MOLLY DOUSE, GHOST GIRL

Speaking as a paranormal psychic, an extremely rare and magnificent gift of which I am hugely grateful ... in a small abandoned graveyard in Sherborn, MA, 15 miles west of Boston where I live, and that I visit a few times a month, I have made the acquaintance of a lovely young spirit named Molly Douse.  When she was 11-year-old, she drowned in a small inlet of the Charles River on June 22, 1823.  Over the past several months, we have met many, many times at the graveyard, and more recently, she comes to my home. 

Molly told me she wants to write a book with me.  About her life.  Her thoughts on human life.  On being dead.  On what happened to her.  On what she would have liked to become had she lived.  Whom would she have married?  Would she have been a homemaker, an 'all day nagger' as she calls it?  A teacher?  An artist?  What it was like living in her time?  What does she think about ours?  What is it  like for her to have me as her best ‘not dead friend' as she calls me?

Molly and I have amassed about 50-pages of, another of her delightful descriptions, 'Thoughts and Scribbles.'  Molly has been floating over the 1/4 mile distance between her home to mine for visits for about a month now.  When she arrives, my home becomes full of happy invisible sparks and swirling laughter.  She loves to fly (or whatever she does) right through me.  Makes us both laugh every time.

I asked her if she minds if I keep an account of the project here on the Site as we progress along.  She thinks that is a great idea, even though she does not understand the Internet.  I told her it is like a Trillion ghosts carrying information quick as lightning through wires from one place on earth to another. 

Molly wants to name whatever we come up with, "Molly Is Not as Dead as You Think."  So far, I am going for "Molly the Ghost Girl's Thoughts and Scribbles."  We will come up with something.  

Believe me, this work took hours and hours to receive from Molly, and even more to turn the "Thoughts and Scribbles" into a polished and readable form.  Along the way, as I present Molly's story, I will include scanned examples of what my raw handwritten notes look like.  Some resemble a class of first graders going crazy with pens on a piece of notebook paper.  There is so much bad penmanship in my note taking, crossing out, arrows to words and sections, random  thoughts, stupid thoughts, deep thoughts, doodles and drawings.  Some are really quite beautiful when somehow my handwriting becomes stylish and striking on a particularly intense and energetic session.

Every few days I will add more material until we catch up to the present tense.  As I account the past, Molly and I are still very much still underway in the present.  Which for her, is like the past, the present, and the future all happening at the same time.  Or none of them happening at the same time.  Or something like that.  I am sure she will have a lot more to tell us about ... death and time, and a million other things.  I hope you enjoy reading it as much as Molly and I do writing it.

One more thing.  Molly can be reached at molly@shadowtolightparanormal.com.

All 'original' images, text and notes associated with Molly Douse, Ghost Girl are the legal properties of Shadow To Light Paranormal, and may not be used without expressed written consent  by its owners.  "Molly Douse, Ghost Girl" is protected by legal copyright laws.

The first thing Molly wants to tell you, there is such thing as time when you are dead.  It is not like our time where people grow up and get old.  Molly's time ... she is stuck on one precise moment and will never go forward ... as long as she stays dead.  When I asked her, ‘what do you mean as long as you stay dead?'  She thought for a moment, "We go to more places than just death when we are dead.  Some do anyway.  Places where you live in light until you become light.  I am not sure what you are in those places.  But you are not dead anymore.  You are just not a person who died.  I know how to do that.  But I don't want to."

Before I could ask, why not?, she continued.  "I know about time because as an alive girl everything we did had something to do with time.  Living in time is hard to forget when you do not have it anymore.  It is more like I remember time.  I wish I didn't.  Time might go by faster."  I felt her thinking over what she just said.  "It took me a long time to learn about these things.  And even longer to understand it.  I don't expect alive people to get it right away."'

So that means, for the last 185 years, she has been stuck on the precise moment she died ... a Saturday at 2:30 in the afternoon on March 22, 1803.  I asked her, ‘Do you want to talk about your death?' 

"Do you mean how I died?  Or what it feels like to die?" 

‘I don't know, either one.'

"When you are a person in life, all you do is think about death.  Death and time.  That's is why they always go together.  When your time runs out, you die.  You don't die if you get more time.

