When faced with something terrifying, most people resort to fight or flight, or they freeze in place. But some us choose the unspoken option you’ll hear about in this episode.

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Welcome to the PEEP Podcast! I’m your host Nicolle Morock, and I’m grateful you’re here! The two big ideas behind the PEEP Podcast are to show that the paranormal is more normal than most people think and to connect the science to the psi, including ESP, hauntings, and psychokinesis! In this episode, I’m sharing the story of the scariest year of my life, and how it led me to where I am now.

But first, I want to let you know that I’m going to take a production break from this podcast during March. I will be back, I promise! This is the time of year when it’s nearly impossible to find guests for this show, and rather than stress about it, this year, I’m going to roll with it and use that energy to work on my sequel to Daughter of the Mystic Moon. Most of the plot has developed in my head now, so it’s time to put it in writing. Well, technically typing, but you know what I mean.

While I’m working on that, there are 117 episodes of the PEEP Podcast – and now, 4 episodes of Positive Head Space – for your enjoyment. If you’re one of my amazing listeners who have heard every episode, please email me and let me know what your favorite was. I truly want to know because that’s the kind of information that can inspire future episodes. I’ll be back in April with new shows, and to that end, if you’d like to be a guest, please also get in touch. The best way is to use the “Share Your Personal Experience” button at peeppodcast.com.

In past episodes, I’ve mentioned what I call “the scary house,” but I haven’t gone into real detail about it.

I lived there when I was a junior in high school, and for reasons you’ll soon hear, I was truly terrified to be in that house alone. I altered the way I behaved in an effort to deal with my fear, and I can still remember (and occasionally relive) all the emotions that came from my year there.

What you’re about to hear is one of the first chapters of my nonfiction book, Please, don’t call my psychic: stories from my paranormal life, because it’s a more concise version than listening to me ramble about a year’s worth of memories decades after the fact. This chapter is basically the backstory I’ve never fully shared on this podcast, but alluded to many times. I think it’s about time you know exactly where I’m coming from.

My Life Pre-NSPIR

One of the questions I am most often asked when George Matthis, the founder of NSPIR, and I give our annual talks at the Wake County Libraries in October is at what point in my life I realized I had “a gift.” In answering, I usually first state that it’s not anything different than what anyone else has, but not everybody pays attention to it or tries to develop it. In fact, most children who say they can see or hear or in some way sense the presence of spirits are told they are imagining things, and are basically taught to tune it out and stop paying attention to those sensations. What makes me different is that I am stubborn and I was never convinced that it was my imagination even when it would have been less frightening to believe it.

Since I was a child, I have randomly had dreams that came true, feelings about people that proved correct, and the ability to walk into a place and know if there was a different kind of energy to it. When I was young, the energy that I now associate with spirits (or ghosts or entities or whatever you prefer to call them) really freaked me out. I would get that sensation that someone was there that I couldn’t see and want to run away as fast as I could.

Of course, running from that feeling wasn’t always possible. My mom had a strict policy about her little ones not wondering off on their own. So, if she took us to a nursing home to visit a great aunt, I had to just find a way to deal with the sensation that they were all around me. I hated that feeling. I would get the same feeling in hospitals, too. It was overwhelming, and I couldn’t explain it because I was too young to understand what it was.

I was overly sensitive to living people, too, and I still am. I can literally feel another person’s pain if I let myself. The ability is called being empathic, and if you don’t know how to control it, the whole thing can seem like a curse. I don’t just cry at Hallmark commercials, I weep when I watch the grieving mother on the news or think about the people who just lost their loved ones in another suicide bombing in the Middle East. I feel the excitement of kids on Christmas and the thrill of a friend who just proposed to his girlfriend. Many people have empathic tendencies, and it is something to celebrate. It keeps us connected to each other on a higher level and helps us remember our own humanity.

But there’s more to my empathy than emotion. I can stand next to a person and feel her backache or his knee throbbing. I can look at a person and know that she has a headache without any noticeable visual clue. The physical pains are the ones that I have to actively block out. I have learned how to put up psychic (for lack of a better term) walls so that I am not constantly being bombarded by other people’s ailments. I let the walls down when I need to for an investigation or on the rare occasion that I practice Reiki, but otherwise, I try to keep them up. Sometimes I fail, and I have to mentally check myself when I feel a sudden pain. Is that really mine, or is it the person’s standing next to me?

