Michelle Belanger

which I absolutely choose to believe is real. I mean you've heard my conversations with Katrina Wideman and Jack Osborne, who also work on that show. I mean, come on, it's real. It's real. Anyway, what she does is just so cool. And so Michelle is also a demon and a cult expert as well. She wrote the Dictionary of Demons and tons and tons of books, and we talk a little bit about that in this conversation. But so what we decided to do this week is We're going

to do two parts of this conversation. This week's episode is going to be focused on Michelle's psychic abilities, and then next week we're gonna be talking about demons and it's booky. But I left the conversation feeling like, Okay, I don't feel like I need to be terrified of demons. I think I'm gonna listen to what Michelle has to say. But of course, like always, like always with this show, please just you know, make your own decisions on things.

But also it's it's great to hear from experts and to hear their insights, and that's sort of how my beliefs, you know. I keep my beliefs obviously open and they shift all the time. But it's just hearing these conversations with demonologists and psychics and experts and exorcists and all of these people. They definitely help me to have a very expansive idea of what could be possible. And I don't know, I just I personally hear someone like Michelle

talk and I go, yeah, that sounds about right. But also Michelle, as you'll hear in this conversation, is somebody that is also a paranormal investigator on top of having all of these different psychic abilities. So Michelle has that open minded investigator brain as well, which I really appreciate.

So before we get to that conversation, I thought I would read an email that came to me from a listener and that also reminds me I would love to do a listener episode very very soon, So please get me your listener episode submissions by emailing me at ghosted by Roz at gmail dot com with the subject line listener episode and hopefully we can work that out soon. This story came from Jordan, and Jordan is from my

hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Jordan writes, my best friend and I had a tradition dating back to college where we would drink cheap beer and watch bad movies every Thursday night. Our ironic alcohol of choice was forties of King Cobra. Dumb, but it's important, Okay. He passed away about ten years ago when he was hit by a car while walking home, and his death hit me really hard, as my wife, fiance at the time, and I were the last people he knew to see him alive. Ooh,

that's rough. Two weeks after he passed Thursday rolled around and I couldn't think of anything else to do but to pour one out for him. So I drove to my local party store, which was empty except for the clerk, and reached for our two dollars malt liquor of choice, which PS. I've had conversations with people before, and not short. I mean, I'm from the same neck of the woods as you, and we call it a party store there.

But a lot of a party store is like what you call a liquor store, basically essentially a liquor store or I don't know what do they call it where you live, let me know, okay, So went to the liquor store party store situation. When I picked it up, I saw that all the labels were completely different, and I felt a hand on my shoulder and heard my friend's voice in my ear clear as day, saying, I

just wanted to let you know that I'm okay. Of course, there was no one there when I turned around, and I promptly broke down crying in front of nobody but God and the proprietor of Kentwood Liquor. When I got back, still just beside myself with a combination of tears and be mused laughter. I told my wife, who replied, of course, that's how he'd come back and reassure you with a

loving eye roll. The story sounds silly to type, but it was definitely him saying goodbye, and it's good to know that silly, juvenile traditions can transcend even death itself. Rip Kyle, thank you for sending me that. I always love those kinds of stories of friends and loved ones coming back and still having that sense of humor. I mean that really keeps me gieing and not afraid of death like I once was. The more I hear stories like that of your sense of humor can still live on,

and I just think that's beautiful. So thank you. I know it sounds silly to type, but it's you're telling it to the right crowd of people we get to, So thank you for sending me that. Okay, here is the first part of this conversation with Michelle as we talk about the psychic stuff, and of course, like always, if you want a little bit more, go on over to patreon dot com slash rosdres Flees. There's also a link in the description of this episode and on my

second tier I have a couple of bonus clips. Now this is a proper two parter, okay, Michelle, and I will also give props to Michelle for this because it was so sweet. Michelle gave me an hour and forty minutes of her time. I mean, we really just kept going with this and it was just so great and it was I mean, we didn't cut anything out besides the Patreon clips. I mean, it was just NonStop. I

