Ancestors, Past Lives and Ghost Stories – Part Three

I’m Sara Walka, founder of The Sisters Enchanted, and I’ve spent years as a psychic intuitive helping women connect with the parts of life most of us are taught to fear or ignore. This is Part Three of our Ancestors, Past Lives, and Ghost Stories series, and it’s the one people get the most worked up about: ghosts.

So before we go anywhere, here’s my one disclaimer. Everybody believes something different, and that’s okay. What I’m sharing comes from my own experiences, and it’s my honest belief that there is nothing here to fear. I don’t think there’s evil lurking around every corner. I never have. So come in with an open mind, and let’s talk about what connecting with spirits actually looks like, as opposed to what you’ve seen on TV.

How does mediumship actually work?

Mediumship works by receiving and interpreting, not by looking up answers. A lot of people think a medium can ask your passed loved ones anything and just know it, like you could test them with ‘where did you hide the book’ or ‘what was the code,’ and they’d rattle it right off. That’s not how it works. By and large, mediums receive messages, or they ask questions and interpret the answer back.

And here’s the key part: people interpret information based on what they are able to interpret and understand. If a medium has never seen a certain symbol before, they can only describe it the best way they can. They are not going to spit out the exact words you’re looking for, because they’re working with the language and the visuals they know, and then handing that back to you.

My friend Tracy is a medium, and she’s a research medium, which means she’s been studied and verified as accurate by an independent institution. She told me once about an in-person reading she did for some women who were really looking for one specific answer, and she just wasn’t getting it for them. As they were leaving, they noticed a painting or a little model she had, something with a boat or a ship, and they pointed it out. The second she saw it, it clicked. She said the thing, and that was exactly what they had been looking for. The way they were asking, what came through didn’t line up. It took that one interaction, probably not random at all, for the connection to land.

That’s mediumship. It’s not really about accuracy. It’s about messages coming through, and being open enough to receive them without clamping down on a specific outcome.

What was the Spiritualism movement?

The Spiritualism movement was a religious practice, popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s, built on the belief that people who had passed were still evolving and could connect us to a higher power through mediums. You’ve maybe heard of it. The idea was that those who had passed kept evolving, could connect to God or the higher power, and that we could speak to them and receive messages back.

It was especially popular in wealthy European communities at the time. It never took a long-lasting stronghold, and you can see why: it’s easy for someone to misconstrue, or for a false medium to take advantage of people. But Spiritualist churches still exist in the US today. If that interests you, give it a Google. They’re still around, and they’re one more place where the living and the dead come together.

What’s the difference between sensing a ghost and getting a message?

For me, these are two completely different experiences. When I sense a ghost, it’s a knowing of a presence, and I don’t receive messages. When I do mediumship, I get symbols, letters, and quick nods to a spirit, but usually no sense of a figure in the room. Let me start with the first one, because it’s what most people mean when they say ‘ghost.’

When I say I ‘saw’ a ghost, I don’t mean a figure standing there like a cardboard cutout. It’s more of a knowing. A clear, certain sense that someone is there, how old they are, what their energy is.

The first time I knew for sure I was looking at a spirit, I was working alone in a room in my house. I looked over and had this knowing of a man, middle-aged or older. And here’s the wild part: I knew he was peeing into a coffee can. No anatomy involved, just a certain knowing that that’s what was happening. I was a little wigged out, but I also knew I wasn’t in danger. So I told my husband, who is not a witchy guy at all, just an average Joe, and I said, ‘You’re going to think I’ve gone off the deep end, just hear me out.’ Then I told him I saw a ghost peeing into a coffee can.

Some background. The house we live in has been in his family for a long time. His grandfather, who passed away suddenly when we were first dating and who I never met, used to work on this house with him. My husband looked at me and said it wasn’t coffee cans, it was tobacco cans. His grandfather was a pipe smoker, and he used to pee into tobacco cans and set them out in the yard to keep the deer away. The room I was working in used to be the garage, where his grandfather did exactly that kind of thing.

His name was Corky, and to this day I think he’s still around, causing a little friendly chaos. House-sitters report things moving from one spot to another. Just the other day our electronic door lock, which logs every unlock and makes a loud noise when it opens, showed a manual unlock from inside the house ten minutes before I went to open it. Nobody was anywhere near it. So, hi Corky.

