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Like The Exorcist, the legendary Poltergeist movies are a part of popular culture—at least the creepy side of it and some weird synchros were involved before, during and after the filming.

The simple phrase: “The-e-e-y’re here,” instantly reminds us of the creepy scene in which the little girl, Carol Anne Freeling,is abducted by evil spirits in the TV.

In the pool scene, the skeletons that emerge from the muddy water were real. JoBeth Williams was unaware of this until the scene had already been filmed. Director William Friedkin felt somewhat uneasy about the matter and possibly sensing what was coming, asked technical advisor Reverend Thomas Bermingham to exorcise the set. He gave a blessing and talked to the cast and crew to reassure them, but refused to perform an exorcism, saying it might increase anxiety.

 The presence of real skeletons on the set might’ve been a premonition of strange events related to the movie, including multiple deaths, including the two young actresses who played sisters.

 Julian Beck, who played the bad spirit’ in Poltergeist II, died of stomach cancer in 1985.  Two years later, Will Sampson who played the ‘good spirit’ in Poltergeist II, died after receiving a heart-lung transplant. Will was also known as the tall ‘mute’ Indian in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

 The two men had medical conditions, so their deaths aren’t nearly as strange as the  deaths of the two girls. Dominique Dunn, who played the older sister in the first Poltergeist movie, was strangled by her ex-lover shortly after the release of the first movie in 1982. Six years later, Heather O’Rourke, who played the little girl Carol Anne in all three movies, died of congenital intestinal stenosis at the age of 12. She was on a break from filming Poltergeist III at the time and a replacement was used in parts of the film.Ironically, Dominique Dunn and Heather O’Rourke, the on-screen sisters, are buried in the same cemetery.

 The Omen,  a classic horror film about the devil’s offspring, might be the most cursed film of the genre. Before and during the filming, there were many…omens.

 A series of peculiar accidents plagued the cast, crew and even people loosely connected to the film. The strange occurrences began with a series of unlikely lightning strikes.

 Before filming began, the plane carrying novelist and screenwriter David Seltzer was struck by lightning, and he was lucky he survived. In another electrifying incident, a plane transporting the film’s star, Gregory Peck, was also struck by lightning. The pilot managed to land the plane safely and nobody was hurt. During filming in Rome, a bolt of lightning narrowly missed producer Harvey Bernhard.

Peck had another close brush with death during the filming, when he cancelled a trip to Israel that crashed and killing all onboard. With all the strange happenings, it was a wonder that Peck decided to continue on with the project.

It’s also surprising that director Richard Donner didn’t walk away from The Omen when he was hit by a car, and stayed at a hotel that was bombed by the IRA. In a separate vehicle related incident, a number of crew members were nearly killed on the first day of shooting in a head-on car crash.

As another omen, the poster for the movie depicted the silhouette of a boy with a wolf-like shadow. The movie title was above and below the image were the words: YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

With The Crow, Tragedy and irony, as well as mystery and intrigue, overtook the plot maneuvers of this comic book adaptation when real life and fiction collided head-on in the making of this cult classic. The film’s star, Brandon Lee, was accidentally shot and killed with a life bullet in a scene in which he was to be murdered, and his death led to rumors of an actual murder.

Like The Omen, the production was cursed from day one of shooting, Feb. 1, 1993, when a carpenter was badly shocked and burned after a lift he was operating struck high-voltage power cables. Other incidents included a grip truck catching fire, a stuntman falling through the roof of one of the sets, a handyman crashing his car through the studio’s plaster shop, and a member of the crew accidentally stabbing a screwdriver through his hand. Six weeks into the shoot, a powerful storm destroyed a number of elaborate set pieces that delayed the shooting schedule.

Somehow, the production finally wrapped. As a result of the tragedy and mystery surrounding the making of The Crow, the film stood out from the plethora of horror films and led to its cult status.

Weird synchros all the way around!

