“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now there are several “house connections” here, involving David, the Steffanses, and ourselves. We actually bought the hill house through the real-estate agent for the Steffanses, a few months after they’d moved out of Elmira. I never met the couple. Jane met Mrs. Steffans just once, in 1973, when she came through with a spontaneous “reading” for the lady at an informal party David Yoder gave in the apartment he was renting at the time. Jane and I think it most interesting that we were living in the same downtown apartment house as David was, and that Jane met—just that once—a person living in the house we were to buy two years later. Furthermore, Mrs. Steffans is the last individual for whom Jane has given a reading under such public circumstances.²

Her relative, David told us now, had informed him that Mrs. Steffans had suffered bouts of deep depression while living in the hill house. After David left we began to wonder if either one of us had ever picked up on such psychic lows, so to speak, either before or after we’d moved into the place. Jane certainly hadn’t done so during her reading for Mrs. Steffans, and that made us speculate about when those depressive states had begun.

(After lunch today Jane and I were visited by our old friend David Yoder, who’s been in Florida recuperating from the heart bypass surgery he underwent early this year.¹ David brought news that was at first startling, then quickly developed into several conflicting emotions and ideas for us: He’d just learned from a relative of hers that a few weeks ago Mrs. Steffans [not her real name], the wife of the couple we’d purchased the hill house from in March 1975, had committed suicide at her home in a Western state while her husband was away on a business trip.

I was curious as to how often such a “negative psychology” operated—when, simply because of his or her own hang-ups, an individual [or more than one person] is attracted to a site where strongly negative events had taken place. Surely this happens just as often as it does with positive situations. Later this afternoon Jane said she didn’t think she’d ever tuned into Mrs. Steffans’s depressions in that manner: “If I thought I had, or still was,” she said, “I’d move out.” We’d have to. I have no feeling that I’d been affected, either. Still, we found it strange indeed—unreal, even—to consider that a person so intimately connected with a place we love had killed herself.³

[...] It’s neither the most inconsequential item on our list, or the most spectacular — but recently we learned through a close relative of the Steffans (I’ll call them), the couple from whom we bought the hill house, that at a small social gathering over two years ago Jane had spontaneously given something of a psychic “reading” for Mrs. Steffans. [...]

Jane hadn’t met Mrs. Steffans before, and never saw her again. [...]

Let me note at the end of this account that the mutual friend who introduced Jane and Mrs. Steffans has participated in some of our other house connections also — a function similar to the one enacted by our new acquaintance, Frank Corio, whom I referred to in Note 11 for Session 740. [...]