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Beyond the Veil: Ghost Stories and Contacts from Beyond
Once in the long ago, there was a place on the internet much like Ricochet’s PIT. It had started out as the comment section for an odd news story, but it continued on with hundreds of thousands of comments long after that particular story was no longer accessible. Because of the initial story, it attracted an odd and quirky bunch who were soon camping out on the thread. One of these internet squatters was “Tor.”
Tor was hilariously funny. Over time, some of his history emerged. He had been a minor Olympian for his European nation. At one point, he had been in his country’s military and had participated in Desert Storm in the 1990s. Much later I found out he had also been in the forces involved in trying to protect civilians in the break-up of Yugoslavia. There was a lot of pain behind the funny.
When a bunch of yahoos decided to fly jumbo jets into buildings, Tor re-enlisted in his nation’s military. He was in his country’s special forces. He was sent somewhere, I was never certain where, although I had clues. The one thing I know is that wherever he was sent, his country was not officially there or participating. Remember when a photo in the news media outed the fact that some Polish forces were participating in, was it Iraq? Well, he wasn’t Polish, but he was in a similar situation. His nation’s government was fulfilling obligations, but did not want to admit it to the public. He was always cagey as to what was happening due to concerns over operational security.
Whatever place he was in, there was a bomb. One of what later became known as Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) took out a bus near where he and others happened to be standing. It blew him back hard, and he landed on his shoulder. He had minor injuries from shrapnel and scraping along a hard surface. He also had fibers from his flak jacket embedded in his shoulder. But, he got up and walked away from it, which was more than many were able to say from the incident. Three days later, he fell down dead. It was renal, liver, and heart failure.
Officially, since his country was not participating where the injury occurred, he had been injured in a training accident in his own country. Yes, governments lie.
Luckily for Tor, he was close to medical facilities, and he was quickly revived. The IED had had some chemical weapon included. It had taken a few days for the trace amount to which he had been exposed to shut down his systems. He was evacuated to a military hospital in Germany where he spent the next several months. The doctors were able to deal with the after-effects of the chemical weapon, but there were other complications from the initial injuries. He lost a few fingers to gangrene. But the thing that caused the most trouble for months on end were those fibers from his flak jacket that had been embedded in his shoulder. The area would not heal, and it became infected. The doctors finally determined that the arm and shoulder would have to come off.
In the months he had spent in the hospital, someone had suggested a new place on the internet for him to go, a place where wounded warriors used poetry as a form of therapy. As he knew I was a poet, he had brought me over there as well. We had spent time together through that site and communicated nearly daily. The site was a bit more private than the place we had initially met had been.
On the day he was to have surgery, I did not go on the internet at all.
I was doing dishes after dinner when I heard someone behind and above me laugh with the thought, “How domestic!” I immediately knew it was Tor coming to say goodbye. I dried my hands and went back to my office to turn on my computer and log in. There on the poetry therapy site was a fresh announcement from Tor’s brother. Tor had just passed a few minutes before. He had been too weak to survive the amputation surgery after months in the hospital.
My friends, I know that many of you have had contacts from those who have passed. What are your stories?
Published in General
I was sitting with my dad at his home in the last days of his life. He was on hospice care for cancer and had gone down hill pretty fast. (When I arrived at the first of the week with him, he was eating and talking, but 48 hours later he was mostly sleeping and talking took great effort). I was sitting by his bed reading when he woke up, looked toward the end of the bed and his eyes seemed to track someone to the other side of the bed. He then turned to me and gave me that dad, squint-y look and said with intense effort, “Honey, promise me you will tell me the truth..” I said of course Dad. He then asked: “Is there a woman at the side of the bed with us?” I made sure to look closely all around the room and I looked back at my dad and said “No Dad, I don’t see anyone”. He asked if I was sure and I told him I was sure. He quickly fell back asleep. I tried to ask him who she was or what she looked like, but he never woke up to tell me. That was my last conversation with him. He passed away less than 24 hours later.
You guessed right. And his brother too. Lee did the encrypting stuff, and his brother did the wiring stuff. Both traveled all over the world for the Air Force.
So I’ll tell the second part of the story.
Remember the story about the Walker spy family? The father and son who sold all of our codes to the Russians during the Cold War?
In the aftermath of the discovery of this treason, all of the European computer encryption codes had to be redone. Lee did a lot of the new encryption stuff, and his brother did something with the computers to make the new system work.