"Dying was horrible.  Drowning is horrible.  I was so scared.  So scared, I forgot to swim even though I knew how a little.  I was so amazed that I was all alone, so scared and alone, and the water was filling me up.  And I couldn't shut my mouth because I was trying so hard to scream.  But I couldn't because of the water in my throat.  And then the water in my lungs.  And then I was way underwater.  And it hurt so much, my body and my insides.  I remember the inside of my nose was stinging and stinging.  And inside my chest felt like someone had a pillow made of water over my face smothering me.  And then, it stopped stinging, stopped hurting.  Just stopped.  And nothing hurt. 

"I floated around a little for a few seconds under there, and then I wasn't scared anymore.  I felt like I belonged down there.  I felt like I was under there looking around and seeing new things for the longest time.  But it was really just a split second or even  less.  That's time again for you, always tricky.

"A shiny lady who I just knew was some kind of grandmother to me dived in like a really slow bolt of lightning.  I could see her coming down, feet first.  Slow like a dream.  Maybe all death is is a dream.  And we dead people have figure out a way to wake up and become people again or go somewhere different and more nice.  Or stay dead forever, which is like ... you know when you have a dream and part of you wants to wake up?  But you can't?  You can't for the longest time?  And you are halfway between places, awake and in dreamlife?  And you are scared in your dream and scared in that part of that is awake but can't get the rest of you wake up?  That's what death feels like to me.  Feels like that to me now.  Back then, death just felt like what we think it does, before we're dead.  The scariest moment in all creation, that lasts way too long, but really only lasts for that split second. 

"Then, it is over, and you are nowhere for a while.  Really, just absolutely nowhere.  And then you have to wake up from that place, too, or you'll stay there in nowhere.  I woke up from there but I do not remember anymore how I did it."

Molly went silent for several minutes.  Then I felt her energy wind down like a slowly dying candle flame until she was gone.

Entry #2 ... From the Session Conducted on 9.30.08      

"You ready?" 

"I am," I answered.

It is two days later.  I was so excited to continue our sessions, I walked to the graveyard a little before 6 p.m.  Usually when I go at night, I wait until dark.  Even though the graveyard gates are only five feet from the street, the street curves down in such a way that if you are driving north you can just barely see it with your peripheral vision.  Driving up the hill bearing south, you can see it dead on.  But it is so innocuous, you don't even know it just passed by.  

For the first time in many years, tonight I am feeling inhibited about what passers-by must be thinking about ... 'that guy that's always in that graveyard.'  Usually, I am so lost inside my paranormal investigation work, and, recently, lost in my work with Molly, I am unaware of anything else in the world.  I do not even know I am outside.  Let alone sitting on a little blue fold-up-chair you carry around in a long blue bag, in a nameless cemetery, talking to a pre pubescent ghost.

I just could not focus.  That happens sometimes.  Molly became impatient.  "You're not ready, Jason.  Come back when you are."

I walked home feeling pretty stupid for worrying about what did not matter, and ignoring what did.

Entry #3 ... From the Session Conducted on 10.4.08  

That first night I responded to Molly's call and walked out of my home just after midnight to find what or who was beckoning to me, I couldn't find her.  Usually, when I feel paranormal energy, it takes me all of30 seconds to zoom in on it and begin to get reads.  My energy sensitivity has always been extraordinarily acute since I was very young.  I can feel energy with my whole body, especially with my chest.  I can feel the precise and unique energy signature of anything, and everything.  People, rocks, trees, houses, towns, states, roads, objects, living things, inanimate things ... dead things.

I stumbled around in that graveyard for twenty minutes in the dark and all I could come up with was, and as I already knew, the place was ... well, alive.  Certainly I knew something fantastic was going to happen.  But that night I walked home in the dark feeling a little concerned that whatever in me is the sensitivity element, it wasn't working.

Entry #4 ... From the Session Conducted on 10.9.08  

I had a long conversation with myself tonight ... that is, my internal dialogue and I.  If I was going to be successful with and respectful of Molly, I had to give her my undivided attention, day or night. 

