Clairalience

 I mentioned Clairalience in my last post as one of the multiple 'Clair-' abilities.  The others being Clairvoyant - seeing the unseen, Clairaudient - hearing the unheard, Clairsentience - feeling, either the emotions or physical pain of an entity, Clairgustance - tasting something that isn't actually there (I've never experienced this myself but my sister has.  More on that later), Claircognizance - knowing something we, by all rights, should not be able to know.  This one I've also had occurrences multiple times in my life that I'll go into another time.  And as the title mentioned, Clairalience - the ability to smell something which isn't there.  And that's what I'll primarily be focusing on during this post.  

The floral fragrance that I experienced with dad at Chaucer was the first time I can vividly recall that happening to me.  That's not to say it didn't happen earlier in life at other times.  Just that this specific time is my first time recalling it happening and recognizing it in that moment.  And it's happened a number of times since and I wanted to share a few of them here as they all seem to be directly tied to what may be on the other side of the veil.  

The most significant time I experienced Clairalience was in the days shortly after dad passed away.  This would have been back in 2012, in the week after his demise, I was working on putting myself into a blackout drunken stupor at the time.  I have to be honest, even though we had known this was going to be the eventual outcome for dad, even though we spent months preparing ourselves for the inevitable, when the time finally did come, I honestly wasn't ready for it.  And in those days, weeks and months that followed, I spent a LOT of time doing what I could to numb the pain.  
And so it was in this state of mind that I was several bottles deep into my nightly routine of blubbering on the couch and/or living room floor watching tv, tears would go from simple trickles down my cheek to full-on, body shuddering heaves that left me physically tired.  It was a Wednesday night, I was on the floor, between the TV stand and ottoman, bottle of Dos Equis almost gone and it hit me.  
Dad had this very distinct body odor.  I still can't forget it to this day.  It wasn't the Speedstick deodorant that he always used, it wasn't the Tres Flores brilliantine that he used in his hair, no, dad's body odor was very acidic, very similar to olive oil to me.  Not exactly but along those lines.  And that's the scent I caught in my living room that night.  It lingered, too.  Not like the flowers at Chaucer that was there and gone.  Dad's scent stayed with me a little longer than that.  Enough that once I caught the aroma, I breathed it in again.  A proper lung full.  By the time I exhaled and tried to catch it again, it was quickly becoming as faint as the flowers.  Gone.  I can only assume it was dad stopping by to visit me that night.  You know, he never came to visit me in that apartment while I was living there.  I lived there almost 3 years before he passed.  But he just wasn't driving anymore and climbing a full flight of stairs in his declining health just wasn't going to be happening.  But I have no doubt he came to visit me that night.  Whether it was just to check up on me, let me know he was finally better off or even if it was his way to say goodbye, I don't know.  
I think in that week between his passing and his life celebration, he was making the rounds visiting us kids and grandkids.  My sister-in-law told me that her youngest, who was 6 at the time woke up with a bolt in the middle of one night that week and just sat up and said, "Grandpa!" The other wonder twin, my sister's oldest, would dream of dad in the coming weeks and after as well.  Which made sense because he was one of the grandkids who spent the most time with him before dad went into the hospital.  I never asked any of the other kids if they were visited by dad but it's also been 10 years so I don't know if they'd remember after so long since they were all so young when he passed.  

The most recent experiences with Clairalience that I've encountered have been less personal and actually very recent.  As in, within the past year since I've started going on paranormal investigations and ghost walks locally.  The first time was at the Alexandria Ballrooms tour I went on with Haunted by History Author, Craig Owens.  The Alexandria Hotel is pretty much bordering skid row, just a short walk from the notorious Cecil Hotel in DTLA.  The Alexandria was THE place to see and be seen in a town before Hollywood was truly born.  While we were visiting the ballrooms and getting as much historical information from Craig, he took us to the staircase where he's mentioned guests of the hotel and film crews have seen apparitions walking up and down the stairs at random moments throughout the hotel's history.  And it was in this stairwell that I was struck by the smell, very distinct smell of cigarette smoke.  To me it literally smelled like someone had just been walking the stairs and was smoking along the way.  Which, not only was there nobody in the group smoking, the building itself is a non-smoking facility.  There's no way someone could have snuck into that stairwell to light up without having been seen by multiple people, much less dissipate any cloud of smoke for it to smell like it did.  

