Fleeing the Ghost
When spiritual practice cranks up your light, and the weird energies come flocking
The first time I had trouble with a spirit was in an AirBnB in Tucson: a little gated fourplex in the historic Armory Park neighborhood on the south side of town.
In the middle of the night, I awoke with the distinct sense of someone—something—leaning over me.
This was November 2019, and the place I’d booked was part of an old Sonora-style adobe rowhouse—painted mint green and laced with papery hot pink bougainvillea, with an aesthetically rusted security door. Sinewy nopales, dried bamboo, and a lone ocotillo filled the courtyard.
Six months previously, my landlord of seven years had required me to move out so he could sell. I’d been stringing together places to stay ever since. For the last three months, I’d been working on my overdue book Lightning Flowers from the road—teaching in New York, Seattle, and Salt Lake City, while testing out smaller Wyoming and Montana towns I might live in next. I’d traveled back to Tucson to lead a weekend writing intensive.
I picked the Armory Park neighborhood because “historic” seemed charming; I’d barely explored the area while I lived there. But it wasn’t until I pulled up in front of the fourplex—after midnight, since I’d met my friends for beers when I got in—that I realized I was less than a block from Santa Rita Park, where clumps of people spent their days beside packed shopping carts.
If you had asked me before I was staying there, I would have told you that the park felt like a gaping wound in the city. A friend who worked for the government told me they’d been warned not to wear sandals in the park, because of the needles.
Let me say now what I could not have explained then: it is not exactly about the people there.
It is about historical residue, about pre-existing energies on the land that draw them to that place. And it is about the entity attachments that can cling to any of us, but that enter most easily those suffering from a severe loss of personal power.
Shamans call this soul fragmentation or soul loss:1 when traumatic events split off a part of us, forcing us to move forward essentially with holes in the fabric of ourselves. Some of the work of a shaman is “soul retrieval”—journeying for a client back through space and time, on another plane, in order to recapture the missing piece and restore wholeness.
In a society without shamans, shattering traumas rarely lead to a soul retrieval. People are left (within broken housing, healthcare, and other systems) to do the best they can on their own. The substances that many people turn to for short term stability or relief end up keeping their frequency low, making them a match for negative energies and parasitic beings. Once the entity attaches, it’s even harder for the soul-shattered person to make the kinds of decisions that would restore their sovereignty; they may feel exhausted and viscerally out of control (because they are), while attracting additional misfortunes that strengthen the need for self-medicating.
The beings attached to them feed off their despair.
And the gathering of many of these beings in one place, as at the park down the street? This creates its own field, magnetizing and seeding chaos. A gleeful and toxic darkness. A lover of mine called it a bane.
All places have their own energetic texture, their own spiritual landscape, but Tucson’s is more complex than many. I love Tucson, but it’s hissing with vortexes and portals, layered with the ghosts of colonization, full of tiny dark bars I wouldn’t set foot in. Neighborhood safety varies wildly block by block.
The energetic backdrop of a place can influence your relationships, your feelings and your body—the outcomes of your life—but if you’re not sensitive, and you don’t consciously know they’re there, this happens invisibly.
I didn’t understand until I’d been away and came back.
On the day I’d driven north out of Tucson in August, I felt burned to a crisp. Monsoon had never arrived. My overdue book was finally in to the publisher, but it was 30,000 words too long. Within the week my agent would send word that the editor refused to touch it until I brought it back to our contracted length.
The cut my agent thought would take a weekend took three months. I was a mess, exhausted from months of writing about deeply traumatic events. At first, I stayed up all night, panicked, trying to push through the work. I collapsed again, again, again.
In a friend’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, I slept whole days, with the AC blasting and two comforters piled atop me, in the silent world created by double-paned glass. I took the train to Brooklyn to see a psychic, a tarot reader, a holotropic breathwork guide. My body felt empty; I needed healers to smooth my shattered edges. How will I do this? I wondered, as I walked the mile to my publisher’s high rise. The sheen of a triumphant moment stretched over terror. I met my editor, took pictures, smiled and pretended it was all okay. Back in the apartment, I had a call with someone named Katherine who called herself an “emotional alchemist.”
One thing became clear: I would not be able to cut 30,000 words, to fix the structure of my book, without radical rest. I had burned myself down too far.
Another: The spiritual work required of me that summer—meditating before writing, calling on angels for help, removing creative blocks with the help of a reiki master—would be the minimum moving forward.
Working in my old way, I had run myself into the absolute ground. Into a brick wall.
To move forward, I would have to transform.
By the time I drove back south to Tucson at the beginning of November, my energy was soft, sober, and bright. I had spent months learning to quiet my insides. I had friendly rapport with several angels. I whispered prayers when my anxious body needed them. I channeled whole passages. Fixed chapters in minutes, because I was finally told how. Sleeping and writing those last weeks in a cabin in Kelly, Wyoming—surrounded by the big energy of the Tetons, its medicine elk and bison—was like chilling on top of a giant crystal.
