Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
In my energy practice I also “ghost” houses. I’m sure that’s why I’ve posted two comments on a ghost thread that avoided mentioning ghosts. My ghost stories are too ghoulish.
Very, very interesting.
Yeah, this thread is not meant to be of the horrifying variety, although that could be an interesting thread in and of itself.
The closest thing I have to a ghost story is an unusually detailed dream I had fifteen years ago. It was a dream that took place in an alternate reality.
My dad is from Montana, born in Deer Lodge, raised in Missoula. I lived there myself back in the ’90s.
More than ten thousand years ago, much of what is now western Montana (including Deer Lodge and Missoula) was submerged beneath a large glacial lake that geologists refer to as Lake Missoula. At the end of the last Ice Age, Lake Missoula ceased to exist when an ice dam along its western shore broke, emptying most of the lake’s water into what are now northern Idaho and eastern Washington, carving out the Palouse, the Yakima Valley, and the Columbia Gorge. My dream took place in a reality where that ancient cataclysm never happened and Lake Missoula still exists. Now to the dream…
The year is 2002 and I am flying up to Lake Missoula City for a family reunion. I am aboard a Brasilia Embraer turboprop that is making its final approach to Lake Missoula International Airport, located in an island in the lake and linked to Lake Missoula City on the mainland by a causeway.
I am looking out the window at the stunning scenery (massive deep blue lake, steep forested mountains with snow-capped peaks) when the plane’s intercom chimes and the pilot announces to the passengers and crew to prepare for landing.
As I deplane and enter the terminal, I am met by my grandfather (whose name is Tony) who has called me to pick me up. I am puzzled by this, as he died twenty years earlier in 1982. But I conceal my surprise and instead he and I talk and reminisce as we head out to the parking lot with my luggage. I notice that Grandpa Tony’s 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass is in superb condition.
As we pull out of the airport and drive up onto the causeway that will take us to Lake Missoula City, I observe the lack of signage that should identify it as the Nelson Rockefeller Causeway, named after the late president who died in office twenty-three years earlier.
As we head across the causeway, the car’s radio is tuned in to a local station playing “Le Freak” by Chic. I then turn to my grandfather and ask, “How is it that you’re here? You died twenty years ago.”
My grandfather looks at me quizzically and asks, “Just what year do you think it is?”
“It’s 2002,” I reply.
“No it’s not,” he says, “it’s 1979.”
And then I woke up.
Way cool. Love that you remember so much detail. Is that really a one-off?
My mother and I were very close. Many times I would suddenly think of Mom only to have her call me a few minutes later just to “see how I was doing.”
She passed away a couple of years ago one day before her 89th birthday. Since then, during Mass each Sunday I have said a special prayer that the Lord would hold my mother close in his arms for me.
About a month ago at 3:00 ish in the morning, I heard my mother clearly call my name. Then she said, “I’m in heaven now, in his arms.”
As a Catholic, I firmly believe there is a Purgatory. I also believe that you eventually leave there to go into Heaven. Now my prayer is to thank the Lord for bringing Mom into his arms.
Beautiful.
That was a very nifty dream.
Yes, remembering so much detail is unusual for me. I very rarely remember my dreams. But that one has stuck with me. And the details are even more intricate than what I posted. It’s as if that other reality actually exists and I was, for a short while, living in it.
Keeping a dream journal helps.
Never mess with Momma, especially when she’s a psychic.
I had one that came true, once.
I remember most my dreams but this one really freaked me out because it was so realistic. Unlike most dreams, where you walk in one place and suddenly end up somewhere else, in this one I got up, wearing a nightgown I usually wore at that time, came down the stairs, felt the cold in the house, felt the carpet under my bare feet, walked the right distance down the hall into the family room, turned on the tv and knew, from the game show that came on, that I was home on a weekday when I should have been in school. I glanced outside . . . “ah! Snow Day. That explains it,” I thought, in my dream. I could feel the familiar scratch of the couch pillow I lay back on to watch tv and suddenly I heard a rushing noise so I got up to investigate, followed the sound to the laundry room, pulled out some shopping bags between the wall and the washer, and got hit in the face with water. That’s when I woke up.
