“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

But first, the beautiful little house that Jane and I bought in 1975 sits near the top of a moderately steep hill at the western edge of Elmira. We soon came to call it the “hill house,” in person and in our books. (Eventually mail began to arrive addressed to us simply at “The Hill House, Elmira, N.Y.” The people at the post office still see to it that such pieces are delivered. I’m grateful.)

Last night was the fifth night in a row that I’ve slept on the screened-in back porch in my new sleeping bag. I didn’t start doing this to avoid the bedroom that Jane and I had shared in the hill house for the last nine years, but because I’d always wanted to and now can. Jane is no longer here for me to be so close to, night and day, to leap to take care of when she needs me. She’d never been able to sleep on the porch — one of the reasons we’d had it added onto the house to begin with.

The night was so warm that I unzipped the bag all the way down to my feet. In the half-dark I spoke aloud to my wife, telling her that I wished she was with me. I fell asleep. Around 4:30 A.M. I woke to the sound of a heavy wind and the feel of much colder air creeping in around my body. The wind chimes hanging in a corner of the porch were clashing together repeatedly. I zipped up the bag as spatters of rain began to blow in on me. The woods come down over the crest of the hill in back of the house, to the north, and with a sound like an ocean tide the wind was racing through their treetops, plunging south past the house and into the valley. Jane and I had always loved that great roar. The trees thrashed in my neighbor’s yard across the road. The whole scene was one of change and energy and mystery.

October 10, 1984. Both of us had jobs at the large hospital in my home town of Sayre, Pa., eighteen miles southeast of Elmira, N.Y. The setting and the buildings weren’t like those of the “real” hospital in Sayre, though. It was a gorgeous summer day. Jane was much younger than she’d been when she died at the age of fifty-five. She still had her long jet-black hair, slim active figure and exuberant personality. I could have been my own age, sixty-five. We relaxed upon a large, sloping, very green lawn beside a brick hospital building that was several stories high. Then with great surprise I saw that on top of the near end of the building there sat an old, flat-sided, two-story house with steep roofs, weathered a drab gray and with all of its windows shuttered. Caught in one shutter was a filmy pink garment like a negligee, fluttering in the breeze. Curiously, Jane and I stared up at the house perched so incongruously there, and we talked about trying to get up into it to see what it was like inside.

Suddenly I felt a strong jolt at the top of my skull; the next instant, I found myself standing on the front steps of an ordinary house. [...] The neighborhood was middle-class, the house gray-framed, two-storied, with a front porch.

I wasn’t used to any messages from Seth when I was out of the house, and I’d been in the habit of discouraging any when I wasn’t having a session. [...]

[...] Go, go, go.
Why not have a band play and give balloons away?
There’s nothing like killing birds
To clean up the business section.
We could feature a Starling Day, for our centennial celebration,
Such elation as the city fathers
And other pot-bellied elders
Did their best to keep the city clean.
We could give ice cream away to the kids who killed the most,
The hosts of observers could yell the cheer:
“Oh, it takes such courage and it takes such brawn
To drop the blackbirds on the County House lawn.”

[...] Quickly I looked at the house. [...]

[...] When she returned to the house she saw her body upon the floor … Her husband remarried seven months later. [...]

Then Seth told Rob to imagine a man looking at a tree in the near distance on an ordinary street, with intervening houses and sidewalks.

Using the inner senses, it would be as if, instead of seeing the various houses, our man felt them. [...]

[...] It was a stone house with a fireplace; September, damp and foggy in the afternoon, about four o’clock. [...]

[...] “I see houses and a couple of shops, then a narrow cobbled walk raised up high — it was a partly dirt road built up of rocks and stones that ran around an inlet from the sea. [...]

[...] The land was so rocky … and they would build a house on a slab of rock, and it was always damp. [...]

[...] As I worked at the gallery or at my book or did my house chores, the last session kept coming to mind. [...]

[...] Several times, flashes of concepts came to me while I was house-cleaning — sudden intrusive patterns of thought accompanied by a feeling of intellectual and emotional illumination. [...]

[...] Our living room is very large — opens from the apartment house hallway and runs down to three large bay windows at the other end. [...]

[...] Finally I tried to reach out and envelop the feeling of the houses and trees on either side of me — to sense them as if by inner touch, as I passed each one by.

Who do I share this image with?
What ghost haunts this house?
I smile and reach for a cup of tea
And motions beyond my will begin.
My fingers move smoothly out
And lift the curving spoon.
With just the proper touch
They pick the china saucer up.
Yet I have nothing to do with this.
Who moves the cup? [...]

[...] She had been interviewing people in the apartment house about their experiences. [...]