The Energetics of Magnetic Anomalies

The high strangeness of resonating with certain locations (and not others)

I was born in Waynesboro (Va) and spent a large portion of my life in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains just north of there, in Augusta county. My parents began buying tracts of mountainous property near Harriston when they were in their 20’s, and built a house there when I was 11. When I married, my mom and dad gave me five acres of the property not far from their home, and we eventually built our own house.

I loved the seclusion of the mountains, the wildlife, and the endless sea of trees, but I really didn’t like the place itself. That’s a strange thing to say, I know – and it took me many years before I finally understood why.

In 2013, when I moved to Buckingham (Va) for a job, I truly felt “at home” for the first time in my life. Something deep inside of me stopped being slightly out of kilter and settled, like clay in a jar of water once left in stillness.

I had been in Buckingham for about a month before my job would allow me a trip back to Augusta county to see my family. As I drove, I noticed something odd – the farther away from Buckingham county I got, the more uncomfortable I became. I liked adjoining Nelson county alright, but when I began the ascent of Afton mountain, I began to feel a “draining” sensation at my core, as if I had passed an invisible barrier into a space which no longer harmonized with my own energy. Topping the mountain made the feeling stronger, and it exploded when I cleared the bottom of Afton and entered Waynesboro.

As I traveled north on route 340 toward my family’s home, the feeling intensified until, upon arriving, I felt as though there were lead weights in my chest. There was a “deadness” to the pressure, as if the air itself was too thick to breathe. However, it wasn’t a physical sensation so much as an energetic one. I wasn’t stressed out over visiting, so it wasn’t a psychological reaction either. Whatever was causing it seemed to originate with the location itself.

As I mused over this during my visit, becoming more uncomfortable with each passing minute, I remembered something that had transpired before I had moved to Buckingham. It was around 2010, and a friend of ours had come for a visit at my mom’s house. Her name was Red Cameron, a respected energy worker and psychic.

Red had actually come to help us figure out some strange things that had been going on in our mountains for quite some time (but that’s a story for another post), and after we had brainstormed for a while, Red turned to my mom and said “Honestly, Jennifer – I don’t know how y’all can stand to live here. I can’t bear the energy of this place”.

That memory sent a chill up my spine, and it didn’t take long for another realization to float into view – Red Cameron was from Nelson county, neighboring county to Buckingham, and Nelson was the place where I still felt “alright” before beginning that dreadful climb up Afton mountain. Was there a connection between Red’s reaction to the energy in the foothills of our mountains and my own energetic malaise? If so, what in the hell was it?

I thought it very odd, to say the least, but it also fascinated me. Upon making my way back to Buckingham county, the energetic fugue I was experiencing reversed itself, and when I crossed the county line, I literally shouted “wahoo – back in Buckingham!”. My relief was enormous.

In 2014, my son Zack moved to Buckingham with me. On our first trip back to visit the family together, I didn’t say a word about the change in atmosphere that I knew was coming. I wanted to see if it would affect him in the same way.

Upon exiting the bottom of Afton mountain and entering Waynesboro, he turned to me with concern on his face and said “there is something wrong with this place”.

At that point, I had my confirmation – whatever was happening wasn’t all in my head. Red had felt it, and so did Zack. Upon our return back to Buckingham, his relief was as profound as my own.

So I started really thinking about this strange phenomenon, and that was when I realized that I never really liked being in those mountains to begin with, despite the fact that I had spent the majority of my life there. I didn’t like any of the surrounding areas either. I tried making a list of any locations in or around Augusta county where I felt truly comfortable, and couldn’t come up with a single one.

I started looking for possible reasons why this was, but since I didn’t have any real idea of what I was searching for, I would get frustrated and quit. Then, after making another trip or two across Afton, I would start searching again. This went on for years, and then, in 2019, I stumbled upon something.

I was watching a YouTube video – I can’t remember exactly what it was, but it had to do with natural energies and UFO’s (imagine that), and somewhere in there, the guy that was being interviewed held up this really colorful map and mentioned the term “magnetic anomaly”. I immediately began searching for geomagnetic maps of Virginia, and – bingo! – I found what I was looking for.

In all of my previous research, I had endlessly used terms such as “geopathic energy differences” and “energetic changes from one place to another” (and, when desperate enough “why do I like one place and not another?”), but my searches never returned a satisfactory explanation. I knew the issue was energetic in nature, but I wanted to know why, and I was excited to finally have come across some data that seemed useful.

The first thing I did was to look up my location in Buckingham on the interactive version of the map. I was a little dismayed to find that the color assigned to it was a pink so pale that it was nearly white. That wasn’t very exciting – I kind of expected it to be a vibrant shade of blue or green, given how wonderful the area felt to me. Then I looked closer at the color key and realized that the “pink so pale it’s nearly white” color of my location corresponded to a very high occurrence of geomagnetic anomaly.

So, of course, I immediately located my homeplace in the mountains of Augusta county on the map. It was a very pale green, the opposite end of the spectrum from Buckingham.

This meant that there was a total geomagnetic difference between the two places of more than 500 nT, with the location in Augusta county measuring approximately -90 nT and the location in Buckingham county measuring approximately +450 nT, when a value of 0 nT was considered the baseline average.

Granted, an nT (nanotesla – a unit of magnetic flux density) is a small number, equivalent to 10^-9 tesla, but in this case, it isn’t the size that matters so much as the percentage of change, especially if you are sensitive to geomagnetic energies in the first place.

