X-Files FBI Special Agent Fox William Mulder told us, “I want to believe so badly, in a truth beyond our own, hidden and obscured from all but the most sensitive eyes.” I too, like Mulder, want to believe. I have always wanted to believe. Growing up Catholic, we were not just Catholic, we were Catholic. We attended church every Sunday, walked the Stations of the Cross, lit and knelt in front of candles in our home, praying that the saints would act as our intermediaries to God. I grew up with stories of angels and saints, saints like Our Lady of Lourdes, who was blessed as a child with the ability to see the celestial being of the Virgin Mary bathed in stars and light. The young girl, Bernadette Soubirous, would go on to join the Sisters of Charity, and years later when she was asked about her vision, she said modestly, “The Virgin used me as a broom to remove the dust. When the work is done, the broom is put behind the door again.”
At one point I believed that in order to become elevated to the point that Mulder spoke of, to have the “sensitive eyes” that could observe truths hidden from all others, I needed to become like Soubirous and dedicate my life to prayer and meditation. My mother was not pleased with my desire to become a nun, so that was quickly stopped, just like her own father had stopped her from becoming a nun many years before. Perhaps my fascination with spirituality came from my mother, her stories about espiritismo (spiritism) in Puerto Rico from her upbringing in the 1940s, and rumors that my grandmother was the town healer.
Still, my fascination with the possibility of something else, of a curtain we could peek behind, continued. Above my childhood bed hung that famous print of the Guardian Angel: A little girl has her arm around a little boy, presumably her brother. Her face is turned away from us as she whispers something to him. His face is one of fear, consternation. They are barefoot on a worn wooden bridge. Just behind them is a worrisome scene of dead, weeping flowers, and of a gap in the bridge that we can only assume would have led to the children’s deaths if they had slipped and fallen through to the vicious waves below. But these little children have passed that danger, and onward they go. We can assume the little girl is telling the boy to be brave, that they are almost there. And then in this image we see the Guardian Angel, a woman in luminous, billowing robes, who hovers just above them. They cannot see her, but she is there, and a single bright star is settled just above her head; this star seems to be the source of all light that this angel draws power from. The angel’s hands rest above those children’s heads, and we can only guess that she is sharing her light of protection with them, guiding them, keeping them safe from harm. Before the children, we see the bridge is complete, and blooming flowers surround it. We can only hope the most worrisome part of their journey, their final battle through the dark and dangerous forest, is over, and that little sister will continue to comfort little brother until they reach their destination safely.
I believed then, when I was a little girl, that there were dangers in the world—dark and terrible forests, looming dangers that lay ahead. Yet I also fiercely believed then that there were angels who could guide us, who could give us comfort in our times of need. And in believing that, I believed as a little girl that there was something magical beyond us.
I grew from a child into a teenager, and while I shed my beliefs in Santa Claus and fairies, I took up a Ouija board, because “What if?” What if I could call upon a heavenly being, or ask questions of someone on the other side? Nothing happened. So, in middle school, I stood in the girls’ bathroom right outside of the gymnasium, turned off the light, and said: “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary.” The light flicked on, and a group of girls walked in and shouted “Boo!” and then laughed at me. I thought summoning Bloody Mary in the school would be safer than, say, raising her in our house. How was I supposed to explain to my mother that a ghost in a tattered, blood-covered wedding dress was trying to kill me? Bloody Mary never showed.
In my neighbor’s house, I found myself lying on the basement floor. My neighbor, a girl a year younger than me, and her three little sisters placed their index and middle fingers beneath my thighs, back, and neck, and chanted, “Light as a feather, stiff as a board. Light as a feather, stiff as a board.” I felt their fingers push upward, but still I did not take flight. They giggled. I sighed.