We’ve written about mirror gazing previously, but since today is Halloween, we decided today to put up a short excerpt on the subject from our new book, The Synchronicity Highway: Exploring Coincidence, the Paranormal & Alien Contact. Now where else are you going to read about the history of mirror gazing?

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In the 16^th century, John Dee, a famed English mathematician, astronomer and astrologer, used an Aztec mirror to make contact with the dead. Dee studied alchemy and divination while straddling the worlds of science and magic, and made extensive use of his mirror while pursuing his occult interests. He was also the official scryer or crystal gazer for Queen Elizabeth I.

The black mirror, made of highly-polished obsidian, was brought to Europe after the conquest of Mexico by Cortés between 1527 and 1530. Mirrors in Mexico were associated with Tezcatlipoca, the dark god of war and sorcery, whose name can be translated as ‘Smoking Mirror.’ Aztec priests used mirrors for divination and conjuring visions.

No doubt Dee was knowledgeable about the Greek’s use of psychomanteum, or mirror-gazing and that added to his fascination with the Aztec mirror. Among the ancient Greeks, mirror-gazing was a well known means of reaching out to ancestors for guidance. This method frequently involved the use of a dimly lit isolated room with a mirror or reflective surface, such as a pool of water.

You’ve probably heard about the famed Oracle of Delphi, where ancient Greeks journeyed to hear prophecies from a priestess serving as the oracle. Lesser known is the Oracle of the Dead, a site in northwest Greece that pilgrims visited to contact the dead and learn of their future. Built in the third century BC, the Oracle of the Dead included a complex of underground passageways and isolation cells. It was the ancient Greek’s premier psychomanteum, and was also known as The Necromanteion of Ephyra. Pilgrims, who were placed in the cells, fasted and underwent sensory deprivation, exhaustion and disorientation — all designed to create an environment to induce visions. They also wandered through dark passageways and a stone labyrinth.

After several days or weeks, pilgrims were ready to meet the souls of the dead. They descended to the Sacred Hall in an underground cavern where they were given hallucinogenic leaves or seeds to chew. The pilgrims then gazed into a large copper cauldron filled with water, where they saw visions of the dead in the dark, reflective surface. In their heightened state, it was said that dead friends and relatives sometimes even emerged from the reflective cauldron and appeared as if they were physical beings.

Very little was known about the Greek psychomanteums until 1958 when archaeologist Sotirios Dakaris and his team uncovered a series of small underground rooms connected by a passageway that led to the main chamber where they found the remains of a large copper cauldron ringed with a banister. They had discovered the Oracle of the Dead, spoken of by Homer and Herodotus.

Raymond Moody’s Psychomanteum

One psychomanteum was created in the late 20^th century by psychiatrist Raymond Moody. Years after he wrote Life After Life, the classic book on near-death experiences, he wanted to find a way that anyone could connect with the afterlife without having to die briefly and be revived.

Moody, a scholar of ancient Greece, eventually found his answer when he read the Greek magical papyri–scrolls of magical recipes found in Egypt, but written in Greek. By following the instruction of the magical papyri in a facility designed for just this purpose, he had created a modern psychomanteum in the style of the ancient Greeks.

He named his psychomanteum the John Dee Theater of the Mind, and began looking for people willing to step into his ‘apparition booth.’ His goal was to answer the question: Can apparitions of deceased loved ones make themselves known in a controlled environment to normal, healthy people?

In preparation, he would spend hours with a patient, discussing the loved one they wanted to encounter. Then he would escort the person into his mirror-gazing booth and turn on a light that was about as bright as a single candle. He would tell the patient to relax, gaze deeply into the mirror, and think only of the one he wanted to see. They would remain in the booth for as long as they liked and Moody would discuss the experience with the patient afterward.

He was surprised that five of his first ten subjects saw and communicated with an apparition, and all five believed that they had actually connected with a deceased loved one. He had expected only one or two would report contact and figured they would have doubts about the reality of the contact.