loved at all. And so if you want to go to Patreon, you can hear a couple more stories and a little bit more of Michelle's abilities and we talk about this being that she encountered in New Orleans, and we talk a little bit about Portals to Hell and some of the things that she does psychically on that show. And yeah, so check that out. And then of course next week there will also be another bonus clip when

we do our little Demon episode. And it always helps me out if you join Patreon, and I appreciate your support. So anyway, here we go, partner one with Michelle Belja on with the show. Oh my goodness, I am so excited. We have got Michelle Balane here. Hello, how are you?

Don't know if it will work this way for you, but here's what I learned. And I guess if there's one god. I'm terrible when people are like, well, what's one word we can put on your log line? I'm like a mystic teacher, right, professional weirdo.

things I like. And also great website, by the way, you have a very comprehensive website with so many things about you that that's why I'm like, you're one of these people that's like both really easy to like interview, but also there's just so much to talk about.

had experiences. I would say that it was an environment where we weren't encouraged to just swallow the beliefs without thinking about them. My grandmother, her older sister, and her younger brother were the ones who mainly raised me. My grandmother's older sister was a social worker who had been

working to become a psychiatrist. So I got a lot of early exposure to psychology and the idea of like psychosomatism and how our perceptions can be misinterpreted as a good counterbalance to the sort of Irish American lore about the second sight, and you know, family abilities that I got from my grandmother and such. And on top of that, like I was just an early reader, and you know, everybody has a different way they interface with learning, and for me, it's a book first, Like I want to

read it in a book. I want to read every single book on that topic, take a whole bunch of notes, and then sit with it and go But what do I think? Hmm? And I think that comes out with a lot of my psychic stuff because I'm not only an experiencer. I'm also I let myself dive into the experience in the moment, and then I step back and get as much objectivity as it is possible to have over your own experiences and analyze it.

were for doing stuff, he was all for it. Because for me, as much as it's you know, yay, I'm on TV and this is cool, it's I get to go someplace that I've probably never heard of before, and we make every effort to make sure that it's someplace I haven't heard of before and just sort of get dumped in and see what comes and then have these other awesome people around me who can do the research to see if I'm talking out on my butt or

if there's really something that I've done. So it's kind of like this long, extended I won't call it a laboratory experiment because there's no way to have laboratory protocols, but it's as close to a personal experiment as I can really delve into.

Is this me like seeing a little boy who's the blonde hair because I just saw a photo that looked like that, you know, five rooms away. When we had the option of the blindfold, it opened so much up because I just I stopped second guessing and I just

spewed out whatever I picked up. And when I saw that particular episode, one of the ones where that happened, Like there's a point where like Ryan has me standing in front of something and I'm describing what I'm saying in front of and I think at some point, like the folks who had had that like assumed that the blindfold wasn't real, but it was the sleep mask that I used, and trust me, like that was meant to like block out all light and all everything because I'm

a light sleeper and I just I liked it so much that I kept it and it's been a fantastic addition to my practice with portals. I'm really lucky that Katrina knew like why I used that so much, and Jack was like sure, So, like they blindfolded me from the time, like they stick me up in some hotel and then they blindfold me as they picked me up.

They filmed that whole process. You know, somewhere there's video of me talking about like getting blindfolded and what feels like in the car, and you know, all that stuff. And on a few occasions, in the most recent one, like I've had images that were clear enough that I needed to draw them, and they are so respectful of those boundaries that, for I think it was the Paulding

jail one, they moved me into this van. They parked it in a blind alley, so like if even if I looked around the van, all I had were bricks around me, so there was no chance so I could kind of peek it up a little bit and actually draw and not look like I was, you know, drawing stick figures literally blindfolded, because nobody needed to see that. It was bad enough as it was.