After that, this started happening more often. I’d be somewhere other people were picking up an energy, and I’d just breathe and ask, is someone here? In one house everyone swore was haunted, I looked at the doorway and simply knew there was a little girl standing in it. More recently I went ghost hunting at the Lizzie Borden house in Massachusetts, where a father and stepmother were murdered back in the late 1800s and the case was never really solved. You can actually stay in the house. I’ve done it twice, once when it was a bed and breakfast and once now that a ghost hunting company owns it and makes a whole kitschy experience out of it, handing out tools and trying to stir up negative ghosts. For someone like me, who doesn’t think that’s typical and had already slept there peacefully, that part was honestly a little off-putting. What I felt in that house was a little toddler-girl energy, playful, running around, not even really noticing there were people there.

How do I receive messages from spirit?

When mediumship does happen for me, it comes through as symbols, letters, and quick impressions rather than full sentences. I won’t claim to be a medium, because I’ve never trained it or tried to grow it. So when it happens, I usually don’t even know it’s happening. I’ll be giving someone what I think is an intuitive or psychic message, and they’ll stop me and say, that is not intuition, that’s my so-and-so.

It shows up as connections. I was giving a past life reading for someone in one of our programs and said I saw them doing glassblowing over a fire in a barn. They were astonished, because they had actually done glassblowing in this life, to honor someone who had passed. Another time I saw the color yellow, moving fast, and said it felt like yellow running sneakers going really fast. Turns out someone’s father had a yellow Barracuda, and then I pulled their father’s initials. So for me it’s a lot of symbols, letters, and a nod to the spirit, rather than a clean message from the spirit.

How do you connect with a ghost or spirit yourself?

If you want to try connecting, the foundation is self-trust, openness, and not being afraid. Fear is the thing that blocks you. Once you have that foundation, the tools are simple: tarot, a spirit board, a pendulum, or even just the alphabet written on paper. Here’s how I use each one.

Start with self-trust and release the fear

This is the same foundation as past life work. Being open and not afraid is the whole game. And I’ll be honest with you: if the only ghosts you’ve ever seen are the angry, demonic, scary ones on TV, don’t watch that stuff before you try this. You’ll just end up afraid, and fear keeps you closed. I never watch those shows, ever.

Use tarot to ask your questions

You can use tarot cards for mediumship the same way you’d use them for past life work. Ask your questions. You can even ask about the energy of a house, a piece of land, or a relative, and let the cards answer.

Understand the spirit board (and the Ouija panic)

People have big feelings about spirit boards, so let me say two things. First, the boxed Ouija board is made by Mattel on the same factory lines that make Monopoly. Same cardboard, different paper on top, same boxes, different labels. If you’re afraid of a Ouija board out of a box, maybe you should be afraid of your Monopoly money too. Second, anything only has the power you give it. A book, even the Bible, is just a book until you have a connection to it, a belief in it. A spirit board is no different. It’s your connection and your belief that give it any power, not the object.

Or skip the board and use a pendulum or the plain alphabet

When I’m actively asking whether someone wants to come through and say hi, I’ll use a spirit board to find a name or initials with yes or no questions, and I’ll use a pendulum, moving it and feeling the connection to get the letters. Honestly, half the time I skip the board entirely and just write the alphabet out on paper, or use ABC cards. Same thing. That’s what makes all the fear around these tools so wild to me. It’s the ABCs.

Why connect with spirits during this liminal time?

This time of year, the veil is said to be thinner, which makes it easier to connect with spirit. But the deeper reason to try has less to do with ghosts and more to do with you. Practices like these pull you out of your comfort zone and strengthen your self-trust.

Sometimes we’re afraid to move forward, or we’re carrying hidden fears we don’t even know we have, because we’re not comfortable with not knowing things. Sitting with a practice like this, asking new questions of yourself, that’s where the real work is. What stories have you been holding onto? What have you been afraid to look at? And it ties straight back into ancestor work. If you’re looking for validation, or comfort, or just to understand the energy of a place, acknowledgment can be enough. When my own house felt wild for a while, the moment I acknowledged Corky, the whole place felt lighter again.

Here’s where I want to connect this to something bigger. So much of what keeps women from this kind of practice isn’t the spirits at all. It’s a long, inherited habit of dismissing our own knowing, of deciding our intuition can’t be trusted, of making ourselves small around what we sense. That’s one of the seven self-sabotage patterns that keep women small, the ones I call the witch wound, and learning to trust your own knowing is exactly how you interrupt it.

Every time you honor a knowing instead of talking yourself out of it, you’re doing more than ghost work. You’re reclaiming your own authority. If you want to understand the full pattern, start here: What Is the Witch Wound?.

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