Episode 7: House of Spirits - The Haunting of Virginia's Blue Ball Inn

Exploring the History and Mystery of Virginia's Blue Ball Inn

In this episode, the hosts discuss their excitement for the seventh episode, which centers around the history and paranormal experiences at the Blue Ball Inn, a 1747 tavern located near Winchester. They plan to release bonus content featuring an interview with Joseph, the current owner, about his journey with the inn. The episode delves into the hosts' experiences with spirits, their transformative lessons, and the creation of a community focused on preserving the inn. They explore the impact of energy work and the importance of embracing both life and death. Additionally, they share insights into the inn's name origin and the role of historical connections. The hosts also offer paintings and poppets related to the Inn as part of their fundraising efforts.

To find out more about Virginia's Blue Ball Inn:
https://www.tiktok.com/@blue.ball.inn.1747

To inquire about volunteering at the Inn:
Volunteerforbbi@gmail.com

Tava's etsy shop (BBI fundraising poppets and prints available shortly)
https://darkflowerbooks.etsy.com

To register for one of Tava's in-person fundraising classes at the Inn (look for classes that say "BBI Benefit":
https://www.tavabaird.com/classes

To donate to the Inn:
https://checkout.square.site/merchant/ML1VP5DCXKY9P/checkout/U666TUROWQFNGLQRFHQAJKLY?src=webqr&fbclid=IwY2xjawFsEZVleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHUVnsazcNui2okuxF8MWM4G02EkBKBmBDE2H6YZM_zohHcxJhYOhlhNUrw_aem_Rk6GaYOsUcFFcdCeoXEgUg

00:00 Introduction and Episode Excitement

00:16 Discussing the Blue Ball Inn

01:04 Creating Sacred Space

05:03 Energy Sensitivity and Electronics

07:09 Paranormal Experiences at the Inn

10:16 Personal Connection to the Inn

26:41 First Paranormal Encounter

33:55 Community Involvement and Preservation

37:07 Winter Activities and Community Building

37:59 Spiritual Sensitivity and Paranormal Experiences

41:35 Restoration Efforts and Historical Discoveries

43:57 Interacting with Spirits and Offering Gifts

48:25 Facing Fears and Personal Growth

01:00:21 Cultural Perspectives on Death and Transition

01:05:07 The Blue Ball Inn: History and Mysteries

01:08:39 Community Involvement and Future Plans

01:22:24 Concluding Thoughts and Farewell

Thank you joining us today, remember to LIKE and SUBSCRIBE to keep up to date with your tribe.

Connect with your Hosts!

Tava Baird: tavabaird.com or https://darkflowerbooks.etsy.com.

Jennifer Taylor: Willow Ridge Reiki and Healing Arts https://www.willowridgereiki.com/

Transcript

[00:00:00] 

Jennifer Taylor: Hello, how are you doing? 

Jennifer Taylor: I am well, thanks. I am excited for our next episode. 

Tava Baird: I am too. I'm starting to lose track of which one we're on. I think this might be seven at this point. Yeah, 

Jennifer Taylor: I think it's seven. 

Tava Baird: Lucky seven. 

Jennifer Taylor: and we get to finally hear more about the Blue Ball Inn that you have referenced as we've gone along of sometime, we're going to talk about that.

Jennifer Taylor: So today we're actually going to talk about that. 

Tava Baird: Yeah, we're actually going to talk about the in today. And because there's a lot to talk about with this in, we are planning on making a bonus content episode that we will post. I'm going to be interviewing Joseph. Who is the owner of the blue ball in, um, in a couple of days about his experience, uh, getting to own it.

Tava Baird: So if you like today's episode and you'd like more information about the inn and to hear Joseph talking about the building please take a look and, [00:01:00] shortly you will see something about that coming along as well. 

Jennifer Taylor: Excellent. So as we always do, let's take a few moments to just, Kind of settle in and create sacred space here in which We can share and join together.

Jennifer Taylor: So if you are not driving, I invite you to close your eyes and take three slow, deep breaths. And imagine as you are breathing, imagine breathing in and out through the center of your chest, which is the center of your heart chakra.

Jennifer Taylor: And I will sing us into sacred space.

[00:02:00] [00:03:00] [00:04:00] 

Tava Baird: Now that we've done seven episodes, I have to tell you something that happens every time you sing. So you sing and I'm sitting here and my energy level must settle tremendously because my dogs, which tend to follow me from room to room. I'm getting set up for the podcast and I'm plugging things in and there's a lot of activity.

Tava Baird: They're all running around and they're hyper, but as soon as you sing and I mellow out, like they are both sound asleep right now. They just hit the floor and they're down for the entire time we're on the podcast and I'm like, does she know she knows how to charm owns or I think you're charming me.

Tava Baird: And then my energy level dropping is just making them go. Okay. She's probably going to stay put for a while. Boom. And down they go. Their guarding duties are done because they don't usually hang out too much together. And they are both thrashed out within a foot of each other [00:05:00] behind me on the left. 

Jennifer Taylor: So that's fantastic.

Jennifer Taylor: Yeah. Animals are so sensitive to energy and so tuned in and aware that Yeah, it's it's always amazing and Reiki classes and then sessions people have their animals around and yeah, they're like And half the time they'll know that we're right when we're about to start or they'll know, we'll be talking, you know, for maybe an hour and a half about like theory and practice.

Jennifer Taylor: And then it's like, I'll, I'll be just about to say, now we're going to go into a healing experience and their animals come from all over the house and are all of a sudden right there. Like, yep, I'm here for that. It's, it never fails. It's so amazing. 

Tava Baird: Sign me up. I want part of it. 

Jennifer Taylor: They're like, I am in here for this.

Tava Baird: You know, there's all these phrases we have, seeing is believing and all these different things and it, there's so much we can't see that is constantly running in our world [00:06:00] and,taking the time to step back and acknowledge that it's there seems to make everything run better, 

Tava Baird: if you're walking out into a windstorm and not acknowledging the wind that you can't see that you just see the effects and you feellost as to what sort of decisions you should make when I think a lot of times when we get busy, we sort of. Flow through life, pretending that the weather doesn't affect us, pretending that energy doesn't affect us, pretending that what we ate for breakfast doesn't affect us.

Tava Baird: But all of these things that are both flowing around us and through us and within us are a huge part of how well our day is going to go. and the dogs know that. 

Jennifer Taylor: Absolutely. And electronics. No, that like, yes, electronic things. It never ceases to amaze me how the electronics will start to short out and things will start to not work.

Jennifer Taylor: The more like when like your energy is really out there and you're trying to plow through and get [00:07:00] something done and everything is breaking, stop, reset your energy and it's amazing. All of a sudden stuff starts working again. 

Tava Baird: I don't know if I mentioned this on our last podcast where we were talking about Samuel, but, a lot of times he comes through really clearly during electrical storms.

Tava Baird: I'll get woken up in the middle of the night. And sometimes the times when I can hear him very clearly, or he says things that are like Much bigger and outside our normal conversation or when there is a shift in energy like that. And I didn't think about this until recently, but, at the inn, which we're going to talk about today, one of the things that happens there regularly is Joseph will get calls from the neighbors.

Tava Baird: He'll have shut everything off in the inn and gone home. He lives next door. And she'll get calls from the neighbors that the lights are going off and on in the in by [00:08:00] themselves. and I was just thinking about, Oh yeah, like here we have this electrical, you have a movement of energies happening in the house at times and it's affecting The electrical items that are going on in there.