His first subject, a 44-year-old nurse whose husband had died two years earlier, made contact, but not in the way that she or Moody had expected. They had talked for hours about her late husband. But when she emerged from the booth, her expression was puzzled.  She had made contact, but with her father, not her husband. She was stunned by the experience, because he had actually come out of the mirror to talk to her.

In all, Moody led 300 subjects into the psychomanteum for his mirror-gazing experiment that he wrote about in his book, Reunions. He viewed the room as a therapeutic tool to heal grief and bring insight into the continuity of life.

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Happy Hollow’s Eve to all. This is when the veil between the world of the living and the dead is the thinnest.

Time is what we don’t seem to have enough of.

Time is what we see when we look in the mirror and still remember ourselves at five, at 15, at 30, 50, 60.

Time is what marches on with or without us.

Time is the way we measure our lives.

Time is fleeting, mercurial.

Time is what we see when we look at our children.

Time – and its passage – is what we see when we look at the history of our lives.

And time may be the ultimate trickster. 

Recently, Ekaterina Moreva at the Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica (INRIM) in Turin, Italy, and a few science buddies have proved : “Time is an emergent phenomenon that is a side effect of quantum entanglement.”

 Entanglement is a seductive word. And it’s a complex idea. Here’s the Wikipedia version: My version is simpler: everything  and everyone in the universe is connected.

 Einstein referred to it as “spooky action at a distance.” Entangled particles remain connected so that actions performed on one affect the other, even when separated by great distances.  It’s why identical twins, even those separated at birth, share such eerie parallels in their lives. It’s why you feel your partner’s pain and triumphs, why you often know what your animal companion is feeling, why you sense a weather phenomenon in your area before it occurs.

Could synchronicity lie at the heart of quantum entanglement? Could it be the interface, the juncture where we drawn into entanglement? Where the voice we hear is not our own? Where we are inducted into a grand quantum experiment? Where we are warned, informed, illuminated? Could synchronicity be the missing quantum piece?

I grasp these ideas in an intuitive, abstract sense, but am woefully short on the science end of this. And yet. Synchronicity seems to exist along some human, equal opportunity border where you don’t have to be an Einstein to recognize it or a Carl Jung to explore it. The phenomenon occurs across the spectrum of human experience and may well be our compass through life, the karass Vonnegut referred to in Cat’s Cradle,  an intimate part of the entanglement that bewilders physicists, and the seemingly miraculous that captivates the rest of us.

Marker 239 belongs on the Synchronicity Highway! I ran across it in Mysteries of the Unexplained. There’re a few places on the Internet, too, that recount this story. Here are the details…

Late in the summer of 1929, a new highway was opened in Germany. It connected the cities of Bremen and Bremerhaven. Within a year, more than 100 cars had crashed on the highway – all of them at kilometer marker 239, on a stretch of road that was ruler straight.

When survivors were questioned by the police, they described feeling “a tremendous thrill” as their cars reached the marker. They claimed that some great force seized their vehicles and pulled them off the road. On September 7, 1930, nine cars were wrecked at the marker.

Investigators, of course, were bewildered. But Carl Wehrs, a  local dowser, suggested that the mysterious force was a powerful magnetic current generated by an underground stream.  To test his theory, he used a divining rod and slowly walked toward marker 239. When he was about 12 feet away and directly opposite the marker, the rod flew out of his hands and he was spun around.

Convinced his theory was correct, Wehrs found a solution to the problem. He buried a copper box filled with small, star-shaped pieces of copper at the base of the stone marker. For a week, the box stayed where he’d buried it and during this time, there wasn’t a single accident.

Then the box was dug up  and the first three cars that passed the marker were wrecked. The box was quickly reburied and since then, there supposedly haven’t been any accidents at marker 239.

Local farmers believed that a devil was responsible for the accidents. They claimed that after it had been exorcised from the road, it entered their radios, which then produced nothing but static.

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I Googled whether marker 239 has been accident free since 1930 but couldn’t find anything. If anyone else knows, let us know!

