This story begins many years ago in a town known as Lily Dale.
Lily Dale is a spiritual enclave nestled alongside Cassadaga Lake in Western New York, originally started in the 1800s. As they were creating this community of like minded individuals, a hotel was built from a horse barn in the center of town. This hotel was originally known as the Grand Hotel, and now goes by the name of the Maplewood Hotel.
The Maplewood Hotel was created by raising the horse barn and adding new floors with hotel rooms underneath. Therefore, what was once at ground level was now suspended many feet up.
For a horse, I could see how that might be an issue. Even if that horse was in spirit form.
We arrived at Lily Dale on a Sunday morning, greeted by their wonderful gate staff, and checked into the Maplewood. The next day and a half were filled with meeting new people, seeing mediums exercise their talents and gifts, browsing the shops, and absorbing the energy that is so prevalent at this location.
Monday afternoon, Patty, Orion and myself attended a workshop at Assembly Hall. We were so inspired by the talk, that Patty started looking around for different energies. She noticed that there were a number of spirits in the hall – and one particular spirit by the podium caught her interest. We both centered on it, and found that it was some sort of animal moving in circles, and probably unnoticed by only some of those in attendance. After the workshop had concluded, I casually mentioned this discovery to a corporeal – a nice man whom I believe worked at Lily Dale. I said to him, “There is some sort of large cat up there, circling,” while pointing to the podium area.
He said, “That’s Bob the Cat.”
“Bob the Cat? A Bobcat?”
“Yes,” he responded.
He then casually mentioned something about horses on the third floor of the Maplewood, and added no one has been able to move them on – they would just keep coming back.
My first thought was this – how could anyone in the hotel ever sleep with horses galloping above at all hours of the night? Quickly realizing how silly that was, I then came to my senses and thought, how can we move them on?
By this time, Patty and Orion had left the Assembly Hall, and did not hear the conversation I had with the corporeal.
I rushed outside, and my mind, soul and other various parts had already determined that this would be something we really should try to do, as I did not like the idea that these horse’s spirits had not returned to what I would call their true home. By the time I made it outside, the plan was already formulated in my head – make contact with the horses, find out where the light would be to pass them through, and move them through it.
One problem – I don’t know how to speak horse.
Enter Patty. As Patty has eight horses, including one in spirit, she communicates with them exceptionally well. Naturally, I thought this might actually be easy.
Or, maybe not quite that easy.
We had dinner offsite, returned and started to implement our plan. We went up to the third floor, and Patty called for the horses. She created the essence of a carrot to use as bait. They arrived within moments, and both Patty and I confirmed their presence. So far, so good.
We then asked our guides, Posin and Little Fawn, where the light would be. Patty already had an idea where it would be; naturally I had no clue. I drew a map – our guides then showed us where on the map as I pointed to different areas. Of course, it was almost exactly where Patty had said it would be – right by the emergency exit. She was just one floor off as we happened to be on the second floor when we asked.
In my experience, the light usually shows up fairly quickly, but not so in this case. We kept checking with our guides and were repeatedly told it wasn’t ready yet. I didn’t understand why, and then it hit me.
Horses are large.
After about 10 minutes or so, we were told it was finally ready, and went back up to the third floor to verify. We both could feel the energy from the back door, and were ready to start.
And once again, I was clueless.
Thankfully, Patty knew exactly what to do and began calling them. First she tried with an essence of feed, but the horses weren’t buying that. She had to reformulate the plan and use some energetic carrots instead. That worked nicely and the first one went through almost immediately.
The second one was a different story. And so my next lesson about horses commenced – they can be incredibly stubborn. As horses are herd animals and we certainly couldn’t leave just one of their spirits remaining on the floor, we knew we had to try for as long as we could.
As Patty kept talking to her and trying to coax her through, she would repeatedly approach the light and back off. This went on for around 20 minutes. Finally, Patty asked me to try and nudge her a bit from behind. As I nudged her, I had to suppress the mostly ridiculous thought that I would get kicked. She moved closer to the light, and then seemed to back up nervously. During this time, Patty was able to determine that the two horses were sisters. They were also draft horse style and appeared to be half lingers. Patty was feeling that this second horse wanted to see the little girl who used to spend time with her, and kept hearing the name Nikki.
For me, I was not used to detecting horse spirits – these were the first – so much that I was having difficulties determining the remaining horse’s location, and at this point I wasn’t sure if she had gone through toward the end of the soul rescuing. It took a few minutes, but I regained my bearings without being stepped on.
It was just a few minutes later that she finally went through, and we both confirmed that their spirit energies were gone. It felt good for both of us.
As we were heading back to our rooms, Patty’s eye caught something on the wall – it was a painting of horses, tilling fields – of the same breed.