I had no idea what it would be like to re-enter the desert.
By Flagstaff, I could sense the difference in every cell of me. The old, twisty energy of the Colorado Plateau moving through me like a trickster.
By the time I hit Tucson, I was shaking. How sensitive I had become. “Thank you, no,” I said out loud as one tarot teacher had taught me, bright but boundaried, trying to let feelings move through me unhindered. The energy thickened as I drove south. I recited affirmations to counter the deep fear seeping through my cracks.
As I took the Miracle Mile exit—pointed toward those beers with my friends—I gulped, barely able to whisper, as a wall of energy took me. The place was feet deep with spirits. Tears coating my cheeks as they all moved through my field.
I crossed the overpass, beside the tattered tents of the unhoused. I passed by old motels, thick with a buildup of violence and drugs. I spoke boundaries again and again, tried to send back love, as half the cemetery flocked to my light.
I could feel everything.
Nothing like this had ever happened to me before.
Or. Maybe I had felt this, a tiny bit.
Maybe in my last years in Tucson I was feeling it increasingly, without knowing it. Maybe I was already getting more sensitive; maybe the opioid and housing crises were darkening Tucson’s energetic texture, as more and more people stood desperate at gas stations. Maybe I was responding with more alcohol and lots of travel.
Maybe this was a part of my leaving.
To be sensitive and not realize it, I thought—driving east deeper into Tucson, tears rolling down my face—was both intolerable and dangerous.
If a person had spiritual tools and context, she could be in any space with boundaries and shields, holding her sovereignty against the energies that might try to attach to her. But if a person lacked these skills and awarenesses, she would explain away the feelings. She would find other ways to deal with the awful sensations invading her life.
But this would not work.
Because this layer of reality existed, whether we saw it or not.
The back of my truck was packed with heavy-duty plastic bins of gear, clothing, and books—with no topper, no cover, no locks. I stood at midnight on the sidewalk eyeballing the short distance to Santa Rita Park, unable to shake the anxious feeling that whatever I left out would disappear.
Finally, I sighed, and began to haul bin by bin through the gate, across the courtyard, and up the porch stairs into the apartment.
It was past 1am when I finally walked into the bedroom, sweaty and exhausted. There, I found myself staring at a picture on the wall opposite the bed.
An adobe dwelling. A Pueblo woman carrying sticks inside. The bare branches of trees casting long, knobby finger-like shadows into the building.
Behind it all, the sky a menacing pink.
The door the woman was about to walk through faced my bed.
A turbulent purple space inside.
I shuddered. Something in my heart felt… dark.
In the morning, I had a session with Katherine the emotional alchemist. “Oh yeah, there’s a lot of dead people walking around there,” she said of the neighborhood, when I told her where I was staying. “The veil is really thin there.”
She told me to smudge the house, to do a spell at the front door. To be aware of where I felt discouraged, because these spirits wanted to enter my space and attach to that and make it worse.
“And—don’t drink this week?” she said. “There’s a reason they call them spirits.” Drinking could allow them a crack, to climb in and get ahold of me, Katherine said. She sent me a link to music, to stabilize the energy. I laid my phone flat on the stairs at the entrance to the house.
And at first it was fine. I wrote at the tiny table in the kitchen; I got a shocking amount done. My latest deadline was just around the corner of the weekend. I’d envisioned that this, finally, would be the place I turned in my book.
Then I got a call from my friend in Seattle, where I was headed next. Her partner had badly injured his leg, and would need to stay in the first-floor bedroom that would have been mine. She would be busy caring for him.
She hated to say it, but she couldn’t host.
I’d planned to go to Seattle for ten days. I could stay with other friends, but just for the days I was actually teaching. After I changed my flight, I sent the Airbnb host a message asking if I could extend.
Almost immediately, he called me. It was a strange conversation. He spoke rapidly, his speech pressurized, as he rambled about how the complex was one of the original spots to house railroad workers. How the place was full of “prostitutes and drugs” in the ‘70s when he first lived in my apartment. “For fifty bucks a month!” he crowed. “Can you believe it? But it was a real shithouse then.”
He kept cutting me off. He lived in North Carolina now, he said. His neighbors helped him look after the place. He was Native American, he said.
That last detail, he told me at least four times. I wasn’t sure why. But I agreed to Paypal him instead of going through Airbnb for the extension, to save on fees.
That night, the thing leaned over me in my sleep, despite the high vibration music playing at the door, despite the boundaries spoken and the candles burned.
