It's late on an autumn evening, slate-colored clouds are gliding across the face of a nearly full moon, and in a dimly lit studio about a nautical mile from the South River, a woman who may or may not have traveled through time fingers her lapis lazuli pendant, sits at her microphone and begins to speak very softly.
"Our waxing gibbous moon shines over the Chesapeake Bay tonight, and 'Chesapeake Moon' shines on WRYR," she says, her voice as tranquil as a breeze on the waves. "I'm Carol Bennett, inviting you to participate in metaphysical talk radio. Share your supernatural experiences. Call in your questions. It's Monday night — day of the moon — and I'm live. Let's have fun."
It's a time of year when many look forward to the ghoulish joys of Halloween, but Bennett needs no excuse to explore the macabre. Once a week for the past seven years, the 66-year-old has worked the sound board of this all-volunteer station near Deale, sending her musings on the paranormal across the skies of southern Anne Arundel and beyond.
"I don't see myself as a psychic," says Bennett, who left a NASA career 16 years ago to focus full time on the phantasmagorical. "I simply explore phenomena that do not fit into conventional scientific models. I'm sharing words, images, feelings — alternate ways of knowing."
The phone rings. "This is Megan," a caller says. "I called in before and asked you about my baby. You were the only one to predict she would be a girl. She's going to be!"
Now Megan wants to know if the baby will arrive early. Yes, Bennett says, and she's sensing the number three: three days, three weeks — it's not quite clear. "It's hard to see beyond the veil of forgetfulness," she says. Megan thanks her and rings off.
"Hello on the Eastern Shore," Bennett says. "How about a call?"
Hooey?
As many as 10 listeners check in per "Chesapeake Moon," a show that airs between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. most Mondays on WRYR (the call letters stand for "We Are Your Radio") and is rebroadcast the next Saturday night.
"She has very regular listeners," says Phil LeCroy, the station's program director. "I don't know if her advice changes their lives, exactly, but they do seem to like relying on it."
Megan's call was Bennett's first of the night, and she's fretting she might not be "at level" — clairvoyant-speak for warmed up and ready to go. "The inner pendulum can take a bit of time to balance," she says.
Her own rhythms began conventionally enough. Born in San Francisco to a military family, Carol Elizabeth Kendall moved to Ashtabula, Ohio, before the age of 1 and lived there, amidst her dad's relations, through high school.
Her grandmother, Elsie Elisabeth Gravatt Kendall, shaped her view that the universe is too vast to be understood by conventional means. She taught her to read tea leaves at age 7 and gave her the blue stone necklace she still grips when meditating (or when a call gets tricky).
Kendall women, it turned out, passed their supernatural leanings along — but only to girls who bear the name Elizabeth. "I was among the elect," she says.
As she grew up, she wasted little time on "the hooey" — her jocular nickname for the supernatural. She moved East with her then-husband, a Marine, in 1970, won an internship at the Army Security Agency and spent the next quarter-century climbing the ladder at the National Security Agency and NASA, riding her IT skills to a six-figure income.
Bennett loved the perks — Rolex watches, a Mercedes sedan, the house on a quiet cove near Annapolis — but she also felt "shot out of a cannon at 5:30 every morning," pressured by the demands of travel and raising two sons by herself.
In time, her mind began to wander. "There had to be more purpose to human existence than I had discovered," she says.
A safe bet
WRYR, 97.5-FM, a licensed low-power station, sits atop a Domino's restaurant in Churchton, a community halfway between the bayside burgs of Shadyside and Deale.
"We celebrate the diversity of our community, and we provide access to all, within the guidelines of radio," says founding director Mike Shay, a board member and the Green Party's candidate for Anne Arundel County executive.
Bennett, the station's longest-running host, won her unpaid gig after an audition and started on the air in February 2003.
She arrives a half-hour early and spends some time adjusting the levels on the sound board — a skill she learned on the job. "The talk part is [intuitive]," she says. "Working with this stuff is purely left-brain. It can get stressful."
In her hand is a CD containing her theme music, a song from "Evita" called "On This Night of a Thousand Stars." As introductions go, it's positively celestial. "On this night of a thousand stars, let me take you to heaven's door," croons singer Jimmy Nail. "On this night in a million nights, fly away with me!
Bennett, too, took flight once upon a time. She can't pinpoint when, though she does remember that trip to Ashtabula in the mid-1980s. She decided she'd follow some friends on a ghost-hunting trip to the local cemetery. Photos the group took of her that night showed something jaw-dropping: a brightly lit orb hovering over Carol's right shoulder.
"People will think I'm a whack job, but it was right there, in picture after picture," she says.
Or was it during the NASA years? In the late 1980s, she and some aerospace colleagues became interested in the unexplained.
