The House with Cleaning Spirits
A HALLOWEEN TALE: Most of us have a story or two to tell about houses that are occupied by spirits. What usually keeps an incarnated spirit from moving on is one of several things: 1) They may have died suddenly or traumatically, and don’t realize they’ve died; 2) They have unresolved or unfinished business on this plane that holds them here; or 3) their stuck in a holding pattern and keep coming back to what feels most familiar to them. What they all have in common is the need for guidance and healing to move towards their final destination.
Years ago I bought an old blue and white Victorian house in Kansas with my then psychologist boyfriend. When we were shown the house, something prompted me to ask the owner whether it had any old ghosts. She hesitated a fraction too long before finally saying, “I know this house. It will take care of you.” It was a very odd and rather cryptic statement. “It will take care of you???” What in the world did that mean? Before I could question her further, she was called to the phone and had to end the tour. We loved the house, it felt good and I thought how wonderful it would be to restore it—so we bought it.
The night before we moved in, I had a very unusual dream. In the dream I saw myself in the kitchen of the new house. The kitchen door leading down to the root cellar opened and a brown-haired woman, her hair in a severely pulled back bun and wearing a blue apron, appeared with a menagerie of cats following her. They stepped into the kitchen and acted as if I wasn’t there. Still in the dream state, I asked the woman what she was doing in MY house. She told me quite matter-of-fact that it was HER house and that SHE lived there. I knew this was impossible, but I quickly deduced (even in my dream state) that perhaps she was not from this world. Just as I was going to tell her, “Well then you must be dead…,” I suddenly woke up. I told my boyfriend the dream, but we managed to laugh it off.
Our first night in the new house, we were both tired from the long moving process and went to bed in the big master suite upstairs. Just
before drifting off to sleep I remember thinking “the downstairs neighbors are awfully noisy tonight.” I had been used to apartment living and it hadn’t yet occurred to me that we no longer had downstairs neighbors. I fell asleep from exhaustion, never giving it a second thought.
The next morning my boyfriend asked me if I had “heard all the racket going on downstairs” the night before. I looked at him blankly. He related how he heard people talking and moving around on the first floor. He got up, walked downstairs and the noise stopped. He returned back upstairs and it started again. Needless to say, he was somewhat concerned. No one was outside. The neighbors on either side of us had their lights out and the only noise was coming from our downstairs living room. He said he told whomever it was making the noise “please be quiet.” It apparently worked.
The next day I was alone in the house. Around noontime I was moving a large house plant down to the root cellar to be re-potted. As I awkwardly maneuvered it through the kitchen doorway, some dirt spilled out on the floor along with a few seashells. I left the mess on the floor intending to return later to clean it up.
Imagine my surprise when I came back upstairs about 20 minutes later to find the spilled dirt all gone. That’s when I looked over at the kitchen garbage container and saw to my amazement that the sea shells were now sitting on top of it. I opened the lid and saw the dirt had been disposed of neatly inside the can. I called out thinking my boyfriend had come home early from seeing patients and had cleaned up. However, I was puzzled to see his car was not in the driveway. I immediately called his office to learn he was still at work and had been there all morning. Wow, I thought. We’ve got a house cleaning spirit! It suddenly occurred to me this could have some real benefits. That evening I placed a note on the kitchen table saying, “Thank you so much for cleaning up. I know you’re here. What is your name?” I jokingly added a P.S.— “Feel free to clean anything you want. The vacuum cleaner is in the side hall closet.”
Of course, there was no answer to my note the next day, nor had the vacuum cleaner been used (one can always dream). In the process of our move, I had developed a chest cold and was experiencing bouts of coughing. I decided to sleep that night in the upstairs guest bedroom, so as not to disturb my boyfriend’s sleep. I recall propping myself up in bed to an almost sitting position to breathe easier. I was just starting to feel sleepy when I felt something jump up and land on the bed. It was pitch dark in the room, but I could feel the footfalls of what I knew had to be a small animal. I was paralyzed with fear. I could feel it moving nearer. I could hear the purr of a cat as it moved closer to my head. That’s when I sprang up out of the bed and turned on the overhead light switch. I scanned the room. Nothing was there. I suddenly recalled the dream I had before moving in about the old woman and all her animals. Had I just been visited by one of her many cats?
I didn’t sleep well that night for more reasons than having a chest cold. I kept expecting that darn cat to come back. The next morning my mother was in visiting from Chicago and I was dead tired. I put her in the “cat” guest bedroom without telling her what had occurred. I didn’t want to scare the living daylights out of her. The next morning I asked her how she had slept. She hesitated. “Okay, I guess,” before quickly adding, “Did you call out in the middle of the night?”
“Why?” I cautiously asked. I could tell my mother was somewhat puzzled. “Well, I thought I heard a woman’s voice. It sounded like she was calling out ‘Ava’ or ‘Alva’ or something like that. You didn’t hear it?” I told her I hadn’t and tried to look disinterested.
My new house was becoming more intriguing. I knew I needed to search out information on the house’s prior owners to get some answers. I went to the town’s historical society and found out the name of the couple who had built the house in 1905. And to my astonishment, I learned the wife’s name was “Alva”. I guess Alva, the house cleaner, had answered my note after all. She DID want us to know her name.
Back at the turn of the century, respectable women were rarely mentioned in the newspaper outside of a marriage, birth or a death announcement. I was surprised to learn that Alva and her husband had no record of having had children, although a side nursery had been lovingly built as an attachment to the master bedroom. Alva’s husband had been in the insurance business and they must have suffered some kind of financial loss, because a few years after building the house they unexpectedly sold the house and moved to a much smaller home, not nearly as nice. She eventually died there. I never saw Alva’s face, outside of in my dream, and I couldn’t find any historical pictures of her to see if my dream vision matched the real person. Whatever Alva’s story was, it was evident her heart was still attached to her first marriage home, now my home, and she did not want to leave it—or stop cleaning it.
Thankfully, Alva was not a malevolent spirit. Instead, she was definitely a lurker. Sometimes I would see movement out of the corner of my eye whenever I was either spackling, painting, wallpapering, or restoring the oak woodwork in the old house. While I couldn’t get her to run the vacuum, she would still move things around to create a tidier order. I started to talk to Alva and tell her I would really take care of her house, make it shine again, and she didn’t need to worry. I told her there was another house of her dreams waiting for her on the other side of the lighted doorway and to look for it. C’mon Alva, I thought. Get along towards the Light!
However, you just can’t rush these things. Remembering the unused nursery in the house, I even told Alva there were probably babies on the other side of that Light that needed her mothering. Lots of babies. Eventually she must have been satisfied with my promise to take care of her house—or she really got tired of me telling her what to do, because her presence became less and less. Then one day the house felt like it was now totally—mine. Rest in Peace Alva.
POSTSCRIPT: This story happened more than 30 years ago and the house has long since been sold. It was decades before I invented the bio-energetic Trinfinity8 technology. But today, this technology is providing some unusual holistic answers to even other-worldly problems. I have several practitioners who use the Trinfinity8 technology to get rid of pesky spirits and clear a house of negative energy. England, with its long history of battles, plagues, and untimely deaths, has plenty of house guests still lurking around from the past. One London Trinfinity8 practitioner, with a specialty in house clearing, says it keeps her very busy. Who would have thought?
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Dr. Kathy Forti is a clinical psychologist, inventor of the Trinfinity8 technology, and author of the book, Fractals of God
