Marilyn Moody Goodes

“From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties, and things that go ‘Bump!’ in the night…Good Lord, deliver us.”

Except, perhaps, when a writer is on deadline for a Halloween column. Then, a little haunting is welcomed. (Do tell!)

Even more so has Marilyn Moody Goodes welcomed “energies [she] cannot explain.” Experiences, she’s had a few — right in our Valley.

She’s a Curves Salem trainer, nutritional health coach and Pilates instructor with Lifestream Center. Recently in her matter-of-fact way she told of strange happenings (she seems to find bad diets scarier).

She added details via email: The Roanoke County native lived for 25 years in the wonderful woods of Wabun. Her family had lived in their newly built home for a few months in 2001 when her nine-year-old daughter began asking if Marilyn could see “full-figured auras of purple and blue standing beside her or passing her on the stairs.” She could not.

About a decade later a friend checking on their pets while the family was away found “a room full of orbs, greeting him like a crowd with happy applause.” He photographed one of the “large orbs following him along the windows.”

In the photo she could see “a thick gray fog interrupting the view of my granny’s 100-year-old lamp in the kitchen. Over the years there, I had seen slow-moving fogs of what appeared to be the corner of a lace skirt from the knee down, usually caught in my peripheral vision, but not always.”

She’s also felt a “forced breath” on her arms during difficult times and hoped “that this might have been a close relative who wished to comfort me. Now when I visit the house, I do not feel any presence of any kind, as if it were abandoned by spirits.”

Moving from her marital residence in 2010, she rented a Grandin-area home from a friend whose elderly parents had died there about 18 months earlier. Immediately Marilyn put their picture on the mantel, so she could think of them and thank them for her friend’s generosity.

“I always felt a pure and good vibration throughout the house and was never scared to be living alone for the first time in my life,” she wrote. But one day in her peripheral vision she saw something “coming around the corner from the kitchen. As I looked closer, it appeared to be two sets of feet, one closely behind the other as if the one in the back had their hands on the shoulders of the one in front. I could see the two pairs of shoes from the knees down and shuffling as if they were tiptoeing around the door frame into the back room.”

From then on she spoke to her friend’s parents by name whenever she felt gratitude toward them. “It was … a blessing that I could stay there for a year.”

But when it was time to move, she had a darker experience: Looking at other Grandin rentals, she stood “in the upstairs bedroom of one house where I felt a deep pressure on my shoulders and a restricting pressure on my chest and back. The energy was very dark and as I chose to leave the room, these feelings of pressure immediately subsided. Obviously, I did not rent that house.”

She remains aware of “vibrations and energies [she] cannot explain.” But, she wrote, she tries “to recognize them in thought or verbally whenever I can.”

After all, as her stationery’s signature concludes, “‘I am always in the right place at the right time, for the spirit of the Lord guides my steps’ (Corinthians).”