The next tour I went on where I caught the smell of something was with Haunted Orange County at the Kellogg House in Santa Ana.  Not to be confused with the Kellogg House in Pomona.  Hiram Kellogg of Santa Ana was a surveyor and engineer, not related the breakfast food magnate who owned the Pomona property.  It was at the end of the tour, we were all leaving the house and thanking Helen for letting us visit the home and I was stepping out the front door to the porch when I suddenly caught the aroma of smoke.  It was either a cigar or pipe smoke.  Much more aromatic than cigarette smoke, heavier, bolder.  And again, nobody around to be creating that.  In fact, I'm quite certain the entire property is non-smoking.  I mean, 100 year old wooden homes, you better believe they're not going to allow anyone to light anything on the porch.  And yet, there it was.  Very clearly, very distinct smell of smoke lingering outside the front door.  I should have asked our docent if Hiram was a smoker but the whole thing didn't really register with me and what it was until I was already in my car pulling out of the parking lot.  

Lastly and most recently a scent that hit me out of the ether was at an investigation with Craig Owens' group at the Warner Grand Theater in San Pedro.  I had been on a previous investigation at theater and while there were a handful of other activities to occur before, that second investigation seemed to yield much more EVPs than the first trip.  But the clairalience I experienced was during a quiet moment for me in the upstairs lobby.  The other investigators/guests were either upstairs in the projection booth, downstairs in the restroom lobby or under the stage.  I was sitting between the restroom doors, camera gear down, still recording everything just in case and I was suddenly hit by the scent of shoe polish.  Very unusual since I wasn't wearing dress shoes and there was no one else nearby.  I could only assume that at some point in the theater's 90-year history, there may have been a shoeshine stand right about where I was sitting.  Logically it makes sense as it's a theater and people used to dress up for a night out on the town.  The fact that San Pedro is also a port, so Seamen would likely have stopped by the theater on leave, shoeshines would have been a common thing.  I just need to find out if there was a shine stand upstairs, if at all.   

And to just wrap this up on the Clair- senses, I mentioned my sister experienced Clairgustance at least once before.  And that was during her quinceañera.  During the church service as she was receiving communion, the priest gave her the Eucharist, just a small wafer of bread, and she said as she was eating it, that it felt and tasted like meat.  "This is my body."

Chaucer

 For the entire time I lived there, I always referred to the house as Chaucer.  Considering Geoffrey Chaucer's most famous works are the Canterbury Tales, it made perfect sense to me.  Although it's unlikely others would have clued in to things like that.  But while The Garage and Mountain Top were active residences for me and the Cul-de-Sac wasn't, Chaucer seemed to be a quietly active place from even before we moved in.  

My brother bought the house as a fixer-upper and boy, did it ever need the fixing up.  Several of the power outlets were bare wire, open boxes.  Some live, some not.  There may have been a foundation crack as there was a crack running most of the driveway into the garage and you could feel an uneven floor in the kitchen despite the tile that was laid over it.  The roof leaked, as did the bathroom, the bathroom being renovated after we had moved in.  I'll tell you, taking a shower in late winter with a partially missing bathroom wall makes for QUICK showers to get the hell back into the warmer house.  There were chain-link fences between us and the neighbors with both our left and right not even having the privacy slats in the fencing.  You could see everything our neighbors were doing, even when that meant the neighbors to our right were sunbathing or running naked from the kitchen door to their garage because she was doing laundry and literally had nothing clean to wear, or the neighbors to our left who would dig a hole in the backyard and dump their motor oil after changing it.  These were the same neighbors where their son's friend just decided to smash dad's back window out of the minivan just because he felt like it.  Oh, the shitstorm their dad gave that kid when he found out what had happened. 
But despite all of that, we actually turned that house into a home for the time we lived there.  