I am not a very good sleeper anymore.  A few hours, then I wake up.  I do not mind, really.  I live by myself with my dog and greatly enjoy the freedom to be as eccentric as I want to be.  Often, it is those times when I wake up at 3 a.m. that I throw on some clothes, grab my carrying bag with my psychic goodies inside, and drag myself out the door and up my street to S. Main Street.  Where Molly's graveyard sits like a little dying flower at the intersection.

In the dark, I have the freedom of invisibility.  No one can see me sitting way back in a corner furthest from the road.  I wonder though if passers-by can see illumination around Molly when she is right there with me.  I know several people who see auras and can make out the form of a spirit, if it has one.  Or better said, wants to show one.  I cannot see auras.  Although I have seen ghost shadows moving and spirits in glimpses of passing light, I have never seen anything that I could say was Molly. 

Right now, I am sitting on my little blue chair at 2:30 a.m. taking a few breaths before I feel Molly arrive.  This is how she usually does it.  She does not gradually become intensified energy.  She 'explodes' near me like a wonderful little ocean wave crashing right through me.

I wanted to know who the illuminated grandmother woman was who she told me about a few days ago, and what purpose she served?  Molly had disappeared right after she mentioned her.

Most of the time, as I am sitting here waiting for Molly, all I do is take a long slow breath, calm myself, and become intensely aware that I am now a powerful energetic generator and receptor at the same time.  I feel like I become a screen door of sorts, and the energy of the world around passes though like different degrees of wind.  And I feel it.  I feel all of the individual breezes.

Another way of explaining it, imagine yourself outside of your house at night in the dark and something to the side or behind you knocks over a metal trash barrel.  It makes a sharp, sudden and fearful noise.  Crash.  For a second or two, because you cannot see what caused the noise or even see the barrel over there in the dark, your body tenses.  But at the same time, you can feel your whole self, your whole body, involuntarily shock into action.  You become immediately energetically open.  Your inner self becomes a sensitivity radar devise, almost every one of your atoms feeling (or reading) for an explanation.

Energy sensitivity must be something a person can learn.  But with myself and many energy sensitives I know, one day you just decide to use it, and you know exactly how to open yourself energetically.  How to turn on the invisible inner switch that turns you into a being who can feel the vibration of everything.  Everything. 

I know one energy sensitive with a gift like mine who spends most of his waking hours trying to turn the power off because it is on full blast all day.  He spends most days exhausted and tense from the nonstop sensation of being a human satellite dish.  While most people's challenge is learning how to turn their energy sensitivity on, his is just beginning to learn how to turn it off.  Otherwise, he is going to mentally blow a fuse. 

I felt Molly arrive.  She did not waste any time.

She never really says hello, in words (thoughts).  She sends a happy or sad sensation of herself, depending on her mood, and yes, spirits have moods, that I feel and have gotten to know as clearly as listening to and feeling emotion from a favorite song.

"That nice old lady in the water pushed her nice old lady face into mine.  With both our hair floating all around our heads in smooth slow motion, she smiled the most beautiful thing.  Then she said, and I was looking for bubbles coming out of her mouth but there wasn't any, "Molly, when you smile back at me, all this will be over."

 I knew she had just given me some kind of heavenly choice where some people smile and feel nice and safe all of a sudden  And other people who won't or can't ... become angry and upset ghosts, too upset for such a long, long time they can't leave this world."

As for spending all these years living in the little graveyard, "I am dead bored most of the time.  I have one friend here, Ama.  We both died on the same date, March 22, although I died in 1823 and she died in 1806.  That may not seem like much to alive people but to us, because we always think time has not moved a muscle since the moment we died, even a week passing by takes forever."

Entry #5 ... From the Session Conducted on on 10.4.08  

It is a Saturday late afternoon, cold and windy.  I am sitting on the stonewall at the entrance to Molly's graveyard.  I am locked-in today, I barely hear the cars driving by.  They are just flashes of undeterminable color that seem far away in my mind.  I hear the dull swish of them passing a few seconds after they have already taken the corner and disappeared.  Sound delay, it reminds me of the three or four times I have seen a ghost, not the scores of times I have been in their presence and felt them, over the years.  Not out of ‘the corner of my eye' as so many people seem to say is how they saw whatever they saw.  But straight in front  of me.  It was not sound delay but visual delay.  I could not see human forms or facial expressions.  Just a passing mass of energy either dark or light, and that I could feel energetically as intensely as someone standing in front of music speakers on full blast.  You feel the vibrations of the music push against you.  That is close to how I feel spirits sometimes.