But the vast majority of folks do, and they I actually believe that they are so natural to us, not even paranormal or weird, that we don't realize when they're influencing us when we make decisions based on them. Like we talk in language about having a gut instinct, we talk about like just sort of following a feeling, we

talk about intuition. Sometimes we meet people and we have an immediate reaction to them, and if we stop to deconstruct where that comes from, there's, in my opinion, always some aspect that isn't going to simply come down to. They reminded me of someone I didn't like before their

body language was different. Like there's our perceptions are all of a piece, both the psychological cues we get from the world around us, the physical cues, the things from our five physical senses, and then this sort of constant running dialogue of something else you can't always put your finger on, but you are definitely picking up on and reacting to.

maybe there's no doubt we are these magical creatures. But if we like, is there any truth to the fact that people you know on that aren't cis gender or hetero or have these abilities, I.

And at the same time, I also think that those of us who had to take the time to really ask ourselves, who am I, regardless of what the world says, how do I feel? How do I experience things? How do I listen and accept that that opens us up to all of the possibilities inside of who we are. We have learned to listen to something even if the world has told us that's not possible or that's not

our right. And I think for many of us that extends to all of the other rich, fantastic and magical things that we are.

your mind open to any possibility, both supernatural or or not. No, totally or is that dangerous?

paranormal and supernatural just just unusual things. But when we put them in little labeled boxes and assume that those boxes are anything other than the arbitrary walls that we've built to just make it easier at first, we lose the richness. And hellure is an interesting thing because they really kind of they've started to dig into you know,

it's not just ghosts. What if there's a correlation between ghost experiences in a place but also UFO experiences in a place, and also you know reports of like ferries or changelings are goblins, So let's let's investigate all of it and see what people are talking about, like what's behind the reports and the language.

What happens when we really exist in a truly global worldview and everybody has a place and everybody has a voice and they can express that how they wish.

kind of abilities do you have. I feel like that's a condescending question.

identify is the energy of people. This is also how my identity as a psychic is kind of you can't pull it apart from my identity as a psychic vampire. There's the energy that people have, and I pick up the energy of the living first, their vitality, their emotions, snippets of thoughts, what they leave behind in rooms where they've been, what they leave on items that were important to them. And my extension and spirits are also energy,

and so that's another layer that I pick up. But I definitely not all the time, but also experienced things in dreams and dream work. Have had a few kind of startling dreams that foretold something that happened in the future, some of which were just completely mundane, and a couple of which were really unnerving and startling. Probably the biggest one, and it was a lesson learned, was when I was in seventh grade, I had a dream about the Space

Shuttle launch going horribly awry the next day. And there were some very specific things. There was the class period that it happened in, There were there was a bunch of stuff about it. So suffice to say that seventh grade me was sitting there about, you know, crapping myself when the news came over the thing, because I'm like, I dreamed that, like, and anybody who has even one or two visions of the future has this moment of like could I have done something? Should I have done something? Like?

Was I given this for a reason? Should I have changed the course of history? Like what? Even? And I went home and I talked to my grandmother about it, and bless her heart, but like the first thing she

said was anybody can be psychic after the fact. And while that was a little harsh in the moment as we talked about it, it was what I learned was if that happens again, write it down before the thing you've foreseen happens one so you are better able to recognize that this is actually something for telling the future as opposed to just a random dream or you know,

a stress dream or whatever. But also so you've got a record realistically, She's like, you're in seventh grade, who would like if you called up NASA, Like like, really, that wasn't going to change anything, like maybe, yeah, maybe you got this just a bear witness to it, like just except that sometimes these things happen.

on the professor? Like I don't always know the answer.

enough to be on the heart lung machine they had available at the time. So there was a lot of dodgy stuff going on when I was little, which also meant that there were a lot of conversations when I was tiny about life and death, what comes after, and like really adult conversations. I had a lot of fairly traumatic experiences, and you know, my mother confirmed that there were a couple of you know, legitimate like which time that you died on the operating table deer, just very

casually because that was just a thing. So there's that argument that psychic abilities are enhanced by near death experiences. Personally, I think I kind of came out of the box with these abilities. But I also think that those experiences as a tiny child really helped, I don't know, make it more accessible, make it easier to talk about, make

me less fearful of any kind of repercussions. I mean, when you're facing down death at three or four and your family's like legitimately talking to you about that, there's not many things that are going to scare you after that.

