“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A strong saving grace in all of the personal and household turmoil she lived in, Jane told me often, was her relationship with her maternal grandfather, Joseph Burdo, her “Little Daddy,” as she called him because of his diminutive size. Even as a youngster she had been well aware that she felt psychically connected to him. Joseph Burdo had become estranged from his wife, Minnie Finn, long ago. He was a man of few words, yet he nurtured in his granddaughter a love of nature that she was to cherish for the rest of her life. In Appendix 1, Volume 1 of The “Unknown” Reality, published in 1977, I partially quote Seth as saying that Joseph Burdo was “Part of a very strong entity. However, extremely inarticulate in his last life, due to an inability to synthesize gains in past lives… That is, in his feeling of unity with All That Is, he excluded other human beings....” He lived alone in rented rooms and worked at various jobs in town; he was a doorman, a watchman. He drank and gambled at the local casinos and played the horses at Saratoga Springs’ famous racetrack. He took Jane on walks in the nearby woods. “When he spoke of the wind,” Seth remarked, “she felt like the wind, as any child will unselfconsciously identify with the elements.” He died in 1949 at 68, when Jane was 20 years old.

While we were surveying the house I saw a young black man step off the front porch and stroll out to the sidewalk. He didn’t turn to walk up or down the street, however, as one might expect, but casually stood there and turned to look at our group a few times as we talked and took pictures. Evidently we’d bothered at least one tenant after all, to the point of sending a sibling, say, to try to see what we might be up to, if anything. Perhaps deciding that we were no threat, our observer sauntered back into the house. I never did see anyone peeking out at us, though.