From there, I expanded my thoughts to other places I had been, trying to determine if there was anywhere else that I could recall feeling as “at home” as I did in and around Buckingham. Bear in mind, I’m not talking about places I just liked to visit for entertainment value – I’m talking about feeling grounded and at home in a way that comes from the seat of the soul.

There were only two places that immediately came to mind: Lincoln City, Oregon and Panther, West Virginia. At this point, I was really interested to see if the same high level of magnetic anomaly was present at these locations, because Buckingham county, Lincoln City, and Panther were about as physically different from one another as three places could be. If there was a common denominator between the three, it would have to be energetic in nature.

I spent 10 days in different parts of Oregon in the summer of 1992. By far, the place I was the most drawn to and wanted to go back to again and again was Lincoln City, and the tide pools at Lincoln Beach. Upon returning back to Virginia, I began to cry profusely when the plane’s landing gear touched the tarmac at Charlottesville airport, and I cried for weeks. I felt broken. I was homesick for a place I had only visited for a few days, and was unable to explain the depth of my sorrow to anyone.

My dad told my mom that it was just because I “didn’t have any responsibilities out there in Oregon”, suggesting that my return home to my children and the grind of daily life was something I wanted to escape from. My mom told him that his conclusion was way off, as she had been with me on the trip, and saw the difference in my entire being while we were there. However, she couldn’t explain the mystery any better than I could.

In the fall of 2018, 26 years after my trip to Oregon, I ended up in Panther, WV trying to help a close friend locate the grave of his grandmother. I had never heard of Panther and was rather shocked at the rawness of the place. It felt wild and edgy, beautiful, but dangerous, as if it could turn on you in the blink of an eye. With a start, I realized just how appropriate the name “Panther” was for this strange place. Despite the air of unpredictability, I immediately felt at home there, as if I had somehow carried the energy of Buckingham with me, deep into the jagged wilderness of West Virginia.

I thought about these two places as I scrolled across the map and then zoomed in, searching for the location of each. I almost didn’t want to look, because if either of these places were any color other than white-pink, my theory was blown all to hell once again.

I located Lincoln City first, and drew in a sharp breath as the pink came into view. It was virtually the same color as my location in Buckingham.

I then cruised the mouse pointer eastward, stopping over West Virginia and zoom-scrolled until I located Welch, southeast of Panther. As I pulled the map over to where I could see my target location, the yellow-green color surrounding Welch gave way to pink, and Panther was square in the middle of it.

I let out a whoop! of triumph and then frantically began checking other places around Virginia that I had been (which is most everywhere). In every single case, the closer to purple-pink the color was, the more I had liked the location, and without exception, every place that was yellow-to-green-to-blue was a location that I couldn’t tolerate.

As I pondered on this, I wondered about my mom – she is every bit as sensitive to energetic frequencies and geopathic conditions as I am, so how was she able to endure still being there in those mountains of Augusta county, when I ended up an energetic mess every time I went back to visit?

I’m not sure of the answer, but I have a suspicion – as I said previously, I never really liked Augusta county or the surrounding areas even when I lived there, but I was accustomed to it. Moving to Buckingham meant that I was out of the green and into the pink long enough for the higher levels of geomagnetic energy to have a positive effect on my entire being, and therefore, returning to areas of such low magnetic resonance was a shock to my system (and I also think this is why Zack could feel it so profoundly on our first trip back together). I suspect that if my mom moved into a “pink” area for an extended period of time, she may also react in the same way, even though she dearly loves her home and her mountains.

I also think this is why Red Cameron reacted the way she did when she visited us more than a decade ago – Nelson county is primarily pink on the map, with only a few areas trending towards yellow, so Red was accustomed to the higher magnetic resonance around her home and was negatively impacted by the extremely low levels she encountered during her visit.

So what causes the extreme variations in these magnetic readings in the first place? In a word: rocks.

Non-magnetic rocks and minerals (such as quartz and feldspar) have no bearing on these magnetic anomalies. It’s things rich in iron like hematite and magnetite that are the culprits. Additionally, measurements are also dependent upon how far below the surface the Ferromagnetic (or Ferrimagnetic) rocks lie. A deposit that is only 50′ from the surface will give a higher reading than one which is buried at a depth of 150′.

These iron-rich rocks and minerals become magnetic when exposed to the earth’s magnetic field, a property known as magnetic susceptibility. However, they are also able to retain the magnetism they developed even when removed from the earth’s magnetic field (which is called remanent magnetization).

Oddly enough, the kryptonite of magnetized rocks is heat – if a piece of hematite is exposed to a temperature of 1,247⁰ Fahrenheit, it becomes paramagnetic. This is what’s called the “Curie point” for hematite, which differs between varying rock and mineral compositions. For example, the Curie point for magnetite is lower, at 1,060⁰ Fahrenheit. This means that “hot rocks” such as the mantle and magma have little to no bearing on magnetic anomalies at the surface; it’s all about the solidified and magnetized rocks and minerals at ground level and just under our feet.

The fact that there is a logical reason for these magnetic anomalies satisfies my nagging Capricorn side, who likes to make lists and understand the “why” of things. That pacifier keeps her quiet and leaves my spiritual side free to explore the crazy effect that these fields have on my entire being. It’s just one more piece of the giant energetic puzzle, and it makes me wonder – is there anyone else out there who has experienced this? I’d love to hear from you, if so …