This video is strangely compelling. It was caught on a home security camera in Southeast Michigan. 2:25 minutes into it, the orb appears to be drawing up water from a pond.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2XwwjCkJXw#t=10

One of the great fantasy and science fiction writers, Terry Pratchett, talks about what it’s like to live with a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. Except, the discussion is about much more than that. Worth your time. I found this on artist’s Lauren Raines’s site, where the big questions are always asked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slZnfC-V1SY#t=43

Library at Skywalker Ranch

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 Let me tell you about Indiana Jones. Think of this as the wife’s perspective, okay?

In the late 1980s, we were sitting around a table with some editors  in New York and Risa asked Rob if he would be interested in doing some novelizations for a TV show. He said sure, and  did two novelizations of a TV show, Private Eye, that never went anywhere because by the time the books came out the show had been cancelled. But this connection led to an invite to adapt the script for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

 I was pregnant with Megan then. I remember we went to the theater to see the movie. When the novelization hit the NY Times Bestseller list,  Lucasfilm asked Rob to write some prequels. When Megan was about a year old, we flew out to California and spent some time at Skywalker Ranch.  In those days, you could simply drive into the ranch and right up to the house.

Megan doesn’t remember it, but she is probably one of the few babies who ever crawled across the floor of the library at Skywalker Ranch.

And what a library it was.  As a former librarian and newly published writer, I was struck by the books on the occult,  metaphysis and quantum physics. This library was so huge that it featured a spiral staircase, shelves  from floor to ceiling, with a moveable ladder that took you from one section to the other. Our guide during this visit was a woman named Lucy,  one of Lucas’s first employees, and, if I recall correctly, she was a big mystery reader.

We were supposed to go sailing on Lucas’s boat the next day, but the  weather didn’t cooperate and we spent the day in the library. This was in the days before cell phones, otherwise  I would have photos. Otherwise I would have photos of the Star Wars  display in an  exhibit case, or of Indy’s whip, or photos of the 2,000 acres that comprise Skywalker Ranch.

Some years later, when Megan had seen a couple of the Indiana Jones films, I mentioned that she had crawled around on the library floor at Skywalker Ranch.

“What?” she exclaimed. “Really? How come you guys never told me that? That’s stuff I should know. It’s, like, my personal history.”

I had never thought of it like that, but of course she’s right.

A few years ago, Rob was hired by Lucasfilms to write another book on Indy’s adventures. This time, though, Megan and I weren’t permitted to accompany him. This time, he had to go through multiple security checkpoints,  the place, he said, was like an armed camp.

He described something that I found intriguing – a storyboard that was “probably fifty feet long” that detailed every character, every plot point, every subplot, in Indy’s life.   One of my best tools in fiction writing is a storyboard.  Mine is never fifty feet long. It’s a black poster board that I tack to my office door. I choose different color post-its for each character point of view, so I can tell with just a glance at the storyboard whose POV should come up next.

I suspect that George R.R. Martin, the author whose books are now on HBO as Game of Thrones, must use a storyboard, too. In that series, seven different families are vying for the throne and there are a lot of characters, with multiple plot lines and intrigues.  The only feasible way of keeping so many characters straight is a storyboard – or a brain much larger and more organized than mine.

Now, more than 20 years after our visit to Skywalker Ranch, Megan is writing a novel. She knows about storyboards, but hasn’t used one yet. Instead, as a detail-oriented writer, she has written several extensive outlines. She wants to know where her story is headed. She’s in good company. Ken Follett, one of the best historical and thriller writers around, also writes extensive outlines.

Jerzy Kosinski, author of such classics as The Painted Bird and Being There  supposedly wrote the endings of his books first. I’ve never tried this, but it sounds like an excellent idea. If I do that, though, I first have to know what the trigger event is – the what if  that gets the ball rolling. It might be a mass beaching of dolphins and whales, a psychic vision, a murder, a haunting, a powerful synchronicity, a psychic vision…

But when you have an archetypal character like Indiana Jones, you’ve got to know your triggering event, the characters and their intrigues, the plot points and subplots, and where it’s all going to take you.   Your franchise depends on it.

