While working on my newest research into commonalities amongst haunted locations, I can’t help but reflect back on my upbringing at Aspen Grove. It impacted me in more ways than just the experiences of its haunting phenomena.
Growing up with formal boxwood mazes, orchards, arbors, surrounding woods, and all the gentle beauty of Northern Virginia, I couldn’t help but be very tied to nature and to the land. There were gentle reminders of the type of potent environment I lived in, but I never knew how to voice it as a child, except to say “the land knows things.” I became romantic by nature and especially moved by weather and the cycles of the moon. It’s a kind of bonding from an early age that helps to make you more sensitive to earth’s changes, like oncoming earthquakes and tsunami’s, changes in weather patterns, and upcoming tornados. That’s an influence I felt on my own body and spirit, so I can imagine what happens when these earthly conditions occur on a property and affect the course of its history. I could literally feel it in the relics I dug up from the earth, having been hidden away since the Civil War and long before then.
The ancient Celtic pagans understood a thing or two about the land and how to harness its powers, how to use what you have, and amplify its inherent properties for magic and spellbinding. Erecting stone structures such as Stonehenge was just a sample of what drove the ancients to create a powerful place of worship and insight. They were driven to devise a spirituality and a lifestyle that was motivated by the qualities of the land they lived upon and the sensations it evoked within their bodies, like the gentle ebb and flow of the tides on earth pulled by the moon.
Wandering the property of Aspen Grove with much of the same elements of running streams above and below ground, quartz rock, shale beneath the dirt and lining the creek, and a home built of stone in the 1700s, all made for a perfect haunted setting. In fact, the original name of the property was “Springfield” because of the springs all around the property. Our own well pump was just feet away from our house, pumping the best-tasting water ever from a stream that ran below the structure.
We wonder sometimes why the Brit’s have so many haunted places, but why shouldn’t they? They have the ideal conditions and disruptive/dramatic history, as I see it from my research thus far. It will be interesting to see how my research unfolds. It could make it possible to predict likely haunted spots and ones that potentially could be if they have the right “earth stew.”
I will continue to keep you posted. I’m hoping to publish my findings within the next few weeks.
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