Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Today, we got together with our friends Bruce and Lynn Gernon and Kathy Doore and met in Palm Beach, at the Flagler Museum, built in 1902. It is still known as Whitehall and was Flagler’s winter home. We were there to do a little ghost hunting.

A little background. Henry Flagler was a founding partner of Standard Oil and the earliest and undoubtedly the most important developer of Florida. He developed two million acres of land and his East Coast Railway connected the entire east coast of the state, from Jacksonville to Key West. He built Whitehall, which has more than 75 rooms, as a wedding present for this third wife, Mary Lily Keenan. She was 24 when she married Flagler, then 60.

The inside of the mansion: ceiling in the lobby, painting surrounded by ornate, gold-plated art.

Back in the late 1970s, Bruce and Lynn were visiting the museum when she had an encounter with a man she believes was Flagler’s ghost. She and Bruce were on the second floor and Lynn had gotten lost, which is easy to do in this place. She was looking for the restroom and ended up in one of the strange little hallways that lead to a room. And in this hallway she encountered a man dressed in overalls. She asked him where the restroom was and he gestured off to his right. “Down there.”

“I knew something strange was going on,” Lynn said. “I felt really disoriented, disconnected. I followed his directions toward the restroom and when I glanced back, he was gone.”

Bruce says that when he finally found Lynn, she was pale, scared, and it took awhile for her to tell him what she’d experienced.

Some years later, when Lynn and Bruce were living in the keys, Bruce awakened suddenly one night and saw a man standing at the foot of his bed. “I was totally freaked out,” he said. “I thought a robber had broken into the house.” But the man telepathically told Bruce not to be afraid. And it was then that Bruce recognized him as Henry Flagler.

And Bruce, remembering Lynn’s encounter that day t the museum, demanded, “What’s your interest in my wife?”

“She looks like one of my wives,” Flagler replied.

Mary Lily’s portrait. She, like Lynn, was a blond. This hair, though, looks like a wig.

And when Lynn was 25, she did look a lot like Mary Lily and didn’t wear a wig!

Over the years, there have been sightings of Flagler in Whitehall. According to one article, he has been sighted on the stairs where, at the age of 84, he fell and died. But the security guard I spoke to said that Flagler didn’t die in Whitehall. The fall broke his hip and he was taken to a cottage near the Breakers Hotel to recuperate – and died there. The cottage no longer exists. He also said there were no ghosts in the museum. “For there to be a ghost, someone has to have died here. And no one has died here.”

To give you some idea of the opulence of this place:

the ballroom:

A photo of what ballroom looked like when it held actual people from the era:

the music room: the organ is set into the wall

Other people have sighted Mary Lily peering from a second floor bedroom window. Several women have claimed to seen her dressed in her distinctive period clothing while using the lady’s restroom.

So over lunch, before we went to the museum, I showed Lynn and Kathy the Ghost Radar app on my iPhone, which allegedly registers energy fluctuations in your immediate environment.

From the FAQ that comes with the app: “It has been suggested that paranormal energies manifest themselves through the Quantum Flux or are an aspect Jung’s collective unconscious. Regardless of the medium through which the energies manipulate electric devices the resulting manipulated readings seem to indicate intelligence on occasion… It’s believed that paranormal energies have the ability to influence electrical equipment. This idea comes from the concept that matter, life, soul, and life are fundamentally an electrical phenomena. The app provides a set of parameters for paranormal energies to manipulate which are then processed as graphical, textual, and audible readouts.”

The app registered energy fluctuations frequently, but in some areas the fluctuations were abundant. They appear on the app radar screen as red, blue, green or yellow blips, with red the strongest. On the second floor where Lynn had her encounter nearly 30 years ago, I got several red blips in a tiny hall between two small rooms that had been servants’ quarters.

Three words from the app’s library popped up quickly: guess, also, edge. In using the app, I’ve found that the words often describe what I’m thinking or the conditions in the immediate environment – i.e., a synchronicity. These 3 words intrigued me. I was thinking, We’re guessing at all this. After all, nearly 30 years had passed and just because Lynn had had an encounter in this area didn’t mean anything now. But suppose this app was cutting edge?