Tava Baird: the other thing that occasionally happens at the end as well is we'll have a really strong cell phone or internet signal. and then it'll just disappear. It's just gone. And then it comes back later and you're like, what happened? 

Jennifer Taylor: You know, like, where was it? 

Tava Baird: Yeah, and I don't, I'm going to talk a little bit about, I'm going to talk a lot about my spiritual connection with the inn today.

Tava Baird: I would like to tell, because I'm sure there will be people listening who have tons of experience, with paranormal investigations and things like that. I do not. I have never been on one. I am learning through people that I am now [00:09:00] excavating with who do have this sort of experience, what some of the tools and things that they use are.

Tava Baird: please forgive me in advance if I botch up, I'm learning. But I know one of the things that people have used in the house, I think it's called a spirit box and it is supposed to work with, I think radio waves. it's so interesting that, we have how electricity moves and we have radio waves and we have all of these different, sometimes, you'll be inside the house and suddenly the temperature will change really dramatically.

Tava Baird: there's all of these things moving that we can't see, that definitely affect what's going on inside us as we're in a space. I'm so happy with your invocation. I'm just like, can we do another one? No. Maybe today as we're talking, we'll do a couple of them.

Jennifer Taylor: Yeah. We can absolutely stop as we go through and it may help people to. Integrate and process the information as we go along [00:10:00] and You know, just move things forward for us in the conversation or bring through whatever the next thing is, we can absolutely do that. 

Tava Baird: I think that would be really great.

Tava Baird: I 

Jennifer Taylor: realize we're already jumping to talking about things that we're experiencing or that you're experiencing in the house. But first let's back like way up to what is this in that you've been talking about and how did you, how did you even come to find it or have anything to do with this? 

Tava Baird: So there's, as I'm learning as I get older, there's often daily mundane, somebody asked me to take out the trash explanation, but that that usually is following different explanation.

Tava Baird: That explanation is usually because you need to be somewhere. You're supposed to be to learn something. I really think that we are moved and [00:11:00] called to and given opportunities to go to new places because it's. Each of them holds a lesson. We're going to learn.

Tava Baird: Sometimes those lessons are really, really fun. And sometimes those lessons are harder, but that they are part of us becoming a more fully developed and for more realized person who can then reach out sometimes learning or going to a new place and having a hard experience there.

Tava Baird: Learning how to deal with it, that means you can turn around and put your hand out to somebody on the path behind you and say, here's the experience that I had. Yours is going to be different. Perhaps some of what I've learned will help inform your experience. And I mean, that's the whole reason we do this podcast really is.

Tava Baird: Jen and I, yeah, we have, she has a whole history of different experiences than I've had. [00:12:00] strangely, they often seem to lead us to the exact same place. And I learn from you every time we're together. And I know you've often expressed that things that I say will make you go, that's what that meant.

Jennifer Taylor: Oh, absolutely. I learn from you every time we speak. 

Tava Baird: The mundane version of how I found the inn is I have a little business, Darkflower Books and Folk Art, where I sell my paintings and my prints and I make puppets. We'll have to do a fun episode on ball magic at some point. that's a great, cool thing to talk about.

Tava Baird: And I got asked to vent at an event to help raise awareness and funds for, the longer version, the more spiritual version of this. So I was just about to publish the book of Samael that we spoke about at length last week. [00:13:00] And. I'm a person who's a big fan of naps. I don't know if anybody in the car right now is like, yeah, I could use one of those, but I'm a napper hardcore.

Tava Baird: And this one afternoon, I had been doing a lot of things and I needed to get up that evening and sit down and edit the book of Samael, but I decided I was going to take a nap before I did that. And I laid down for a nap. And when I woke up during the nap, I had this incredibly vivid experience, but didn't feel like a dream.

Tava Baird: And it's actually the opening chapter of the second book was I had this experience and I woke up from the dream and went, what in the world was that? And it, it, Hook me a few minutes to kind of write myself and Sam Aiel showed up and he said, Um, where is my book, um, Sean? And I said, I'm getting to it. I'm getting to it.

Tava Baird: Like I [00:14:00] know I was going to take a nap first before I wrapped it up. And he said, not that one, the next one. And that was the first moment when I realized he wasn't just going to hanging out, but that he now had plans for what we were going to do next. And I still hadn't finished what we did first.

Tava Baird: What happened was I quickly came to realize that the first six months with him were just him helping me to get through a phase of comprehending that he existed. That my world was never going to be the same to get me a sort of a fundamental shift in perspective That I needed and of course at the time I was like, this is my hard spiritual work I don't have to do anything after this only to discover that.

Tava Baird: No. No. No,This was the puppy bowl before the Super Bowl, [00:15:00] so to speak. And that the first, those first six months and all the experiences in that book were literally him just getting me to a point where I could get over the shell shock of him being around and really listen.

Tava Baird: So it turns out phase one was get used to, archangel visiting phase two was, okay, kid, now we go to work. And one of the things that he told me I needed to do was that, well, he said, you have a lot to learn from the dead, which is not something you want to hear. waking up from a nap. 

Jennifer Taylor: Or maybe ever.

Jennifer Taylor: Oh 

Tava Baird: no, what does that mean? Exactly what does that mean? What am I supposed to do with that? Um, and exactly how is that going to manifest? And right about that [00:16:00] time, the owner of a local metaphysical shop who carries a lot of my merchandise,called me up and said, There's this 1747 tavern outside of Winchester.

Tava Baird: And it is Very, very haunted. And we are holding a little market in the backyard while we do paranormal investigations and tours of the house. And my first thought was, no, this doesn't sound like it's my bag. You know, like I do metaphysical markets, but I never really stepped into that, the paranormal thing before.

Tava Baird: I didn't know any about it. I've never even watched any of those TV shows before. I always vend with my good friend, Kathy and her daughter, and they were up for it. They were like, let's do it. This sounds cool. And I'm like, I don't know, folks, far away from the house.

Tava Baird: Are we going to be, you know, like, I mean, literally my experience with the paranormal is watching Scooby [00:17:00] Doo when I was six years old. That was never actually paranormal. It was always a guy in a bad mask. So I finally went, okay, if you guys are excited, I'll go. Um, and they're like, oh, we want to go on a tour.

Tava Baird: And I went, no, I'm just going to set up my tent. I'll be out there. You know, I'll make, I'll make some special merchandise, but I, it just wasn't my world. It wasn't my world. So then Samuel tells me I have a lot to learn from the dead and I went, Oh, okay, well, but I literally did not make any connection between the two.

Tava Baird: One was a vending event my friend has had talked me into, and this was completely different. This was my spiritual life, right? It had nothing to do with that. So we get to the event and we set up our tents and everything. I had this picture in my mind that it was going to be like this big Victorian house on a hill where it was perpetually [00:18:00] lightning.

Tava Baird: They always show that, you know, when you watch like those films where it's like, you know, and that we would be in a parking lot really well removed from it. They didn't realize I was going to be, right in the backyard of this little tavern. And we get there and they're like, donuts and coffee in the kitchen.

Tava Baird: And I literally stood there going on one hand, it is free donuts. On the other hand, They're inside a haunted tavern, doughnuts tavern, doughnuts tavern. Well, um, this will give you a lot of insight into my psyche, the doughnuts one. So I,went and stuck my head in, my friends were with me. We went, they were right in the first room.