“Get away from me!!” I yelled, grabbing at the light switch, a wild fear leaping in my chest. “You may not enter my space!” In the middle of the night, I saged the house, refreshed the music, asked Archangel Michael for protection, and spoke boundaries—including casting out of malevolent entities—as Katherine had told me to.
The tools I’d been taught felt wobbly—as though the problem was not them but me.
The one thing I hadn’t done? Avoid drinking.
In the morning when I woke there was a distinct smell to the apartment. Something fetid. I sniffed my way around the bedroom, around the living room. It was something in the space between the kitchen and the bathroom, but the trash cans were empty, the cupboards bare. I smelled the walls themselves, wondering if a dead animal had gotten inside and died somehow, though this seemed dubious with adobe walls.
“Is it possible for ghosts to SMELL?” I texted Katherine. I’d already told her about the thing leaning over me. “There is a bad smell I can’t find a source for in one corner of the house and I wondered if this was part of the haunting?”
“Yes, they totally do make themselves known that way. Can you describe the kind of smell?”
“It wafts of something rotten. But I can’t find it coming from the sink or fridge or toaster or dead animal in the cupboard or anything.”
“Remind me how you set the space up?” Katherine said. “I know I told you to be conscious of setting your area, but can you tell me what you did exactly? What are your options for leaving there?”
I repeated back what I had done. Then I told her about changing my flight and extending my stay. “I do have another space rented for the class I’m teaching this weekend,” I added. It was about a mile away, in Barrio Viejo. “I can sleep there the next two nights if useful.”
Katherine advised me to stay in the Barrio, and asked permission to consult a colleague. “Send me a non-smiling photo of yourself as well as the address?” she asked.
A few hours later, she texted again. “Okay, you’ve been given a respite energetically, through the weekend, up until Tuesday to get through your deadline, but then you are advised to get out of the space and back away. Fully. The energies have been put into a sleep state to make room for you to finish what you need to, but it’s important that you withdraw from there.”
That night, I moved with a small bag of belongings over to the other AirBnB. My writing students weren’t staying in the space—some lived in town, and some had their own accommodations—and after I waved them all out the front door I climbed into the fluffy white king bed in a side room and fell asleep, grateful for the reprieve.
On the second night of our class, I was not so lucky. I couldn’t stop thinking about the other Airbnb. I filled the giant historic clawfoot bathtub, dropped a rose-petal-salt bathbomb, and climbed inside, trying to figure out if there was a way to watch The Dead Files—a paranormal show featuring a medium and a homicide detective—without paying for an expensive Hulu package.
The best I found were extremely short YouTube clips. I watched these slivers of many episodes as I soaked, desperate for information about what to do with a haunting. What was this? Was I making it all up?
How bad can something like this possibly be? I texted two friends.
The metaphysical shop owner, at whose house I usually watched The Dead Files, replied: It depends how much time you spend in the space. But. It can get really really bad.
Even as I held my phone above the water, I could feel a strange sensation—how obsessively I thought about the rowhouse.
It was like it was reaching for me.
On the day I went back, things happened fast. I was still planning to stay for three more days, but the second I walked in the smell had become a wall, and my bodily revulsion was total. I could not be in there for one minute. I grabbed what I needed and ran out, driving to a coffeeshop to call the landlord, to tell him about the smell, to ask if he could have someone check it out.
Things got slippery. He told me he sent a neighbor to check out the stink; a few minutes later, he called to say the neighbor didn’t smell anything.
How could that possibly be true? I asked.
Nothing was there, the landlord said.
I’m Native American, he said, I’m Native American, he said again and again. Why did he keep saying it??
He didn’t want to refund me. And of course, Airbnb wasn’t involved in this part of the stay. He offered me another property of his, and my stomach went queasy. Something in me said: absolutely not.
“He’s lying,” Katherine said. “He knows precisely what’s there. I bet this isn’t the first time this happened.”
He was, after all, the one who placed the painting across from the bed. The portal of the murky purple door.
“You have to get out,” she said. “You have to stay somewhere else.”
My book. It was so, so incredibly due. I couldn’t blow the deadline again. But I also couldn’t stay there. I had spent the extra money extending, and it wasn’t money I could afford to waste. Frustration bloomed in my chest; then the edge of despair.
Suddenly I remembered: This was what it wanted from me.
I was supposed to meet friends for a campfire in a backyard in Midtown. Instead, I packed the car, tying a shirt around my face to limit The Smell. I moved as fast as possible; I ran.
When I bumped into the neighbor in the midst of my bin-hauling, I mentioned The Smell. He had no idea what I was talking about. He hadn’t heard from the landlord that day at all.
Katherine warned me that a being like this thrived off being thought about, talked about. “You must not tell the story,” she said. Tell a few people something short tonight and then don’t mention it again.2 You must cut it off entirely.