The place where my app and Lynn’s went nuts was in the master bedroom, the walk-in closet, and the master bathroom. Lots of red and intense blue blips and the words: wonderful and successful.

bedroom

bathroom

walk-in closet

No one had an encounter, but we certainly had fun with the app and now and then, I could feel the powerful presence of the past that suffused the air in the mansion. While I was writing this post, I turned on the app to check on the words that had come up in the master bedroom area and three words came up: cell, correctly, evidence. Was my cell app correctly interpreting the evidence?

It would be interesting to test this app with a psychic who can perceive spirits. Would the psychic’s impressions fit those of the app?

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A ghost has also been sighted in Flagler’s private railroad car, also on display in the museum. We went through it, but will leave that one for another day!

Not all synchros are huge, sweeping and powerful. Some are small and seemingly silly and happen almost daily. I used to dismiss these small synchros as oddities, but I’m beginning to think they may be significant in ways we don’t see at first. Here’s what I mean.

A few days ago, Rob came out into the kitchen holding a lint roller. “Hey, the next time you hit Walgreen’s, could you get some replacement adhesives for this thing? “ He set it down on the table and I thought of the various ways we use this simple device. It’s great for getting Noah’s fur off the seats in the car, for removing cat fur from the couch, the blanket, the chairs.

So today I was headed to Walgreen’s and dropped the lint roller in my purse so I’d be sure to get the right size. But when I finally found the aisle at the drug store where the lint rollers were, I couldn’t find any replacement coverings, just lint rollers. I asked a clerk if they carried the replacement coverings, and he said he would ask the manager and be right back.

Within a few minutes, the man returned to the aisle with the female manager. She checked the stock and shook her head. “I’m sorry, but we’re no longer carrying the replacements.”

Okay, fine. I bought a new lint roller for three bucks and change. When I got home, with the new lint roller, Rob and I got a chuckle over the fact that the replacements probably cost less than a buck, so why carry them if a NEW lint roller brought in three times the money?

Before going back to work, I logged on to a game I play on my iPad. A hunt and banish game. The collection item that came up was one I’d never seen before: a lint roller. My first thought was: what a silly synchro. Rob and I got a good laugh about it, about how silly synchros like this happen almost daily and that it might be cool to gather several of them for a post.

Then this evening I was writing a scene in my novel where the protagonist, a young woman who is an animal communicator, is at the site of a particularly brutal murder. I knew something was missing and thought about the lint roller. I Googled, What is a lint roller? Google delivered a response:

A lint roller or lint remover is a roll of one-sided adhesive paper on a cardboard or plastic barrel that is mounted on a central spindle, with an attached handle. The device facilitates the removal of lint or other small fibers from most materials such as clothing, upholstery and linen.

The moment I saw the words “other small fibers,” I understood the synchro. Using a lint roller, the protagonist is able to find hairs that forensics analyzes and which ultimately lead to who the killer is.

Not so small, after all! This one seems to fall under secret #4, The Creative,  from our book  7 Secrets of Synchronicity.

I love these Henri videos. He reminds me of a tuxedo cat we had named Whiskers.

Remember that movie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, based on the novel by Jack Finney?  One of the most striking aspects of the horror story is that aliens were gestating in strange pods that people kept finding in their basements, garages, backyards,  attics, etc. There was a somewhat similar scenario in Cocoon. This time the alien pods were in the bottom of a swimming pool at a retirement home. A fun movie.

Well, now we have strange spherical pods washing ashore on a beach in northern Sydney, Australia. The green pods attracted hundreds of visitor in late September, according to reports.

“I didn’t want to touch one because you never know what can sting you on the beach, but I did poke it with my toes and it’s squishy, like a sponge,” said beach patrol member RaeMaree Hutton. “They look like alien eggs or something.”