I remember the day when I realized my gift of energy sensitivity was more than just a little psychic.  Probably nearly twenty years ago now, I had a (another) life changing experience.  I thank my lucky stars for so many life-changing moments of which I have been aware as they are happening throughout my life.  In those days, in the house we lived in, I had converted a walk-in closet into a CD library room.  I bought big 6' CD racks and painstakingly organized, alphabetized, and sectioned my collection of what was in the neighborhood of 2,000 CDs. 

One night, I walked in intending to choose five, load them on the 5-CD carousel, enjoy a glass of wine, and lose myself in the music  Just let in wash right through me as I had been doing since high school.  Feel it, not just let it get picked up by my eardrums.

I stood there looking at the racks and racks of CDs, running my eyes from CD to CD, deciding which ones to play.  I remember one was Miles Davis' Kind of Blue.  Another was Joni Mitchell, The Hissing of Summer Lawns.  Another, Pat Metheny's Secret Story.  I do not remember the other two. 

Standing there taking them all in ... I suddenly realized that because I feel everything so acutely, all I had to do was look at a CD and I could feel what listening to all tracks would sound like.  I could look at one, and because I have heard  it before, I could feel all the feelings I get listening to it.  Like some split-second fast forward psychic ability ... I did not have to listen to a CD to hear it, just look at ... and feel it.

As a psychic ability, it was a major breakthrough.  The experience moved me to the next level of reading (feeling) energy right down to the most subtle and meaningful vibration.  Reading people, as Molly likes to say, from then on was ‘dead easy.'  One look, and I knew an amazing amount about  them.  Not fortune-telling stuff, but who they really were.  What emotional issues motivate them.  What emotional issues are tormenting them.  Their strengths.  Their inner pain. 

Whenever I am attending a Red Sox game or I am in a large crowd at a concert, I look from person to person, all 30,000 of them sometimes, and get a distinct and unique vibratory impression of each one.  Everyone I have ever met or can remember meeting or seeing somewhere, even strangers that for some reason stick in our memories, whom I had seen thirty years ago, or when I was a child, from my memory I can put their vibration all over me. 

In the early-mid 1990s, I got myself involved in spirituality.  I attended spiritual seminars all over the country.  I gave channeling beings and energy healing a shot.  I could completely lose myself in meditation for hours.  I had a lot of New Agey abilities.  They came to me naturally.  But eventually, I realized I could not relate to folks that had become so committed to (obsessed) with higher consciousness.  For people like us, naturally spiritually gifted, being spiritual was ... well, dead easy.  It is who we are. 

What was hard, for me anyway, was living as a down to earth, intensely human guy in the physical world.  Just being myself rather than forever chasing higher consciousness.  I have evolved as a spiritual being because I devolved, or something crazy like that.

I stopped writing all this in my Ghost Book when I realized my fingers were numb and dark red from the cold.  It had become twilight.  That small period of our day where day and night are even with each other just before dusk begins to fall, and the world becomes blurry and one-dimensional.  All my life that moment of twilight fading into dusk has been my favorite time of day. 

I hopped off the wall, my legs and rear end numb.  I squeezed through the space between the end of a black wrought iron gate long rusted solid and the stonewall.  At night, it is a little precarious.  There are sharp stones jutting out of the ground and a three-foot drop.  More than once I crashed through that space and by sheer reflex did not fall dumbly onto the rocks.

When I arrived at Molly's gravestone, the air surrounding it was warm.  Walking into it from the cold everywhere else, it felt like when you wade in seawater and pass though cold patches and warm patches of water.  (What causes that, by the way?)

After some shenanigans, zooming up on me, then zooming away, she loves to do this, for the next 45-minutes Molly told me about watching the men dig her grave.  And some townspeople who did not care for her family whispering among themselves that the tragedy of her death by drowning was probably deserved.  And the male cardinal, "red as sunset" that flew down into her grave hole.

