|
Joan and Michael Kelley press the palms of their hands against the
coarse brick surface of a wall. With their eyes squeezed tightly shut
and expressions of focused concentration on their faces, they talk
amoungst themselves in low murmurs.
In the darkness intermixed with the light of an open doorway, the
silhouettes of the pair wander throughout the cellar of a one-time
brewery, following traces and whispers of places and events that have
long ago vanished from both the world and memory; imperceptible traces.
That is, imperceptible traces to most.
 |
|
by Steve Stoner - The Metropolitan
|
| Psychic Michael Kelley passes a window in the
cellar of the Tivoli during a reading of spirits in the building
Oct. 18. |
Old copper pipes catch the gleam of the light through the doorway
as Joan Kelley, draped in a solid black dress, speaks up.
“All I’m getting is transient energy,” Joan said
as she removed the rings from her hands. “Something down here
makes my fingers swell up. So much hopelessness and despair was left
here I want to cry.”
Michael Kelley adds to his wife’s impression.
“A large group of men coughing and murmuring to each other
were here.”
According to the couple, the cellar housed the homeless and the transient
during the Great Depression.
This was but one of the many impressions they received in one of
the oldest landmark buildings in both the campus and the city.
Professional psychics Joan and Michael Kelley, accompanied by staff
from The Metropolitan, led a tour of the legendary hauntings surrounding
the Tivoli building on the Auraria campus Saturday afternoon, offering
an unusual perspective into the building’s long history.
Amid the Tivoli’s latest reconstruction project, the couple
strolled around the building’s three primary levels searching
for clairvoyantly received impressions often buried in a building.
The Tivoli has undergone a nearly unbroken chain of changes, from
a beer brewery to college administration offices, in its nearly 150
year history, a history often immersed in the failed hopes of various
owners.
“So many people needed it (The Tivoli) to be what it wasn’t.”
Michael said. Joan concurred, “There are a lot of hopes and
dreams that didn’t make it. Lots of tragedy surrounding the
owners.”
Often the couple will be asked to “read” a building with
only one haunting because of one owner or one tragedy, and the Tivoli
proved challenging because of the frequent changes in both the ownership
and the purpose of the building.
Despite the layers of change the Tivoli has gone through over the
years, the couple was drawn to the parts of the building where they
claim the most vivid and powerful aspects of the haunting occur.
“We can get a feel for the time of the haunting,” Michael
said. “Every building has its own personality. Every haunting
is different. Some can be in your face and some you have to stroll
through.”
Joan and Michael Kelley claimed to detect the presence of a longtime
subject of the folklore surrounding the Tivoli, a spirit inhabiting
the third floor, a spirit somewhat uncharacteristic of what is usually
expected of a haunting.
“I feel young energy,” Joan, who is also a psychology
major at Metro, said about a purported playful spirit of a twelve-year-old
girl, who reputedly haunts the Tivoli’s third floor. “She
can leave anytime she wants, but she likes it here. She likes to scare
people. She plays up here and is having a ball.”
The Tivoli’s Turnhalle also drew the couple with peculiar energy.
The one-time opera house has witnessed some of the seedier aspects
of stage entertainment with the performance of burlesque shows.
“(The energy) is vibratory, jittery,” Joan said as she
placed her hands on the wall. “I wonder if it had been a burlesque
hall. Real shady energy.”
Joan also claimed to pick up a presence behind her as she ascended
the stairs behind the stage of the Turnhalle.
“Who’s the woman following me?” Joan asked. “She
can’t even breathe here the air is so thin.”
According to Joan, the presence she felt was the spirit of a woman
who may have been a dancer in one the burlesque shows and who married
an older man who may have held a managerial position during the Tivoli’s
years as a brewery.
“She was an entertainer,” Joan said. “Her husband
was a manager and a very oppressive man who dominated her.”
With research done beforehand on the legends of the purported haunting
of the Tivoli, both Joan and Michael Kelley were “one hundred
percent” accurate with their findings. How did they reach their
conclusions? How do they claim to receive their impressions of people
and events undetected by the five senses?
“When we start to do this, we have to open (ourselves) to the
energy we have to track,” said Michael. “Energy is like
air, you breathe it in and out. You can become the receiver and transmitter
at the same time. You learn not to filter what comes in.”
“Sometimes, you pick up energy because it wants to be picked
up,” Joan said, continuing Michael’s thought. “(Energy)
is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. We’re so intimate
with it.”
Joan and Michael also believe that everyone has access to these abilities,
but through societal conditioning to use the more logical, fact-oriented
aspects of thought, the intuitive side, which can receive these impressions,
gets ignored. This happened to Joan.
“I knew I had an ability as a child,” Joan said. “You
put it away, though. I wanted to be normal as I got older, but when
you have a challenge in your life — it’s also called the
dark night of the soul — you go back because it’s familiar
and it can come back even stronger.
According to the couple, the dead come back to haunt the living for
a variety of reasons.
“Being alive is wonderful,” Michael said. “Most
people can’t get over the fact that they’re gone.”
Michael also said that the dead have more control over worldly affairs
than they did when they were alive.
“They’re trying to have a say-so in human affairs,”
Michael said. “They want to be a guiding voice in death that
they weren’t in life.”
Both Joan and Michael Kelley’s services are available by e-mailing
joankelley6@hotmail.com or fyredozer@bored.com.
|