While getting ready for school that morning, I told the dream to my sister, detail for detail. (Which she found very interesting . . . not, but which is also the only reason why anyone believed me, later.)
Three days after that dream, we had a snow day and when I got up, everything unfolded exactly as I’d dreamed it. When I heard the noise, followed it to the laundry room, moved the bags and got splashed in the face, I discovered that a pipe had burst behind the washer.
Mom told me she wanted to hear all my dreams after that. The very next night, I dreamed that I’d wrecked the family car and Mom had had twins.
My subconscious clearly has a twisted sense of humor.
This may be closer to Mike’s dream of a parallel world. Early in my parents’ marriage, my father tended to pooh-pooh ghost stories and psychic things. Our house was a raised ranch where one came up the stairs, which opened up into the living room. There was a hallway from there that led to the bath and three bedrooms. While the first ten feet or so opposite the living room was opposite the stairwell and had a railing one could look over down to the foyer, there was then a wall in the hallway that was the outside wall of the smallest bedroom.
One evening my parents had some guests over and they were sitting in the living room. They were discussing psychic phenomena, and my father made some disparaging remark about “all this woo-woo stuff.” He heard something and turned to see a door open in that blank wall that was on the outside of the smallest bedroom. People walked out and across the hall, and the door and the people disappeared.
Now, I’m not sure exactly what happened, but Dad never made disparaging comments about “woo-woo stuff” again.
Could be worse, then. My mother does it with everyone, not just her children.
:D
I have had many that came true. It’s why I pay so much attention to them.
Obviously, Locherbie was not her time. Close, but not her time.
Whoa. Was this the inspiration for Final Destination?
Here’s one for you. On 9-11 at about 1:00 AM, I was on a plane from Phoenix headed for LaGuardia. We made our final; approach but as we were approaching the runway, the pilot pulled the 737 up, accelerated hard and banked left. He immediately got on the intercom and apologized to the scant passengers. There was some unexpected traffic on the runway so he thought it best we go back around and try again. I looked out my window to see the twin towers rapidly approaching and thought to myself, damn, those suckers are tall and freakin’ close. However, I trusted our pilot would successfully maneuver around them and bring us safely back to the LaGuardia
We landed safely on our second approach. The next morning, as I sat in traffic in an on-ramp to the top of the GW Bridge, I listened to Imus as his crew tried to make sense of the attack. They received a call from the show’s part-time sports guy, Werner Wolf, who lived in lower Manhatten and was off that day. A plane had hit one of the WTC Towers. They kept Werner on the line as they tried desperately to get details. All doubt was erased when another jet hit the second tower and Wolf confirmed the madness just blocks away.
That’s really interesting to me.
I was in Logan International Airport the Tuesday before the September 11 attacks. My middle child Carrie was on her way to Ireland for an internship. She had just graduated from college. It was a six-month position, and so my son, my husband, and I all went to the airport with her to see her off.
I had the strangest vibe that day.
So did my husband and son.
It was Terminal E, the international terminal, and it was under construction. Security was haphazard at best. Mostly, the place was a mess with construction equipment and stuff everywhere. It was chaotic, but not a happy chaos that you’d expect for an international airport terminal. Something was just off.
It felt weird to all three of us. And we talked about it all the way home to Cape Cod. This had never happened before, and it has not happened since. But we really felt an odd sensation there that day.
I think ESP exists–the phenomenon that makes us turn around when someone behind us is looking at us–and I think there was some sort of evil energy there that day, and we picked up on it.
@judgemental has the best eye-witness account.
I am finishing up my work day as I type this and am wearing sweatpants. It just seems classier and more respectful than doing IT in my underwear.
(I work from home, if anyone is wondering.) ;-)
Concur. But damned if I have any idea what’n heck it is.
Like that would matter for IT.