Tava Baird: I walked in, grabbed a doughnut and left and went, okay, great. Made it in and out of the haunted house. That's all I'm going to do. it was a two day event as I spent I'm in this place. I had this overwhelming feeling that [00:19:00] I needed to be of service here. And I couldn't pinpoint it.

Tava Baird: I couldn't tell exactly where it came from, but I was just captivated by it. And I'm sure a part of it is this. I have a degree in colonial archeology, and this is a 1747 tavern where no one has ever dug a hole and excavated. And I'd worked for Monticello, and I'd been a tour guide at Ashland Island, and I'd gone to digs that were sponsored by William Mary, and I dug in places all over Virginia and Maryland.

Tava Baird: When you go to dig for those museums, there's already somebody there running the show, and usually they've already been excavating for a few years. This was on the ground. And the other part of it was my novels are set in 1746. So I know the time [00:20:00] period really well, both from the angle of my archaeology degree and from the research that I did for the Spiral Pathways series.

Tava Baird: And so here I am standing in a building that is literally straight out of the time period that I write about. And that I spent, you know, years getting a degree on that. And so I'm sure there was an intellectual part of that. And Joseph is the owner of the place.

Tava Baird: he hasn't had it very long. But I, he was really busy cause there were, people coming in and out doing tours and talks. And, it was a very busy thing and all I could think was, I have got to get this man alone in a room and say, I'm going to have to calm down first. so I don't look like a crazy person he just met and tell him, I want to help this place stand.

Tava Baird: And I don't know the entire rationale for it. But then on the second note, um, [00:21:00] can I dig holes in your backyard? didn't know me from Adam. I was one of the vendors, but I, I told him I want to help in any way I can. I don't know why, but I feel really compelled to do this.

Tava Baird: And second, can I dig a two foot by two foot test square in your backyard and see if any artifacts come out? And he said yes to both. and what has developed out of that. I thought, I'd be out there with a couple of volunteers, two volunteers and me for a week or two, we pull out some artifacts.

Tava Baird: That would be the end of it. Instead, I now have a garage full of artifacts. There are over 70 people involved on this project and more coming every day. We just had some retired career archaeologists join the project. And so this has been twofold. One part of my work there is. Helping to coordinate the volunteers and research the history.

Tava Baird: of the inn and work with the local [00:22:00] historians and get to know the area and to pull these artifacts out of the ground and clean them and research them and catalog them. because this is an incredible building, historical building that needs to be preserved. The other aspect of it is that I very quickly learned that the less, when you go to college and there's always that lab.

Tava Baird: course that goes along with your main course. This was going to be my lab. some things that Samael wanted me to learn one, to let fears that I carried around for years ago to, to help me find my own sense of worth. I grew up as a people pleaser and often my sense of worth. has been lacking.

Tava Baird: Don't sound that way on this podcast, but it's a long process, right? People always say you sound really confident. And I'm like, a lot of the people who sound the most confident, are the ones who have the longest way to go. 

Tava Baird: My husband is [00:23:00] always telling me like, you're good at that. When people give me compliments, I go, Oh, well, you know, ha ha. And he's like, why can't you just say thank you? And I'm like, because I think they're, you know, they don't know. They don't know what a mess I am. And I don't know, dear listeners, if any of you have that same concept, but I think a lot of us do, um, this idea that we have are somehow not worthy of the things that are presented to us.

Tava Baird: So Samuel quickly pointed out that I had things to do on worth and that I was going to be learning these things in the lab and the lab was a haunted tavern.

Tava Baird: That is the longest answer to your question. 

Jennifer Taylor: No, that's perfect. That's exactly, the answer is, how this came to be. And I remember,following you through all of that and All of the synchronicities and then us talking later about all of the things that had to have happened and [00:24:00] all of the little things that had to have come through for years building up to this to bring everything together to where you were united with this in with your exact set of skills and passions and knowledge and I remember the weekend that first weekend that you were there for Paracon and You were like sending Marcos all throughout the day and all throughout that night, and then you were there late and I spent like the entire weekend listening to and responding to Marcos and my husband was like on Pensy like what what's the update?

Jennifer Taylor: What's the latest thing because it was such an active Huge weekend there were so many things that were happening in the house with paranormal things there were so much that was happening with you personally But I remember one of the things that came out of that was you saying, that you had really created [00:25:00] And you, of course, would never have said it this way because you were like, oh, it just sort of happened and whatever, but what really happened was you recognizing the, the potential for community there and all of these different people that were excited about it and you were like, before we leave this weekend, we're going to get an email list and we're going to have a list because so many people were tapping into that same thing.

Jennifer Taylor: I think that you were tapping into there, that there was something that was drawing people that was beyond an interest in the paranormal There were all these people who also had this deep sense of. I'm supposed to help. I want to help. And by the time you left that weekend, you had a whole email list of people that were offering all different kinds of things.

Tava Baird: Yeah, it was really strange because, I knew that there was something there. And if you ask, I mean, if you ask me [00:26:00] about it now, all I can say is the house told me to do it. there was something in that house that compelled me. I wanted to help. And I, I looked at Joseph, who.

Tava Baird: Was dragging, decades of trash out of the house it needs a new roof. It needs a new chimney. I mean, it's rock solid. It has literal tree trunks holding it up in the root cellar.something dads would say is they don't build them like this anymore.

Tava Baird: They really don't. you build an inn in the 1740s, you're building it to stand the test of time and it's been there 260 something years at this point. Oh God, my math may be off, but it's been there centuries and a lot happens in a building over centuries. I'll tell you a little bit about my first experience,after I went in and grabbed a donut and made it back outside without being possessed, later on, I wanted to go back in, and one of the reasons I wanted to go back in is that I UVA's Department of Architectural Archaeology.

Tava Baird: Now this was a, What, 30 years ago? I don't even know if [00:27:00] it's still there.Joseph has this dear friend, and she's wonderful. And she had said to me, I'd really love you to walk through the house and look at it because there's Victorian pieces in it, there's colonial pieces in it, and tell us what era you think things are.

Tava Baird: So as Joseph is working on things, he doesn't pair something out that's probably been there since the 1740s, as he's trying to restore things. So from an intellectual standpoint, I needed to walk through the house and look at it and get an a sense of its decor and the space and look at the beams upstairs and look at the floor plan.

Tava Baird: I haven't gone traipsing around a haunted house before. my friend Melissa was there vending and Melissa does Reiki. And of course, whenever I hear someone does Reiki because of you, Jen, I'm like, this is a good person that I need to have go with me. I know that Melissa is very sensitive to these energies because she does Reiki.

Tava Baird: And I said, Melissa, I need to walk through the house and do a little [00:28:00] survey. would you mind walking through with me? And the house was open. There were people walking all through it. it wasn't like it was standing alone on a darkened hill. It was noon on a Saturday in April. And she said, sure, I'll go with you.

Tava Baird: So we walked in and as I said, I don't consider myself super sensitive to now. I think I'm a lot more attuned to it than I was. Um, I could feel energy moving when I was working magic or doing spells. I could feel, if I focused, I could feel energy moving up through the earth, but I had never tried to sit in like, listen for a ghost before.

Tava Baird: So I was counting on Melissa to tell me if she felt anything. So. as we're walking through the ground floor of the house, there was this strange, heavy feeling around your heart. And since this time, I have everyone at that [00:29:00] paracon would come, and in the weeks after, would come out and say they could feel this.

