The Compass Lady
My sincere and heartfelt thanks to my friend David, who made a karmic landing into my life in 2006 and, with all his mistral wit and wisom, pulled the name Compass Lady out of the blue. In true Snoopy and Woodstock fashion, thank you for letting me tag along after you, for putting up with my questions about all things in general and electricity in particular, and for telling me that Tesla would have loved me when I talk about PK. Thank you for making me laugh, and for encouraging me to throw some dirt on it and get back up when nobody else understood. Knowing myself, I might never have been brave enough to stand up and tell this story if you hadn’t.
I don’t know where the path will lead now, but The Compass Lady is a true story, every word. It is a story that needed to be told and I needed to tell it. More than that, I think I was supposed to tell it from Day One, if only I would. The decision was left to me.
Teresa L. Frisch, 3.25.09
August 31, 2004 was no different than any other day. I worked a shift in the Emergency Department, arriving home about seven-thirty in the evening. I had moved into my Cape Cod home on June fourth and had been renovating non-stop and working overtime ever since. I was exhausted.
Zelda, my dog, was always ecstatic when Mom came home, fussing and checking in with me as soon as she knew I was there. Nothing unusual, I checked the mail, grabbed some dinner and settled down at the computer to read for the rest of the evening. I had been reading non-stop on the internet for several years because I seemed to be “psychic” and maybe even telepathic, but I thought that was absolutely impossible. I was trying to find credible source material, but as I was doing it, it seemed like it was almost being handed to me. I was attempting to find a personal pattern and replicate these “synchronicities.”
No way. No way was telepathy going to exist, and especially not to me. That just could not be, I didn’t want it to be, but a lot of weird things had been happening that I had no explanation for, and neither did anyone else that I knew, as I’d been asking questions everywhere. I was driven. I had to know. I was chasing down links but not really learning much of anything of scientific value or significance.
I had been off the weekend before and part of my time was spent reading a book about Lakota Holy Women. They were healers and, as respected Elders, looked to for advice and knowledge. A drumming CD came with the book and I listened to it as I did chores around the house. I was wistful, realizing that I was the right age for apprenticing myself out as one of these healers but couldn’t because I wasn’t of the right culture. I really wished that I could have, if I only had the right teacher. I thought that being a nurse, I could have mixed my western medicine with theirs and might have been able to help somehow.
My computer had also been down and I wasn’t looking forward to spending time troubleshooting it that weekend. People have said they thought there was something different about me, and maybe I have some natural healing abilities. What I am is an Empath, and Introverted Intuitive Feeling Judging (INFJ) personality type with a big heart (“INFJ: The Protector”). I really needed that computer to pursue my reading at night, for my personal “school”, not for games or goofing around. I had decided to ask for help and guidance several days before and thinking, “Okay, this is about the weirdest thing I’ve ever done,” I placed one hand on the monitor and one hand on the CPU and prayed.
“Please Lord, I need this machine for work and school, not goofy or dishonorable stuff. I don’t have time to waste on the phone for hours. Please let me just ask the right question of the right person so I can fix it.”
The right person turned out to be my friend Dan H. He told me to try reloading Windows to see if the machine would just pick up whatever was missing. I was happy and somehow at peace. In my quest to learn, I had been addicted to that machine and if it wouldn’t have rebooted I wasn’t in a position financially to replace it. I was happy that I had made a “healthy” decision and knew I couldn’t could live without it. My conviction was so certain that I put off taking care of trying his suggestion until Sunday. I ignored the thing all unusual, as I had virtually lived in front of that screen for about four years.
I put in the Windows software, planning to go outside during the download but thought better of it as it might need some sort of prompting. I settled into my chair, closed my eyes and waited. Almost immediately I went into one of those weird, deep sleeps, where time sort of goes away. Every now and then I would crack open an eye and sure enough, I needed to respond to a cue in the download process. Let me say again that these naps weren’t ordinary naps; they were more like being in a trance, whatever the working version of a trance is. After the download I rebooted and the machine worked perfectly!
So arriving home after work the night of August 31, 2004, I resumed my usual reading routine, surfing the ‘Net. It was a warm summer evening and the only light on in the house was over my desk. The windows were open and I could hear the night sounds of my small town and the neighborhood. It was cool at night and most folks slept with their windows open.
