Victoria has been known as one of the most haunted places in Canada, but it doesn’t have to be like that.
Isabele O’Kanese is a native seer who aids people in their spiritual plights. O’Kanese, who is of the Oji-Cree nation, helps people with their haunts by doing tarot readings, psychometry, pet readings, and mediumship for spiritual house cleanings.
“I think the number one thing is to take care of [a haunting] right away, don’t go through the mind games of calling yourself crazy, or waiting to see if others will accept the fact that your home may be haunted,” advises O’Kanese. “In my culture elders say if you even hear a knock at the door, or a knock in your room, you smudge the house or you say a prayer.”
O’Kanese has been communicating with spirits since she was a child. Her earliest memories are of playing and speaking with spirits and helping them return to the spirit world, but she wasn’t always supported in doing so, and was even mocked for her clairvoyance. This inspired O’Kanese to use these abilities to help people who feel they are being haunted.
Many of the techniques O’Kanese uses and teaches in her workshops are directed towards encouraging positive energy while discouraging negative energy, and to help lost spirits find their way out of a person’s house and towards their next world.
“Sometimes people who have passed on don’t realize that they’re dead, so you have to have a conversation with them,” she explains, “and that’s where it’s good to get a medium like myself, or any other medium, to help push the ghost and say, ‘Hey, there is a better place for you and you can go on.’”
Having a medium come clean your home can be costly and some may find themselves stuck in a haunted house and living in fear but unable to afford to do anything about it. This is one of the reasons that O’Kanese recently put on a Ghostbusting 101 workshop at the Intuitive Arts Festival, held in Victoria.
The workshop was an affordable way for people to further their understanding on what their hauntings might be and receive tips from O’Kanese on dealing with the dead.
“Ghosts are like people, they just don’t understand,” she says. “They’re scared, like a child going to kindergarten for the first time. It’s okay, you can move on to the next level.”