The Psychic Sense of Smell
Juxtaposition of light and dark: Magnolia and wisteria. Photo copyright by Lorna Tedder, all rights reserved.
“I smell Granddaddy!”
She was visibly upset. She’d walked into a room in the house where I grew up, presumably after Grandma’s brownies or see where my mom was, and she’d smelled my dad’s scent heavy in the air. It’s been a long time since any of us smelled his particular scent but she recognized it right away. Not in a bad or ominous way…just a signature of energy.
I didn’t tell her that the exact spot where she noted the scent was the spot where he died more than three years ago.
Most people think of intuition and psychic abilities as being expressed through seeing something, some form of energy. For me, I’ve always been able to feel it and occasionally an image will form in my head as a metaphor. For a long time, I felt deficient because so many of my friends saw The Dead, or auras, or other energies. I have on occasion heard them, but not in any reliable sort of way. Smell? That’s the strangest to me.
A clairvoyant woman I was friends with for many years used to sense her mother near, and would then smell carnations. She didn’t, to my knowledge, ever see her mother but she smelled her scent, sometimes waking to it in the middle of the night. Another woman would swear her father was nearby because she’d smell his cherry tobacco when there was no cherry tobacco anywhere for miles.
I’ve had this happen more than once myself. Sometimes others smell it, too, and then it’s gone. It doesn’t stay for long but the memories conjured are deep. I don’t often have this happen with The Dead but with people in danger or far away or focused on me. I will often hear later of some trouble they were in at that time or that they were thinking of me.
Although no one has ever been allowed to smoke in my house, I occasionally smell Marlboro cigarettes in my house, just a whiff and then gone. Both my daughters have smelled it at the same time. Sometimes, I will smell Bill’s Polo cologne even after all these years. I will follow it through the house searching for the source and it seems to come out of nowhere and stay confined to a particular area with no explanation. I have smelled F-15 jet grease in Todd’s hair and the antiseptics on Frank’s hands after a shift at the ER. A whiff and then gone. This week alone, I have been in my car, just me, and suddenly smelled the nicotine-laced perspiration that was peculiar to Justin and, soon after, a cologne-and-skin scent I haven’t smelled since I was last in Southern California.
I’ve always had a “sensitive nose.” During my pregnancies, I could smell a cigarette smoker in a car two vehicles ahead of me, with their windows and mine rolled up and my vent recirculating air from within. Typically, I can smell it one car-length ahead. Then again, these are real and present odors, not some olfactory flash of energy.
I have no idea what the connection is, but thus far, it’s only to the living. There’s a sense of intimacy to me with these smells, and on some level I do find it disturbing, especially when I no longer wish any contact with that person. It doesn’t last long, and though it rarely feels dangerous or upsetting, I find it’s best to burn incense in my home to mask whatever fragrant energies are thinking of me.
Hello,
My fiance and I decided to look up “psychic sense of smell” this evening because I have very much the same sort of thing you have going on. I’ve always had a strong — ABNORMALLY strong! — sense of smell, but as I’ve gotten older and my eyesight has deteriorated, it has gotten even stronger. It’s even really at the point where I rely on it to know who’s coming up behind me, or to assess a situation. I do recognize scents like you describe above, like smoke or cologne and such, and associate them with certain people, but I also recognize individual scents of people. I had an odd thing happen tonight when we were in a shop, where a fellow walked past me from behind and gave me the creeps in general, but what really sort of made it stick out in my mind was the fact that he had no scent whatsoever. I have never come across that. It was alarming, in fact. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know you’re not alone and it’s rather a relief to read an article that I’m not alone in at least having a heightened sense of smell. Thanks for your article.
Help those energies move into the light and then you can burn incense for better reasins. If thy are spirits who fear the light so much that you cannot get them to leave, then I suggest you order them out to never return, only allowing energies there wonare for your higher good.
Smell evokes our strongest emotions and can trigger memories when other senses cannot. I have a strong sense always and thought it normal to have awareness with this sense, too.