of trash in sight. So the three of us were moving through the interior, marveling at how cool it was despite the summer heat outside. I happened to look down and stopped, incredulous, staring at a single straight pin.

I picked it up and showed it to Linda’s mother. “What’re the odds of finding a straight pin in this place?” I asked.

Her mom smiled. “I’ve been feeling Nana G around.”

“Looks like she wanted to tour the place with us,” Linda said.

“So is this an apport?” I asked.

Neither of them had an answer. But to this day, an apport – the paranormal transference of an object from one place to another – seems to be the best explanation.

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Now jump ahead five years since we posted this. Poet Sharlie West emails me whenever she has had an intriguing vision or dream, as it was in her most recent note:

Last night I dreamed about straight pins that I was collecting, lining them in two rows

next to each other like railroad ties. In the dream I said to someone, this is a coincidence, I just saw a television movie that had straight pins in it. (I didn’t)

I woke up thinking, what was that about? Then as I was reading The Synchronicity Highway I came to the part about Straight Pins in Castillo San Marcos and had to share. So funny after last night’s dream. I have no idea if this is a meaningful sync. I don’t even sew.

We shall see. The parallel lines might mean something. Oh, and as I sat down at the computer to mention this, it was 11:11.

Whatever the dream means to Sharlie, it struck me as precognitive.