Over the years, there came other self-appointed challenges, all part of my effort to peek into the other side. One time I decided to sneak into Rosehill Cemetery at night, on Halloween. Rosehill Cemetery is Chicago’s largest city cemetery, with over 350 acres cradling the final remains of more than 100,000 people. Rosehill is the final resting place of Civil War soldiers, people who died in the Great Chicago Fire, politicians, athletes, former mayors, victims of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and more. If there were a place where I could find something worth exploring, a portal to the other side, it would be here. However, once I approached the broken metal fence to sneak in, I stopped myself. I felt an overpowering embarrassment because the dead, and the other side, should not be disturbed like this.
I have visited the Edinburgh Vaults, the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic, the Tower of London in England, Castillo San Felipe del Morro in Puerto Rico, and Madame LaLaurie’s Mansion in New Orleans; gone underground in Seattle to explore networks of tunnels; and traveled to countless other purported and reported places of mystery, sorrow, and madness said to harbor a ripple in the fabric of reality, but I have come away with nothing.
Yes, I have experienced events that I can claim as strange, but those things or feelings can be brushed away as the effects of anxiety or sleeplessness: a tingling sensation in my forearms in a dark hall in the Edinburgh Vaults; a star, or what appeared to be a star, above Badlands National Park in South Dakota one night, lazily following a linear and then a jagged motion; and even one day walking into my church and seeing a woman in a traditional black nun’s habit seated front and center, but once I stood at the lectern and faced the congregation, she was gone. In all of those instances, what I felt and what I saw cannot be validated as proof of the other side.
I have stood as a participant in séances, watched as tarot cards were shuffled and people’s lives spread and read for them. I have spent hours and hours in the dark, holding tape recorders in the air, walking through silent halls and houses calling out, “Is anyone there?” I have taken pictures at locations where people have gone missing or have been maimed and murdered. The most fascinating picture is one I took at the Chicago River at the site of the SS Eastland disaster—America’s Titanic—where in 1915 a passenger ship capsized and 844 were killed. It was late at night, past midnight surely, and a shape seems to rest right beneath the water’s surface, bright white and its human form directed toward me. Still, I brushed it off as just the reflection of the thousands of lights in our skyscrapers above.
I know the language of paranormal investigation, a field often mocked and ridiculed in the mainstream for its camp, tackiness, and big personalities: electromagnetic field, an unseen energy force that is capable of driving a charge; extrasensory perception, an awareness others may not have; ley lines, patterns of invisible energy that are located at places deemed sacred by some; mediums, individuals who claim to be able to channel spirits; and more, so much more. There is equipment dedicated to discovering what lies beyond. There is an industry of people who are devoted paranormal sleuths, but again, have any of them moved beyond the wanting to believe, to the actual knowing?
Over the years, in one way or another, I have done it. I have sat in darkened rooms, with only a candle flickering or a flashlight shaking in my hand. I have chanted ancient names and phrases. I have been splashed with blessed waters, have twirled in the smoke of sage and Palo Santo. I have received blessings from people who claim to be witches and wizards, shamans and priests. From these gatherings, my house now holds various collections of divination tools, crystals, stones, incense, graveyard dirt, and every sort of herb or oil—for success, for prosperity, for blessing, for banishing negativity, for the evil eye. I have books in my house with the names of every demon and all of the saints. I have books that claim to summon the Holy Guardian Angel if you follow a grueling, detailed, yearlong dedication that involves isolation, fasting, intense ritual, and meditation. All of this has been in an effort to somehow peek into that other place.