Intuition is another “gift” we have all been given, but not everyone makes use of. I’ve learned to listen to that little voice and give credence to that sudden “just knowing.” When I ignore it, I often end up regretting that choice. In extreme cases, not ignoring it has probably saved my life many times. For example, once I was driving home from work, and I kept getting the strong impression that I should slow down. I wasn’t really going that fast, but the closer I came to my neighborhood, the more intense the message was, so just before my turn, I hit the brakes and took that right slower than I ever have. As I did, a car was coming out of the neighborhood in my lane! We would have had a head-on collision had I not heeded that warning. I can credit nothing but my intuition (or if you believe in angels and spirit guides, I could credit them, too) for saving the other driver and me from serious injury or possibly death.

Again, anyone and everyone has some PSI ability, but each person’s type of reception may be different. PSI is a term that people who study the paranormal use to refer to a number of abilities including extrasensory perception (ESP), telekinesis, remote viewing, etc. Mine covers a range of senses: I have seen glimpses of ghosts, heard them speak, and felt them touch me. I get information intuitively on investigations and I have physically felt the ailments the spirits seemed to have suffered from. It’s pretty amazing even now to think that all of the sensations that overwhelmed and terrified me as a child are now things that I embrace as a way to gain information that I might not otherwise learn.

But, please, don’t call me psychic. Only a handful of times in my life have I seen the future, and when I did, it happened so spontaneously that it took me by surprise. Then, of course, there is the fact that you can’t know you are really seeing the future. You have to remember what you saw and what you said and wait to see if it actually plays out that way. Validation takes time. There is an amount of expectation that is tied to the word “psychic” these days that I really try to stay away from. Don’t get me wrong. I actually know a few good, trustworthy professional psychics, so I am not saying it is not possible to be one. I am only saying I do not claim to be one, and I don’t want to be called one.

So how did I go from wanting to run away from ghosts to running toward them with a digital voice recorder? When I was 16 years old, my family moved from Mississippi to North Carolina. My parents decided to rent a split-level ranch home in a quiet neighborhood in Raleigh while they looked for a permanent residence. That house had something mean and angry in it. The first time I stepped over the threshold, I backed out and told them that I didn’t like the house and I didn’t want to live there. There was something bad in it. Of course, they told me that I was just upset about having to move so far from all my friends and that I would get over it, and oh, by the way, I didn’t have a choice because the one year lease was signed and we had no place else to go.

Our first or second night in the house, I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor surrounded by boxes of my belongings. My room had not been put together yet, and it was pretty sparse. I was sound asleep when I felt the hair on the crown of my head being yanked. Yes, yanked. Hard! I opened my eyes to see something that reminded me of a silver mylar balloon above my head, shifting in appearance and getting closer. Being the good little, scared-out-of-my-mind, Catholic girl that I was, I threw the covers over my head and prayed Hail Maries until I eventually fell back to sleep from exhaustion. I told my parents what happened the next morning. They told me I had dreamed the whole thing. I knew better.

About a week later, I was in the bathroom sitting on the toilet, and I suddenly felt heat on my leg that was closest to the wall. It was getting hot fast. I looked down to see the knob on the little heater that was set into the wall turning toward “high” by itself! Of course, I had to finish my business before I could leave the vicinity, so I waited until it stopped turning before reaching down and turning it back off. As soon as I was done, I ran downstairs in a near panic to tell Mom what had just happened. She looked at me and said, “Maybe one of your brothers was in there before you and left it on.”

“But I saw it turning!” Once again, I was dismissed as imagining things.

Both of my parents worked, and since my brothers went to middle school and got home later than I did, I would find myself home alone for about an hour after school every day. I hated that house, and I really hated being alone in that house. Everything that happened seemed to be aimed at me, so I would get home, open the door, throw my book bag inside and walk down to the neighborhood park where I would sit until I knew someone else would be home. That worked pretty well until the weather turned rough or when winter came with its early twilight. Those afternoons when the park wasn’t an option were spent in my room with my door shut and Metallica or Queensryche or some other hard rock or heavy metal band blasting on my stereo because I wanted to drown out any sound that might catch me off guard.

