I do believe in ghosts…the lingering souls of the deceased…all deceased. I’ve had several “otherworldly presence” experiences with the family cat. We had her for 19 years and she feebly died in my arms. On occassion, as I’d walk from the driveway to the front door of the old house, out of the corner of my eye I’d see a “dash” of shadow run across the lawn and know that it was Choo-Choo.

I don’t, thankfully as I think it would freak me out, have any personal experience of ghosts. However, I do believe pretty much anything is possible so I wouldn’t discount it solely because I have no experience of it. I do believe in angels, in what form I am not sure.

Joni, Yes, I believe in ghosts……….I’ve seen two in my house. Maybe sometime in the future I will tell that story. I also have the God given ability to communicate with those who have passed over. My grandson and I used to have conversations death. I told him when I died I would try to contact him. When he was 14 years old he had a Heart transplant. (that’s another whole long story) He lived for two more years and died a couple of months after he turned 16. After the horrible tragedy of losing my daughter in law and my two granddaughters being kidnapped 20 years earlier. My husband feared I wouldn’t make it through the pain of losing my grandson. It was a terrible loss, he was my heart. Our entire family suffered so much at his death. He was such a great kid………..funny and brave. Right up to the end he would joke with his nurses and Doctors. Two weeks after his death I was sitting at my computer and all of a sudden my computer froze. I didn’t know much about computers at the time. Justin had always been my Computer Guru………. I heard his voice from behind me say “Grandma, turn the computer off manually and then turn it back on. It will reboot (I didn’t even know what that meant). I turned around expecting to see him standing in the doorway. No one was there. So I did what he said and my computer worked fine. I was stunned to say the least. We had talked about my contacting him, never expecting him to die before me. Several weeks later I was at the computer again writing to the mother of the child whose heart was donated to Justin. All of a sudden I could see Justin standing right in front of me, he had a young boy standing beside him. He said Grandma this is Brandon. It was so strange. I could see the computer screen and at the same time I could see them standing there in front of me. Brandon’s mother wrote DONA WHAT’S HAPPENING, I have goose bumps all over my body. When I explained that Justin and Brandon were there with me she was floored. They spoke to me for a few minutes, with Brandon giving his mother a message. Then they both said Goodbye. After that Happening I’ve received messages from all the members of my family who have died. This happened in Feb of 1999. Later that year my brother died on Christmas Day, then two weeks later my father died Later the next year my Husband, my sister in law and my mother all died within three months. I received messages from each one of them. They all told me they had arrived and were very happy and didn’t have any more pain. They were surprised at how young everyone was on the ‘Other Side’ ( Heaven) They told me that all the members of the family were there to greet them. They described to me how it looked and how wonderful they felt. They said the beauty was beyond words that I would understand. I still get messages from them periodically………….My grandson always arrives by Laughing or saying “Grandma I’m here” Justin and his parents and sister appeared on the “Leeza” TV show in Dec 1998 to meet the Mother of Brandon the Heart donor. Later after Justin died they appeared on a Miracle Organ Donor Reunion Show on Leeza……..On this show Althea (The Psychic you met) was there and gave a reading. She was right on. I was very impressed with her ability. I had a very strange communication one night about 10PM, This happened two weeks after my Father died. I heard Justin’s voice. He said “Grandma They are all gathering”. I didn’t know what that meant so I asked him to explain. He said all the family members who were already there were gathering to meet someone who was coming. That kind of freaked me out. I asked Who? He said I don’t know until they get here. I got a phone call two hours later telling me my favorite Uncle had just died. Talk about being blown away, that’s mild for how I was feeling. I’ve been blessed with this Gift…………I do consider it a gift from God. With all the tragedy’s I’ve had over the past 30 years it has helped give me strength to get through the pain and grief. If you’ve never had a visit from a loved one and would like to have one you need to be open to allow them to come through. It takes a lot of energy for them to send and also for us to receive…… I often times feel very tired after having one of these experiences. Years ago I wouldn’t admit I had this gift………….because people think you’re crazy………..maybe some of you reading this will think that……………but it’s OK now. Justin tells me to share because the knowledge might bring comfort to someone in pain. Monday was the 7th anniversary of my Husbands death and I felt his presence near me all day. They tell me when I need them…………Just call and they will come. The anniversary of so many family members is coming up in the next three months. It makes it hard over the Holidays, I will talk to them so I don’t feel so sad.