She got talking to the librarian. There's like all these places where I wasn't supposed to go, and construction tape and whatnot. So I was the kid who as soon as Mom turned her back, I went exactly where I wasn't supposed to go, which which led me upstairs to a room that was disappointingly empty of anything beyond like painting supplies and whatnot. Except there was a woman who

was standing at the window. And the thing is is, at that time I saw her and parsed her as if she were a real flesh and blood, living person. I saw the buttons all up and down the back of her dress, the weird sort of poofy shoulder bits on her sleeves, and the way that they went down really tight on her fore arms, and all the little buttons there and that, like the tiny little blue flowers that were like like almost look hand embroidered on this dress and her hair.

here's some adult in here. And I called back to Mom to let her know them I'm coming. You know that flush of guilt that you have because you got caught. And in the time that I turned my head away and turned back, she wasn't in the room anymore, and I was standing in the only door that went in and out. So of course, four year old live told me that she found a hiding place because she wasn't supposed to be up there either. But it made an

impression on me. I remember the encounter. I talked about it a little bit, you know, didn't get any pushback, but it was it was years later that I found The person I saw was someone who was described by multiple people, and her name was Rebecca. She had lived in the house with her brother. He had been like the school teacher in the early eighteen hundreds. She had died like an old maid at thirty eight or something

like at thirty It might be twenty eight. I mean, it was like a ridiculous number where it's like seriously, guys. But she was known for her needle point which I saw her dress as white with blue flowers. Most people reported her as the Lady in Blue, and I really kind of hold to the fact that she showed up in that dress so intently because she had hands own that Like, this is totally my own head canon about it, but I think that was a factor for why she

showed up so intently. But what I will say is, as I got older, and not because anybody told me I wasn't allowed to see ghosts, but I think just as I learned better to navigate the perceptions these days, it's more that I'm seeing something with my mind's eye. I am an incredibly visual person and so it's usually quite vivid, but it's not as if I see them physically standing in the room. Every once in a while, I do, and I'll be honest, it throws me because I don't expect it.

for experience and perception. I think as kids start to go to school, start to socialize, start to i don't know, get a better handle just on a physiological level and also like a personal psychological level of how they interface with the world, they start to kind of narrow their focus again, just because that's part of surviving in this life, Like you start to rule out the stuff that nobody else is talking about that doesn't seem to be the

focus of what you're learning about. Sure, and certainly there there's families and school systems and situations where people start to be like actually suppressed, Like if they continue to talk about it, oh, you know, that's just your imagine cerinary friend, that's you know, all in your head. But I think there is an aspect. That's simply how we develop and settle into living this this thing called life. Like we we don't need to in most cases perceive

the spirits and the other things around us. We do need to worry about the car that's on the road that we're crossing. We do need to worry about how we do our ABC's and you know, how to interface with the other living kids around us. And that's hard enough, Like that takes up so much space in our brains.

going on. And there was a point where I opened a door and there was someone who from the crew who had like hidden in there because they like were at the last minute, so like it was like kind of an unintended jump scare for the both of us.