When David and Lee went into the Air Force, the Air Force ran a two-month-long vetting process. They descended on the little town of Nahant, Massachusetts, where the boys had grown up, and they talked to everyone in town to make sure the kids were of good character.
My dad reported the same sort of thing on the last day he spent with his father. Grandpa kept mentioning and pointing to a lady he said was there in the room with them.
Being Catholic, of course, we like to think it was the Blessed Mother, come to welcome a good and faithful servant.
Very interesting.
But, any port in a storm. ;)
My younger brother and I were very close to my Aunt Kathy, who was not that much older than us, we were raised near each other, and were more like siblings. She died after a battle with cancer at the end of May when she was 52 years old.
My brother and his wife were expecting a baby any minute. They didn’t find out the baby’s sex ahead of time so it would be a surprise. On the night of June 10th I had an unusually vivid dream that I was walking down a residential street and saw Kathy through the picture window of a house. She came out of the house and walked to the end of the driveway, and she was beaming, and carrying a baby boy. I couldn’t get close enough to talk to her, but she saw me and knew I saw her.
The next day my brother called to tell me that Josiah had been born.
Reminds me of a dream I had recently, but the results of that one are still pending.
Not long after my mother and stepfather married, they bought a puppy. Tasha was mostly Puli and had a strong herding drive. Pulik are amazing dogs. Compact and agile. And really bossy: bred to work big flocks, four or five hundred sheep or more. When she was a teenager she took to jumping up on the kitchen counters: slippery stainless steel surface, no room for a running start.
She was told in no uncertain terms that she was not to get up on the counter. Not long after, it was someone’s birthday and there was a cake on the counter. I walked into the kitchen to find her balanced on her hind legs with her paws tucked into her chest – not touching the counter, delicately licking the frosting.
Tasha objected strongly to any displays of affection between my mother and stepfather, and if they were out for the evening and gone too long she would pull the bedspread down from his pillow and sleep on it. As another Puli owner once wrote, “she’s convinced that she is my wife and my wife is our servant.”
When my when my autoimmune arthritis first hit hard, I had no energy and was seriously down. My sleep was poor. I had night sweats which woke me and other things as well. Sometimes it was hard to get out of bed. We were up in our vacation cabin, and Tasha sort of made a project of me. My bedroom door didn’t latch and she would push the door open in the morning and make sure that I got up. Her cheerful persistence was a glimmer of light for me in a dark time.
She eventually developed cancer and had to be euthanized. About a decade later, my stepfather was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma; as he declined, a home hospice plan was arranged and he died at home. Late on the Shabbat afternoon a couple of days before he died I was sitting by myself in a downstairs room; the light was going so I had put my book down.
In the shadows I saw Tasha come into my view, tail wagging, and then turn and go away. I knew she was letting me know that my stepfather was not going to live much longer, and that she was telling me that he would not be alone on his journey.
That’s beautiful.
I’m an old man now, and these occurrences were long ago. One was clearly my imagination, my subconscious working out issues. The other, however, had in a sense, independent confirmation. A family I knew very well seemed to be having “visitations”. The two-year-old son said he saw something, and when asked who/what it was that he saw, he pointed to a picture of a relative who had committed suicide. When I left that night, I felt someone following me as I walked to my car. A strong enough feeling that I checked over my shoulder more than once, never seeing anyone.
In the car, I felt I wasn’t alone and looking in the back seat it seemed that the area was darker than it should have been under the streetlight, though I saw nothing. Knowing the stress the family was under, I blew a gasket and royally chewed out the “presence” and told her to leave them alone and if she had to hang around, to stay with me. She, or something, did. For two weeks or so. Late one night on my way to bed, I thought I felt someone brush my shoulder as if to say goodbye. The sense of someone being there left, never to return. The family said later that the “visitations” stopped on the night I described.
What happened? I have no idea, but I no longer laugh at ghost stories.
When I was growing up, we had a German shepherd named Duke. He was the family dog, but somehow from an early age I wound up feeding, watering, and cleaning up after him. We had a weeping willow tree my father had planted in the back yard, and as it got larger, Duke was normally chained to the tree. (Times have changed. Now that would probably be reported as abuse, but lots of people did that sort of thing back then.) Since I was the one feeding him, we developed a fairly close relationship. I believe he died over forty years ago now.
A few years back, I had a dream that I was back at the house I grew up in standing in the side yard and looking back at that old willow tree. Duke was there, and I said hello. In response, a hippo appeared and walked by him. He swallowed the hippo in one bite. A definite way of telling me, “Hey, why don’t you feed me anymore? I’m so hungry I could eat a hippo.”
