Beyond the veil: Real life ghost stories + a spooky special to bring you online 🍭✨
As the darkness falls and election season nears, you may feel yourself pulled into a fight or flight stress response. Here's a free tool to bring you back online.
Hey, boo! This is a special mid-week edition of Sex and Style with a sweet treat at the end! A happy ending 😉 Sex and Style is a reader-supported publication. If my work resonates with you, give it a heart and consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to keep them — and you — cumming. 🖤
Have you ever heard the stairs creak in the middle of the night that sends a shiver down your spine? Or had a feeling of being watched, even though you were alone? Just in time for Halloween, I’ve gathered some real life ghost stories to make your hair stand on end.
Don't worry — as your resident Embodiment Coach and Sex Witch, I’ll leave you with some chill tips to help bring you back to baseline, even after the spookiest of stories.
Do you have your flashlight? Come sit by the fire.
Ghost Stories
There was a man I dated with a mutual love of X-Files and the paranormal. On our first date, he told me how he once got a blow job from a ghost. One night, he woke up to someone’s mouth on him under the blankets and assumed it was his girlfriend going down on him. But when he saw her sound asleep next to him, he realized his encounter with the third kind. 😳
For all my word nerds, spectrophilia is the word for sexual encounters with ghosts.
Come to think of it… once I was self-pleasuring when I suddenly felt something penetrate me. It wasn’t me.
I haven’t been in touch with my wasband for a while. When I texted him out of the blue for a recipe, later that day at the coffee shop, I heard a Foo Fighters song he used to serenade me with. Suddenly we’re on the same channel again.
This isn’t entirely abnormal. When we were unbraiding our lives, I remember one late-night phone conversation across state lines. He shared how a glass shattered on the bathroom granite countertop in the middle of the night. As we spoke, I was cleaning the steps and inexplicably discovered shards of glass on the stairs — with no broken glass in recent memory. There seemed to be a portal between us.
For a while, I had little ghosties living at my flat. They would do trickster things like unplug my computer, remove the batteries from my wine bottle opener (Pinky swear I don’t drink enough for this to be an intervention), and turn my skincare bottles upside down. (I would have suspected my cats, except the obvious opposable thumb dilemma.)
Once, when my house had flooded from a neighboring unit, contractors set up loud dehumidifiers to get the water cleared out. The ghosties seemed to take offense and migrated to my car. Occasionally I’d notice my brights had been turned on, or the radio would play static. I took this as an invitation to look and to listen.
The ghosties seemed benevolent, even playful and permissive. On a day that I was utterly exhausted, I returned from breakfast to find my work laptop had been unplugged from the power source. They didn’t seem to want me to work either.I’ve had less benevolent energies in my space, too. Like the red eyes in the dark that watched as I fell asleep. Or the dark shadow creature that crawled up the stairs on its belly toward my bed. Or waking from dreams and being unable to move, paralyzed. Or the man’s face I saw, trying to concealed itself in the wall, watching me touch my body. 😬 To name a few.
You can bet that I had a curandera come and clear the space and these sinister energies.
Fight, Flight, Freeze
When we’re afraid, our bodies go into a stress response of fight, flight or freeze. This is an evolutionary survival response that is beyond our control. A chemical cocktail of adrenaline and cortisol (the stress hormone) is injected into your bloodstream to ready your muscles for action.
In the process, more blood goes to your hands and feet, preparing you to fight or flee, diverting energy away from the digestive system. Your pupils dilate, allowing you to take in more light in the dark.
The lesser known of the stress responses is freeze. Imagine you’re a prehistoric human on the Serengeti. If you’re attacked by a lion, it’s unlikely that you’ll outrun or defend yourself. So the body may respond by playing dead — freezing. This could be the very thing that saves your life.
Say the lion leaves your motionless body to bring back her cubs to feast. When the threat of the predator is gone, this gives you a chance to escape.
Returning to baseline after this type of a stress response can take time, attention and care. Regardless of what stress response your body chooses for you, the amount of energy that is stuck in your body is the same. To release this trapped energy:
Shake your body. Animals in the wild that narrowly escape death will shake uncontrollably. If you watch videos of this in slow motion, the animal is running in place — animating the escape from the attack, not unlike rewriting their recent history. Without shaking off the stress response, animals in the wild rarely survive.
Engage in bilateral movement. Bilateral is a fancy word that means affecting both sides of the body. When you’re in a fight, flight or freeze stress response, the two hemispheres of body — left and right — become divided. Bilateral movement will help bridge the chasm and allow you to come back online.
The butterfly hug is my favorite way to do this. Plus, whether you give yourself a hug, or someone you love hugs you, your body doesn’t recognize the difference. Here’s a demonstration:
Embodiment practices. To reconnect to your body’s sensations and emotions, embodiment practices help you become more aware of what you’re feeling in the body and support you to return to a baseline. This helps to ground your nervous system.
Maybe you’ve outgrown trick-or-treating… but not here.
It’s a festive week — so we’re celebrating with a big thank you to YOU for being a ride or die crew for Sex and Style. I put together a very special something to call your spirit back to your body!
When it comes to this special Practice, there’s no jumpscare lurking behind a corner here — just a 12-page Embodiment PDF and accompany audio meditation that will call you home.
This link will take you to a form that looks like this! Enter your name and email and voila! Watch for the PDF in your inbox.
Tata for now! Happy Halloween, from your favorite Shapeshifter. 😈😇
Sex and Style is written by Certified Sex, Love and Relationship Coach and Wardrobe Stylist, Sarah Ward. She has spent the last 20 years studying human sexuality and minted it in 2021, certifying in the VITA Methodology with Layla Martin. Since 2009, Sarah has styled over 5000 photo shoots and dressed thousands of bodies. Her work has been published in Seattle Met Bride and Groom and Women’s Wear Daily.
If this sent shivers up your spine, I invite you to press the ♥️. Do you have your own ghost story to share? Please leave it in the comments below!
