A New Ghost in the House

I am spirit-sensitive but that doesn’t mean I see them in detail. I usually feel a chill, or see a wavering in the air, like the heat over a fire. Sometimes there will be the impression of a silhouette that gives me some guesses at details.

Recently, I had a very different experience.

My wife and I were talking and suddenly I felt a being sitting overtop of me. I did not disappear from the encounter. I did not feel pushed aside. I was not being ridden.

She considered it a greeting, an introduction. And she was so jazzed to be there, her energy was visceral in my body and I was flooded with sensory impressions. I rattled them off to my wife.

A woman was so excited to finally make it to our party. She likely meant our annual Dumb Supper. She had a drink in her hand, like a champagne glass. She punctuated her words with her shoulders. Her energy was very animated. She had short, curly hair and was wearing a fancy dress. She is very poised… in her dress. She was not just a wayward spirit. She was here for one of us.

Her dress was very late 20s/early 30s but her makeup and hair were still mid-20s. After checking my genealogy and my wife’s genealogy, we know who our new visitor is. One of her grandmother’s sisters, one of her great-aunts. She was a secretary in the 20s in Chicago, and there are family stories about them working all day, partying all night, and then using speed to go work again all day.

We’re pretty sure we just met her, and, let me tell you, she is a pip.

[All photos are stock photos from on-line, representative of the time period she would have been living it up through.]

Communicating Through Music

I have spoken before about how my connection to spirit world is more auditory than visual. I experience temperature fluctuations and the hairs lifting off my neck like others. But I don’t hear voices or messages as much as I hear song lyrics or music.

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Blame it on my 80s upbringing, but usually spirit communicates with me through…tv show jingles. That’s right. I swear. The first one I noticed over and over was the Three’s Company theme song. Just the same two lines repeated, over and over:

            Come and knock on my door,

            We’ll be waiting for you…

This usually means a spirit is trying to get my attention.

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A newer one that started manifesting for me a few years ago happens less often and, in my experiences, is a spirit trying to warn me about something. It’s usually about, or for another person. If I get a flash or glimpse of who it might be associated with, I have been known to reach out to them. It’s two lines from the song “Outside” by Staind:

            I’m on the outside, I’m looking in…

            I can see through you, see to the real you…

I normally don’t lead with, “Spirit sent me to check on you,” but I will check in and see if they’re all right. I have never regretted reaching out when I do. So, if I hear that song, I listen to it.

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This year, a newer jingle has been playing this month. It’s the Sanford and Sons theme song. It’s pretty insistent. My wife says I have been humming it for days now. I don’t know what this music means yet.

I don’t know it’s message for me, but I’m listening.

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Always at this time of year, when the garden starts to bed and the winds whip up and the faded garbage blows about the neighborhood… Always, when the air chills and the green things decay and frost… The spirits walk more thickly. Trick is, they are always there, somewhere beyond here, but overlaying us still.

This is the time of year the in-betweens thin.

 

Spirit Talking

While I am sensitive to spirit world year-round, at this time of year, every year, it’s like the phone keeps ringing. Often, it’s so persistent I stop noticing. I have to, in order to get any work done. I am not a psychic. I cannot call in specific spirits. I’m a sensitive. I am useful in a seance. I can open doors. I just don’t know what, if anything, will come through.

I can’t call your Uncle. But he might visit in my dreams. That’s how I usually see them, when I am most open and my brain isn’t trying to do real-world things.

But at the thinning time? I don’t always get that option.

There are always people I am hoping to see or speak to, people I am hoping will show up. But recently, a friend visited me for the first time. We were friends for years. Not terribly close but good friends and confidants.

And I know why he came to me.

I have been feeling low, battling my trauma depression and PTSD as I near another burniversary. And then I was distracted by a song from the 90s I haven’t heard in a long time. It reminded me immediately of my time in college. I hadn’t heard it since Fredonia but it was playing clear as a bell.

            “…when I come around…”

It stuck with me in the way an earworm doesn’t. And then I felt the cool whoosh of a door opening and I heard:

            “Knock knock.”

And as I frowned:

            “I have a joke for you.”

He was king of jokes. In five years, I never heard the same joke twice. And I never did remember a joke long enough to share it with him.

I felt him in my kitchen as clearly as if I were sitting in his office pretending I had no clue who kept filling the candy bowl that was usually empty on his desk. (It was my friend Ann and I.) He seemed to want to cheer me up.

And then he was gone. So, I played Chapin’s song “Taxi” for him, like we used to listen to together. And when I see him again, I know exactly what I’ll say:

            After all this time, I finally have a joke for you.

Got Schmeelk?

I am looking for some help in solving another family mystery involving my 3x great-grandmother.

Her name was Katherine Maria Schmeelk, though the spelling could be Katherine or Catherine and the note on the back of the photo says Marta instead of Maria. She was born around 1834 and died in 1901. Katherine married my 3x great-grandfather Adam Arth, an immigrant from Hesse-Darmstadt, Germany. Within his lifetime the name Arth became Art. 

In with the photo were two obituaries for Schmeelks that must be relatives of hers. One was from the N.Y. Times in 1935 for a Herman Marcus Schmeelk from Hanover, Germany, who had settled in Rockaway Beach, NY and was referred to as a "pioneer developer of oyster and clam beds." At the time of his death only two of his children survived, son Garrett and daughter Kathryn. 

Sounds like Kathryn is our person, right? But no. The second obituary was for Kathryn G. Schmeelk, daughter of Herman, who never married and never left Rockaway Beach, NY. As Katherine/Kathryn/Catherine was a VERY popular name for German women at the time, it is my best guess that Katherine and Kathryn were cousins. 

Except that Herman would have been born in 1850, about 15 years after my 3x great-grandma Katherine. So they could have been siblings? Cousins?

Ancestry has not been much help. They keep trying to push her father as either Blume or Seibel, both of whom did have daughters named Catherine of a similar age and both hailed from Germany, but none of the records for Katherine and Adam that we have line up with their families.

I am left with assuming that my Katherine is related to the Rockaway Beach Schmeelks, and according to Herman's obituary, his parents John and Catherine (Piper) Schmeelk brought him over as an infant from Hanover, Germany. I am starting a search both assuming and hoping this is the right family and maybe I can find her if I trace a lineage down from John.

It is always possible that Schmeelk was her married name before she wed Adam Arth, but there is no evidence to support that theory. And then it would be strange, for the time, for her to keep tabs of her former extended family. But I am keeping my options open.

I can't find any definitive records on her except for this notation on the back of her photo. But I'm trusting the family notes until I learn I can't and I'm writing this post in the hope that maybe someone else is looking for her family, too.

If anyone has any tips or knows of any specific German immigrant sources to search, I would appreciate any and all breadcrumbs.