Tava Baird: It has changed a lot since then. we can talk more about that, but this was the first experience. Melissa asked if I wanted to go upstairs. So we went up to the 2nd floor and you could take 2 routes. You can continue up to the next landing, or you can take a right and take a step up into this little bedroom that has blue and white wallpaper and Melissa said, let's go in here.

Tava Baird: So we said, okay, so we, we took a right into the blue and white wallpaper room and it's a small bedroom. It's on the back of the house and there's a little bed there and there's, uh, Closet in the wall that appears to be perhaps part of a dumbwaiter because downstairs there's another opening into what appears to be the same space next to the fireplace and as we turned into the room and I'm going, Ooh, look at the wallpaper and molding and.

Tava Baird: You know, kind of looking [00:30:00] at what age I think the floorboards are and are they original and I'm, I'm looking for square nails in the walls. And in this there's like a lot of Victorian wallpaper that's peeling. a lot of the plaster has buckled. So I'm really focused on that.

Tava Baird: And as we got to the center of the room and it's not a very big room, all of a sudden I felt the heat level. I mean, it went from 60 degrees in the room to a hundred degrees in the room, like. flat so quick and my vision started fogging around the edges and my heart started to race and I turned to the left and I swear to you there was someone standing in the corner of the room and I, my brain did not know how to process this.

Tava Baird: I always thought, when I was a kid and you read choose your own adventure books and they take place in a haunted house or whatever, I always thought that my natural reaction. [00:31:00] To feeling a presence there that wasn't fully materialized would be to, A, wet my pants, B, scream, and C, haul butt out of the room.

Tava Baird: But instead, what was happening is my brain was trying to go, okay, maybe you came up that stair really fast and the blood rushed to your head, that's why you can't see. Oh no, you're having some sort of a heart thing. Oh, perhaps the sun came out. Your brain is trying to rationalize what's going on. But it's getting all this conflicting information at the exact same time, and it gets overwhelmed.

Tava Baird: And so instead you do what deer do when they see headlights. I just froze, and I was trying to get my eyes to adjust to whatever was in the corner of the room. And my brain is going, is it a coat rack? Is it a, except that it was putting off energy unlike a piece of furniture. It was putting off energy like a coat rack.

Tava Baird: And at that [00:32:00] moment, Melissa grabs my hand and she says, there's a man in the corner of the room and she's looking in the same direction I am. And at that point I went, Oh no, like I don't know what to do here. And Melissa basically dragged me out of the room. Um, and when we got into the next room, It all went away.

Tava Baird: It was just gone like it had never been there. My heart rate slowed down. My vision returned to normal. It was suddenly 65 degrees again. It was just fine. And there was a big bed in that second room, and the room felt really, really peaceful. A lot of people have started calling, and it it was a really Uh, sort of a pink and white wallpaper.

Tava Baird: And a lot of us, for some reason or another, we didn't, a lot of the people who work at the house, we didn't realize it, but we all think that room feels like a mother's room. And it wasn't until some of us were trading information the other day that we were like, Oh, up in mom's room. Yeah. Yeah. Up in the mother's room.

Tava Baird: [00:33:00] Right. So I sat down on the corner of the bed there and just tried to process like, am I having a medical event? Like what just happened to me? But it was all gone. And that was the first moment when I thought, okay, there's something, there's definitely something here. And then, of course, as I started doing research into the house, um, and into the people who built it, I found, according to Ancestry.

Tava Baird: com, it appears that there may be a family connection between the Myself and, and Mary Ross Littler, who was one half of the couple that built the inn and her father, Alexander, we think, uh, gave them the money to build the inn in the first place. Alexander Ross was a Scottish immigrant and a Quaker.

Tava Baird: Um, but what's also been really unusual is the number of people who've showed up [00:34:00] to dig there or who just drive by and park their car while we're digging. And they will come in the backyard and they will go. Well, you're not a construction crew. You're not going to tear it down. Like it turns out there's a tremendous number of people in this area who this house, they drive past it all the time.

Tava Baird: And they've always felt very strongly that they needed to go there. They've never been inside, but now what they were seeing is we started the archeology digs there. is crews of somebody working in the backyard. And a lot of them felt a fear thinking, Oh no, is there going to be a development here? Is it going to get torn down?

Tava Baird: Because they've never taken that. They've never actually stopped and gone to see if they could be there. And then they will round. It was very funny. We had one woman a couple of weeks ago who did this. She came around the corner and she saw me and she went, Whoa. You're not a construction crew, I guess, because [00:35:00] she thought I was female, so I was probably, and also I do not look like I have a body that could sustain one day of construction.

Tava Baird: So, and I explained, no, we're an archaeology team, we're all volunteers, we're working here to try to find more about the history of the inn, and you saw her shoulders just drop with relief, and she said, so you're not here to tear it down? And I said, no, God, no, we're trying to keep it standing. And he said, I've driven past this place for years.

Tava Baird: It has this special place in my heart. I've never stopped. And I said, would you like to go inside? And her eyes lit up and she said, are you kidding me? And she is not the only person who has had this. We have people stop all. All the time when they see us out there in the yard and they're having to look hard cause we're in the backyard.

Tava Baird: But when they see cars there, they come and they go, we're neighbors and we just want to know what's going on. We love this place. And we don't know why. And none of them [00:36:00] can articulate. It's not like their family used to live there. It's. Just something about the house. And so once we bring them inside, a lot of them, and they're total strangers, will just start telling me their stories.

Tava Baird: And a lot of them, by the time they get part, I mean, they'll start telling me incredibly personal things. And by the time they're done, they've joined the archaeology team, they've signed up to volunteer. And we come to find out as we're doing the research on this house. A tremendous number of them are actually related to someone who at 1 point was on that property or lived on that property.

Tava Baird: And so now there's this entire. community of the living that have rallied around this place and that are building their own community there. Um, I can tell you right now, as the ground gets, as we edge towards [00:37:00] winter, in the wintertime and the ground freezes, you can't really dig. It's mud.

Tava Baird: It's, you can't see what's going on. It's unpleasant. To be digging when it's, 10 degrees outside. And all of these people are saying, we're not just not going to see each other in winter. Are we, what are we going to do? We've started hosting school groups and hosting game nights in the house. And, people want to get together and have potlucks.

Tava Baird: And we're talking about once we can get consistent running water in the end, having our, artifact cleaning teams and parties there. Cause everybody. if I try to cancel a dig, someone else steps in and says, I'll take over. They just don't want there to be a week where they're not there.

Tava Baird: And it's incredibly beautiful thing that I never expected to happen. 

Jennifer Taylor: Yeah. And getting to watch this evolve and watch the growth of it and the types of things that. [00:38:00] We're happening to I think you know one ofthe things that seems to have really been shifting in the inn as I watched, its progression is more and more real sensitivity to those who are still residing in that house and just don't have a body and the amount of Awareness and directly interacting with them as opposed to just initially you know, it seems like there was a lot of going through the house with the sense of people just wanting to have a Paranormal experience and wanting to get a sense of it and I think one of the things that the presence of the people that have been drawn there and certainly the presence of you there is that There's, there's shifted more and more this sensitivity to and care for those that are living there.

Jennifer Taylor: And, those whose souls are still really wrapped up in it. And, [00:39:00] um, I've heard you describe so much the ways in which they, the spirits in the house are expressing their joy of your being there. They're welcoming of your being there and, I think that's a really beautiful thing, I remember that first, um, experience where, the spirits were really aggravated a little bit.

Jennifer Taylor: And, the things that they were doing, it was very chaotic and things were getting kind of thrown about and cast about and turned upside down and all kinds of stuff. and as you have really consciously come into the house and said, I'm here to help. I care about you. I care about this house, and I know that you really care about this, and I want to restore this and help Joseph.

Jennifer Taylor: That's what he's doing, and directly dialoguing with them, you know, and not having . At the time, a lot of, [00:40:00] psychic, anything or seeing, stuff, but just walking in and saying, Hey, just sort of talking to the house and interacting and bringing flowers and, you started doing things helping it to feel like a home again and that, that transformation and all of these, people coming in and offering to, I've heard you talk about, you know, people just, you know, Giving toys for the children that we now know, are residing in the upstairs and picnic tables and, old Victrola's and, all of these things there's something about that house that is calling people and seems to be bringing All these different kinds of levels of healing to people in all these different ways that you had tapped into and I hear more and more stories of you sharing all of these other people that are being drawn for this and I remember really early on, um, Keith and I talking about [00:41:00] how it seemed so clear that there was your healing and the house's healing were really connected. and I think there's a lot of that for a lot of people and it's such an interesting thing that a place that seemed so broken is has actually become like this beacon of healing and helping people to see hard things.

Jennifer Taylor: Yes. And The people. And the house all healing in concert together. 

Tava Baird: One of the things that's been interesting. Joseph was talking about when he first took over the house, there was someone living in the house, but they were only in one room and they had boarded the doors to the rest of the house shut.

Tava Baird: So, the house has been pretty much continuously lived in. I mean, no one's. Residing in it every night right now, but Joseph's right next door. and we're there a lot now. [00:42:00] but three quarters of the house, was just boarded up and empty. Although neighbors did report seeing, even though that had happened a woman moving across the windows regularly.

Tava Baird: so this house is literally as far as we can tell right now, and we're still putting together all of the owners and the timelines and when they were there and everything, which appears that this house has been continuously occupied since it's, it was built and we know. Sadly of quite a few deaths on the property, but when Joseph took over, he unboarded those doors and was moving through rooms of the house that had not been lived in for probably decades.

Tava Baird: And pulling out all this trash. he'll tell you like, I didn't know what that, it was haunted , he, there was a lot of, I mean, people were getting scratched, uh, people were getting bitten. There were things like Jen said, moving across spaces. There were obviously a lot of [00:43:00] unhealed.

Tava Baird: energies in the place, but also I think energies that were just used to being on their own. imagine if you, have sat quietly in a dark room by yourself for decades, since the 1980s, and then suddenly somebody opens the door and comes in and starts moving everything around, you're going to go, What are you doing?

Tava Baird: you're going to have a reaction to that. and then there were people who were like, Oh, we need to get rid of the spirits. I just, they are, my feeling has been they're, they're doing spiritual work. They wouldn't be there if they weren't meant to be there. And, you know, the idea that we're going to come in and just like force them out because I don't think you should be here, especially when they've, the person doing it has never resided in there.

Tava Baird: Of course, it was going to kick up adversarial feelings in the energy there. Um, plus just echoes of energies that were in the space, that might not even be conscious were there. before I opened up any pit in the [00:44:00] backyard, I talked a lot to people who were spending time in the house who were a lot more psychic than I was.

Tava Baird: And I said, I really want to help. Um, I don't hear them the way you do. If you do encounter a spirit, can you please let them know? That I am listening, that I want to help, that I want to keep the place standing, and that I'm not here to hurt, and I want to be a friend. And so every time I went to the house, I would go in and say, every time we came to dig, I would go in.

Tava Baird: I usually brought flowers or something else like some quilts for the beds or, and Joseph meanwhile was putting furniture back in the house to make it feel lived in, he's making little repairs, he's pulling all the buckled plaster off the original colonial beams in the attic, where you can see the Roman numerals carved in [00:45:00] them by the woodworker.

Tava Baird: That was first there. I was asking Jen and, anybody I could find that did energy work. Can you please send good energy to this house? And if the entities inside are responsive, that they know that they're cared for and that we want to find out more about them. I would sing in the house and it was.

Tava Baird: It was actually odd how often I would walk in and find somebody else from the archaeology team singing in the house or I was singing. People would come with instruments and say, I feel called to go in with my fiddle and sit in a room and play. Joseph got a sound system put in there and we would play all sorts of things.

Tava Baird: Like the other day we had big band, I always wanted to play big band swing music in the house. And you just hear it echo through the halls, this sort of joyful dance music. From the big band era, and we'll play classical music in there. 

Tava Baird: And we bought the children toys. people brought, vintage rocking chairs and, doll cradles and, and [00:46:00] people built things. Allie's dad built a podium, for the guest book in the front hall. And we're. Going in and we're as we're finding the family trees of the people who lived here, we're going in and we're saying people's names.

Tava Baird: Are you here? Are you here? We started looking up their grave sites of people who had resided in the house and going to visit them and local cemeteries and leaving them flowers. Just trying to. We wanted them to realize that we weren't trying to move them out, but that if they needed us, we were there. Uh, if we had someone on the archaeology staff who had a birthday, we would bring cupcakes and go inside to sing happy birthday.

Tava Baird: So any spirits that wanted to come could come to a birthday party. we know there's little children's spirits all through the house, lots of people say they, Feel the children looking at their skirts, especially if they're a mom. They'll say, Oh, I can feel a little one.

Tava Baird: holding on to my clothes.[00:47:00] and you'll see some of the balls and toys that we got sometimes moving around in the attic. going in and just singing and, playing games at the kitchen table. I teach a whole series of art classes inside that are, time appropriate to the past.

Tava Baird: I taught a brew making class in there on Saturday. I've done a quilting class. Um, I'm doing a colonial bookbinding class this coming weekend. So the old arts, if you lived in that house during the Victorian era, you would have seen people sitting in crazy quilting and embroidering and gossiping over coffee and tea.

Tava Baird: And so we're, we're trying to do these things there and then use the names of the spirits, you know, Oh, Mary Elizabeth, if she's here. Here she probably thinks that our stitches are too big, and laughing and, and just trying to let them know. it's been so wonderful because when we first got to the house, Joseph would talk about how he would go in to try to make repairs and he would feel this [00:48:00] sadness around his heart and his whole mood would change and he just couldn't stay in there long.

Tava Baird: very long. And now when we go, there's a group of us sitting in the parlor chit chatting while the spirit box makes little, notations about what we're talking about and Joseph can do repairs. We're in there with him, and he says, I love it when you guys are here. It feels like a family lives here again,I never expected this to happen.

Tava Baird: and now I'm learning to be more, become more confident. With, with turning towards my fear, because the, that I told you at the beginning of this podcast, that I had this experience, this would seem like something more than a dream. Um, and then Sam Aiel said, where's my book? And in that dream, I was chasing this butterfly.

Tava Baird: There was a lot of fear, a lot of my old fears, without going too deep into my own psychology, there [00:49:00] were a lot of fears in the dream and I was trying to fly away from them. And I have had dreams ever since I was a child where I was inside a big building. Sometimes it would be a church, sometimes it would be like a train station, and I had wings and there were people on the ground trying to grab my feet and pull me to earth.

Tava Baird: And I was frantically trying, in the upper reaches of these big buildings, trying to find a way out. But every window I went to was barred, every window I could break was too small for me to fit through. And in this dream I would just be in a wild, like a panic, trying to get out of the building. And Samuel told me, what would happen if you flew towards your fear?

