Read more spooky stories in “Real Wyrd – A Modern Shaman’s Roots in the Middle World,” my collection of true paranormal experiences as a lifelong intuitive.

Every year for Samhain I publish accounts of my more charged, and in some cases creepy, spiritual pursuits. The Dead Time is a treasured journey to Solstice, and as it is a time of untime, the shadowed season presents a great opportunity to tell the stories that many who do shamanic work won’t tell–the occasions when things don’t go well or the unseen presents itself unexpectedly. You may recognize some of these accounts from my previous stories, while others are more recent. Enjoy the solitude of the darkness, and know the light will soon warm!

Apparently the American trend of vast strip malls is a bad idea, energetically speaking, as it seems I have quite a few stories of odd experiences in them. I’m fairly sure I’m not the only one. This event in particular happened in the Winter of 2006.

On my way home from work one day I went to the newest, shiniest Wal-mart in Raleigh. The whole MegaloCenter area on which it is situated is very discordant for me and I don’t go there often at all. As it was, a specific item that I needed was only at that location, so off I went. From the second I passed through the enormous automated doors something was wrong. I literally felt a twinge in my head, like a synapse torqued funny and the tingly effect of it rippled through my whole body and into my etheric field. I truly should have turned around and left immediately but my consumerist hunter-gatherer instincts were having none of it. Once inside the fluorescent patina reflected off my skin and I hesitated to get my navigational bearings. When I did, I noticed something very odd: it sounded like a radio was on, inside my head.

I am quite clairaudient so I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the buzz at first. As I made my way through the store, I began to realize that when I passed directly by certain people, the buzz would clarify into distinct words and phrases. I noticed that the voices changed as I passed by different people. I passed a young couple and had two voices go through my head at once, lovebirds individually cooing over each other. Then I passed a woman and heard a proliferation of expletives about having to find a specific item for someone else. It wasn’t until I passed a little girl of about six or seven years old holding the hand of an old man that I realized what was going on. When I passed her I heard a little voice begging for someone to please get her away from this mean man, I realized I was hearing peoples’ thoughts. I was spontaneously, though unintentionally, cosmically eavesdropping. I recognized the phenomenon for what it because it happens almost every night when I lie down to sleep. In hypnagogic states most people see abstract visuals—blurbs light or random scenes, until they shift into sleep. For those who are aware, this state is the precursor to lucid dreaming. I do sometimes see odd visuals in pre-sleep but most of the time I flip through the bandwidth of the Universe, hearing anonymous conversations, voices, music. It quite literally sounds like a radio dial skimming stations, never quite settling on one for any length of time, though the phrases that manage to come through are distinct. Sometimes I hear several conversations and languages before I fall to sleep. This bedtime ritual I gave in to early in my childhood, and I never really think about it too much.
However, standing in the middle of Wal-mart I couldn’t think of anything. My head was full of everyone else. I had never felt anything like it before, and frankly I never had reason to consider it possible. As soon as I processed that the little girl was experiencing deep distress about the man with whom she walked, I began to project back to her, telling her that she was powerful and she could overcome anything that she needed to. I told her that I was with her and loads of angels and lightbeings walked with her, and that we would all do our best to take care of her. I felt sick at that point. I didn’t want to hear anything else. I forewent the object of my trip and started to make my way out of the store.

As soon as I stepped out of the door there was an audible crackling in my head and I had an instant migraine. It hurt so badly that I was in disbelief that I wasn’t bleeding somewhere. I hadn’t had a migraine in a few years, and never had one so suddenly. My head hurt all the way home, and I still heard voices that whole time. I lay down, everything spinning inside me and out. I tracked the pain to a specific spot in my head and in it I felt a rapid exchange of information—the cosmic equivalent of some Universal mainframe. It wasn’t harmful, per se, but it seemed that the physical pain itself was coming from the furious exchange of data. I asked my guides to come in and facilitate as gently as possible whatever was going on in my brain, and in about 45 minutes the headache was gone, and I was the only one in my head.

I maintain that the ground beneath that shopping center houses some kind of hyper-charged grid that is not getting along with the supersuburbia atop it. I don’t know what alignment of elements triggered the event in the store—timing, aliens, dental work, planets… I don’t know.

Personally, I like to think I was upgraded.

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