Issue date: Saturday, August 5, 2006
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P A R A N O R M A L I N S I D E R
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Read stories that defy logic every week in Paranormal
Insider. Subscribe instructions and email links are at the
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Warm greetings to everyone and once again, thank you to
all my readers who have responded with amazing and
wonderful
stories about psychic and paranormal behavior in
pets. I will be
sharing more of your letters in today's
issue, and please keep
those emails coming!
Before we get to your letters, I
thought I'd scout out the
latest paranormal news for you, so
here's a brief look at
the weird and wonderful things going on
in this world ...
and beyond.
Witch School
Comes to Illinois
ABC News reported recently that
Hoopestown, Ill. has become
home to a brick and mortar school
for students of Wicca,
aptly called Witch School. The small
community of
Hoopestown (population 6,000) hasn't exactly
offered the
warmest of welcomes to the school, which is housed
in a
former brick horse stable right in the center of town
near
the Hoopeston Civic Center, but perhaps they'll have
to
start getting used to the idea that the face of the
town
is changing. Witch School is not the first New Age
business
to move to the area. With the town's low real
estate
prices, it's an attractive place for businesses on
a
budget, and besides Witch School, there is a Botanica
and
a Wiccan owned bookstore, giving rise to the idea that
the
town could soon be known as a Pagan colony. It will be
a
drastic change of character for a town which until now
has
been known for its Sweet Corn Festival and the
National
Sweetheart Pageant, which has produced eight Miss
America
winners. Witch School's director, Ed Hubbard, says
that
the online school has roughly 120,000 active
students
studying topics such as Druid and Celtic history,
crystal
and gem magic, and with 30 to 50 new students
registering
online daily, the schoolhouse itself could soon be
bulging
with students too. ABC says that The American
Religious
Identification Survey counted approximately
134,000
Americans claiming Wicca as their religion in 2001,
up
from 8,000 people in 1990.
Crop
Circles
Hungarian Media has reported the appearance of 2
giant
crop circles in a field between 2 small northern
towns,
Mezokomarom and Lajoskomarom. A local newspaper,
Fejer
Megyei Hirlap, says that as is expected with real
crop
circles, the stalks of wheat were bent without
being
broken and it is unlikely that this would have been
a
stunt, as it was in such an out of the way location.
The
head of the League of Hungarian U.F.O. Research,
RYUFOR,
who investigated the anomalous circles says that
their
shape, which is slightly oval, suggest that the
circles
are indeed of alien origin, as man-made circles,
made
with a rope and planks, would be perfectly round.
Experts
continue to investigate and radiation measurements
may
provide further information soon.
Ghosts and Ghoulies For Your Viewing Pleasure
Malaysia's The Star Online reports that the Shah Alam
State Museum in Kuala Lumpur opened its doors to a new
exhibition called Mysteries, Genies, Ghosts and Coffins
on
July 4. Museum director Mohd Lotfi Nazar and other
museum
authorities claim that the displays, which include
ghosts,
genies and many supernatural beings, are real -
and many
of the spooky creatures are actually alive.
Ustaz Safuan Abu
Bakar, the owner of the genies and
ghosts, is a Sufi religious
teacher and healer who says
he has mastered the art of capturing
and trapping the
supernatural creatures. Having received
spiritual
revelations on a meditative retreat in the mountains
many
years ago, he has become an expert in collecting
ghostly
artifacts and along with a 15 man team called
Paranorma,
devotes much of his time to capturing genies and
ghosts
in haunted Indonesian and Thai locales.
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Now, I'm delighted to share some of your letters:
Pets
and Memory Genes
I have 2 topics to comment on. One is the
pets. I have 2
cats; one was a stray who found us 12 years ago
and the
other was rescued from an abusive owner. Our
stray,
Buttons, is a large cat and he loves to be snuggled
and
cuddled but not picked up and I found that with him if
you
rub his belly he will let you as long as you do not
comment
on his belly fat. If you do, he will bite and scratch.
If
not, he will let you rub to your heart's content. My
other
one, Mookie, came with her own guardian ghost kitty. I
have
heard this from other people who own rescued cats
that
they have a ghost kitty that they play with. All of us
in
the house have at one time or another seen this ghost cat
-
it is very large and orange. It regularly jumps on the
bed
or rubs against your leg. I have even heard it meowing
on
occasion. Last night I saw the ghost kitty walk into
the
living room and disappear in front of me. Both of my
cats
see it and play with it.
Buttons will
watch TV with us and if we are watching a
show with birds or, of
all things, winter sports and it
goes to a commercial he gives
us heck thinking we changed
the channel on him. Quite often he
will lay on the remote
so we can't change the channel. He
absolutely loves to
watch the winter Olympics especially skiing,
hockey, and
curling. He prefers women's curling.
The other topic I wanted to touch on was the idea of the
memory gene. Science for the longest time has suggested
that
cro-magnon man, with their larger brains, actually
inherited
their knowledge of what plants were edible and
food preparation
through their familial genes, so this
idea is not so far-fetched
at all.
Kahlest Tiger Eye
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Kitty Speak
Many years ago, my daughter rescued a
kitten about 5 months
old. She was having trouble finding a vet
(it was a Sunday)
and she called me. As I was listening to
the tale of woe,
I kept saying to myself, "We'll fix him up,
we'll find him
a home" but when she finished I was amazed that
what came
out of my mouth instead was, "We have 5, so we'll have
6."