Ghosts….spirits…however you label them, I believe they exist. No one knows what happens to your soul after you die. It’s part of human nature to attempt to make sense out of things that do not. Death is a mystery that many have tried to dissect and explain, but in my opinion no one has solved it. And we won’t, because the reality is there are some aspects of life that are above all our heads. The most brilliant among us with letters before and after their names have tried and failed when it comes to capturing the mystery of the afterlife.

Absolutely. My Father comes to me in dreams when I have a big decision to make, always. We have just finished moving from the city back to the small southern town where my husband was raised, and where I have owned a home for years. When we married, I rented my home out. I knew then that it had a ghost, but didn’t want to frighten the new tenants. Within a couple of months, they reported doors that wouldn’t close, windows that worked one day and stuck the next, on and on. I asked if the house was “put together”…in other words, were their pictures hung, were they taking care of it. They told me no, they had been too busy to do the little things. I told them once the house was all put together, things would be fine. I was right. I knew this because after I bought this house, I was at a church supper, and two of the older women in the congregation approached me and asked if it was true that I had bought this house. I said yes, and they told me their Aunt and Uncle had built it in the fifties and lived here until 2000. I bought it from the second owners who had totally remodeled the kitchen and bath etc. The ladies went on to tell me that their Aunt was crazy about the house and very particular about it being “just right”. They told me she used to sit by the big picture window in the living room all the time. This solved a mystery for me…as I had a chair in my living room that would be in its place when I went to bed, but when I would wake up, it would be in front of the window. I blamed the dogs…but no. I also had trouble with bedroom doors that wouldn’t stay closed, lights that wouldn’t work. I asked a friend, who is a medium, to come to the house. She spoke to the ghost of the Aunt and learned that I was upsetting her because I hadn’t hung pictures and settled in properly. I wasn’t making it a home. Once the pictures were hung, and I had my first dinner party, everything was fine. When we moved back here last week, I spoke to the ghost first thing, telling her we would put things in place as soon as we could and to please not do anything to frighten our two young sons. We haven’t had any issues, and of course, the first thing I did was put a big comfy chair in front of the window!! I’ve never had an out of body experience, but many, many ghostly encounters, none un-pleasant.

I would have to say yes…My 2 1/2 year old see’s my Nana who passed away when my daughter was 11 months old…I have a picture of my Nana on our fridge & one day now that my daughter talks she was looking at the pictures on the fridge & naming “Mommy, Daddy, Auntie, Mimi, Papa, and then she got to the picture of my Nana and with so much excitement “Nana, Momma look Nana” and I about dropped her on the floor…I knew at that moment my Nana had visited my daughter…she had 8 grand daughters and 2 great grand daughters when she passed…she didnt get a chance to know her 2 great grand daughters b/c dimenta set it but I would take my daughter, an infant at the time, to visits with Nana, even though Nana didnt know who we were…so it was shocking to hear my daughter so excited to see a picture of her Nana… I also have a friend that I work with who lives around an old battlefield here in Virginia (hanover county) and she said when her grandson visists he plays w/ the soldiers, they come to visit him…she has been driving home and almost wrecked b/c she drove through soldiers walking on the roads…there is a room in her house, no matter what they do, space heaters or whatever, it never gets above 65 degrees, in just that one room…she said pictures have been thrown across the room off her walls and doors will slam shut or open…Not sure if I would be able to live there with all that going on but to each its own… I also watched some videos of the Ghost Hunters and there is one that really got to me but didnt really scare me…its the one “hunt” they did at St. Augistine Lighhouse in Florida…there were two little girls killed while that lighthouse was built and their ghosts still roam around & they caught these little lights on camera…if you can go to youtube & pull it up, its amazing to watch…the little girls are actually playing w/ the ghost hunters… The only time I have seen a ghost with my own eyes is about a year after an old boyfrield passed away drinking and driving, I was out one night in the rain, same kind of night he died in, and I was upset over my current boyfriend and driving way too fast…I looked over and in my passenger seat was Aaron and he was shaking his head at me b/c when we dated he always said I drove too fast & would sit there and shake his head at me…Thankfully I saw him that day b/c I immediatly slowed down and Thankfully I did b/c at the same moment I slowed down I hit a big huge water puddle so who knows what would have happened if I would have hit it at the speed I was going…Aaron died way too young at the age of 20 but the freaky thing about him was he knew he wouldnt live to be an old man, and he knew he would die drinking and driving…he was a gorgeous man, dark hair, blue eyes, and a wonderful spirit. I am grateful and thankful I was able to know him as I did…

