Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, August 2025
Another Mound Tour of Ohio
by: Brent Raynes
Shrum Mound site
Photo by Kimberly Grimes
Tuesday morning, July 14th, 2009, in the city limits of Columbus, Ohio, a busload of people on an Indian Mound Tour sponsored by the Association for Research and Enlightenment stopped shortly after 10 a.m. to see a 20-foot tall Adena era conical mound, known as Shrum Mound, located off of McKinley Avenue, close to the Scioto River. While Dr. Greg Little walked a group of folks to the top of the mound and explained what was known about the site and these ancient people, my wife Joan and I quietly headed to a shaded area on the back side of the mound. An Appreciative Indian Spirit?
It was a sunny and pleasant day. Joan took our small deer skin drum and sounded four beats in each of the four directions to call in the spirits, and then we lit the white sage in a seashell. Soon everyone had gathered around us on the grass in a semicircle, some leaning up against a nearby stone wall. I instructed everyone to relax and sit with their back’s straight, to close their eyes and take three deep breaths. I asked them to visualize a medicine wheel and instructed everyone that we would briefly visit each of the four directions individually and try for some sort of message, guidance, or insight each time. Afterwards Greg complimented me from his nearby spot on the ground stating he had found the slow beat of the drum very pleasant. Then he added that he seldom meditated, joking that he meditated with his eyes open, but at any rate he wanted to share something quite extraordinary that had just happened to him! He said that soon after Joan had smudged him with the sage, (and before I began the drumbeat) an opening had appeared to him from inside the mound to his left. A Native American man came up to Greg from the mound. He was tall, strong, bare chested. It all happened suddenly and quickly, Greg pointed out. He spoke a different language, but Greg somehow knew that he was saying something like “Thank you for bringing these people here. This is a good thing you are doing.”
Greg said that it was like he could see inside the mound, like it was illuminated, and he could see clay pottery that this man’s people had buried with him, but that none of this really mattered to him anymore. Greg just instantly knew things about this man. He died at age 35. He had been a fierce and mighty warrior. He had killed many of his enemy. But later on in his life he had become a beloved leader of his people.
A lady sitting right next to Greg stated that she had sensed a protective Indian presence behind her.
Sixteen years later, another ARE sponsored Mound Tour bus stops again at the Shrum Mound, around 9:15 a.m., Saturday, July 19, 2025. This time Joan and I smudged the group shortly after they disembarked from the bus. Then Dr. Lora Little, Greg’s wife, invited everyone to join her for a meditation in a circle sitting on the ground.
Only the next day, as the tour ended and everyone was saying their goodbyes and preparing to catch their rides and flights home, Greg hollered to me and waved me over to talk with a couple who early that morning Joan and I had engaged in pleasant small talk with about our beloved pets, families, and other things about ourselves and them in the breakfast room of the hotel we had been staying. But now I was to learn of an experience that the wife had had the morning before at Shrum Mound, during Lora’s group meditation, which Greg clearly felt was of much interest, something I was soon to learn paralleled his mound experience there 16 years earlier!
I asked the woman to describe the warrior figure that appeared to her there, that she came to refer to as the Guardian. She began, “He was part bald, looked like black hair toward the back of his head. That’s where the two feathers were. The skin was a slightly darker tannish red. He would’ve been 30s or 40s. Wasn’t holding any apparent weapons. Moderately muscular, looked more agile. Not sure of the eye color. He was wearing long pants, which were a light tan colored leather. Also, an apron out of the same fabric. I didn’t notice any jewelry or coloring he was wearing. He may have been. It’s just I don’t recall. In a way I feel that when he appeared, he was surprised we were there. It didn’t seem like he was expecting us. It was as though we exchanged hellos, and we looked at each other for it seemed like quite a while. Then he turned toward the mound.”