At some point I began to notice a headache in the center of my forehead. I am not prone to headaches, seldom have them but this turned into a whopper. I was beyond tired. I was beat down and exhausted, working overtime and renovating the house. I didn’t know how much more I could take but, by God, I was determined to make it back to a semblance of the mother my children knew. Post divorce, I wanted my life back, and being independent and making this house my home was my way of doing it.
The headache got worse. Boring into my forehead, it became blinding. I buried my face in my hands, sobbing, my head in a vise and I knew that somehow I was done. I had hit bottom and the only thing left to do was fight. I couldn’t be a pushover, couldn’t stand by and let people run over me. I had held plenty of leadership roles in my life but I hated fighting with a passion. Fighting was against my nature. My entire marriage, the past twenty plus years of my life, had been one long fight, but for some reason tonight, with this blinding headache I came to understand that if I was going to survive alone, I was going to have to fight.
From the depths of my soul, from that pit of anguish and despair, I begged God for help. Sitting at my desk with my face in my hands and tears running through my fingers, I sent out a desperate plea for two things: teach me how to fight and please come take my headache away. At that exact moment my dog came alive upstairs where she was sleeping on my bed. It was eleven-thirty at night and I knew my neighbors were sleeping with their windows open. We were new to the neighborhood and above all I didn’t want us to get into trouble because she was a nuisance. Besides, she never barked!
Once, twice… I waited, hoping, but she kept it up, loud and furious. By the fifth bark I was between a hiss and a yell, “Zel! SHHHH, Zel! You’ll wake up the whole neighborhood!” I heard her jump off the bed and, nails clicking, head down the stairs. My head still in a vise, she came whining to the little breakfast nook that I had claimed as an office. Sitting at my desk, I swiveled in my office chair toward the dining room and looking down, kept trying to shush her. She lay facing me, her backside to the dining room, just through the open doorway. Chin on her paws, belly to the floor, tail swishing, she looked up at me whining and she kept it up.
She would not shut up.
It was late and my head was out of control. Obviously bed was the place I needed to be, but first I needed to lock up the house. I didn’t feel up to doing even that but I had no choice. She might sense, or hear something that I didn’t. Occam’s Razor was easy: she might have heard someone out in the alley. The jump, not so easy. I had read that Native Americans kept dogs as part of an early warning system for spirits. The same thing from people who said they had encountered Extra Biological Entities, or EBENS. I had had enough weird things happen the past few years that I didn’t rule anything out.
I started talking to her. “Shhhh, alright already! I’m going, I’m going, but I have to get some Tylenol and lock the doors first!” By now she had done an about face, no longer facing my office chair and me. She was facing the opposite direction, and had moved into the dining room, facing the corner of that room and the street to the west. Chin still on her paws, belly to the floor, tail swishing, she whined and stared. In spite of all my talking, she still would not shut up! I found the Tylenol in the kitchen drawer and managed to find a glass, turn on the faucet and swallow two. Then I started moving, barely able to navigate, muttering to the dog, “Just a minute, I’m going!” I made my way around the first floor, making sure the garage doors were down and locked, closing and locking the back door, the front door and the screened-in porch. Then came the stairs.
Somehow I made it to the second floor, used the bathroom and made it to bed. Zel hit the bed like a rocket, dropped like a stone beside me, glued herself to my left side and began to snore, all in one fluid motion. Through the haze of my head I noticed, and thought, “That’s pretty weird. She never does that.”
Curling on my left side I tried to get comfortable and once again despair magnified to the point of hopelessness. So many weird things I had tried to explain, getting me nowhere fast it seemed. I didn’t know what to do anymore. I didn’t know where to turn, who to ask, or where to go. I began thinking about all the people I had met, talked to, and learned things from, teachers appearing just when I needed them. I wondered if there really was some “thing” or some “body” there that I couldn’t see. Maybe there was. Vaguely, I remembered reading that if I thought there was someone there I should try talking to them.
I had had other experiences when I lived at three other houses over the years, things that only seemed to match with metaphysics or mystics. Nothing scary, nothing that went “bump in the night,” more like somehow being surrounded by gold light sometimes, mixed in with the usual premonitions and deja’vu episodes that seemed to be happening more and more. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem to be associated with location. It seemed to be all about me.
The pain continued and my mind drifted over some of the belief systems and philosophies I had visited in my studies, both Eastern and Western. I felt they all had common threads and good points but had splintered into too many man-made divisions. It was as if I were a mix of all of them. If there was “somebody” or “something” in the house, I thought about what some others would have done for protection. Catholics would have had their beads out, counting the Rosary. Wiccans would have painted Pentagrams on the doors and windows. Pentecostals would have anointed the doors and windows and over the bed.
I lay there in my bed that night, curled on my left side with my dog plastered against me, with what felt like a spike being driven into the middle of my forehead, and I cried. I was alone and somehow I knew, of all the people in the world, I was never meant to be alone. I was always supposed to have somebody with me, a mate or, at the very least, a protector, but I also knew I couldn’t go looking. I had to wait until I learned more about myself or it would never work. I couldn’t hide anymore.
I also knew that I wasn’t up for doing any of the things I had just thought about for protection. I hurt too much and I really didn’t put much faith in them anyway. I’d always dialed God up direct and in my heart of hearts always thought it was silly to go through an operator. I pretty much threw caution to the wind and decided to wing it. He and I had been buddies for years so God in the background was a given. Beyond that, I was on my own.
I was in such pain that there wasn’t much winging to be had and only a few minutes had passed. I could see the room clearly through my tears, the streetlight from the alley illuminating the walls, the furniture, the sheer curtains blowing in a soft night breeze. I could hear traffic and the usual little night noises drifted in.
I don’t know how much was thought and how much was vocal but I am sure it was a mix of the two. I remembered reading about invoking the protection of Jesus specifically, especially if there were EBENs around. I loved, honored, respected and admired Jesus dearly, all that he stood for in his life and how I thought he was wronged in many ways. I thought he was the personification of love and showed us how we should try to be by walking his talk. Peacenik that he was, if he would have staged a sit-in I knew I would have been there. If they could have done his personality profile back in the day, he and Ghandi were supposedly INFJ personality types like me. I’ve always wished I could have hung out with them. I think we’d have had a good time.
Still crying, I stared at the corner of the bedroom and visualized myself, my boys, my now daughter-in-law, my mother, my brother, essentially my immediate family and a close friend who seemed very depressed lately. I thought that the list could go on forever and I needed to stop. In my mind I pulled spirals of the white light of Jesus around us and asked for his protection. Protection from what I didn’t know, but I was done. I had given myself to him years before, but now, I was done. I couldn’t fight anymore. I was too tired. I had had enough. I surrendered, but while doing that, I took it one step further.
My head was still killing me but I started to talk, or think, as if there really could be someone in my bedroom that I couldn’t see. I told them I was done, I surrendered, and if they wanted me that bad then I was theirs because I couldn’t fight them anymore. I told them that in the end I was God’s but if they were that bent on having me I hoped that they understood what love was and that they wouldn’t hurt me. Then I both apologized and asked, and I did it out loud. If there was somebody there I apologized for not being able to see them and asked for a sign if they were really with me. I knew I might die tonight and had even agreed to it, but I had had enough. I wanted to know.
Just that quick the spike that was killing my forehead began to ease up. From lying down until then it had all happened in less than five minutes, or as fast as a person can think thoughts and I can be a pretty fast thinker sometimes. I thought, “Man, that Tylenol worked really fast!” I was both puzzled and amazed because I knew that Tylenol just does not work that fast. Especially on killer headaches like this one.
While I was thinking that, I was simultaneously rolling over from my left side and onto my back. Perfectly perpendicular, my head at the head of the bed with my eyes closed, my feet pointed north, toward the open window, my hands across my chest. In retrospect, I must have looked for all the world exactly like a sarcophagus.
Then it hit.
Being a nurse, I realize that it chose the precise point of entry to my boney skeleton for a reason. Not through the soles of my feet, but at the growth plates where my tib / fibs and my ankles join with ligaments and tendons. It was pure, indescribable, unbelievable energy pushing through me. It felt as if I knew and could distinguish the push upward through the protoplasm and ectoplasm that was “me”.
I didn’t move and I didn’t breathe. I was engulfed in the experience, tracking it as it pushed me toward the head of the bed, beginning to lift me off the sheets. I wish I would have opened my eyes to see if there was any “blue light” in the room, as I’d read about people seeing during visitations, but the view behind my eyelids remained dark while I did nothing more than feel it moving through me.
