Greenfield is a town with its share of ghost stories. 

Karen, a longtime Greenfield resident, preferred that I not use her last name when I tell her story. 

“Everyone in town knows who I am. I am very fortunate that I have always been able to help people with my abilities. Spirits come to me, but I can’t summon them on demand. I can’t call them up,”  Karen told me. “I just don’t want people calling me up asking me if I can talk to their departed loved one; that’s not something I do.”

Karen said anyone who knows her knows she has a sixth sense. She is a psychic intuitive healer, which is not the same thing as a medium.

“People at my work joke all the time when something is going wrong – ‘Oh, don’t worry, Karen will figure it out,’” she said.

In 1984, Karen came to Greenfield to house hunt. When she drove by a certain house with a “For Sale” sign, she felt a strong emotional reaction to the property. 

“I knew I was meant to live there,” she said. “It was as if the property was saying to me: ‘You are needed here.’”

After settling into her new home, Karen began to have a strange premonition every day as she drove home from work.

“Every day, when I got around the lake, and I would be overcome with this terrible fear that my house was burning down. Then I would smell smoke. But every day when I got home, it was fine,” Karen said.

After moving into the house, Karen also began to sense spirits in residence. 

“They would come and and leave the door open,” she said. “I had to tell them, ‘You can’t come in my house.’”

Karen has known about her abilities since she was a young child, but she quickly learned to hide it from adults.

“I would tell my brothers, and they knew,” she said. “But sometimes adults would think I was lying or trying to get attention.”

Karen remembers one time a friend of hers got in trouble over a missing library book. Karen had a vision of where the book was, and led her friend and an adult right to the spot where the book had been shelved by mistake.

“They thought I put it there,” Karen recalled. “So I learned to stop telling people when I knew things I couldn’t have known.”

Karen considers herself extremely fortunate that her abilities have always enabled her to help people, even to save lives. Twice, she has run into a neighbor’s house just as they were having a health emergency, and was able to call 911. 

Another time, she saw a dramatic car accident in her rearview mirror, but when she went back to check, there was nothing there. Karen then called a Greenfield police officer, and he confirmed that an accident identical to the one she described had taken place earlier that morning in the same spot.  

After months of smelling smoke and fearing her house was burning, Karen asked Lenny Cornwell, longtime president of the Greenfield Historical Society, if there was a history of fire on her property. While Karen’s home had no history of fire, what Lenny told Karen about the property helped her put the pieces together. 

“Lenny told me that after the Civil War,  the land where my house is used to have shanties for transient workers such as loggers, workers in the Greenfield ice house and railroad workers. These shanties were all heated by wood, and they burned down a lot,” Karen said.  

Slip Road has a long history of fires, including what people in town call the “Railroad Fire” and the “Grain Mill Fire.”  

Cornwell also told Karen about Greenfield’s “tramp house," which was near where Greenfield Elementary School is now. Men coming through town looking for work would stay in the tramp house during seasonal labor. 

“People just had very, very hard lives back then,” she said. 

Driving home one day not long after her talk with Lenny, Karen saw a woman sitting on a lawn chair at a home near her own. Then she realized the woman was wearing a dress typical of the 1800s, and she knew that not only was woman a spirit, but that she was one of the deeply unhappy spirits who had been coming into Karen’s home. 

“She had her face buried in her hands, and she was grieving, and she was in so much pain,” Karen said. “Something must have happened to her on my property, and she was still in so much pain, 200 years later.”

Karen communed with the spirit, acknowledging her pain and suffering and the tragedy that had taken place on the land so many years ago. 

“Then I looked in the back yard, and a white handkerchief flew by, past my house, toward the woods, and it was gone,” Karen said. “And I knew that was the woman’s spirit, escaping, and now she could move on. And then I knew: this is why I was meant to live in this house. To help this spirit move on.” 

After that, Karen stopped smelling smoke or fearing her house was going to burn down, and spirits stopped opening her front door. 

While Karen works full-time, including as a bereavement counselor, she would someday like to be able to assist the police with finding missing people, which is done on a volunteer basis. 

“I took a test to identify criminals in mug shots, and I scored 100%,” Karen said. “I can see it in their eyes.” 

Karen works on sharpening her abilities with other members of the clairvoyant community.

“You have to have a good sense of humor when you have these abilities. Some people think you’re crazy, or they’re uncomfortable with it, and I understand that,” Karen said. “People sometimes don’t like what they can’t understand. I’m just really lucky, because I’ve been able to use my abilities to help, and that is a gift.”