Picture the drive north that night as a long threshold. I didn’t know where I was going, which hotel I would check into. I would think of one, and then, approaching it, I would know I hadn’t driven far enough yet, that I needed to be further to slip out of its reach. I stopped at a gas station, and a ragged man immediately began to cross the parking lot toward me; I left without filling up.
“When your light brightens,” Katherine had said, “the dark will be attracted to you.”
I drove north, north, north, and I still could feel it reaching for me.
Finally I crossed into the town of Oro Valley. If you had asked me where I would like to finish my book, I never would have said the Holiday Inn in Oro Valley, but that is where I settled that night, fleeing the ghost, inside a Standard King with bright white walls, my sense of the being internally finally quiet. The building seemed new, without residual energy. I took a long, deep breath.
Never had I felt so relieved to be in a generic strip mall hotel.
I set up my desk and got to work.
On one side of the threshold sat a woman who was still questioning her own spiritual read on a situation. Who hesitated to accept what was happening, at every step. On the other side of a threshold was a woman to whom something had happened that she could not deny. Who could feel whether—and how intensely—an energy lapped at the back of her skull. Who made decisions around it.3
I would have to learn further skills, I knew, to keep myself safe. After all: I did not plan to dim my light.
Would I have been able to stay in the rowhouse without incident if I hadn’t been meditating and praying so deeply all fall? Maybe. Or maybe the being would still have found ways to kick me around, invading my sleep, stealing my concentration, bombing me with a smell. A spirit can have a good time doing this. Maybe my car would have been broken into. A taunting series of mishaps, to see if the despair could take me.
We only know what is happening once we know.
For two days and two nights, I stayed up writing. I clicked “send” with tears in my eyes. Then I collapsed into bed.
Back then, the double initiation was lost on me. On November 9 I ran from my first spirit; on November 11 I turned in my book.
One year later, on November 10, Lightning Flowers came out.
Back then, I thought only the book was important. Now I understand: the two events were always going to be connected. It was never going to be possible for me to write and publish that book—to become my most potent self as a writer—without beginning to come into my full self (who I could not even begin to imagine then). Without waking up to this whole other plane.
Because who I am is one who stares into the eyes of spirits.
One more thing:
For a year afterward, that mint green adobe rowhouse (with its hot pink bougainvillea) stalked me wherever Airbnb bought ad space.
My feed never advertised any other house. Always that one, appearing on Facebook or on the side of a website when I least expected it, sending a shudder through me. I would flag the house as irrelevant, as offensive, as repetitive. I would cleanse myself energetically after I saw it. I refused to feed it by telling the story.
Always it came back. Until finally, on some day I did not notice, the thing in that house let go of me.
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In this newsletter, I am always writing from the uneasy place of being a new initiate—still learning things myself—yet having to explain concepts to readers who may be entirely unfamiliar. Though I’m a dedicated researcher (and am working through a stack of books for this project), the spiritual realm doesn’t always have great resources easily available. (That’s part of why I’m writing!) If you are an experienced practitioner who understands these ideas differently, you’re welcome to add your wisdom in the comments. This is my first stab at it. :)
Not to ruin the final line of the essay, but: Because this being has been disconnected from me some number of years, it is now safe to tell this story. I have additionally done some energy work to hopefully preclude anything unexpected from coming through this writing. I could not, however, include pictures of the actual space (and especially not of the painting opposite the bed), as these snapshots still contain an untenable energy. The need for caution in writing and speaking about energies/ entities is a whole separate topic!
Disclaimer: If you are experiencing the symptoms of carrying a malevolent entity/energy, or staying in a location you suspect is haunted, seek spiritual help immediately! Notice the essential role Katherine plays in this story in ushering me to safety. Even though any of us can end up with an entity attachment or be influenced by the energetic landscape around us, not everyone is resourced to survive what I’ve survived. I do not recommend continuing to stay in a house you suspect is compromised, nor handling alone more than you are trained to handle. The spirit world is no joke and the consequences can be dire.
*shudder* I have never felt this here in a malevolent way, but I know other people who have. Well, now we know what the OV is good for! Cheers to the Holiday Inn and to you for this super creepy telling.
What an incredibly well written and insightful cautionary tale about the potential hazards that await our collective awakening, as we open our consciousness into other realms. It does leave me a bit nervous as I oscillate between feelings of bravado and ignorant overwhelm as I contend with the deeper stirrings beckoning me out of the status quo, myself.
I'm also curious about the distinction between fleeing and fighting in such instances.
Do you think someone with more experience (and skill) who encountered a malevolent force such as this, might have chosen to transform or dissolve this entity; rather than back away?
Also, if you'd be willing to share any more granular detail of practices that have aided you here and elsewhere on your journey-- it would be warmly welcomed. So glad I'm following you, and thank you for your courageous transparency and vulnerability.