Poltergeists in the Playpen: When My Toddler Started Seeing Spirits, It Challenged Everything We Knew (Exclusive)

'Turn Off the Light' author Jacquie Walters reveals how her daughter's relationship with the spirit realm has changed their lives

The first time we realized our daughter was communing with another realm, she was just shy of 2 years old. She was holding her lovey, a gray bunny with a little blanket attached. She used the bunny to give me a kiss. “Mwah!” Then she said, “Papa, mwah!” Another mwah for her little brother. Then she looked toward the corner of her room, just above the window, and offered one last bunny kiss to the air. It was clearly deliberate, there was no denying it. But I shook it off. A fluke. It had to be. 

A month later, she started crying during her nap. She was hysterical, so we figured Bunny had fallen from her crib. My husband went into the room. But Bunny was safe in her arms, so he didn’t understand what was wrong. She pointed to the corner of the room — that same spot, just above the window. My husband said, “Is someone there?” She shook her head no. He asked, “Was someone there?” She nodded. Yes. “Are they scary?” No. “Do they play with you?” Yes. “Are you sad they left?” Yes. 

Something strange and powerful and challenging happens when your child sees spirits. Suddenly, as a parent, you’re faced with these huge existential questions. What do I believe? What’s really happening? How do I support my child through this?

The first time any of it made me feel uneasy, I was reading to my daughter in her bed. She suddenly sat up and stared at her spot in the corner. Then she frowned and said repeatedly, “My house.” Her tone wasn’t angry or scared, but it was stern. After a minute, I whispered, “Is someone there?” She paused, stared at the spot, then finally looked at me. “No.” Her tone light now, as if to say, not anymore, where were we? I was unsettled, to say the least. But I was also now entirely convinced that I was witnessing real encounters. 

I have countless stories like this. The Notes app on my phone is full of them. My small daughter was having full-on experiences, forming whole relationships, with something I couldn’t even see. Let alone something I could understand. Should I protect her? Should I encourage her? None of us get playbooks for parenting, and we certainly don’t get a Guide for Navigating Poltergeists in the Playpen.   

In a way, though, the universe had been prepping me for this. I’ve always been a little “woo-woo”: astrology, Human Design, the occasional prophetic dream. But these always felt like personal curiosities. Suddenly, my daughter’s experiences turned my spiritual hobbies into a survival manual. This wasn’t just “in my realm;” it was now in my living room. That didn’t mean I knew exactly what to do, but it did give me a starting point: I wouldn’t tell her it was in her imagination, and I wouldn’t tell her how to feel about it. I would only ask questions trying to gauge how she was interpreting what her own heart and mind were telling her. 

And now, over the course of the last two years, my entire worldview has cracked open. It’s difficult to explain in a short essay, but my husband and I have been on a wild journey with the universe. The (working) result is that I’ve started channeling as well as practicing mediumship. I recognize for many people this will sound completely bonkers. Or at least unfamiliar. And if that’s you, I invite you to get curious. A great starting point would be the podcast The Telepathy Tapes. That pretty much sums up what our life has been about the past two years—truly recognizing and tapping into the universal consciousness.  

What I’ve realized is this: we all have these abilities. All of us. They are in our true nature. And we come into this world knowing it. But we are conditioned to forget. And so our whole adult journey of reconnection means remembering what has been trained out of us. And this process can be arduous, painful and even crazy-making. Magical but full of self-doubt. 

And this got me wondering — what if I could raise my kids to never forget in the first place? What if I could say to my daughter, “listen to your gut,” and really, genuinely mean it? What if, instead of getting to adulthood and having to start all over, she could simply never forget what she already knows? What is already intuitively happening for her? I’ve come to believe this is the greatest gift a parent could give a child. Instead of telling her it’s all in her head, or it isn’t real, or to worship at the feet of Logic — I’m choosing to tell her that she should lean into these gifts. That she should trust that undeniable intuition above all else.   

At the same time as all this was happening, I was also writing my second novel. And I couldn’t help but work through much of it via the writing. The more I wrote, the more I realized: I wanted to change how people think about hauntings. 

I set out to deliver a wholly original haunted house story inspired by my daughter’s encounters. I wanted to look at something as common as “ghosts” and make the reader see them in an entirely new way. In Turn Off The Light, I put forward a hypothesis for the fabric of our universe. A different lens through which to look at supernatural phenomena.

And the point is not that this hypothesis is true — more so to give the reader that experience of suddenly seeing the world from a whole new point of view, of flipping everything on its head, just like I’ve been pushed to do in the last two years. This exercise of stretching the comfort zone just might invite you to embrace — even if only a little more — the unknown. The things we don’t understand. 

Because if I know anything now, it’s that we know so very little. 

And finally, I’m okay with that. 

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Turn Off the Light by Jacquie Walters will hit shelves on March 3 and is available now, wherever books are sold.

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