I work in a library that’s been featured in “Ghost Hunters.” As a result, we get visitors from all over the country who come in just to tour the library and usually end up admiring its architecture. My most frequently-asked question is, “Have you seen the ghost?” Honestly, I have to say “No.” But a couple of personal experiences lead me to think of the possibility of spirits communicating from beyond. On the night my father died, I was at his bedside. My aunt and cousin, who live in another state, said he visited them in their dreams. Well, perhaps they just had him on their minds. But that wasn’t the case for the second instance, which occurred about two months ago. I dreamed I was in an early 1960s convertible with my sister and her high school friends; one of her friends who was not with us, Norma, called me on my cell phone and said she wanted to speak to my sister. It was urgent because she was dying. In reality, my sister and I both hadn’t seen or talked to Norma in years and didn’t know that she was ill. Two days after I had my dream I called my sister about another matter. Before hanging up the phone she said, “Oh, while I have you on the phone. Norma died two nights ago.” I was so freaked out, and so was she when I told her my dream.

About 15 years ago, five years after my mother passed away, I was very ill and in the hospital. I had Legionnaire’s Disease and it was frightening. We, my daughters, my brother and I, all felt the presence of my mother at that time. One of my daughters was saying how are we going to tell Grandma; another was arranging for rides, and my brother just: Mom won’t let anything happen to her. I was very sick and my husband was told to prepare for the worst and then, I responded well to everything and….got well. To this day, we all say we felt my mother’s presence even one of my daughters who scoffs at most things not scientifically explained; even my husband (though neither my mother or he could stand each other :) ). So, yes, I did. **a little PS if I may; we were told, presence or no, if I was still a smoker, I would not have made it. So, please, please, all of you out there still smoking……..please use everything you have to stop.

I tell people I don’t have “faith” in God so much as “knowledge”, because of what happened one June night in 1991. The woman I loved - and would’ve married - Jude, suddenly had died on 2 June that year. My mother said we had a “very rare” love. I’d already been through hell in my lifetime, and after Jude died, I screamed out one night in my bedroom, “Jesus, you so and so, everything I’ve been through in my life you owe me a sign right now that Jude’s in heaven and okay. You owe it to me!!!” Just then, I started hearing a beeping sound. I looked around for what it could be, and I could tell it was coming from inside a chest of drawers. I opened up the drawer, and there was an old answering machine going off! I had put it in the drawer several weeks ago, after I moved. I knew right then that God was in the room, and I went from the absolute depths of despair to exhilaration. It was scientifically impossible for a machine that’s not plugged in, and has no battery compartment and capacitors too small to store a charge for several weeks, to go off like that. It wouldn’t stop, so I took it out, found an electrical outlet and plugged the answering machine in. I hit the play button and there were all these old messages from when I used to have the machine plugged in at my previous apartment. One of the messages was from Jude, and simply said, “I love you very much. I’ll talk to you later.” Once something like that happens to you, you know the supernatural is real. It’s not a matter of “if”, and you don’t really care whether anyone believes you, because you experienced it. There was one other thing that I can’t swear by, because it involved my elderly father. The day before he died, he told my sister that he’d been seeing his parents and other late loved ones, but had been afraid to tell anyone, for fear that they’d think he was senile. Dad wasn’t senile, at all. One thing that flipped me out happened a couple days before he died. I helped him into his apartment, because he was struggling to breathe. I prayed a silent prayer, “God, please help him.” Just then, Dad spoke up and said, “Jim, don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay.” He’d never said such a thing to me in his entire life.