I have played all sorts of games in an attempt to summon, divine, and invoke, these dangerous games that children play in the dark in their rooms, and that adults participate in at abandoned castles, asylums, hospitals, and mines: Musical Chairs Alone, the Midnight Game, Hide-and-Seek Alone, the Candles Game, and more. Some of these methods and suggestions came to me from friends or friends of friends, and, of course, from long-lost, dusty, and forgotten books I have collected from occult shops across the world. Some of these games claim that you will fall into a trance and see the other place or be able to call upon otherworldly entities. I have put myself in what some religious leaders may call spiritual danger, all in an effort to connect to something greater and beyond myself. Some of these rituals have rules. Some variations of these rituals are thousands of years old. The Egyptians wrote about how to prepare the living for the journey to the world of the dead. The oracles of ancient Greece claimed to channel the voices of gods, and many individuals were allowed to witness these presentations. Nostradamus entered a focused state to record his prophecies. Ritual—all of these involved a ritual of some kind in order to see a ghost, talk to the dead, invoke the angels, or peek into futures and a plane beyond our own.
At some point in our history, these games became synonymous with spectacle and deception. The Fox sisters claimed they were mediums and could speak to the dead by deciphering a series of clicks and knocks, but they were really generating those sounds themselves. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, fiercely believed in fairies, otherworldly beings, and the abilities of mediums, but his one-time friend Harry Houdini had made it part of his life’s work to expose mediums, psychics, and astrologers as charlatans.
Other famous people who believed in the power of ritual include the wives of presidents—from President Lincoln’s wife, First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, who reportedly practiced spiritualism in the White House, to President Reagan’s wife, Nancy, who is said to have employed an astrologer at the White House—as well as numerous politicians, musicians, media stars, and athletes. Most of these activities have been dismissed as a part of those people’s eccentric and hopeful personalities. Yet I would argue that a much wider range of the human population is curious about the possibility of divination and prediction, and holds the hope that there is just something else out there in the heavens.
All Hallows’ Eve (Halloween), All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day have historically been days to remember the dead, and how we remember the dead may vary. Some believe that an actual veil lifts and the spirits of the dead come to visit us on that day. Yet I have never seen physical proof to validate such. I have never seen a miraculous beam of light that shuffles the souls down from heaven, or the disintegration of an actual wall separating the worlds of the living and the dead, allowing them to greet us once again. All of this is based on hope—the hope that the dead come and visit us, the hope that our dead loved ones can see us and celebrate our joys with us and offer us comfort in our times of need. Altars set up in homes throughout Latin America with pictures of the dead, their favorite foods, and other items that can stir a memory are meant to direct the dead back to our homes, where we are longing for their presence. We set these altars up so that they know when to return home, and where home is, in case they have forgotten.
I suppose I can only say that we don’t know what we don’t know, and what we don’t know is the breadth and possibility—and I suppose the truth—of the paranormal. Parapsychology is the field that investigates paranormal phenomena. Paranormal simply means that which cannot be explained by science. So parapsychology works to try to understand events that science cannot explain. Some events that science has been unable to explain include why we detect unintelligible signals from space, sightings of a being we have lovingly called Bigfoot, déjà vu, mysterious disappearances, those feelings of knowing that humans call intuition, multiple sightings and movements in the sky that we call unidentified flying objects, and so much more.
Again, I have participated in events and rituals that are all meant to create an effect, that are all meant to tap into something else. Yes, I have witnessed and experienced questionable things, like the sighting of that nun in the church and that chill in the Edinburgh Vaults. I have also been in places where those who are with me have claimed to have experienced something they cannot explain.
One Halloween, my husband, my best friend, and her husband decided to visit Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery, a long-abandoned cemetery cut off from the main road, tucked in the Rubio Woods in Illinois. This cemetery is often called one of the most haunted places in America.
One of the first burials at Bachelor’s Grove took place in 1838. The last was in 1965. Shortly after, the area fell into neglect, and it became a place of pilgrimage for local teens looking to step into a place between worlds, given the numerous urban legends surrounding the greater area. There were stories of a stagnant pond nearby being a preferred dumping ground of Al Capone’s; some saying a horse-drawn funeral carriage could be seen emerging from the murky water during a full moon. Then there were the mysterious blue lights appearing among the trees, a car materializing from within the forest and chasing after people only to disappear when they reached the main road. And the stories of the white farmhouse with a wraparound porch and a single lit candle in a front window—they all said whoever entered the farmhouse never returned.