Tava Baird: And I thought, are you crazy? I'm not doing that. I have 50 years of frantically trying to get away from it. And trying to keep whoever's pulling me to earth from pulling [00:50:00] me down and destroying me. And he told me, you must fly towards your fear. That's what's happened in this house.

Tava Baird: Where sometimes I'll be in the house alone and I will see something move. Or I will see something out of the corner of my eye. And instead of turning and falling butt out to the yard. Okay, full disclosure, I have done that numerous times. But what I'm learning to do now is instead take a deep breath, remember that Samael has told me to try and fly towards my fear and that I have much to learn from the dead.

Tava Baird: So what I'm trying to do now instead of when I, of running out of the room is get myself under control. Take a deep breath. Understand that when [00:51:00] they appear, It's not their fault how they look, they are dealing with a whole different set of energy and the world looks very different to them than it does to me, so that if I see someone standing in the corner of the room, probably not trying to frighten me, they're just present and this is how they look.

Tava Baird: And if I can take a deep breath and get myself under control and turn and fly towards my fear. That I will learn something, maybe about them, but more likely about myself. And I'm hoping that as I repeatly do these things in this lab, that I will become a more worthy member of the community that's being built there.

Tava Baird: It is hard work. It is scary work, but I'm sitting here [00:52:00] today saying I've been touched by things I couldn't see. I've seen things that made my heart leap into my throat. But, uh, I, I'm physically fine and I feel so much stronger and so much more aware of energy moving around me that I can't see that I did six months ago.

Tava Baird: And to have people say that they now want to hang out in this haunted house because it is the happiest place in their lives is amazing. Absolutely incredible to me.

Jennifer Taylor: Thank you for sharing all of that. I feel like this would be a good time for a musical interlude. 

Tava Baird: Yes, definitely would. 

Jennifer Taylor: Yeah, so, so I'm inviting angels, and I'm [00:53:00] inviting the guardian angels of everyone listening to Come through my angelic gateway, which I'll have to explain later just for this for this purposes Just the next podcast is angelic 

Tava Baird: gateway 

Jennifer Taylor: Yeah, so we will um, i'm inviting your guardian angels to be more present for you for your individual guardian angel to reflect back to you, your own magnificence, your own divinity, your own worth. And I invite in the angels of integration to help us to integrate and make sense of the information. That we have heard and all that we have received. I invite the angels of clearing to lift and clear away anything [00:54:00] that is not yours that you may have picked up or any emotions that do not need to be present. To be lifted and cleared away for your highest good. , invite the angels. of the Divine Earth to be present and help to ground the energy of everyone listening.

Jennifer Taylor: And I invite you all to breathe in and out through your heart space in the center of your chest. 

Jennifer Taylor: And breathe. Just so you know, my voice will change here for a minute with a little bit of effects to help to bring you into more of A peaceful space. [00:55:00] [00:56:00] [00:57:00] 

Tava Baird: would just like to say I need to listen to that on repeat for about five hours now. Samuel came through so incredibly clearly during that. I should have made this connection, but I didn't. Um, so the book series Spiral Pathways that I do, the main character, Saorsa Stewart, is representative of some [00:58:00] aspects of my spiritual development.

Tava Baird: And long before I found this in, he had been on a journey. And when you get to about book four, she starts learning, about bone casting and she starts learning there's a different side to the world that we see and The world that looks darker than what we're used to.

Tava Baird: And I know Jen, you and I have, been having extensive discussions about dark and light lately. in the books, she starts exploring a little bit more about the concept of darkness.You would think, As I have a character that is often a stand in for me and some of the things that she does, who has been edging towards this for a couple of years in a book series now, that I would have reflected that back and looked at my own life and said, this is a path that you're going to be taking at some point.

Tava Baird: And it was just, [00:59:00] they often say that art reflects life in my case, a lot of times art seems to precede life. I need to, I think at times go back and read things that I've written and then go, Oh, I should probably pay more attention to that on the road ahead. the first book of Samael, like I said, was very transformative for me in terms of my worldview and how I think about life and death.

Tava Baird: over the last six months, I've been collecting notes for the second one, or as he said, the next one. is going to be all about the experiences I've been having in relation to the house and outside the house with him. We're outside the lab, as we should say. one of the things that,he's been saying to me lately that came through really the clearest while you were singing just now, is I keep asking him as I'm having these experiences, what has happened to me?

Tava Baird: Because a lot of times I can't really process in the [01:00:00] moment what's going on. And then there's a lot of time afterwards of going, what's happening to me? What's going on? and his answer today, as you were singing to the question, what has happened to me is, you have become a new thing, Umshal, a bone witch and speaker for the dead.

Tava Baird: It is needed and it will heal. when I started moving into my 40s and 50s, and I started watching friends and family members around me grasp the concept of aging and death and experiencing it much more presently. You know, when you're in your 20s, you think you're immortal, pretty much.

Tava Baird: Anybody who's ever seen like a 23 year old boy with a car, they. They think they're immortal pretty much, like we sling our bodies at all sorts of things we probably shouldn't do. in the way that we eat and drink and, uh, go, rock climbing with probably one less safety rope than we should and drive our cars a little too fast.

Tava Baird: [01:01:00] And then as you start to age, you start to realize that you are a mortal being. And as you have experiences, you start to realize that. You know, your body can only take so much and it needs to sleep a little bit longer and heal a little bit longer. And we're very, very good at welcoming new souls to this planet when they are born.

Tava Baird: There's lots of celebration around babies. obviously not in every single case, there's a lot of children born into poverty and, and have a lot of needs. But we're definitely better in a lot of parts of our society in terms of taking care of the young. we think of the children, what are we going to do for the children?

Tava Baird: We do everything for our children that we, it's possible to do. But an area where we really don't do as much because we don't seem to know how is what happens on the other transition, the transition out of your body and out of this, present lifetime that you were [01:02:00] in. There's a lot of societies that do it a lot better than we do.

Tava Baird: Uh, just yesterday I was at an event and, this people came in and he was from Mexico and he was talking all about the day of the dead. Oh man, the beautiful. bulk art that comes out of the Day of the Dead. Oh, it's incredible. But anyway, and he and I got into a conversation. He was talking about what a difference it was to come from the culture he was from, where there's multiple days at the end of October and beginning of November where you go into the cemeteries and you have a picnic at your ancestor's grave sites and you leave flowers for them and you come back.

Tava Baird: Clean up their stones and everything is celebrated or, it's a celebration of their lives and you have,altars in your home where you're leaving out their favorite things and putting photographs of them and the dead are very present there. In those celebrations, the families all back together, whether they're alive or they're deceased.

Tava Baird: he said it was so interesting to get [01:03:00] married to someone who grew up in the United States and come up here. This doesn't click in here, but there was this. undercurrent constantly of a fear of death and of not being prepared and everything looks scary and terrifying, you know, and especially when we look at the number of our relatives and things that we lost during COVID, you know, that was sort of almost like a mass, we had to face this tragedy that was going on together.

Tava Baird: We really didn't have the tools for it as a society. And so I, I really feel like this is a This is where my calling is going to be in my future years is not just going into places and trying to listen for spirits to try to help the living realize that you are a spirit just like they are. You may be embodied [01:04:00] right now, but one day you won't be.

