There are Moments in Life When You Rethink Yours - My Solution is Travel More

How many times have you read or heard the statement “Live Life to the Fullest?” How many times have you vowed to do this and then forgotten about it after a few days? It’s like the consciousness raising services, EST in the 80s and the mindfulness of today. All of it is helpful to remind you of your importance and power but most of us sink back into our daily life and forget about our Aha moments.

This month I had a wake-up call. Three deaths in eight days. 

First my neighbor who had been sick for years but hung on past the point where we thought he was in immediate danger. 

Then my friend’s husband who had turned his life around multiple times ended up on a ventilator after a heart attack, and died the day before his daughter’s wedding. Finally two boys from a University of Maryland fraternity where my daughter goes to college who hydroplaned on a rainswept road in Ohio on the way back from a football game. 

As a girl who lost her mother at 13, for decades I did whatever I wanted because I always believed I would die young. So I travelled and spent and loved big and lost, knowing that no matter how little I had I could always make and find more. But as I got older and had children I began living for them, particularly when I had to raise them alone.

After I sent my youngest off to college and began to try to figure out what I was and where I had gone. I had trouble finding work, I was blue, I could not find anything that excited me except for men briefly shining, then snuffed out by me or them like a match.

After my neighbor’s funeral they had a lunch where those who knew him best got up and spoke of him. All the speakers talked about how happy he was with his job as an EMT, his family, his life.  His eldest son who is barely 30, came with his seven week old son who would never know his grandfather, spoke with candor and dignity about the man who went to every sporting event where he played and cheered above and beyond the call of parenthood. His younger son, who grew up with mine, spoke through his tears of a father who was always there for him and everyone else, how he was the go to man for moms in the neighborhood.

I went to bed for the rest of the day, and wasted more time. The memorial service for my friend’s husband was postponed.

A couple of days later my daughter called from college late at night terribly upset. One of the boys in Ohio had died instantly, another was probably paralyzed and the rest were in critical condition. She asked what she could do. I said bring food and just be there for them. We made over 100 brownies from my grandmother’s recipe which she said always made her feel better. The boys were surprised and rallied with a handful of smiles.

But the real lesson of the three deaths is that we need to live our lives to the fullest. Tell the people we love that we adore them. Get rid of those who only make us sad or angry. Find your path and stick to it.

I plan to spend the next two decades thriving on whatever path I set. How about you?

I Saw a Confederate Soldier Standing by a Grave

We meet on a dark corner in front of a candy store on Roanoke Island along the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Our spirit guide is Diane. She wears a long black dress, blonde hair hanging Barbie style below her shoulders. About a dozen of us have gathered, a handful of families with older kids, a posse of raucous twenty somethings, and a young couple who hold hands the entire time..

Roanoke Island has a long history of unsolved mysteries. Most famous for its “lost colony” of over 100 English settlers who vanished in the 1580s three years after Sir Walter Raleigh founded it. Raleigh had left to go obtain supplies and it took him several years to return. When Raleigh finally did go back the colony that he had left with 100 settlers had vanished without a trace. The “lost colony” remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of the colonial period.

Lost souls roam the island, Diane tells us by way of background. Many were victims of shipwrecks near its coast. Cape Hatteras forms a perfect storm close to the island where cold waters flo down the coast from the north collide with the warm Gulf Stream current coursing up from the tropics triggering sudden, violent storms. Boats often ran aground on the 20 miles of sandbars surrounding the island.

Diane tells us we must take at least three of every picture and snap as fast as we can because you never know when or where the ghosts will come. They are said to leave behind their energy, which is almost thermodynamic and allows them to show up in photos.

We are instructed to look for four different kinds of paranormal activity including:

Orbs – Tiny globes of light or streaks that move or look like skips. These are humans or animals that have died and are moving from one place to another.  

Ghosts – Usually in human form and make contact with humans they may speak, make noises, touch you, even emit a perfume odor. Experts say that many retain who they once were and can feel emotions.

Poltergeists – One of the rarest forms of haunting, a poltergeist can be constantly aggrieved or give off a strong smell such as rotten eggs. They can turn lights on and off, slam doors and even set fires.

Apparitions – You know something is there but are not sure what it is. On one tour, a Casper like creature followed the tour group around and they felt it’s presence but could not define it.

She takes us through darkened streets, past houses where no one lives except that there are windows ablaze with white light, even admits there is one she is afraid to go inside of. My photos show brilliant light even where windows were dark and a bonfire of guests who were not there replete with bright lines, squiggles, and other signs of paranormal activity.

