“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.

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

10:28 P.M. Once she’d moved past a slow beginning, Jane had accelerated her delivery considerably. “The session’s really good,” I told her. “I want to read over the material on art especially.”