Tava Baird: And we need tools and love and understanding and ceremonies. To mark these passings with more than just trepidation and grease, that we need to understand we are all going to go through this one day and it will benefit us all to be able to reach out to the living and help to better hold their hands as they go through this transition and to help their families go through this transition.

Tava Baird: And to reach out to those who for whatever reason have gone through that tradition, transition, and are still here in some way on this plane and help everyone to have a joyous connection and a joyous crossing towards what comes next. And so that is, I think, is where I am headed [01:05:00] to, uh, to help in that aspect.

Tava Baird: And that's, that's what I'm learning from this house. I do want to speak real quickly on where the inn gets its name because everyone gets real confused by that. And it's kind of funny. I 

Tava Baird: don't actually know the answer to that. 

Tava Baird: So it is called the Blue Ball Inn and, um, everybody says that and then they giggle, right?

Tava Baird: Because, okay, come on, what, everybody knows what that actually means in slang in our Western society, right? The Blue Ball Inn. And everybody wants to know why in the world is it called that? So here's the thing. First off, it is not the only Blue Ball Inn in America. There's another one in Pennsylvania.

Tava Baird: I think there might be another one up in Massachusetts. if you're looking, if you want to learn more about the inn. you want to look up, um, the Blue Ball Inn that's in Virginia that was built in 1747. Um, Joseph actually has a TikTok, where he does make tons of videos about the inn. look up Blue Ball Inn 1747.

Tava Baird: The [01:06:00] reason, and then if you go to England, there are tons of blue ball inns. And the reason for this is that during the colonial era, if you ran a tavern and you wanted to let people know that there was rooms at the inn available for rent, you would take a blue round fishing lure and you would either hang it out in front of the building or down at the nearest crossroads.

Tava Baird: And as people went by on horseback or in their carriages, they would see the blue ball hanging there and go, Oh, I can turn off here and get a room for the night. Or, Oh, they've got space for me to stop by for dinner. And so a lot of these taverns took on the name, the blue ball in because of these fishing lures.

Tava Baird: The way in which we use it. Today didn't come along till much later. So, um, this particular tavern is called the blue ball in for that reason. It was [01:07:00] also known if you look on a lot of old maps as widow Littler's tavern. The reason for that is that the couple who built it was John Littler. He was the descendant of English immigrants and Mary Ross Littler, who was the descendant of Scottish immigrants.

Tava Baird: And they met up in Pennsylvania and got married. They were Quakers and then they moved down to this area. And as far as we can tell, it appears that John and Mary Ross borrowed money from Mary's dad, who was a well, to do Scotsman, who had come to the area and they opened several mills and the tavern.

Tava Baird: Sadly, not long after the tavern opened. Sickness came through the area and we're not sure if it was smallpox or not yet. It's one of the things we're researching. Mary lost both of her parents, her husband, we believe several of her children, two of her brothers. all within the space of a year. But she [01:08:00] was a strong woman and she got back up, dusted herself off, and continued to run the tavern as Widow Littler's Tavern after that for many years with the assistance of her other children.

Tava Baird: And so on a lot of the old maps of Brustown, you'll see it labeled as Widow Littler's Tavern and it's the same building. we will have lots more information in this on our bonus content when we will, I'll talk, talking with Joseph about how he took over the building and what has transpired since.

Tava Baird: And we'll give you links in there and all sorts of things to follow along the progress of the Inn on Facebook and on TikTok. And if you are in the Winchester area and you want to get involved doing research or archaeology, or house repairs or any of those wonderful things or fundraising. we would love to have you in the community and we'll, we'll put all that in our bonus content for 

Jennifer Taylor: you.

Jennifer Taylor: and I will say if you want to find it or anything, I know [01:09:00] Keith and I tried the other day. We were near there. I knew we had to be near there, but, and I was trying to find it and I searched and searched and couldn't find it. And I was like, I need to just go to Tava's website because I know I can find it.

Jennifer Taylor: That is the easiest way, at least as far as I could find, to connect with all of that. 

Tava Baird: Brustown, um, so, uh, Brustown is also known as, that area is also known as Clearbrook, Virginia, but I will tell you something odd about the inn.

Tava Baird: After that very first paracon, I got in the car and I, I'm not very good on backcountry roads. I like couldn't find my way out of a paper bag. And so I set my GPS for my hometown and I started driving. And the next thing I know, I'm looking at the inn again. I had literally made a circle and come back to the inn and I thought I had to have punched in the wrong address or it pulled up when I was trying to find the inn in the first place.

Tava Baird: And, um, I sat, you know, pulled over, sat down. wrote, [01:10:00] you know, double checked that it said my hometown and took off again. And 10 minutes later, I'm looking at the fricking inn again. And I thought, okay, this is now become like Hotel California. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. And eventually I turned off the GPS, drove a good distance away and then turned on the GPS and got home.

Tava Baird: So the funny thing was, uh, the next time I was at the inn, I said to some of the other volunteers there, I'm such a huge. Bufus, like I don't know how a GPS works. I ended up back here twice and come to find out that that is not an experience that is singular to me, but frequently for some unknown reason, a GPS in that area will simply direct you back to the end when you try to leave and it happens sometimes and it doesn't happen other times and we don't know why.

Tava Baird: So um, yeah, it may have something to do with the, I'm saying I'm going with The, uh, electrical or whatever other [01:11:00] currents running around that place.

Jennifer Taylor: something that occurred to me from. You know, an energetic perspective.

Jennifer Taylor: I mean, I, I teach all kinds, I teach energy clearing and I teach a specific way of clearing spirits from, spaces from people's bodies. And the first thing I thought was, Oh great, I'll just, you know, I'll do a spirit release and I can, I'll help everybody and that'll be great. And it was clear from talking to you from your, the first two days that you spent there, that there was something.

Jennifer Taylor: they had different kinds of energy workers, they had priests, they had lots of different, approaches to doing that, and that it was not, received well, and things escalated,and I remember asking you to ask Samuel should I just do this, you know, why is that?

Jennifer Taylor: And I remember you having him say, it's not that they haven't been given the choice or the option [01:12:00] to leave and that, they weren't like abandoned by, the divine. They were doing work there and this was like their choice. And this was the first time I'd ever heard anything like this where.

Jennifer Taylor: in my, background and everything, it's all about, you know, they, they need to go to the light, they need help getting there and we'll call on the angels and we'll work with all of this and they'll help them go up and everything's great. And I've done that on, a number of occasions in old barns where there were, there were spirits that I realized were kind of stuck there and they were very open to.

Jennifer Taylor: that process and to receiving that process and being like absolutely and, and recognizing that they had been stuck in this kind of perpetual dream that just kept repeating and they were willing and happy to go. And this was really my first experience with the idea that. [01:13:00] that's not the thing to do with every place that you encounter.

Jennifer Taylor: And this has been incredibly instructive for me and the idea that, Samuel was basically saying, no, don't, don't do a spirit release on this house. They don't want that. But I could send healing energy to the house as a whole. Yes. And just lift, help to uplift the vibration of the place and that was helpful and that, anything that could just sort of raise the vibration of the place without directly sending to the spirits that were still there or doing anything to insinuate that they needed to leave, that was, you know, that was the way to go.

Jennifer Taylor: And I think. I know my lessons in learning in this are going to continue through this process because that would never have occurred to me. It was always, oh my goodness, well this is what they need, and that, that they would all need the same thing. And there's a lot of learning that's coming [01:14:00] through with that, you know, not necessarily.