Diane is so matter of fact about the spirits around us that one man starts giggling like a school girl, and takes a seat on a bench with a couple of friends letting us walk on ahead. Five minutes later he and I are standing in front of two graves in the local cemetery and I spy a Confederate soldier lounging between the two of them. He is wearing a brown fedora and what looks like street clothes which was common during the war after the south ran out of uniforms My photos are just red or white light and the ghost is not visible. Yet I saw him clearly through my camera lens and he is in the photos of the man standing next to me. What surprised me most is his saunter, the way he stood almost mocking me, yet there was energy between us.

Touched by a Ghost in Charleston

Rhett Butler came from Charleston pops into my head as I walk down the well-lit street filled with the clean cut, neatly dressed, vibrant people on a comfortable early May night. The filthy rich southern scoundrel made his fortune profiteering off of goods and services during the Civil War, The mansions that Rhett could have lived in are carefully preserved in a city that welcomes over four million tourists annually.

In the Spring of 1670, 150 English colonists, indentured servants and slaves sailed into the Charleston harbor and decided to build a miniature of London which they called Charles Towne. Their vision was an aristocratic, English countryside inhabited by the landed gentry. The settlers were plagued by death and disease in the early years and many of them died leaving their ghosts adrift in the city

Our tour meets in front of a dingy bar and is small, about a half dozen people.  Our tour guide is young, male, a bit on the grungy side, a poet and a history teacher. He talks and talks and talks until my head is spinning with stories. Lost Revolutionary and Civil War soldiers, a woman left by her man who still wanders the streets, are just a couple of the stories he tells. Many buildings in Charleston are haunted dating back a couple of centuries. We begin walking to find them.

Charleston City Hall, located at 80 Broad Street, is said to be haunted by General P.G.T. Beauregard, a native of Louisiana and a general in the Confederate army charged with the city's defense during the attacks on Fort Sumter. Multiple guides, employees, and council men and women have reported seeing the general's ghost overlooking the city council chambers from a second-floor balcony. Pirates were imprisoned in a Guard House of the Provost Dungeon and died down there and are said to also haunt the city.

He takes us through a corridor where many people have reported being touched, even manhandled by ghosts but we see no signs of paranormal activity. He begins to sound like a low drone.

We stop in front of a tombstone in the Unitarian Church cemetery and our guide talks about who lies beneath so I duck behind them onto a bench to rest my sore tourist feet. At first, I think that whatever is touching my arms and shoulders are insects and I swat them away but they the have the persistence of mosquitos looking to suck out every last drop of blood. When I duck out of the tour a few minutes later I expect to be covered with but there is nothing. A couple of days later I realize my phantom mosquitos were likely a ghost touching me.

Searching for Ghosts and Vampires in the French Quarter

July in New Orleans is beyond hot, like walking through a bowl of soup that never cools down. My two teenaged children and I join a ghost tour in the French Quarter in front of another dingy bar. Also known as the Vieux Carré, The oldest neighborhood in the city of New Orleans. It was founded in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville,, it is the oldest and most-visited neighborhood. Past the wild partiers on Bourbon Street, we see wrought-iron balconies on Spanish-inspired buildings, inhale the spicy significance of Creole cooking mixed with sweat and the lingering odor of stale beer.

The story that stays with me is that of the LaLaurie Mansion, or 1140 Royal Street which is rumored to be cursed and the centerpiece of a season on American Horror Story.  The back story of the haunted house is fascinating. The matriarch was a woman named Delphine who had several husbands, one who mysteriously died on a trip to Spain. Losing her third husband drove Delphine mad. Rumors spread that she was harming her slaves, and an incident in 1833 when a young slave within the household, Leia, fell to her death in the courtyard turned all eyes on Marie Delphine Macarty LaLaurie.

On the morning of April 10, 1834, a fire broke out at the luxurious house owned by Delphine LaLaurie. The fire not only destroyed part of the house, it also brought to light seven slaves who were starved, tortured and chained in the upper part of the building. Madame LaLaurie managed to escape the fray, but was reviled as a "monster," a "demon in the shape of a woman" and "fury itself escaped from hell." Many of the stories that are told about the LaLaurie Mansion involve slaves found after the fire and had medical experiments conducted on them. One slave was said to have had a hole drilled into his head, with a wooden spoon sticking out--an attempt to stir its brains. Another was found with its skin peeled back so sinew, bone and muscle was visible.

The three of us stand in front of the house, flesh crawling from the stories of torture, as we imagine the darkness within the house that caused its haunting. The tour continues and about halfway through the heat overtakes us and we head back to the airconditioned hotel room, and their addiction to the TV show Friends.