Entry #6 ... From the Session Conducted on 10.5.08  

I did not ask the right follow up questions yesterday.  I was too lost in trying to visualize Molly the ghost girl waiting for her family and her body to arrive at the gravesite.  Floating in the air.  Watching the men dig her grave.  Then later, floating in the air above her family as the Minister performed the funeral ceremony.  Molly listening to townspeople whisper disparaging things about the Douses, gazing down as the cemetery men lowered the small wooden casket into the hole with ropes.

Sometimes I forget her deep and enduring sadness because, more often than not, she is moody, happy, or shy when we visit.  She talks dispassionately, providing an account to the questions I ask.  And I have asked her scores of questions about ... what things are like?  How does it feel? 

Strangely, for me, I am compassionate, emotional man; I have kept things almost businesslike, rather than ask Molly to give me her heart and soul.

We began this session in the graveyard very late at night, and continued later when I got home.  This was the first session that took place in my study.  Whether I invited her to follow me without realizing, or she simply took the initiative, when I sat at my desk to try to make sense of my notes before I went to sleep and forgot some of it, Molly's energy swept into the room.

Immediately, I felt myself rise up, so to speak, into Molly's intense but very pleasant energy.  At the same time, I felt Molly's energy lower down all over me.  It was exhilarating.  At first, I thought I was still feeling the zing and energetic expansion of our work at the cemetery.  But all too quickly, her presence was unmistakable.  She was zooming around looking at everything.  When she zoomed over to take a look at my cat, the cat, out of a sound sleep, shot straight up in the air, like a cartoon.  My dog, tolerant of the cat, was wide-awake but could care less.

Eventually, I calmed down and she slowed down.  Maybe it was a mistake.  Perhaps I should have asked her some benign questions first.  But as these things go, when she and I are in perfect sync, I do more listening and encouraging than rattling off lists of questions.

The following is an account of our one-hour's work.

"...  In a way, my death was all Martha's fault.  But in the right way, it was my father's.  He was a very angry and short-tempered Daddy.  I do not remember too many days in my life where he was just a nice man.  Because he wasn't as nice man.  He scared me every day.  Sometimes all day.  He never hit me or hurt me.  He screamed.  His screaming would go right through you like a thunderstorm.  I couldn't barely breathe when he screamed. 

"One day, I ran away.  It was Saturday afternoon, really pretty day.  The only thing I knew about running away was from a story us children would tell each other.  About the boy that ran away and because he did he was punished.  When he came home, he had lost his mind and didn't know anybody he used to know for the rest of his life.  Maybe a teacher in school told us that first.  Teachers were always telling us things about the bad things that would happen to us if we disobeyed or did dishonest things.

"I didn't know you were supposed to fold up some clothes and maybe some food in a sack so you could get right to living in the place you ran away to.  I just walked out of the front yard.  About a minute later I got worried because I didn't know where to go.  So I went to my friend Martha Leland's house.

"I only went there because it was on the way to wherever I was going to go.  And it was close.  Martha wasn't even a little curious about me just showing up at her door.  We went out to play with two her dollies in the back yard.

"Then when she went down back to the outhouse, I walked out into the woods from her backyard.  I walked and walked until I came to a little watery part of the Charles River that some kids liked to swim in. 

"And for no reason I could of, when I just began to think about what drowning must feel like, and was trying to remember if anyone we knew ever drowned, I jumped in.  Wearing my dress, I kind of tipped-over and fell in.  Just before I hit the water, a big thought came to me.  I can't hardly swim.

"I killed myself.  And even though I didn't mean to, I meant to.  But I really didn't.  But I did."

The session lasted about 40-minutes.  Much more energetic and clear than when we converse in the graveyard, I wrote this dialog as it was happening, verbatim.  No notes, scribbles, or cross-outs.  She followed me home expressly for the purpose of telling this to me.  I did not ask questions as much as I comforted her and encouraged her to keep going.  As a father with two daughters, affirming what she was telling me and affirming her right to express it comes very naturally. 

And not sure if this is a good thing or not, Molly has never given me any indication that she needs me to be a father figure.  She tells me I probably would not be a very good father back in her day because I am much too nice.  And nice father's ruined their children and make them think life is too easy.

When I asked her if she really believed that?  She replied, "Of course, I do.  I was thinking about that when I was falling into the water."

Entry #7 ... From the Session Conducted on 10.17.08