THE UNEXPLAINED REVISITED

Last week when I blogged about ghosts I had more comments than I’ve ever received for a blog and many mentioned supernatural experiences they’d had.  I found them very interesting. In my blog I had vaguely referred to experiences that occurred after my oldest son died of cancer when he was eighteen. Some wanted to know more about that. In this blog I’ll write about it as well as something else that's unexplained..

Any parent can imagine how horrible it would be if their child died, and I don’t think the age of the child matters – it is horrible, and until one actually goes through it I’m not sure one can grasp how much it changes one’s life. Anyway, sometime in the weeks following John’s death, my sixteen-year-old son saw John.  Joey was lying on the bed in my husband’s and my room when John appeared standing beside the bed smiling at him. There were no words just the smile. Joey stared at him for a while and then turned away unwilling to believe what he was seeing. In a few moments, he turned back and John was still standing there smiling at him and then slowly faded away. My youngest daughter, Mary, would hear John come in at night with the chain on the wallet making its usual sound – remember when wallets with chains carried in the back pocket were popular?  I longed to see John, to get a message from him and one night it happened in a dream – a dream I told no one about for over a year because I knew no one would believe it was anything other than a dream. In the dream, he was lying on a couch and he was dead. But then suddenly he sat up and smiled at me. I said, “John, you’re alive!”  Immediately I thought, Oh, no! We gave your car to Joey. And then I asked him, “What is Heaven like?” He smiled and with great enthusiasm said that it was wonderful and he was going to take a train into the mountains. I knew he’d thought about living in the mountains someday.  I had a few other dreams of John over the years, but they were dreams and I knew it when I woke up, but the dream of him telling me about Heaven, I knew was his way of telling me that he was okay.

John had met Martha when she was visiting another patient when he was undergoing treatments at the Cleveland Clinic before the chemo was started. He started to date her when he recovered from the chemo and before he’d start a new bout. But several months before he died, he stopped seeing her. I asked about it and he said she lived too far away and it took too much gas, etc. I offered to pay for the gas, but he declined. I’m sure now he knew he wasn’t going to make it, and didn’t want Martha to get too emotionally involved, but he never admitted that. Martha heard about John’s death a month after the event when she was at a football game in our area. She called me a few days later and told me how much she cared for him and how sad she was. We talked for a short while, but I did not tell her about my dream. The next summer Martha happened to be at the same 4H camp in the same cabin as Maria, a niece of mine. Martha told Maria, about the boy she’d dated and cared for who died and when Maria told her about her cousin who had died they soon realized they were talking about the same person. Then Martha told Maria how the night she learned about John’s death she was sad and crying when she fell asleep. She dreamed John called her on the phone and told her not to be sad. He was taking a train into the mountains and was happy. We both got the same message from John and neither of us had talked about it to each other. My sister-in-law, Joanne, who didn’t know about my dream, either, asked Maria to tell me about what she’d heard at camp.

I'm walking beside a vendor in Venice.

Years later Mary treated me with airfare on a joint trip to Italy for my retirement. Once when we were in a cathedral lighting votive candles, she had an overwhelming vision of John in her mind. He was giving her a big smile, and she felt he was sending the message “Oh, wow! You and mom are in Italy.”

Another weird happening that had nothing to do with John, happened to my daughter, Mary, in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. She lived in an apartment close to a park on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was a long way down to the beach and in the daytime, people walking on the beach looked not much larger than insects. One evening after dark, Mary and Hugo, a fellow she was dating, decided to walk to the park to watch a full moon over the ocean. They took along wine, snacks and a blanket to sit on. Thick cables were strung from post to post with signs warning people not to cross over because of the danger.  Clowning around, Mary pretended to be climbing over the cable next to one of the signs. Hugo used her camera to take pictures of her. Sometime in the days following, Mary downloaded the pictures to her computer, and noticed when the picture of one sign was enlarged, the rust on the sign showed an image. She enlarged it to fill her whole computer screen and it was a sepia image of a family dressed in clothes of the 1800s – a father, mother, several children and a baby.  

They went back other times to take more pictures of that sign and others, but it never came up that way again, nor did it when she took a picture of me with that sign. I’ve tried enlarging my picture with the sign and only get rusty shapes. I saw the picture they took that night on her computer and there was no doctoring of the picture by her or Hugo. They would not have known how to do it even if they’d wanted to do so. We’ve speculated that maybe a horse ran away with the buggy and a family in it and they went over the cliff. Or maybe a road at one time went close to the edge and the edge collapsed. No one could survive a fall from that height.

Last Saturday, I met with my local writers’ group. There were ten of us, and in all the years I’ve been meeting with them, supernatural events have not been discussed. I decided when it was my turn to share something I’d written, I’d read my blog. I wasn’t sure how it would be received, but before I read mine, James, a young poet, read his poem on a ghostly experience he’d had. He admitted he exaggerated some parts, but said the rest really happened. He’d written the poem two weeks before my blog. Jill, an author of children’s stories, looked at me in disbelief. When it came time for her to share what she had brought to read, she admitted she’d been hesitant to read it until she heard my blog. She read about her gift; the gift she’s had since she was a small child of seeing spirits. When she visits old houses before anyone familiar with the history of the house tells her anything, she’ll tell them what she sees and feels. It sometimes spooks them since it often goes along with what they know about the history or even things that had happened there they had not mentioned.  Her mother, who writes memoirs of her young years, always comes with her to our writers group and she backed up Jill’s story. Although no one else had anything to read dealing with the supernatural, six out of the ten who were there had stories to share of strange and ghostly encounters, and some were really spooky. Unless something really spooky happens to me, I’m done with this topic, although I do have more I could write about that has happened to me.

I know non-believers can explain away the experiences with my son, but what about the picture on the sign of the family from the 1800s? What is your explanation for that?