Regular beach goers say they’ve never seen anything like it wash ashore. According to an article in the Daily Mail, the barefoot observers describe the balls as ‘alien eggs,’ ‘alien hairballs,’ Japanese moss balls and UFOs, in this case…Unidentified Floating Objects.

Some beachgoers suggested that the objects had been growing and, yikes, multiplying. “About three days ago, there were a few egg-shaped balls but then today, they were much bigger and everywhere on the beach,” said local resident Jenny Zhang.

There has been much debate among experts with regard to what the objects actually are with the consensus at the moment being that they could be balled up clusters of seaweed or algae.Scientists have suggested that the spheres are a rare type of living algae, brought ashore by warmer than usual weather and rough waters. They think that the algae might form balls to protect itself from hungry fish. 

The person with the long Facebook name who posted this pic did so because she thought the guy in the foreground looked a lot like her friend Bill Gallart. I did too. Bill is my disc golf partner on Saturdays. I also thought for a moment that I was in the photo – the bald guy on the right. Then I realized that it wasn’t either one of us. But two doppels in the same pic?

What’s also surprising is that the photo was taken at JoJo’s, a bar-restaurant here in Wellington, where Bill and I go sometimes, usually separately. But we did meet there once for drinks with several others. So a double doppelganger…and a synchro! After all, that picture could’ve been taken anywhere.

Not only do those guys look fairly close in facial features to us, but they also have similar builds. Bill is tall with a long upper body, and his doppel looks the same. The bald guy not only has a similar build to mine, but his clothes look like what I typically wear. I have several khaki shorts and often wear a pale blue t-shirt. (In fact, I’ve got it on now with the shorts as I write!) Fortunately, the guy is in the background, because I’m guessing he’s probably 30 years younger than me.

So who are those guys and what are they doing, anyhow? We don’t know.

But don’t take my word on the look-a-like matter. Judge for yourself. Here’s Bill and me…

This powerful three-minute film about climate change was shown at the U.N. Climate Summit on September 23, 2014.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vaajVtgRuI

Several weeks ago, my agent emailed me asking is I would be interested in writing a novelization. This kind of book is a novel based on a movie script. Rob has written a number of them, including Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  My agent emailed the script and said that if it interested me, I should write 25 pages from the script showing how I would turn it into a novel. It would then be submitted to the producers and, if they liked it, he would do his best to get me the gig.

The script was 125 pages long. That meant that for it to become a novel, one page of script – a minute of film –  would need to become at least 3 pages of a novel. It meant I would have to fill in the character’s background. What’s her past? How does she think? What motivates her? Since a script is done mostly through dialogue, it meant I would have to show who she is within herself, what she thinks about, obsesses about, what her past is like. To do this, the first person voice – I – seemed be the best point of view to use.

The first eight pages of the script – which would be the basis for the first 25 pages of the novel – follow a young American woman through her first day in the U.K. There’s a natural break at the top of page 8 of the script, so I decided that would be the ideal place to end my 25 pages. I then read the entire script to get a sense of the character and how she evolves through the course of the movie.

The protagonist is a year younger than my daughter, so I could identify with her journey. I was specifically looking for something in her past that I could carry forward through the story. Rob had suggested this and I found it. She lost her father when she was really young and after his death, her mother told him that if she ever wanted to talk to him, she should write a message to him against the sky and he would see it. She does this several times in the script, so I seized on this and used it a couple of times in my 25 pages.

After Rob had read through the pages, I tweaked it and sent it off. That was on  a Friday. Sunday evening, we took Noah to the dog park and I was talking with Diana, a woman who had been one of Rob’s yoga students. Her husband was diagnosed with liver cancer last year, has had extensive surgery, and is doing better now. They had recently spent three weeks  in Alaska and had just gotten back yesterday. On the flights out there and back, she said, she had watched an emotionally wrenching film about a young man with cancer who falls in love with a woman who has a disability.

“This movie really touched me. I can’t remember the name of the film, though, Trish. Do you know which movie I’m talking about?”