Now, it may have just been a dream spurred by some form of lingering guilt that as a thoughtless child I may not have cared for him as well as I could have. But I would like to think it was his way of coming back to say hello.
In my 94 year-old grandmother’s last weeks we did hospice for her in the living room of the home she shared with my mother. We wanted her to feel centered within her family and took shifts so someone was always sitting with her.
One night I was on over-night shift. The house full of sleepers was so quiet the only sounds were grandma’s labored breaths and the loud tick-tocking of the grandfather clock in the foyer. Through the long night I felt, intensely, that as long as I listened close, grandma would keep on breathing. Along about the time I saw faint sunlight reflect on the sky above the hills, I got up fretfully and paced silently around the living room, still urging grandma’s every breath and listening to the clock. Feeling chilly I went over to the couch to get the throw and wrap myself in its warmth. Then I sank down on the couch, promising I would sit in the softness just for a minute. Glancing at the clock, it was 5:33 a.m.
Between the sound of grandma’s breath and the next tick of the clock, I slipped into sleep. And I dreamed.
In my dream grandma made a huffing, rustling noise so I turned quickly to look at her and was alarmed to see her thin arms push her covers away and lever herself to a sitting position. Jumping up from the couch, I ran to her side to keep her from falling from bed. “Grandma!,” I shouted (because grandma was a bit hard of hearing), “Be still!” Grandma turned her face to me and smiled, a lop-sided radiant smile. She slipped her legs over the side of the bed, pushed her bedside tray full of pain medications out of the way, and said, “I don’t need those any more.” She gazed around the room, grasped both of my wrists and held my arms away from her. “I’m going to take a shower,” she announced. Her papery old hands released me, then caressed my cheeks softly. Turning, she walked easily into her bedroom and closed the door.
I stood there as if taken root. I heard the shower go on, then off. I worried. More rustling sounds and grandma emerged from her room, luminous. And very young. Face fresh and unlined, body tall and lithe, her hair full and shining blue-black. Clothed in a purple gown, she twirled across the living room, turned her eyes to me and murmured, “Everything is okay.”
Something soft and heavy suddenly thumped hard against my legs and I glanced down to see a large orange cat. My favorite kitty. Who had died four years before. He leaped against me again and commanded, “Wake UP!”
And so I awoke. In the few minutes I had dreamed, grandma had passed on. It was 5:37 a.m.
My grandfather acted very similarly just before he passed after being in hospice care for a few weeks. He had fallen into nearly constant sleep so we knew the time was near. Our family gathered around his bed and sang some of his favorite hymns. At one point, he partially sat up, looked beyond us gathered around and had the brightest smile on his face as he lifted his hand and began waving slightly. I really believe the veil was being lifted and he saw loved ones who had entered heaven before him who were waiting to greet him there.
Chills!
My best friend died in Feb 2013. He was someone who had akways given a lot of thought to death and the dead–sounds morbid but he was Irish, so it really wasn’t. He was a sociable, charming man with a great gift for friendship. How I miss him…..
Anyway: I saw him in a dream that Spring.
Like we always do when we dream about the dead, I said, “Where have you been!?”
We don’t ever get an answer to that question in a dream, do we? I never had before.
But this time I did. My friend answered, “Thanksgiving”.
I understood that as both a verb and a place, a festival atmosphere.
Well, I know better, but to me it FELT like I had received a gift from him:
a reminder, in my mourning, to look forward to my favorite holiday–
and that year’s text for the toast I always make as hostess of my Thanksgiving table.
i told the story, raised my glass and said:
the dream was my way of reminding me that this holiday, this table, our friends, our children:
this is the closest thing to Paradise that I can imagine.
Cheers.
Nothing ghostly to share, but when I was little, I did have a next-door neighbor who extorted my prized Lego and Fisher-Price toys and Tonka trucks by telling me her mother was a witch and threatening to have me hexed.
Painfully beautiful account, Arahant. Heartbreaking.
I understand that.
After reading all these, can someone please assure me that my father isn’t watching me, like ALL the time??!
These stories are giving me chills. I’ve never experienced anything similar myself but I totally believe.
And it really was.
I laughed at this. I think @garymcvey would also appreciate it.
I should have thought of trying that. ;)
Nope. :twisted:
GAH
But, you do have sisters, don’t you? And a daughter and nieces and nephews? He probably isn’t watching you all of the time. ;)
Thanks a bunch.
I can think of a way to find out. ?
Gee, Mike, what’s your method? :twisted: