I’ve been living in Arizona the majority of my life. Funny, how I do not think of myself as an Arizonan. I suppose you have to be born into it. I do, however, find that the history here is vastly different than what I found growing up in the Mid-Atlantic state of Virginia: The land here seems to hold memories.
I wonder if part of this is due to the geological conditions, the lack of rain, the old HoHoKam water canals that carve into the desert that sent life-giving moisture, or the high level of Pagan spirituality that was expressed in the desert. If soil can be alkali from lack of rain, does this help the Earth remember events to replay them? to store them? to attract hauntings? So many questions run through my mind about the baffling conditions that create a haunted site.
When you think of England you often think of a lot of haunting of old castles and buildings, but you also think of the land as haunted. The same is true of places like the continent of Africa and the region of Scandinavia. I secretly wonder if perhaps Pagan practices by our ancestors helped create a mixture that holds power in the land. If Stonehenge was made for spiritual purposes on some important leyline, then perhaps that same Pagan knowledge that understood and was connected with the Earth points out the gateways to the other side.
These are all theories, but I would have to assume that any people who follow the Earth as their guideline to spirituality would be highly attuned to such places and events as what we deem the “paranormal.” I don't think it's coincidence that many Pagans choose to be ghost hunters and to use dowsing rods for tuning into spiritual "centers." Those ties to the earth and life cycles are a definite edge in the ghost hunting industry for finding the "sweet" spot that might be active.
Arizona has many sites of countless battles and much anguish by the indigenous people. People who were highly spiritual and in tune with the earth and seasons. If you find a good haunted site in Arizona it’s typical for folks to say “Indian burial grounds,” but they may be onto something. Any spiritually charged site is likely to evoke paranormal occurrences. The land lived on by the native citizens would have likely been steeped in part real world/part spiritual world. You can truly understand the importance of spirituality to the Native Americans when you realize they had to survive in a very brutal environment. Without that spirituality and ties to the land, they would not have been able to find food or water to survive the Arizona summers.
We may have an arid desert here, but it is soaked in Pagan spirituality.
I currently live in northern Wyoming, in a basin where there is little rain, alkali soil, and many remnants of spiritual/holy sites. (I can see Medicine Mountain, where the famous solar cairn/wheel is located, from my window.) However, I find that I experienced more phenomena in northern California, where I am orignally from.
ReplyDeleteI found out recently that the house where I live now is known as "haunted" among the locals. When I first moved in I heard footsteps coming down the carpeted switchback stairwell in the center of the house. (It's a split-entry two-level.) I tried to engage whatever was making the sound, but when I stepped out from my bedroom into the lower hall, the footsteps just continued. I felt quite foolish, standing there in the middle of the night with my hands outstretched!
It was only later that I found out from my friend's masseuse, who visited this house as a boy, that he had similar experiences with the staircase, and refused to ever enter the house again. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I think the "haunting" is only a recording. Interestingly enough, when we took the carpet off of the stairs and replaced them with wood-laminate, the footsteps coninued, sounding as if they were still over carpet.
The land here is more active, rather than the towns, I've noticed. My friend and I have seen whirlwinds, which the Crow tribe believed were ghosts, forming inside tipi rings and then "exiting" the stone circles from the east, where the doors would have been.