Jennifer Taylor: And I think, It's a really good lesson energetically in making sure that when we step in or decide to, to intervene somewhere that We're doing that in right relationship with the the spirits of the place andwhat is in the highest good and that what we think is in the highest good isn't always the case And so that's been really really helpful for me to to get to to experience some of this tangentially through yeah 

Tava Baird: And I mean, I would, I would have thought the same thing.

Tava Baird: one of the first things that I was when I was there, we had a lot of energy workers who would come who would say, can't get past the first floor, they would say that the intensity of the energy gets stronger, the higher up in the building you go, and there's an attic up there. And my first experience was with the attic was I tried to walk into one of them and got this wall of heat.

Tava Baird: And it was so strong that I literally was like, Sam, I only need help. And like, like, help, [01:15:00] help. There's something, something's going on here. we've since gone up there and, and that's where a lot of the children's spirits seem to congregate. And it's interesting. We have a lot of adults who are uncomfortable in the attic.

Tava Baird: Um, children seem to love. The act when we have young people, teenagers and younger, they will go and we say, Oh, the addicts really intense. They will go. No, no, that's the most comfortable place in the whole house and they tend to feel more uncomfortable in what would have been some of the more public rooms of the tavern, like the parlor and that ground floor.

Tava Baird: And so I'm wondering if it had to do with, you know, the children or the family tended to stay upstairs if they were younger, rather than being underfoot with the travelers coming through that sort of thing, or, the four sort of more formal adult spaces. But I remember being up there and saying, you know, if there's anything that can't find its way out, I'm going to go down the stairs, you can [01:16:00] follow me.

Tava Baird: And I, I felt like there was somebody behind me, but when I think they got to the top of the stairs, they stopped. And I think there's an assortment of things going on there. I think there are. Um, and this is just from any time a psychic or anybody who's good with energy, where it comes out of that house, we're actually working on writing a book about the house.

Tava Baird: And I started off just doing it on the history. And then I started saying, To people, if you have an experience in the house and you want to share it, please come tell it to me. Because now what I'm doing is when people come out and they go, this happened, I can say, Oh yeah, 12 other people have had that happen in that room.

Tava Baird: I'm kind of becoming this repository of, you know, somebody three months ago had that exact same experience, but it was here, just kind of like helping take all this information in. And so I've been getting. I've become the stockpile of people's experiences within the house.

Tava Baird: And it's interesting because a lot of the people who do energy work and stuff, [01:17:00] they would say that they would go in and offer that. And at first there were a couple of things that did seem. Like they wanted to skeedaddle, but the majority of the entities in the house, or some of them are very territorial.

Tava Baird: This is my house. And they're worried about the house. They feel a responsibility towards it. Like they can't leave until they know it's in good hands, or that they're afraid they're disappointing their family. If it falls down. and when you think you look back and you see that this place was used, not only as a tavern, but it's a family farm for generations.

Tava Baird: there are a lot of people who have very strong ties to the land and to, to the building and to whatever happened there. feel a responsibility. And, um, so what I'm hoping is that as we're there to help prepare for the structure itself, that maybe some of the beings are there will feel like the responsibility is more shared.

Tava Baird: the other [01:18:00] thing that just started happening over the last month is we started getting people related. To families that lived in the house arriving at the end, um, going up and saying, my great grandparents lived here. I haven't been in this house since I was 5 or. You know, I know we actually had someone contact us who is a descendant of the littlers, and I really look forward to getting in touch with them.

Tava Baird: First off, because they probably have, there's a ton of information we don't have. Like, we don't know where John and Mary Littler are buried. We can't find their graves. Um, There may have been a family plot somewhere on the land. We don't know the exact original borders of the property, and maybe they do, like maybe they have some of this information that historically will help us.

Tava Baird: Also, you know, the other day, I could see a couple walk in the door who said, Oh, my gosh, like my [01:19:00] family used to live here. We're starting to get more of that happening. And that, like I said earlier, the people who are digging on the archaeology site who are discovering they have family connections and feel drawn to this place.

Tava Baird: It's almost like There's a circle happening here where the descendants of some of the people whose spirits may still be in this house are now getting their family coming to them, and I'm so curious to see what that does. That may be, maybe opening this house up and talking about it is, is now being able to bring some of these families back, and that may be incredibly healing for the spirits that are still in the house.

Jennifer Taylor: And I I know we have talked a really long time and so yes We need to wrap this up one of the things that you've done to help to bring healing to the house was to paint a painting of the house as [01:20:00] it could be in a a very Healing process and I know this this took you a long time of I mean usually like you crank out paintings like Nobody's business and this was a real You A real energetic process of creating and bringing the, the life and the potential of that house into being and now have.

Jennifer Taylor: But just put it in the house the other day and have what prints available, right, that to sell to support the house as well. 

Tava Baird: Yes. I painted an incredibly large painting that showed the house with a fresh coat of paint and a blue sky behind it, you know, sort of full of what I imagined it looked more like when it was built, um, and gifted it to the house and it is now sitting in the parlor over the years.

Tava Baird: mantle. We have had prints made. Um, and, oh, I guess I, you know what I [01:21:00] should do is put a couple of them up on my Etsy shop. and they're also for sale at the house. if you happen to go through there on a tour or something, and 100 percent of the proceeds goes to, um, helping to save the blue ball in.

Tava Baird: So I will get my butt in gear and get one listed up on my Etsy shop, which is, uh, dark flower books, um, on Etsy. And then if you would like to help support the inn and you live a little too far away to come visit right now, you could go on and get a print and have it shipped to you and, that money will just go straight back to the Blue Ball Inn.

Jennifer Taylor: And we can have, links and show notes to things like that too. Yes, 

Jennifer Taylor: The 

Tava Baird: other thing is I have started making these cute little blue ball in puppets that have a little blue ball on their bellies that say the blue ball in Brustown and under the patch is a penny.

Tava Baird: And in the bonus content, I will tell you the story of the mysterious pennies in [01:22:00] the house, and that we're finding as we excavate all over the yard. There's a whole penny story that I'll put in bonus content. Um, so I'll put, I'll pop one of those up on Etsy or a couple of them up on Etsy too. If you'd like a little poppet with, a penny reminiscent of, um, the pennies at the inn, then, those will be available for two.

Tava Baird: And once again, all the proceeds go back to helping to support the house. 

Jennifer Taylor: Wonderful. And so I will just sing us again into a space that helps to continue with our integration. And I will let you know that throughout from the time that I began the musical interlude, which really turned into what felt like a pretty strong energy healing that I was bringing through.

Jennifer Taylor: I have felt it continuing to flow through me to you, you the listener, and you Tava as well, throughout the rest of the time here. So if you felt Things that [01:23:00] felt different or anything that's likely the energy moving and the angels working with you as well But I just thought I would point that out in case anybody's like I felt a little weird in the last part it's probably just energy moving for your highest good and clearing and lifting and Integrating 

Jennifer Taylor: Breathe in and out through the center of your heart chakra. And really to remind you that you can do this many, many times throughout the day, and it will help to bring you back to your center. Bring all of your energies into one centered coherent place.

Jennifer Taylor: [01:24:00] [01:25:00] May you all be grounded on earth, [01:26:00] receiving light, and centered in the heart.

Jennifer Taylor: Thank you, Jen. Thank you so much for joining us today, everybody. Until next time. We hope that you have lovely days, we'll be getting back together soon. 

Jennifer Taylor: