DURHAM — On Halloween day, Eddita Felt is moving to a writing retreat in Aroostook County to spend the next year working on three books at once: “Real Maine Ghosts Real Maine People,” “So You Want to be a Paranormal Investigator?” and “The Homeowner’s Complete Guide to Ghost Busting.”

The writing effort was bolstered by a grant last year from the Alex Tanous Foundation for Scientific Research. Felt, a psychic medium, teacher and longtime paranormal investigator, said she asked her spirit guides for the best place to finish the books with minimal distractions, surrounded by nature.

They led her, she said, to Craigslist and an artist residency apartment at a place called Magic Pond. Even she was surprised to end up in The County.

The new, temporary home has been saged, her bags are packed, but before Felt leaves to write about an array of encounters she’s kept notes on since 1996, the Sun Journal asked about Halloween, tips for homeowners and her own scariest paranormal experience.

It’s … chilling.

SJ: Do you believe in the idea of the veil thinning between the living and the dead this time of year?

EF: I think it’s very true that the veils between this reality and the afterlife are very thin, especially thin, on Halloween, or some people call it Samhain, or All Hallow’s Eve.

Everything is energy and for centuries, people have been using that particular time frame during the year to do soothsaying or predicting or oracle reading or even games like dropping hot taffy into cold water to see what your husband is going to look like. It’s been happening for such a long time that there’s a big energy field around that — you could call that an unconscious energy field. And for that reason, it makes it that much easier for ordinary people — non-mediums or non-psychics, too — to connect with the other side this time of year. I think it starts about mid-October and goes right through Nov. 5 or so.

SJ: If ghosts and spirits are among us, why do you think they’re sticking around?

EF: It depends on the ghost or the spirit; they have different reasons. In the house I cleared yesterday in Harpswell, the previous owner of the house, who had died in the house, wanted to communicate with the new owner of the house and she also didn’t like the boyfriend of the owner. She wanted to communicate with her and wanted to scare the boyfriend out. This lady wants to stay in the house and the person who has bought the house is OK with that because she knew her (in life) and she liked her. Now that she knows what was going on and that it wasn’t anything scary, they’re going to co-exist together.

SJ: And the boyfriend? Does he get kicked to the curb?

EF: He’s been kicked to the curb, yes. That was very interesting, and I totally agreed (with the late homeowner), who felt like a mother-in-law to this young woman before she passed. He had been drinking and partying and the former owner didn’t like that, she didn’t like all those people in the house making all that ruckus, so she appeared to him a couple of times and he’s gone now.

SJ: What’s one of your tips for homeowners?

EF: The first tip that I have is they can go to my website and they can download a copy of “Symptoms of a haunted house or business.” I generally will say, if you have more than five or six of those, then you may want to face the fact that you’ve got something going on in your house and you might need some help with getting it cleared.

Sometimes it’s the person that’s haunted, sometimes it’s the house or the property that’s haunted and that’s why I try to help people to figure out what the symptoms are and we take it and go forward from there.

SJ: What’s been your scariest experience?

EF: When I was a teenager growing up in a haunted house in Portland. There was a poltergeist and I was the sole recipient of its activities. No one else in the family experienced anything, it was only me. It happened at night, after everyone else had gone to bed, and it was really scary.

I would be laying in the bed upstairs and I would hear footsteps as it came creeping up the stairs, one step at a time, and into the hallway, and it would stop at the foot of my bed. Couldn’t see anything, but I could hear the breathing at the end of my bed. I knew it was looking at me.

Then it would go over to a corner in the bedroom and it would breathe in the corner for a while. The scariest time was when I was in the house by myself, my family had gone camping. I was in the living room and I heard footsteps coming up from the cellar, really slow footsteps coming up from the cellar. I grabbed some stuff and I ran to the front door. By the time the front door was open, I could hear the noise of the breathing in the living room behind me. I shot out of that door like a bat out of you-know-it. I got on my bicycle and I rode to my friend’s house and I said, “Can I sleep here tonight? I can’t sleep at my house, the ghost is back!” I never stayed in that house alone again.

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An excerpt from Eddita Felt’s “Real Maine Ghosts Real Maine People,” told to her by a 94-year-old man who grew up in a haunted Freeport home:

” . . . It was in the middle of the night. My mother woke us up screaming. She had run out of her bedroom into the hallway landing and was yelling for the older boys. She said someone was in her bed. A ghost was in her room. She was in hysterics. The older girls were trying to calm her down.

She said that she heard footsteps coming up the stairs. She figured my father must have come home early. She heard the door open and close, as usual. With her back to the door, she heard and felt somebody sit down on the bed as usual. She heard two shoes hit the floor. One at a time, as usual. Someone sat down on the mattress and then laid down. When she reached out to squeeze my father’s hip, he wasn’t there. There was nobody beside her on the bed.

That night my father took care of things when he got home. Every one was up and upset. We were all talking at once. My mother was still shaky. Father never said a word. He just listened. Then he took off his railroad cap and set it on the table and hung up his jacket on the chair before going up the stairs.

My father thought the ghost must be up in the attic. So he pulled down the attic stairs and climbed up the ladder. When he got to the top, he started yelling at the ghost at the top of his lungs.

Father yelled, “Look! I don’t know who you are. But this is our house now. We live here. You are dead! Go away and leave me and my wife and our children alone! We need to get some sleep at night without your scaring everybody half-to-death!” Then he came back down. Everything was quiet for a long time after that.

My father sold the house in 1942 or ’43 and most of the family moved to South Portland with him to be closer to work at Rigby Railroad Yard. I think my mother was glad to be out of the house! But I am not sure if it was the end of the ghost.”

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