Channeling the spirits at the Item

LYNN – There’s a man floating around our office that none of us have ever met.His round face is framed by thinning hair, he wears wire-rimmed glasses, and his hands are permanently marked with ink stains from the printing press he ran in our office in the ?30s and ?40s.This man – Joe is his name – is a ghost that Swampscott’s Helene Olsen said haunts The Daily Item, following unsuspecting employees like me around, barking orders as if he were still in charge.Let me back up. I’m secretly afraid of ghosts. But for some reason I still don’t understand, this Halloween weekend I asked Olsen, who is a medium, to try and channel the spirits that live in our downtown Lynn office and probably had a part in putting together our now 134-year-old paper.Joe was the only spirit who showed up Saturday, but that didn’t surprise Olsen, who said ghosts are actually quite a rare thing.”Millions of people pass away every year, and there’s only a very, very small percentage that decide not to cross over,” she said.Olsen explained that spirits who hang around the physical realm as opposed to traveling onto heaven (we’ll get to that later) are usually extraordinarily attached to something or someone. A loved one, a home, a task they felt they never completed in life are all good reasons for a spirit to haunt.In Joe’s case, the cantankerous manager made working at the Item his identity, Olsen said as she asked him why he still hangs around the office.”He kind of made this place his life,” she said, repeating with eyes closed what Joe was apparently showing or saying to her. “This is what gave him importance in his life.”Although disgruntled, Joe is quite talkative, said Olsen, who went on to share his thoughts about the old days and how much better they were than 2012. The Item was a bustling place in the 1930s, with people making speeches on its front steps and generations employed together at the paper, often at the same time, Joe apparently said.”He wants everybody to know how hard it was to get the presses rolling in the old days,” she said. Then, as if allowing Joe to speak through her, said, “We had people to answer to, we had serious deadlines to meet. If you didn’t pull your weight, you were gone.”I’m not sure if cognizance is a trait to all spirits, but Joe told Olsen he knows that we know that he’s here.”All of your employees can feel him around occasionally,” she said.Depending on who you ask at the Item, that’s true. We see him out of the corner of our eyes, we feel creeped out on certain floors of the building and I personally don’t like to be in the office alone.But there’s no reason to be afraid of ghosts or death, Olsen said as she thanked Joe for sharing. Ghosts are just energy, a faint imprint of what once was. The truth of who we are is much more apparent in a place Olsen calls heaven, which she said she unequivocally believes exists.”We all have a job while here, and at some point it’s going to end, but that doesn’t mean it will ever die,” she said.I can’t say whether or not I believe everything – or anything – that happened this weekend with Olsen.But the experience humbled me enough that I’m willing to admit there may be much more to life – and death – than I know about.And until the universe reveals more, I’m content to let the mystery be. And just maybe I have a new friend at work.For more information on Helene Olsen, visit AngelsLighthouse.comAmber Parcher can be reached at [email protected].