A Wiccan's Thoughts on Death and the Spirits of Loved Ones

As I drove home from work last night (only a 15 minute drive), I came to think of those people I have lost in my life. Two friends to suicide, one acquaintance to a still unsolved murder, a friend's two-year-old daughter who was beaten to death, and those family members who have passed of old age. As I thought about them, I felt warm inside. I also did not feel alone in the van.

As a Wiccan, I do not believe in Heaven or Hell, nor God or Satan. I believe that at death, our souls do not merely disappear, but are free to wander the Earth until they become forgotten. As long as someone is thinking of them, remembering them, they continue to exist off that power. Now, I do not claim at all that this is the definite way or belief, just what I believe myself.

I have experienced too many personal accounts of "things" happening to not believe in spirits, otherwise known as ghosts. I'm not talking of the negative energies or evil spirits who haunt houses. I'm talking of our loved ones, who choose to stay near us, long after their physical bodies have been buried deep under the cemetery grass.

I have been "visited" by spirits whom I never personally met or knew, yet talked to on a Ouija board. At the age of sixteen, when I first used a Ouija board with a friend, I met a little six-year-old boy named Ox, who claimed to have died in the early 1900s from small pox. His mischievous nature and personality came through on the board and, I fell so in awe with this youngster, I asked him to stay with me for a bit, if he wanted.