Bennett knew well the story of Edgar D. Mitchell, an astronaut who'd walked on the moon in 1971 as part of the Apollo 14 mission — and claimed he had an epiphany during the flight home. "The presence of divinity became almost palpable," Mitchell later wrote, "and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random processes." He later founded the Institute for Noetic Sciences, a "research organization … dedicated to expanding science beyond conventional paradigms."
Bennett joined. Over the years, she attended IONS retreats, devoured books on mysticism and drove to Virginia Beach, Va., to visit the Association for Research and Enlightenment, a center founded by the late American mystic Edgar Cayce.
On and off air, she often cites "Pascal's Gambit," an idea once posed by 17th-century scientist Blaise Pascal. "Belief is a wise wager," the Frenchman famously wrote. "If you win, you take all, but if you lose, you lose nothing." Bennett chose to believe.
Spirit guides
She has been off the air for a month as WRYR wrestled with technical difficulties. Tonight, she primes listeners with a Mitchell quote.
"There are no unnatural or supernatural phenomena, only large gaps in our knowledge of what is natural," she says. "We should strive to fill those gaps of ignorance. Call in a question or predicament, and I'll fill in the gaps in your knowledge."
She fields a call from Amy, a Las Vegas resident who's listening on the Internet. Amy wants to talk about the hospice field. "Mother Theresa said birth is the miracle that brings you here, and death is the miracle that brings you home,'" she says.
Bennett tells of her own father, Carl, who suffered a stroke in 1989 and went into a coma. She prayed for his survival, she says, until a doctor told her he might have suffered brain damage. That changed her approach. "So often, we need to learn how to let go," she says.
She dishes advice freely — par for the course for a person who calls herself a "noetic traveler." Derived from noesis, a Greek word for inner wisdom,
"noetics" describes a field that applies "a scientific lens to the study of subjective experience and … ways that consciousness may influence the physical world," the IONS website says.
She's untroubled by the likes of Stephen Barrett, founder of the nonprofit website Quackwatch, who lists IONS as one of the hundreds of organizations he views "with considerable distrust." At one IONS gathering, a healer even told Bennett she has 11 spirit guides in this life, more than the norm.
Such guides can attach themselves to parts of the body, she says, and the healer told her something that stunned her — that one of hers was attached to her right shoulder. "I don't believe in coincidences," she says. "Do you?"
Jennie's musings
Her house on the cove is the same secluded retreat she bought in 1977. A rear window offers a view of boats bobbing on Almshouse Creek. The only hint of the mystical is a bumper sticker on her car. "Beam Me Back, Merlin!" it says.
It was here, during the early 1990s, that she started an inner journey that seemed as real as anything she could see with her eyes. In dreams, she found herself on the lost continent of Atlantis, in ancient Egypt, in Europe during the Dark Ages. At other times, she dreamed she was awake, only to "see" a visitor — often her father — standing at the edge of her bed. She forced herself to converse.
Bennett remembers little of those exchanges, but she'd get up, take out a notebook and jot whatever came to mind. Next morning, she'd be amazed at what she read. More and more, the words touched on a figure from her family's past: her great-aunt (and Grandma Elsie's sister), Jennie Gravatt. She remembered something odd Elsie had once told her. "You have Jennie's soul," her grandma said.
This led to research, then more dreaming. She found old family postcards that suggested Jennie was born in 1897, bore a son, Edward, out of wedlock, and died of cancer in 1926. She tracked Edward to Bellflower, Calif., and visited him twice. The more she wrote about Aunt Jennie, the more it felt as though she was writing about herself.
She left NASA in 1994, six years before receiving full retirement benefits, and started a novel. Six years later, "Jennie's Reprisal; A Soul's Evolution From Atlantis To Eternity," was published by a small local press. Several scenes take place in present-day Anne Arundel County.
"Not only is this a book about reincarnation," wrote an Amazon reviewer, Judith Pavluvcik, "it is also a romantic and sensuous love story." It has sold about 5,000 copies.
Bennett won't explain her views on life after death — "I'm a normal person!" she insists — but she always quotes the book on the air, and Aunt Jennie's musings seem clear. "[It's] silly to think that in 40, 50, 80 or even 100 years I could learn it all," the author cheerfully reads. "I have to keep coming back until I get it right."
Lifetimes
The phone rings at 9:48. It's Debbie, calling from Williamsburg, Va. "Is your moon as bright as mine?" she asks in a sing-song voice.
"It's waxing gibbous," Bennett declares. "The full right side is bleeding into the left side. It's going toward a full moon."
The caller shares a supernatural tale: One night, as she and a few friends passed a Civil War-era building, they felt a strong pull. Bennett says that was likely the ghost of an old soldier still struggling to leave this plane.
Debbie then asks about her own elderly mother, a woman she says is in ill health. "Seeing her age reminds me of my grandmother," she says. "She had a saying: The first 100 years are the hardest."
The hostess laughs. "That's true, and the ages from 70 to 100 can be especially tough," she says. "The next few centuries are smooth sailing."