Autobiography

When I was a very young child, my paternal grandmother Laura Davis White (who was a staunch Baptist and attended church regularly) took me aside one weekend and forced me to learn John 3:16. She said it was the single most important verse in the entire Bible, and that no granddaughter of hers would go through life not knowing it.

After she chased me around her home in Carrollton, Texas, for hours (literally) repeating it and forcing me to say it aloud back to her until I could do it without mistakes, she finally left me alone! "For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in Him shall have everlasting life." Whew! Finally, I got it.

After that, I escaped to the backyard to play. As I walked around pondering, questions began to surface. Was there really a God AND a Devil? And if I did not believe wholeheartedly in Jesus as my personal savior, would the Devil come to get me?

I stepped back into the kitchen with those questions. "Yes!"she assured me. Satan most certainly would come to tempt me, claim me for his own, and prevent me from salvation, and I would burn forever down below the earth's (somewhere?) surface! I gulped literally. That was a lot of scary information for a young girl to assimilate. I asked her how could I prevent him from coming to tempt me. She told me that anytime I felt strange or odd or scared as if "something" was close to me that wasn't "good", it might be the Devil, and I should say, "Get away from me Satan!" lol! So for good measure, I walked back out in the back yard and said out loud stomping my little sneakered feet. "Get away from me you Devil! Go back down to hell where you belong!" I was always dramatic even then I suppose.

My mother's family was also Christian, but a LOT more laid back about things like this. They knew I was way too young to need to be concerned with things like this and so they all loved me, spoiled me, and protected me from things that they knew I was way too young to understand.

My great-grandmother Mary Jarosh Blasingame in fact was a Bohemian immigrant. They always said Bohemian instead of Czech because they insisted there was a distinction between the two. This woman was a midwife and also read tea leaves for people. She knew all about herbs and wild greens and so the outdoors was a literal feast with which to fill her salad bowl as well as things to take for healing.

She belonged to The Rosicrucian Order and took their courses by mail, and no she did not regularly attend church even back in the old days. She was very psychic, as was my grandmother Stella Blasingame Livesay, and my mother Mariann Livesay White as well.

My grandmother always knew when her children were ill even in the days when there was no telephone installed in the farmhouse. Once as a child, she dreamt where her little gold ring had been lost on exactly which row and stalk in the garden where she'd been hoeing the day before.

My mother was not only psychic about her loved ones, both living and deceased, she also had the ability to communicate with animals. She knew when they were sick and also if they were lost, which direction to begin to walk to find them!

I have inherited the farm where my mother and my grandmother both grew up. The house is haunted with my family members and who knows who else from before them who used to live in the area before 1903 when they moved there. Things just "go on" there occasionally for which there is no explanation. Even when I was small, my grandmother, aunt, and cousin would say that at times they could all hear voices talking in the living room area or just right outside the living room window. But whenever they would go to look, of course no one was there!

My 9 year old cousin Billy, accidentally (apparently) hung himself with a rope as he played "cowboys and Indians" one afternoon by himself when I was only 3 months old. The rope had been used to tie back some limbs that had been scraping against the roof on that side of the house. He untied it and then retied it around his waist to jump from the tree to "pretend" that he was a bad guy being lynched. Ever since that time, his dog would run by "nothing" jumping up and down and playing with somebody who was not there all the way from the road to the back of the house where my cousin used to put his bicycle up inside the old storm cellar. I once saw this with my own eyes when I was about 11 years old which stunned me even though I knew all about the stories concerning this phenomenon.

My mother was always doing or saying something that would come true. I would just stare at her and blink when I was very young, not really understanding what was happening -- not WANTING to understand what was occurring -- because when I was young, I, of course, just did not want to be "different" in any way -- nor did I want my mom to be!

Alas, even the neighborhood children began to notice and even say that our house in Garland was haunted as well. My dad didn't help matters much when he declared after the kids in the neighborhood claimed to hear noises coming out of the house while we were on vacation one year that his granddad haunted that house even though he had never lived there!

It was something that just "was" though, and very soon I learned that not only was my mother different, but so was I. Not only, was I beginning to experience paranormal phenomena as far as spirits were concerned, but then I also did see the UFO when I was 14 (across the road from the same property). Officially, now -- not only was I different, but I was "hooked".

