“The room was full of spirits.”

Do you ever wonder if your room is full of spirits? This evening, my eight-year-old daughter and I were in our basement looking for something, and on a whim, I asked her, “Do you see anything down here?”

She knew I meant spirits, and without batting an eye, she said no. I asked if she was sure, and she glanced around and again said no, “But there was a room full of spirits!”

I was like, “What?”

She described something that happened today in her health camp.  To promote a healthier lifestyle, we enrolled her into a summer health camp at a nearby nature preserve. Today was the first day, and she had already excitedly told me of her first tai quan do lesson and a Zumba session and a number of other activities.

She said the Zumba instructor put on “Indian music”, meaning Native American, and she said spirits flooded into the room and began swirling in a large circle. She said she gasped and someone asked if she was ok, and she said she was, but wanted to sit down. I imagine she probably said, “It’s nothing.” She knows she’s not supposed to talk about what she sees in public.

Once she told her mother that she saw a demonic spirit next to a teacher at school, and asked if she should tell her.  My wife said no, but she could pray. Our daughter said she had asked Jesus to send the demon away, and it growled at her and then left.

Sometimes we just don’t know if she’s embellishing, but we can generally tell when she’s stretching the truth or embellishing.

She certainly didn’t appear to be embelishing when she described how spirits summoned by the Native American music behaved in that Zumba class: she said they shimmered and pulsed around a large circled as if there was a campfire in the middle and they were dancing around it. She said one came onto the instructor and vampire teeth appeared. She was terrified and in her head asked Jesus to help her.

I can’t think of any movie or television show where she could have picked up on that imagery. We don’t allow her to view scary movies or television shows, and I can’t think of any programs where she’d have seen Native Americans behaving in that manner.

It makes me wonder just how music can summon spirits and the implications for a society that has no restraint on the sex/lust-induced music that shimmers and pulses into the hearts and minds of its people.