It hit in both of my ankles simultaneously and moved akin to what I had seen on television, what exposure to a G-Force environment does to a person’s face. I tracked it, felt it, and absorbed it, but not really. My ankles, my calves, my knees, it was in my thighs and still coming. By now I was being pushed toward the headboard and starting to lift, and I wasn’t a lightweight. This was pure, raw power.
This.... was energy.
It was at my belly and I thought, “Dear God, what happens when it gets to my chest?? Am I gonna die?” and then it was there, moving through my chest. By now my entire body was suspended in the push and only my skin still touched the sheet. My head was almost at the headboard and I wondered if I would be driven into it. I barely had time to wonder if my neck could handle the strain and the last of its passing went very, very fast. Once it was through my chest it went through my shoulders and up my neck, pulling the tissue of my face toward my scalp, still lifting, driving. It literally felt like a ball bursting through the top of my skull all at once, not in a stream, but an explosion. And with that, it was gone.
Gone into the night and I was left lying in my bed, flat on my back, head to the south, feet to the north and with my hands still on my chest. My bedroom was still the same. The sheer curtains still billowed gently toward the foot of the bed. The night noises were still there. The only odd thing was that Zel remained curled as tight as an Alaskan Husky against my left side, snoring. And lying there I knew something else. I had moved, or been moved physically while “The Visitor” moved through me, but Zel had not. Terrified and snoring, she had slept through the entire thing.
My headache gone, I briefly took stock of my surroundings and the significance of what had happened and wondered, “WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?!” Nothing had changed around me but I knew that I was changed forever because of the experience. I rolled back over onto my left side, curled up and promptly fell asleep.
I got up the next morning and got ready for work, thinking about what had happened the night before but somehow managing not to dwell on it too much. Once I got to the ED and began my shift, the magnitude of whatever, or whoever, paid me a visit began to sink in. I don’t know how I ever held it together and made it back home. I was terrified.
Once I did, I called a good friend, a woodsman like my family, and he made me go outside, and fast. He kept me focused and grounded, asking me what I saw, what I felt under my feet, what was above me, what was below me, what was around me, what did I smell, what did I hear. He made sure that I knew, in that moment, that I was in the world that I knew to be home. It was the right thing to do but as I sobbed my thank-yous and shook I knew it was cold comfort. This was a confirm. There was at least one Somebody or one Something who had found me. I couldn’t see them coming and there were no guarantees they wouldn’t be back. I truly believed that no one, or no thing, could get past God, so most of me thought The Visitor had to be good if God let it through but I wasn’t sure.
And there was something else, but it took a very long time before I accepted the occasional thought that whispered through my head as to the reality of what happened that night.
This Somebody wanted to meet me. It was purposeful. It wanted me to know it was there and in order to do that It needed me flat. It also knew that I would be flat when I was in bed and I think It may have looked for me there first. I thought I was talking to the dog downstairs but instead I was talking to It, telling It that I was headed upstairs.
It knew when I surrendered and I know that when I rolled over I did it precisely when It needed me to. I was doing what I was told. It was telepathic and evidently so was I, at least where It was concerned. I was also sure that It had the power to kill me but It hadn’t. I was still alive, and more than that, I remembered. Everything. If the experience was supposed to have had some sort of paralytic or amnesiac effect, I was sure that it hadn’t worked, and I was just as sure that I hadn’t gone anywhere.
My hell on earth had just begun as I tried to sort this out. Deep down, I wasn’t as much afraid of The Visitor as much as the realization of how much I didn’t know and It apparently did. Why did it pick me? There were so many more intelligent people around if it needed something to be done. All I knew for sure was that I needed to learn as much as I could and as fast as I could. Thing was, I had no idea where to start.
It’s 2009 now. I still think about The Visitor every day but I’m not afraid. Lyn Buchanan and I talk about it from time to time and he says that, “Somebody came a very long way and used a lot of energy because they thought [I] had the right stuff.” I don’t know about that, I always feel like I’m nobody special. I get up every day, put my shoes on and show up just like everybody else. I do know that whoever they are, or were, they’re wearing a white hat and they’re one of the good guys. They didn’t leave a calling card and I don’t expect them to be back. I just think of them as another friend out there in cyberspace that I can’t see.
Revised tlf 3.28.09
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