Clairaudience

Many of you are familiar with my good friend and paranormal author, Ophelia Julien. (If not, you NEED to check her out on Amazon and Facebook.) She sent out her monthly newsletter, and it was amazing, as usual. So I asked her if I could use it for this week’s Freaky Friday. If you think it’s amazing, too – you can sign up to get her newsletters delivered straight to you by going here!

Most people have heard of clairvoyance, French for “clear seeing.” Psychics who have the ability to obtain knowledge through a sixth sense are described as clairvoyant.
 
There is also something called clairaudience, an ability not as well known, but something I ran into in my younger years, before I even knew it was “a thing.” Clairaudience, “clear hearing,” could probably look like a health or even mental health issue, as it involves hearing voices, noises, laughter, or any number of things that 1) others may not hear, and 2) may not be readily explained. Footsteps, knocking, voices, laughter, shuffling or rustling noises in the next room–all of these are examples of clairaudience. One of the coolest ones I’ve read about was that of a  bell ringing loudly outside of a house in San Francisco. The occupants went out into the garden to investigate and all four of their lives were saved when the huge earthquake of 1906 hit and destroyed the house they had just vacated.

I had a friend who had the ability. She didn’t mention it to me until we were in college. We both started at the University of Illinois-Chicago (or Chicago Circle, as it was known back then), but she eventually transferred to a school in San Francisco. She was already an upperclassman, so instead of living on campus, she found an affordable apartment and settled in. This was back in the days before cell phones and the internet, so we used to run up our landline bills talking about the disturbances in her apartment, largely centered around the voices she would hear when she went to bed: whispers; conversations; disembodied muttering. We both know how crazy it sounds. Hearing voices, eh? (Considering what was in the above paragraph, I’m beginning to wonder if there’s something about San Francisco…)

But I believed her, not the least because of what she once told me about my own home. At some point, she stayed with me at my parent’s house, sharing my second-floor bedroom while things were in flux at her family’s place. Years after this happened, she told me about her experiences as my houseguest. She told me that after I had already fallen asleep, she heard our basement door open on the first floor. She then heard heavy footsteps plod down the front hall to the staircase, come slowly up the steps to the second floor, and then stop right outside my bedroom door. She said it happened more than once, that she could feel something out in the hall waiting on the other side of the door, and that it would be a long time on those nights before she could finally fall asleep. She was only my roommate for about four weeks, and although things were barely settled when she moved back home, I think that between her family “rock” and my haunted “hard place,” she was actually happy to go back to her own house.

A few extra notes about this: our basement door was always kept locked because our basement included a cellar door to the outside and we did not live in a great neighborhood. Thus, locking any point of possible home-invasion type of entry was important. Secondly, I always slept with my bedroom door closed. But an interesting feature of that door is that it included a little hook with matching loop on the door jamb so that it could be tightly secured. I wonder why that was.

As an extra note, I did have another high school gal pal who had a sleepover at my house. I thought everything went fine until she called me from the safety of her own place and told me she would never sleep at my house again. She said she didn’t like the feeling of “always being watched” and “followed around.” She kept her word, never staying another night always going back home after visiting.

Anyone who knows me or reads my books knows I grew up in a haunted house. During those years, I heard my name called. I heard children laughing. I heard a baby crying, furniture moving in the other room, and other noises that I can’t even describe.

So yes, I believe clairaudience is definitely a thing, and my friend wasn’t alone in hearing unexplainable noises.

Amazing – right?!?!?! All I have to add is – Happy Friday!!!