Rob just finished another six-week meditation course at a local yoga studio. The last session is always a shamanic meditation, my personal favorite. There’s something about drums and rattles that transport me.  With each class, he creates a medicine wheel and we do breathing exercises and a short meditation for each of the four directions.

In his last session in May, he created a medicine wheel with Origami Peace Cranes that Adele Aldridge sent us. At the end of the class, he invited everyone to take home one of the peace cranes. In tonight’s final session he created a medicine wheel with avocados from the tree in our backyard.

This tree, which is now about 30 feet tall, languished for years without producing any fruit whatsoever.  We couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Then Rob remembered that a Puerto Rican guy in our former neighborhood said that when avocado trees don’t produce fruit, you just hit them with a bat. So four or five years ago, Rob hit the tree with a stick.

And suddenly, over the next year, it shot up in altitude and produced two avocados. The next year, it yielded a couple of dozen and the tree kept getting taller, like Jack’s beanstalk.This year, it produced 40 or 50 and we have had to pluck them before the squirrels get to them. If  you like avocados, these are beyond delicious.

The class begins with brief meditation in the four directions. First, the South. This direction is the home of the archetypal serpent, where we learn to shed the past and begin to detach from our wounds and personal stories. We learn to release heavy energy accumulated in our bodies.

In the West, we learn about the Jaguar, who teaches us about life, death and rebirth. We face fears and family shadows, and step across the bridge to learn to walk as warriors, without enemies.

 In the North, we meet the archetype Hummingbird and learn to taste knowledge directly, to manifest the impossible, and to receive ancestral knowledge.

In the final gathering we explore the East and the archetype of the Eagle, who demonstrates how to experience vision, destiny and the possibilities of becoming. We develop our vision of peace.

Then he begins a shamanic meditation with a tape by Sandra Ingerman, who was a student of Michael Harner, probably the best-known shaman in the West. I love this 18-minute meditation. Although Sandra’s voice is somewhat sharp, she uses drums and rattles, sounds that transport me. Sandra takes us into the Middle World, an alternative version of our world where mythological creatures are alive. In this place, I imagine myself in the breathtaking landscape of the Arenal Lodge in Costa Rica and have all sorts of fascinating inner experiences with beings that inhabit the lush plants and trees and flowers there.

The next place that Sandra takes us is into the Upper World, a higher spiritual realm. We can get there by riding on the back of a bird, leaping off a cliff, rising upward with smoke. You get the idea. The jumping off the cliff thing reminded me of author Carlos Castaneda, who seemed to jump off quite a few  in his apprenticeship with Don Juan. I didn’t jump off a cliff; I rode on the back of our dusky conure, Kali, who died in 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Wilma. 

I worried about riding on her since she was a small bird. But in this place, size wasn’t a problem. With this meditation, Sandra uses a Brazilian instrument – berimbau- that has a lovely sound, but isn’t quite as all encompassing for me as drums and rattles.

Then, as the finale, Rob takes us into the Lower World, where there are spirit guides, power animals, where we can connect with loved ones. In this place, I connected with one of my favorite fictional characters, Mira Morales,  a psychic and bookstore owner who lives on the fictional island of Tango Key. Mira has crept into my dreams and meditations before. This time, she sat with me and talked about the new Tango Key novel I’m writing. I often wonder if she actually exists in some parallel reality. That’s how real these “visitations” are. She gave me some pointers on plot and motives.

When we returned to the normal world, the class ended with the H’oponpono mantra, a Hawaiian shamanic mantra—I’m sorry, please forgive me, I love you, thank you. Finally, the class came to an end with three OMs.  Then Rob invited the students to take home an avocado. I snapped my photo just before the avocados were snatched up and whisked away.