He was very badly injured. The wonderful vet I found in
the
yellow pages would not let us visit him for 2 days;
he
wasn't even sure that the kitten could survive. When
I
first could visit him, I knelt down in front of his
cage
and he looked into my eyes and I had this
overpowering
feeling that I had known and loved him
always. I've always
talked to our cats, but from the time
I was able to bring
him home, I found myself answering him more
than anything.
The strangest thing was that sometimes the
thought would
come into my mind to feed him a particular food
(not at any
regular feeding time), and I would, and he would
always eat
it. There were many times that this would happen and
I
would ask my daughter to give him that particular food.
She
would say, "Yeah, Ma, like he won't eat anything
else."
Well, guess what, she would give him 5 or 6 different
kinds
of food that he liked, but he would never eat any of
it
until she gave him what I had said. After this
happened
8 or 10 times, she gave up and just gave him what
he
wanted.
a reader
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The Dog
Knew
Many years ago, when my boys were young, we went to
Florida
for the winter break. My mother stayed at my house to
care
for Penny, my pedigreed boxer. They got along
great
together and played hide and seek very often. After a
nice
vacation, we were stopped in Virginia by a highway
police
officer out to make his quota. Many, many out-of-state
cars
at a kangaroo court. We were going to spend the night
in
Maryland and travel home to Long Island, NY the next
day
but my husband was so enraged he just wanted to get
home.
When we arrived home, rather late, my mother had
prepared
a welcome-home snack for us, although we weren't due
until
the next day. I asked her how come? "You expected
us
tomorrow."
"Oh, no," she said, "I knew
you would be here tonight
because Penny told me!" Yes, animals
are connected to
humans, Thank heaven!
El
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My Cat, MeMe
My cat MeMe, whom I had for
many years, and was loved by
everyone, one morning crawled up in
my car engine for some
God-forsaken reason, and when I turned on
my car that
morning, she was injured very badly. A couple of
days later
she died at the hospital. It was very, very sad for
all of
us.
MeMe used to stand at the top of
the stairs where her
litter box was and when I would go around
the front door
and look up and see her I would say hello every
time. The
morning after her death I was doing something and I
looked
up and she was there. Forgetting she had died the
day
before, I called up to her and went about my way. A
few
seconds later I stopped right in my tracks,
remembering
she had passed away. I ran back to the stairs, but
of
course she was not there anymore. I quickly called
my
mother and told her, she told me that MeMe had come
to
say good-bye and show her love once more.,
Ellen M. Lopes
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Lazarus
Dear Zsuzsana,
I read
with great interest your column on pets sharing
psychic bonds
with their human companions. I too had a
strong bond with a
cream ginger cat whom I named Lazarus.
I got him fully grown
from the Cat Haven. Not wanting a
full grown cat, I'd gone
looking for a kitten, but when
I passed his cage and he said,
"Take me!", I did.
Right from the start he refused to sleep
in the cat bed I
bought for him, insisting on sleeping in my
bed, curled
in the crook of my arm just like a baby, and I'm
sure that
at times he actually thought of himself as a human
child.
He'd obviously been fed only cat biscuits during
his
previous life, as that was all he would eat at
first,
but gradually I managed to interest him in a wider
variety
of foods. It was our Saturday afternoon treat to share
a
pound of prawns. He'd sit patiently while I peeled them
in
front of the fire, and fed us both on a
one-for-you-one-for-
me basis.
He appeared
to have been badly treated by a man before I
found him, as he
hid under the settee when my son was
around, but Vince soon
gained his trust, and became as
close to him as I did. Never
shy, Lazarus adopted all my
friends as his, and he eventually
learnt to trust men
again.
Lazarus had a
disconcerting habit of suddenly stopping
whatever he was doing,
to stare fixedly with eyes wide
open and ears laid back at a
certain spot just above my
front door. Vince and I became
convinced that Lazarus
could see a spirit there, though we felt
it must have
been a benign spirit, as Lazarus never fled its
presence.
After I moved to a new house, he never did this again,
so
I know there's no spirit here.
One night
I was awakened from a deep sleep having "heard"
Lazarus calling
me desperately for help. I found that he
was still, limp and not
breathing, with his face buried
in my armpit, suffocated. I
panicked and shook him
desperately, shouting at him to wake up,
upon which he
began to breathe again. A vet later told me that
was the
best thing I could have done, and that I'd
instinctively
known the correct way to resuscitate my much loved
pet.
After that, Lazarus was like my shadow, and stayed
very
close to me until the day he died. Five years on, I
still
grieve for him, and though it's taken 2 little girl
cats
to replace him, both loving and loved in return, even
they
cannot fill the void he left in my life. I know we'll
be
reunited in our next lives.
Telling you
this has been a bit of a catharsis for me, as
I've been typing
through my tears, but on re-reading it,
I feel more at peace.
Thank you for listening to me.
Yours sincerely,
Sandy Parkinson
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Thanks
again to all my readers for your wonderful emails.
Please
comment or send your stories to me at
zsuzsana@arcanamatrix.com and make sure to put
Paranormal
Insider in your subject line. Best wishes and see you
next
week!
Carpe Diem!
Zsuzsana
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