One day, the song “Silent Lucidity” played on the radio and I recorded it on my cassette recorder. I loved that song, and my copy of the album had been lost in the move. I wanted Mom to hear it, so I went downstairs and put it into the larger stereo in the living room. She sat down on the couch to listen, and I hit the play button. What we heard was the most awful guttural growl that made the hair on my arms stand on end. I ejected the tape and threw it across the room and it broke against the wall. If I had known then what I know now, I would have realized that I had managed to catch Electronic Voice Phenomenon on my tape, and it was valuable to paranormal investigators. Unfortunately, at the age of sixteen, all I knew was it scared the crap out of me, and I never wanted to hear that sound again.

On another night, I was in the bathtub trying to relax when I saw a door open and the hand of a man reach in and turn off the light. Of course, I screamed and the light came back on a moment later. The door was shut, and everything seemed okay. I quickly got out of the bath, dried off, and ran downstairs accusing my father of playing a prank on me, and he swore he did not do it. Mom tried to blame my brothers, but it was the hand of a grown man, not a middle school boy. I was practically hysterical and Dad continued to promise that it wasn’t him. Then who was it? Nobody had an answer and my scream had been enough to show it was not my imagination.

After a few months of the spirit tormenting only me, my dad began to notice shadows and the shape of a man out of the corner of his eye. He’d look and nobody would be there. Strange things started to happen around other family members, too.

I refused to watch TV on the lowest floor in the den because the bad energy was incredibly strong down there. I actually preferred to sit in the kitchen by myself and watch the little black and white TV if there was something I really wanted to watch. It was very rare for me to go all the way downstairs for any length of time.

My aunt came for a visit and Mom had set up a sleeping area for her in the den. In the middle of the night, she woke to a sound that she described as marbles rolling through the air conditioning vent and stopping just over her head. She ran upstairs, freaked out. By then, the whole family had been experiencing the weirdness, and they believed her.

Mom and Dad asked the landlord about the history of the house, and she said she didn’t know what they were talking about. According to her, we were crazy and so were the people who lived there before us.

When the year was over, we finally moved into a brand new house in a brand new neighborhood that was free of ghosts. With a sigh of relief (or two or three), I put that part of my past behind me. Mostly. The one thing that living with an angry ghost did for me was to spur my curiosity as to what was happening and why. I started reading about ghosts and quickly became a fan of Hans Holzer, one of the first popularly accepted paranormal investigators in the country. He had interesting tales to share, fascinating case studies of investigations he had performed, and psychic friends who claimed to be able to connect with the dead. I learned from his writing that I shouldn’t be afraid of spirits and that most are harmless and just looking for attention.

I began to expand my library of paranormal books and ghost stories, and the more I read, the less afraid I was. I went from terrified to intrigued to wanting to become an expert. In my twenties, I became friends with a professional psychic and a not-so-professional-but-still-talented psychic, and they taught me a great deal more. I learned how to interpret the sensations I had when in a “haunted” location, I opened up more to receiving information when I could, and even more importantly, I learned how to ground myself and put up those psychic barriers I needed in order to keep from always feeling the pains and emotions of those around me.

By the time I met George, I was in my late thirties, and I wanted to take that next step. I wanted to be an investigator and use my empathy and intuition to further The National Society of Paranormal Investigation and Research’s cause and to help others. I was impressed with NSPIR because the group uses the scientific method as much as possible in its approach to investigations, and being a scientist myself, I felt that would help keep me grounded. I was right. George and I make a good team in that I help keep him open to the possibilities of the metaphysical realm and he helps keep me grounded in the facts of the material world.

Thank you for listening. If you’re interested in buying “Please, don’t call me psychic,” it’s available on Amazon. I’ll have a link in the show notes.

If you want to share your own personal paranormal experiences of any type, use the “Share Your Personal Experience” button and fill out the form at peeppodcast.com to get in touch! You can be as anonymous as you like, or you can let your paranormal freak flag fly and share your name. Either way, I’m happy to hear from you. Sharing our stories helps people realize that the paranormal is much more normal than they think! That's P-E-E-P Podcast.com. Remember that stands for People Experiencing Everyday Paranormal.

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