So what I thought was going on in this house in Maryland was I caught a guy, uh walking into this room and then ducking into what I assumed was a closet, and I just like my eyes darted that way and I kind of went, oh, I'm not going to pay attention to that because that looks like a crew member and that's probably got nothing to do with this haunting. Ryan caught the look and like knew enough about my body lane, which at that point he's like,

what what what caught your attention in that room? I'm like, uh, And I didn't want to say pretty sure it's a crew member Ryan, like right on camera, but he finally like pulled it out of me, and I'm like, I saw a person wearing this and this and this and they walked into that room, and I'm pretty sure it's somebody on the crew and he's like, are you sure. So we go into the room and uh, what I thought was a bathroom that this person ducked into was a blank wall.

a wall. And no, you like, like I I think about it now, and I'm like that that was a person, like like I saw that as a person, Like there was no sense there was there was no point at which if I had just casually had that experience on anything other than a paranormal show, wouldn't have thought anything of it.

and find things. Can you do that, like if you lose keys or something like that, if you're trying to find something.

their murdered family member. Like it's actually gutting how many people have reached out with specifically that, like, like, there shouldn't be this many people with this problem, and yet they are. And I have to always explain like how my abilities work, like you see the ghost aspect of the medium aspect on TV. But that's actually kind of If I have a list of like ten things I do,

that's probably number four or five. And for me, the loudest thing is always how a person feels, you know, we toss out the word mpath a lot, and and mpath is definitely a part of my ability cluster. So when a person reaches out to me and is like, and they have all of these feelings and all these expectations and they really want to end in heaven, they have like a whole bunch of ideas of what it really is, I pick all that up first, and it's so hard to pick anything else past that, Like, it's

really hard. It's like it's broken my objectivity. Yeah, and I don't feel confident and I the rules that I set for myself, especially if it's something that is that important to someone. And I know finding keys is not really that important, but in the moment sometimes it is. We're like you, once your emotions get involved, it's really hard to pick past all of that for me.

not psychic ones. What you really want your homicide detectives or other detectives to do is to come up with demonstrable, provable facts, and if there is any application for a psychic in that, they might be able to point someone

toward where actual evidence can be found. But in the end it has to it must come down to hard police work to find physical evidence that can then go through the legal system, because the last thing anybody ever wants, the last thing we ever ever need, is for someone like me to be able to go, Oh, that person over there is a murderer, you should go investigate them.

And I say it like that because we sat in on a supposed psychic who swore up and down in her presentation that she worked with the police all the time and would just pick murderers out off the street and have them arrested, which if you just apply a little bit of logic to how the world works, that

it does not work that way. Like the guy I was sitting next to happened to also be a police officer, and he had to leave because he could not control Like he just he almost started just yelling at her from behind, because it's just that's how it works, and

nobody would want it to work that way. When I've been asked to do psychic stuff in connection to these investigations I have, it has been after the investigation has been solved, all of the details of like murder or whatever have been handled, and there's just a couple of things that they would hope for, and they're totally like grasping at straws for to give the family some sense of closure. Ah Okay, at least that's been my experience.

pretend I don't have a background in psychology. Uh, with some of my college stuff and all of that said, Uh, I'd say my big achilles heel is if I'm way too emotionally entangled or invested. And I think any of us who've had a couple of bad axes like have had this experienced. If you're just if you're too close, you just don't see it. It doesn't matter. Yeah, how psychic, how perceptive, how much of a sherlock you are for everybody else, if you're too close, it's really hard to see.

want to miss That will be next week. And if you want to hear a little bit more, go to patreon dot com slash Roz dress Faless and you can hear a couple more clips from this section of our conversation. As always, please send me your listener stories to ghosted by Roz at gmail dot com with the subject line

listener episode and send them to me quick. Also, please join the Facebook group another great place to leave a ghost story that is ghosted by Roz dress Faless on Facebook and it's a private group and please join that. I'm on Instagram at Roz Hernandez venmo Queen Roz what am I missing? Oh? Five star review? Please please give the show a five star review on Apple Podcasts and if you have something nice to say, you could leave a review there with your rating and you could also

leave a ghost story there if you'd like. I love you all, both living and dead. But if I didn't ask you to haunt me, don't haunt me.