“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

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.

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

(“Earlier today we were talking about the suicide of Mrs. Steffans, who used to live in this house—”)

I am familiar with the discussion. Ruburt has not been picking up on any of the woman’s past depressions. In a fashion you were attracted to the house, as I mentioned (in 1975), because of its contemporary nature, and the neighborhood—but also because it put you in a different position, in a different social context. And that was the context that Mrs. Steffans operated in in a different way.

The house, as you recall, was highly formal, impeccably clean. [Mrs. Steffans] tried to live on the outside, while she was always concerned with inner issues, and it was on your parts indicative of a creative tension between the two. That is, you could certainly put that atmosphere to use, where she was unable to.

2. For a brief description of Jane’s encounter with Mrs. Steffans, see Note 13 for Session 744, in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. Seth, and Jane and I, described a number of our house-hunting adventures in the two volumes of that work. Those complicated, interrelated happenings are just as fascinating to us now as they were when they were unfolding; we have yet to publish their full story. We think that the events surrounding our purchase of the hill house furnish many clues to the spontaneous and creative workings of individual consciousnesses in our chosen physical reality.

3. In none of our conversations involving Mrs. Steffans did Jane and I talk of blame or guilt in connection with suicide. As we searched for understanding, we reviewed the excellent material on death, as well as suicide, that Seth had given in the very first session for Mass Events: In Chapter 1, see the 801st session for April 18, 1977.