When Donna Raymond visits places that scare the daylights out of the typical person, she prefers complete darkness.

Claiming to have a paranormal gift that allows her to sense a spirit’s presence and communicate with it, she’s been called to more than 100 sites of alleged hauntings in hopes to not only explain what’s taking place, but ideally to make it stop.

Yet, walking into strange homes, churches, offices or institutions to face the source of another’s deathly fears doesn’t rattle the Coupeville resident.

What scares her most is something much more simple.

“People,” she said. “Close-minded people.

“This (a ghost) I can understand. There’s no way for a spirit to sneak up on me. I know where they’re at. I know when they’re coming close. People can sneak up on me. Spirits not at all. This is normal for me.”

Raymond, 53, has been making ghostly house calls for more than 30 years.

She said she was born with the ability to communicate with the spirit world and spent decades in her home state of California being hired to explain the unexplained.

What scared her as a child, she ultimately embraced and turned into a teaching opportunity on a subject she says people shouldn’t fear.

She took a break from investigating spirits since moving to Whidbey Island two years ago because of the emotional toll it took on her and so she could devote more time to her family.

Feeling refreshed, she is entertaining her options, even thinking of educating people about what she knows and leading tours next year.

She led ghost walks in downtown Benicia, Calif., for two years before she came to Whidbey.

“What I like to do is get groups together and get people to open up and communicate with spirits and find out that it’s not scary, everybody can do it. It’s just a matter of using a part of your brain that you normally wouldn’t use,” Raymond said. “It’s that intuition part, that part where you know something is a good place or a bad place, but it’s a part of the brain that we haven’t used for, I’m sure, a long time.

“Some of us are just born more open than others.”

Raymond said she and a women’s group recently got together and she brought out dowsing rods and a pendulum in an attempt to communicate with spirits.

“They found out it’s not scary,” she said. “You feel pretty amazing when you start communicating with people you can’t see. We had a blast.”

Considered a paranormal sensitive, Raymond said she is “sensitive to energies, ghosts, any kinds of energy.”

She said she rarely sees an apparition, or full ghostlike image of a person. Instead, she concentrates on the energies she senses and in her mind sees images that take on different forms.

She doesn’t ordinarily hear a voice. The communication, she said, is telepathic.

“In my mind, I can see an image and it’s kind of like being a detective and putting a puzzle together,” she said. “I’ll walk into a home or a business and I’ll go through the whole place and figure out where the energies are moving. From there, I decide, ‘Is it a man? It is a woman?’ and I start asking questions about who they are, why they’re there and explaining what the situation is and why I’m there. Spirits can read our minds, so they know within seconds why I’m there. Sometimes, it’s received well and other times, it’s not.”

Raymond said she isn’t worried about skeptics because she’s not trying to win anybody over.

“People will only believe what they see,” she said, “and our eyes are so deceptive.

“I don’t rely on my eyes. A lot of times I go into a place where it’s dark and I can’t see anything. Then I can get a clear picture in my mind what’s going on.

“For the doubters, they don’t have to believe me. I’m not out to convince anybody. I’m here to help people and I’m here to help those who want help. I’m here to help the spirits. I’m here to help the living.

Raymond said she’s had plenty of doubters who’ve gone on tours with her only to start opening up their minds by the end of the evening.

“There’s so much of a bigger world out there that’s right in front of us,” she said. “It’s normal. It’s natural. There’s no hocus pocus. There’s no crystal ball that I look into. None of that. This is normal.”