Bachelor’s Grove had become a scary place in the 1980s and 1990s, when America was gripped in a religious paranoia we called the Satanic Panic, reminiscent of the Salem witch trials in a way, where anyone who did anything outside of social conventions was feared a witch, or in this case, a scary, baby-eating Satanist. Headstones at Bachelor’s Grove were soon discovered cracked and toppled over, withering corpses were found smashed and scattered across the forest floor, and blood-drained chickens and other small animals were found hanging from trees. Was it all just for effect? Done in response to the now-debunked fears of Satanists operating in America? Or were there really people who visited the cemetery who believed that these actions, no matter how violent or how much a violation of the dead, could call upon something?
When my friends and I visited one Halloween, we found only a scrubby, sad, but pretty little cemetery tucked away in a forest preserve. There was a local volunteer group onsite cleaning the headstones, tending the grass, and making sure the other visitors—there were many that day—did not litter. My two friends went for a walk in the forest while my husband and I stayed back so I could take photographs of the grave markers and walk over to the Mafia pond. My friends were gone for over an hour. We were worried, and when they finally emerged, wild-eyed and frightened, all they said was, “Let’s go.” In the car they told us how they had found themselves lost in a maze, wrapping around the same trees and stones and creek. They were lost in a sort of twilight zone where everything they passed they had just passed before, and then there were the blue orbs they claimed to have seen off in the distance. None of this I can prove, but I can prove they were both very upset on that car ride home.
I still don’t know if anything I have seen or experienced is real or can be proven by science. What I do know is that within my heart I do believe that this process of ritual and this need to believe gave me answers that no medical professional could give me. When we received news from our hospital that the baby I was carrying would not make it to term, the first person I went to see was a close friend who is a houngan, a Vodou priest. He asked me if I was prepared to know everything, the good and the bad, and I agreed. I did not tell him what the medical professionals had told me; I just needed to know what the other world—if another world existed—had to tell me. During our time, my friend laughed and grieved with me. He told me he could see my son, a beautiful baby boy wrapped in rainbow light surrounded by my ancestors. My son came with a message: he was here just to teach me lessons, and he would be with me always, but he was not made for this world. The pain was excruciating, to know that this life I was carrying could not join me here, and I think of him now as my own guardian angel.
A year later, when I was pregnant again, I so feared for the child I was carrying. Were we healthy enough to bring this child into our world? I again went to see my friend, the Vodou priest who had lived and studied in Haiti, who had danced in ceremonies, initiations, and blessings, who had tossed cowrie shells and bones in divination. I was just a few weeks pregnant, not visible, and only my husband knew. When I entered my friend’s home, this Vodou priest who surrounded himself with many of the same things that I have come to surround myself with over time—sigils, powders, potions, and incense—he looked at me, smiled brightly, held both my hands up and out, away from my body, and looked at my stomach and shouted, “He is strong!” And he gave me the biggest hug.
I think about Mulder’s words often: “I want to believe.” For some, these words are just a part of a meme from a television show they have never seen, or a television show they grew up with. For me, those words are seared into the core of what I so desperately desire, a peek through the window, into the beyond—the ability to pull back the veil, the curtain, and not only see and feel, but know that there is something else outside this realm where I plant my feet. This is not because I want to believe that there is a god, or because I seek validation of any spiritual or religious beliefs. This is all simply for the hope that when we are done here in the form in which we exist now—all skin and bone, and anxiety, worry, hope, love—that when we shed this skin, we will continue on somewhere else, bathed in a glorious light. 
Cynthia (Cina) Pelayo is the author of Loteria, Santa Muerte, The Missing, Poems of My Night, and the upcoming Children of Chicago (Agora/Polis Books). Pelayo is an International Latino Book Award–winning author and an Elgin Award nominee. She lives in Chicago with her family.