I began to go to our local library every week, especially during the summer, reading every paranormal book on the shelves. We were lucky that back in the mid-1970's thing were very progressive, and even OUR library had about 5 shelves full of every kind of "occult" subject from cryptids, to ESP, to "ghosts" to UFO's. I devoured every one of them and then after that I began ordering books through the mail.

I also had a subscription to Fate Magazine that I used to pay for with my weekly allowance. Finally, when I graduated, I went to work, and temporarily suspended my self-education. In 1978; however, a friend suggested that I go down the local grocery store and pick up a copy of the latest Fate Magazine because some guy named Rick Moran had written an article about the Amityville Horror.

I wasn't that interested in the Amityville Horror personally because I firmly believed it was all a bunch of nonsense; however, here in Texas at the time, since there were a lot of fundamentalists, folks actually took it all very seriously! So, I went down to the store, and found that it was being taken off the shelf because the latest issue had come in. The magazine stocker found it for me in his cart and just handed me a free copy luckily!

After I read it, I was thinking, "Oh thank goodness!" Somebody had actually investigated it, and declared it for what it was -- mostly a publicity stunt which unfortunately effectively overshadowed a VERY tragic family massacre.

I remember showing it to my other friends, as well as a few family members who tended to believe in a very "black and white" world as far as good and evil go. Most of them were stunned, but a few said, "Well, yeah, but the Devil still exists even if he isn't haunting a house in Amityville, New York!" lol!

I have to say that Rick believed in an evil force on a very high up spiritual level due to his "Jesuit education" as he used to say. It was just that he believed that the truly demonic forces rarely if EVER bother with mere human beings on a personal level. If they ever become involved in human affairs it is with a very spiritually evolved person whether it be a Priest, Rabbi, or any other true religion in order to torment one of them even if it is through another innocent person.

The article did stick with me for a long time even as changed jobs, got married (twice), had a child, and all of those other life events. Now fast forward to 2005 when Rick Moran put an a free ad into various paranormal discussion boards asking for a "few good men and women" to become paranormal investigators for his group ASUP that he was starting back up from New York to Texas where he and his wife Joi had moved to several years before.

I pondered for days whether to answer. I knew that I had always wanted to become a real paranormal investigator, not just read about it (I had even dreamed at one time of becoming a parapsychologist by attending UCLA at Berkley at one time). I had always wanted to investigate to find out -- not if it was real -- but if it was really happening at a particular location, and if so -- why? I just knew I wanted to experience it more than just in a personal way through my family connections and our familial property, but I suppose you could say that I was a little bit afraid as to whether I could really "cut it".

Finally, I decided to take the plunge, and THEN and only then did Rick wrote to the few of us who had responded at first, telling us exactly who HE was. I was astounded. I can tell you that! I remember just sitting back in my office chair with my mouth open.

He taught me so much during the past four years, and I did relate to him some of the experiences I had had earlier in my life. I think that he more or less accepted it though he didn't say very much; however, in late 2007, he and Joi decided to rent the farm house from me after my dad had passed away.

I said nothing about the property per se. I wanted to see if they experienced anything at all after they had moved in as I knew that Rick was pretty much the authority of paranormal phenomena, and -- well -- a picture is worth a thousand words after all.

After about two months, Rick called me on the phone one days and said, "Hey! I guess you know your farm is HAUNTED!" lol! I just about fell out of my chair laughing! What vindication! I replied, "Yes, I knew it. I was just waiting to see what YOU experienced!"

He eventually likened it to a "Mini Skinwalker Ranch" and began to feel that there was some reason that actually attracted odd occurrences. This is something I cannot really confirm although I know the land has iron rocks, sulfur, sea water, and even uranium pockets really deep in the soil -- but no quartz. But for whatever reasons, I still cannot help but think that in the vast scheme of things, Rick Moran was supposed to live on my little 50 acre plot of land to declare once and for all that just as we always suspected, it is really haunted!

I have found that my paternal grandmother's advice about Satan does still apply sometimes regardless of what you may call negative entities. During some of our investigations, we have found that if the home owner is very afraid of whatever is happening in their home, it tends to get worse and worse. If they take "the bull by the horns" so-to-speak and talk aloud to their ghost and say word to the effect of "Leave me alone!" it is a lot more effective as far as the haunting goes to at least fight back and make some of the activity subside -- at least temporarily.

So perhaps, in her own way, she really did help to educate me early on in my life regardless as we deal with all sorts of spirits who haunt certain locations and like to throw their weight around!