But it was even before we moved in that I took first notice of unexplained activity.  And it started with my bedroom.  We knew for a while when we were going to move from the rental to our new place so unlike previous moves, we had plenty of time to prep the house and start transitioning over from one to the other.  So I took advantage of this time to set up my bedroom before the move and make better use of the space.  I installed one of those wire closet organizers.  That helped a lot since I was scaling down to a smaller bedroom and smaller closet.  Maximize the use of space.  And I also bought a simple bookcase from Target.  You know the kind, the cheap particle board with the woodgrain decal in your choice of 'woodgrain' brown or dark brown/black.  I went with the 'woodgrain' and went into the house about a week before the big move to get those all set up.  It was just me in the place, all by my lonesome and listening to some music while I worked.  Didn't think anything about the random noises I heard in the other rooms since I just figured it was the house settling and since there wasn't anything else in the building, nothing to mute the echoing sounds.  No biggy.  
After I finished the bookcase, I went ahead and started to fill it with my books that I had mentioned previously.  The spiritual reading, shamanism and books on the occult.  Mind you, this point in my life I was also EXTREMELY anal retentive about my organization.  While I didn't always organize everything alphabetically...  well, I DID do that with my VHS collection.  Gah, late 90s of course I owned a small library of say, 50 VHS movies on an organizer.  But I didn't bring that over/set it up, just the bookcase and books.  But the books (and movies), I would always organize so they faced the same direction.  In that, you can read them Left to right, top to bottom.  Everything 'faced' the same direction so the book's spines, you could read at a glance.  

I finished up, locked up the house and left.  I wouldn't be back until the Big Move.  In fact, nobody was back in the house until the Big Move Day.  There were only 3 keys and I had one, my brother and our dad accounted for all 3.  Nobody was in the house from the time I finished working there until I moved the mattress into my bedroom a week later.  And it was as soon as I dropped the mattress on the floor and stopped for a few seconds to catch my breath that I noticed something was amiss.  From that laying position, I looked over at the bookcase and two of the books were facing the opposite direction.  Upside down for lack of a better word.  I know I would never have put them there like that and like I said, no one had been in the house since I was there last.  Who could have touched them much less moved them and then put them back exactly where I left them but facing the wrong way?  The books? 
A Dictionary of Angels and Demons
The Encyclopedia of the Supernatural  

Having lived with the entities in The Garage and then Fred and Wilma at the Mountain Top, I honestly didn't think much of this latest in a lifetime of unexplainable and genuinely didn't think about it again until hours later when I asked dad if he had been to the house since I was last there.  Of course he hadn't.  And of course my brother hadn't.  Yet, there it was.  And it was truly only the first of many small, very subtle activity in that house.  The next significant event didn't take place until a few years later and it was when it was just dad and I.  

My sister had a medical procedure done in Tijuana, because stateside doctors can often never find anything wrong or their process takes too long that people often opt for medical care outside of the country.  Medical "vacations" are a thing if you weren't aware.  Anyway, my sister was at a hospital in TJ and mom was there by her side as always.  So back at home it was dad and I.  He was laying on his bed, doors open leading to the living room and I was in the living room, facing the TV, my back to him.  He made a rustling noise like he was sitting up so I looked back at him and in that instant, he asked me, "Did you smell that?!"  
"No, what?"  
At this point, dad had already had surgery to remove his lower intestine, ulcerative colitis, so he had an ostomy appliance attached to his hip.  I mention this because some of you might be thinking dad farted and as a joke wanted me to breathe it in.  He couldn't pass gas that way anymore so no.  I didn't smell anything.  
He took a few seconds to compose himself and said, 
"I just smelled flowers.  The most incredible smelling flowers like someone had just walked past me with a bundle of them." 
"No, I didn't smell anything." and part of me was wondering how that could be.  After a couple of minutes of just sitting there facing one another hoping to smell it, me for the first time, him a second time, we both just went back to watching our separate TVs.  Him laying back down, me turning back to the living room.  Then it hit me.  

