Articles

The Murky Corridors of the Beyond


 

 

Daily Lakes, September 26-28, 1997 

 

Wanda Pratnicka from Przywidz near Gdansk, became acquainted with exorcisms when she was looking for help for someone close to her. She acquired the secrets of this knowledge in Canada among other places. She has talked about her skills and experiences on New York television. She has helped and continues to help many people by running a center for the restoration of psycho-physical equilibrium. She studied psychology, parapsychology, astrophysics and everything that might help her carry out her work.

My guide through the pathways of wandering ghosts was, unexpectedly, Mrs Wanda Pratnicka from Przywidz near Gdansk, a charming lady without mysterious glances, terrifying gestures or incomprehensible words. She has been talking with ghosts for close to twenty five years. Guiding ghosts away she calls cleansing people.

I must help them understand death

"You feel a cold shiver, the invisible look of someone standing behind your back? That's him. A ghost who probably wants to enter you," she says with a little smile. I felt weak. "There are many ghosts circling round us," Mrs Pratnicka explains, not noticing my fear. "All you need is the appropriate mood to sense their presence. I can even see them!" I soak up every word of hers, I start to feel something unusual. "Maybe I am very suggestible," I think. "You are strong and free," I suddenly hear, as if answering my question. The exorcist writes something on a sheet of paper, holds a pendulum over it, and after a moment's concentration repeats: "Yes." I give her the name of a dead person whom - I have often been told - I resemble closely. "The ghost of that person has not passed to the other side. It is close, but you are free." As she says this, the exorcist repeats the activity with the pendulum and I feel that I won't be able to keep hold of the pen in my hand. I never suspected myself of having such feelings!

The possessed

Flesh and blood people ought not to be a home for ghosts of the dead. Ghosts ought to leave for the other side. They don't always want to. Some of them stay on consciously and lie in their encounters with exorcists, saying they're alive, they didn't die at all, they have a wife, they're bringing up their children. Some of them use bribery. They say they will leave the visited person in peace when they've fixed this or that. They have their scores to settle, they can be cruel because they are beings from the beyond.

Someone with a ghost is tiring for their environment, incomprehensible. That's why they frequently treat themselves for neuroses, take tranquilizers, or cope in some other way by using alcohol or drugs. They suffer. They sometimes feel they have a split consciousness. They can also constantly want to get something fixed - they inundate people with their views, they write letters, demand replies etc. They walk into a room for some keys they left there but once inside they can't remember why they went there. "Because it's not the person looking for the keys, but the ghost who's possessed him," says Mrs Pratnicka.

An outsider's ghost will be activated within a person when that person is over-tired, depressed or when his strength is being wasted by some disease, longing, uncertainty or sorrow... At such times it's easy to break through and possess that person. That's why a high-school girl, Caroline, very calm at school, well brought-up in a loving family, suddenly runs amok during dinner, starts throwing plates against the wall and shouts things of which she is later ashamed.

A small boy withdrew into himself to such an extent that he was taken in for medical observation. The doctors diagnosed autism. The exorcist gave one look, penetrated with her thought and made a different diagnosis: the boy is possessed by his grandfather.

The boy is now regaining contact with his surroundings and the family, though it values the biological and physical sciences, put their faith in an exorcist. She talked to the ghost of the obstinate grandfather and persuaded him to set his grandson free...

Anna befriended the beautiful Eva whom, at first, she liked to touch and then started to fondle more and more brazenly. Her advances became only too apparent. When Anna's parents heard that their daughter was a lesbian, they went crazy. Their view was that their daughter was all right and that it was Eva who was sowing evil which provoked her to extreme behavior. The exorcist uncovered something different. Inside Anna was the ghost of a man demanding sexual relations with a young woman. That's why when she was with Eva Anna's voice became manly and something was pushing her towards her friend. Freed of her possession she now relates how there were moments when something in her head kept saying: "Screw her, screw her now" - Anna finds it hard to know where such vulgar thoughts came from.

Why they wander

The ghosts of people who during their lives saw their deaths as a hideous process of disintegration, rotting and the cold of the grave do not depart for the other world. Neither do those people who did a lot of harm in their lives and are afraid of punishment. Nor do those who don't accept their deaths and want to live on. Then they drift aimlessly. They perceive people as little points of light, they want to get inside them. Sometimes they choose someone and wait for them in the twilight, not sensing the passage of time or space...

People reconciled to death, understanding the fact, but above all those who believed while alive in life on the other side do depart. The ghosts of such people follow that thought as quickly and lightly as the thought itself. They depart along a tunnel of light to another world regardless of whether they died suddenly, in an accident, or if they lived to a ripe old age and prayed for a peaceful death.

Then she adds that a person's ghost remains for some time next to its dead body. If it is going to move on, then it stays for only a short while. A few hours, maybe, a few days at most. If it were to stay any longer it would lose the energy it needs to sail away for ever. The exorcist can help everyone but not always quickly. One time she will free someone of the evil as if with the touch of a wand, another time she struggles with it. Then she can be attacked, but she doesn't fear those powers. She has worked out a defense barrier for herself. "Everyone has one when they're born, it's just that they may weaken or lose it," she says.

The most dangerous ghosts are those that push someone to commit suicide. Wanda Pratnicka's view is that suicides are people possessed by a ghost who is mad at the person who, though they have "permitted" it to penetrate their body, resists the ghost's will. A disobedient person, like a superfluous container, is pushed by the ghost to commit suicide. It drills a hole in a person's thoughts, sows black thoughts, insists on the senselessness of existence and pushes them from a height or helps them tie the noose.

The alleyways of fear

Many people intuitively sense places that are haunted. They don't know what, they don't understand why, but they feel the chill of a presence, an undefined fear. Ghosts have their favored places to stay, which we infer as being unusual. Ghosts are found in churches, in some houses, in cemeteries. They draw their energies from wandering animals running near children, and they wait... "They won't abandon a person voluntarily. Only exorcism will help.

There's no need to fear it or equate it with chicanery," Wanda Pratnicka assures me. "If life's complications cannot be explained rationally, then checking the state of the ghost remains, cleansing someone of the intruder and saving them from tragedy.

"Even while we are still alive it's worth coming to understand the path of death and the need of moving to a better world," she adds.

She reminds me that fortunately - aside from ghosts which don't want to leave and have a destructive effect on a person, forcing them to incomprehensible or shameful acts - there are beings that look after mankind. We should fervently pray for such a Guardian Angel...

Author: Elzbieta Mierzynska