I stood there for a moment, stunned. “It’s called Our Fault in the Stars, and it’s based on a novel by John Green.”

The movie was produced by Temple Hill Entertainment, the same company that is looking for a writer to novelize the script that my agent sent me. So what are the odds on this?  I hadn’t seen Diana at the dog park in months, I hadn’t mentioned the possible project to her or anyone else except Rob and Megan, and I haven’t read Our Fault in the Stars or seen the movie.  The only reason I know about the book is because after my agent emailed me, I looked up the production company and the book. And there were dozens of people at the dog park today and I could have spoken to any of them.

As we left the dog park, I remarked to Rob that the synchro is either a confirmation that I’ll get the project – or a big trickster synchro if I don’t. I’ve experienced several synchros that seemed to be confirmations and turned out to be tricksters. However it unfolds, it’s the sort of synchronicity that invariably leaves me wondering about the power of what quantum physicist David Bohm referred to as the “implicate” or enfolded order in the underlying, deeper reality of our lives.

In other words, who or what orchestrates this stuff, anyway?

Here’s a video about a sighting in Houston in mid-August during a massive electric storm. The narrator goes on to show other examples of the attraction of UFOs to such storms. Of course, an alternate explanation is that the storm itself creates what appears to be UFO. Take a look.

Here are a couple of UFO/alien-related synchros. Well, at least one of them is. The other one is just sort of silly, but it happened when I was preparing to write the real one. So I’ll include it first.

I (Rob) was looking around the house for Noah’s Frisbee. He’s our golden retriever. I looked behind the couch in the family room, didn’t see it, then looked up at the television, which was on, and there was a guy in the foreground facing the camera and holding up a Frisbee. It was the same color as Noah’s! And, of course, Frisbees look like UFOs! Okay, it’s not really a UFO-related synchro, but the next one takes us deep into the contact phenomenon.

This is a story related to me by Sandy, the woman we’ve written about before who is in frequent contact with alien beings…and when I say contact, I mean physical contact. The beings who have been visiting her since 1995 don’t abduct her, but are engaged in what seems to be ‘energy work.’

I’ll let Sandy tell the story.

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I had a very cool synchronicity this weekend that I want to share with you! I was going through some old journal entries this weekend and came across one that involved the beings telling me to go to 3 Reiki sessions (I think it was 1995), so I was thinking about all the energy work they do and remembered that I bought a book about Reiki a couple of years ago titled Hands of Light, by Barbara Brennan, but I never read it.

When I pulled it off my bookshelf on Saturday, it still looked brand new and untouched and even had the sales receipt in between the pages. So I flipped it open and came across an illustration of the aura around hands with a description at the bottom of page stating that “The energy bodies pull like taffy between the fingers…”

This is amazing because in my June 9 1997 journal entry, I wrote: “We (Sandy and her husband George) sat up in bed and played with this amazing energy field that surrounded both of us! It was almost sticky and when we would bring our hands close to the other’s the energy would merge.

When I closed my eyes and held my hands about 8 inches apart, George would pass his hand through the energy field between them and I could feel his hand! George described it as putting his hand in magnetic water. We could actually touch each other without physical contact using this energy field. It was so much fun!

Whenever I would place my palms facing each other the energy appeared as glowing white, and small sparkles and flashes would be produced. After about an hour we were tired and settled in to sleep.

Right before I drifted off I asked what that was all about and received the answer “You are living the future.” The energy field stayed with us for 3 days, growing fainter each night until it was just webbing around our fingers. Too cool.”

So, this had my attention and I spent a lot of time reading parts of this book this weekend and then looked up the author, Barbara Ann Brennan online, wondering if she might have a workshop I could attend. Well, not only is she located in Florida, but there’s a 2-day Hands of Light workshop in Sarasota in February. I signed up.

I think this is where I’ll learn to really work with this energy the beings have opened me up to. It all fell together in a most unexpected way! I love when that happens.