To this day, I can't fully describe properly what it was I caught the aroma of.  It was distinctly floral, almost like a rose.  But even a rose didn't smell as sweet.  It swept past me and I caught a whiff of it, just enough to register and then when I went back to breathe it in deeper, it was gone.  I swiped my head back and forth, leaning forward, stretching my neck out further and further to catch that aroma once again but it was gone.  I looked back at my dad who was sitting up on his bed again and he just smiled at me and said, 
"There it was again."  

I'm sure if you're even passingly familiar with the unexplained, the term Clairvoyant or even Clairaudient should sound familiar.  The ability to "see" or "hear" that which isn't there.  Mediums OFTEN claim to be Clairvoyant, even when they're not.  But I so rarely ever hear about the other Clair- abilities.  And I had never even heard of the term; Clairalience.  The ability to smell something which isn't there.  Yet, that seems to be what I've experienced.  In fact, both my dad and I experienced the same thing at the same time.  And if that doesn't do it for you, I'll do you one better.  We weren't the only two to smell those flowers at the time.  

Down in that Tijuana hospital as my sister was recovering from her surgery, and mind you, MANY of the hospitals in Mexico are run by churches.  And this one was no different, with the nurses actually being nuns associated with the church.  But in that hospital bed, my sister with mom sitting at her side, she asked mom what kind of incense the nuns were lighting in the hospital.  
"They don't burn incense here, it's a hospital."  

Cul-de-sac

It's taken me a few days to finally getting around to talking about this house for a few reasons. The first being that it wasn't 'our' house. Dad lost the previous house due to bankruptcy and we quickly needed a new place to live. So we found a rental in a cul-de-sac, the price was manageable and it was just big enough for the family. This was also around the time I started reading up more and more about what existed beyond our understanding of the world. Yes, I believed and saw with my own eyes unexplainable events but at this point in my life I started reading up more and more about angels and demons and got in touch with my spiritually. Sure, I bought a paperback about witches and spells when I came across the New Age section at B. Dalton years earlier when I was still in high school but I was well into working at the college at this point. However, once mom found that book back then, all hell broke loose and one of my aunts took it to do, I don't know what she planned on doing with it. She later told me she had put it in a closet in her home and her girls would "see" someone/some thing in the closet because of the book. I'm pretty sure I rolled my eyes at that statement back then and I'm rolling my eyes again just writing this out. 

Anyway, I started practicing shamanism and deep meditation techniques by the time we had moved in so I must have either blocked out what was going on at that house or it was leaving me alone for some reason. But that's not too say things weren't occurring there. Just that I wasn't experiencing it personally. So these are going to be second- and third-hand accounts. 

While I never sensed anything, my sister told me once we had moved out years later, that she never felt comfortable going into my bedroom for any reason. That in the back of her mind, she kept feeling/sensing that, "it's Louie's room, we can't go in there." Which I found so odd she felt that way since I hadn't been doing anything other than meditating in there. 

But it was my sister in her bedroom that she mentioned a sense of unease at times. She even stated that a few times she would wake up in the middle of the night and see a figure squatting in the corner of her room, only the moonlight coming through the window giving any sense of what she was looking at. Or that she once woke up to a woman standing over her bed looking down at her. 

While living at this house, my sister and the guy she would eventually marry started dating and a few times he'd sleep out in the living room and he said he never felt comfortable sleeping out there, that there was something or someone watching him while he slept. 

Other family members have mentioned an unsettling feeling at that house while we lived there. 

We were told at some point through my sister and brother's friends that the rental house was once known as the "party house" among their friends of friends. Which may be a reason why some of these things were happening. But considering the dark nature of what everyone else was feeling, it never bothered me, much less get my attention like what had happened at our former residences. Or what was to come at our next home.