Then she described a Chief type figure. “The Chief stepped out of the mound as though he were stepping through a smaller door. He stood up as he came out. Full feather head dress with long things hanging on the side to the right and the left of the head hanging down quite a ways, but not to the waist. His coloring was the same as the Guardian. He appeared older than the Guardian. He appeared to be wearing some long cape, which was a lighter color and had full clothes underneath again, some type of a suede leather in a tan color. I do not recall if these things were other colors. Or if there were other things he was wearing like jewelry. I was more focused on the Chief; I mean his presence. He turned from the Guardian to look at me. And then he was conveying information to me. It is time. It is time to stand in your Chief self, your full power/beingness. His feathers turned into light rays surrounding his body, like you have seen in some Middle Age drawings of Saints, very strong and straight Health rays of light and said/inferred to me it is now time. We are one. I felt like he was saying I am you and you are me and we are one. And then what he was saying to me was for all in the group. I just happened to be the one doing the communication. Then we were finished giving gratitude to each other, he kind of turned with a slight nod of his head, bent down and walked back into the mound. The Guardian was standing there still looking at me. It seemed like he wanted something so I asked can I help you with something. His answer was yes. And implied it was his time to move to the next realm. So, I asked the Great Spirit, the ancestors, and those who are meant to be present to assist him to the next stage or realm or dimension. That is when the swirling energy appeared above the mound. It came from above down and looked like swirling bright, white cloud or smoke. So, I could clearly see that it was in motion and moving.”
I asked her to describe more about the swirling energy. “It was over the mound and was about the size of the mound,” she said. “It didn’t appear to be any specific color but bright white, smoke or cloud like because you could see through it, and in motion and felt very loving. Momentarily, I may have noticed ancestral beings above, but it happened so quickly that I cannot honestly say what it was. When I looked back to the Guardian, he quickly swirled up and was gone. I got a sense of gratitude.”
“What was made to be understood is that it is time for all of us to stand in our integrated full self,” she continued. “The brilliant light that we all are. And that there was stagnant energy, which was stuck and needed to be moved; flow had to happen. I understand that it is both the micro and the macrocosm. As the stagnant energy sits within each of us, it sits within the Earth. As we are the Earth/one with the Earth as the energy within us begins to flow the energy at these sacred locations also began to flow as they are meant to. The fact that we meditated with open hearts at the site contributed to the movement of this. The meditation was to be from the heart with no agenda, other than to be of service to the moment and the greater whole. Beginning to restore balance.”
A member of the ARE for a number of years now, it was her husband who introduced her to the thought-provoking story of America’s Sleeping Prophet, Edgar Cayce. Her husband also admitted that he had seen a figure with two feathers on his head, but initially thought it was just his imagination.
Photo by Kimberly Grimes
After Lora again led a meditation at the base of Seip Mound a little later that day, Greg stood up afterwards and explained to the group that he had an idea for yet something else we could try doing. He noted how my slow rhythmic drumming that accompanied the meditation gave him the idea of everyone relaxing and listening to the drum while also visualizing the World Tree or sacred pole that he had spoken of in his presentation the evening before and how the drum was considered by early shamanic cultures an instrument for vibrating that they believed could connect them with alternate realities, like the Upper World and the Lower World. The drum was in fact called the horse or canoe as it was regarded as a sonic vehicle for traveling to the spirit realms. Joan even painted a white horse on our drum that I was using at these sites. Greg related how this instrument could introduce us to the Schumann resonance whose fundamental frequency is 7.83 Hertz, a frequency I understand that is interconnected with all life on our planet.
After the drumming, one attendee described an inner vision in which skeletal figures who initially had been laying down stood up and climbed up this Pole. The next day, at Newark’s 30-acre Great Circle, at the center where there is a large so-called large mound called a “Bird Effigy,” the group again formed a circle nearby. Joan and I smudged everyone with sage, Joan gave a brief talk, and I added next how I was going to do drumming again, and how we might want to keep in mind Greg’s thoughts on the purpose of the drum as we listened to it. As I beat on the drum for the group, there seemed a slight breeze in the air in which it was as though I were hearing the faint chanting of a number of Native Americans. I wondered if this was a sign that I should join in, or was my imagination beginning to run away with me? I hesitated for a spell. The group was expecting to hear the drum, not necessarily me. How might this affect things? Eventually I overcame my hesitation and uncertainty and began chanting with the drum. As it turned out, it seemed to have been the right thing to do. Everyone seemed to respond quite favorably to the mix. One woman afterwards, after I explained what I had experienced to her, told me to never hold back like that again. She said it was a powerful and moving part of the drumming for her. Joan told me that I had become the hollow bone channeling what was needed right then and there. Afterwards, people described also having visionary type impressions, an inner light, an eye, triangle type imagery, and an actual no doubt about it eagle flying overhead.
