Spiritual superheroes Law enforcement can’t solve mysteries of the great beyond — for that, you need to reach for the Horizons BY SARA DONNELLY

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In a quiet chamber on a windy Portland night, blocks away from the central police station where interim chief Timothy Burton toils as best he can to rid the city of evil-doers, the Spiritual Superheroes gather. These blessed souls, outcasts from a world which mostly fears them, exchange knowledge of special powers, ancient wisdom, and healing energy. After what seems like an eternity spent preparing, the meeting commences:

"Hi, my name is Del Parker, and I’d like to welcome you to this Spiritual Horizons meeting."

Parker’s graying hair, parted neatly in the middle, hangs just out of his eyes. He stands in the meeting room at 75 State Street, a retirement community near Portland’s downtown. The bright room is sparsely filled with members of Spiritual Horizons, the city’s new social group for spiritualists. There are about 15 people at this Tuesday night meeting; they are casually dressed, most are middle aged. Parker, a baker at 75 State, is the reason the group meets here (Horizons is not otherwise affiliated with 75 State).

Founded in the fall of 2004, Horizons is made up of some of Portland’s most dedicated, and, according to their stories, talented mediums, psychics, healers, protectors, and otherwise supernaturally inquisitive folk. Members specialize in powers like astral projection, animal communication, energy manipulation, aura imprinting, telepathy, telekinesis, channeling, foreseeing the future, protecting people with the mind, disinfecting bad mojo, and photographing or digitally recording spirits.

They are all mild mannered. Most have day jobs. None of them, upon a first meeting, seem unusual.

"Before John Moulton begins the energy tools presentation," says Parker, "I’m just going to read our vision statement, which is on our Web site at spiritualhorizonsmaine.org.

"The intent in forming this community is to foster personal spiritual growth through group activities, thus encouraging love, peace, and harmony in life. We are doing this in an open, friendly, and social environment. While sometimes serious we are also a fun-loving group…"

Moulton, one of the co-founders of Horizons, stands behind a long table on which sit two foam cones, upright; crystals; hunks of lead, fluorite, and other minerals; a copper orb; several copper coils curled into tubes; and a giant "Super Coil" which looks like a miniature Washington Monument wrapped in red cellophane. After Parker is finished, Moulton stares awkwardly at the group.

"Well," he says slowly. "These are energy tools."

He presses both palms against the table awkwardly. A man in the back row of the audience moves a few chairs to the left and cranes forward.

Moulton sucks in a breath. Seconds pass.

"This, right here, is a coil."

He picks up a copper tube.

"The first time I saw one of these," he says, "I was over at a friend’s house. I picked it up and I pointed it a plant and I could see the energy flowing from the plant straight to the coil. It was incredible. I said, ‘Holy crap.’ "

Moulton, who says energy looks to him like a jet stream, is regarded as one of the most powerful healers in the group.

That fateful day, February 22, 1974, a young, virile John Moulton never expected a twist of cruel fate would help transform him into the mighty force Polar. As Moulton, a plumber, worked to repair the dark recesses of a rural Maine well, the 1000-pound well cover teetered ominously above his head. The wind shifted. It fell. He was struck. How could Moulton, an average man, ever recover????

John Moulton works as a polarity therapist out of a whitewashed office in his home filled with the same crystals and coils he brought to the Spiritual Horizons meeting in early October. He has pursued the metaphysical since 1974, when a freak accident in a Paris Hill well left his top vertebrae damaged and his body in constant pain. Moulton first sought a cure in self-hypnosis. Then he attended local seminars on developing psychic abilities. Pretty soon he was astral projecting himself through the cosmos and crafting healing coils in his garage.

"I had been seeking out alternative healing methods before, but when I had that accident, I tried anything and everything," says Moulton. "My last surgeon, after his follow-up, said ‘Mr. Moulton, you’re going to have to live this way because medical science has nothing left to offer you.’ "

Thanks, he says, to alternative therapies, Moulton today walks around easily, the pain has largely subsided. Unlike many of the members of Spiritual Horizons, Moulton works in the metaphysical world full time. Though he hosted the first Horizons meeting a year ago, Moulton says spirit — the unified life force of the universe — was the real motivator.

"We’re all spiritual beings, having a physical experience," he explains, sipping his energy-centered water. "Right?"

Astrala stood in the sterile hospital room, watching the life spirit of Mr. X slowly ebb from his body. She had known days before — it had come to her through her feeling sense — that Mr. X would not survive the week. Nothing, not medical science nor her spiritual breath work, could save Mr. X now.

Ann Kilby spent 30 years as a nurse before defecting to the spiritual realm. She now runs a part-time intuitive touch and energy work practice on St. John Street in Portland. Kilby, who, like Moulton, Parker, and six others, is part of the "core" of Spiritual Horizons, helps plan upcoming seminars and discussions at core meetings every other Tuesday. Her husband Alan is a gastroenterologist who is also active with the group. Kilby has an insistently calm demeanor and a measured, airy way of speaking. She’s interested in a lot of aspects of spirituality, including ordered breathing to improve energy circulation, but lately has focused on astral projection. Every month, she meets telepathically with other astral projectors in a crystal in the sky and they go on a trip around the universe.

"I wonder every once in a while if it’s all in my head," she says. "But then something will happen that sort of reaffirms that this is real."

When Kilby worked as a nurse, she says she would often see the waning energy of dying patients. She says spirit looks translucent, like white organza, and describes predicting when her brother would die the day before it happened. She says she was able to say goodbye properly because of her intuition.

Kilby also claims to have watched her step-father’s heart surgery through astral projection and was close enough to know which procedures they were doing and when.

"When [my step-father] was leaving, I placed a crystal in his hand, in between my hand and his," she says of his dying. "I pulled some of his energy into the crystal and if you feel it and you are energy sensitive, you would feel my father’s presence."