A few months before my father died…and I don’t remember what we were talking about…he blurted out, (if you’ll excuse the “colorful” way my father expressed himself) “Hell yes, I believe in angels! I’ve had a guardian angel workin’ overtime my whole goddam life! The day I die that poor sumbitch is gonna rock back on his ass and say, ‘damn! I’m glad that sumbitch is gone!’” Poor Daddy. When we all gathered around his coffin at his final resting place, I looked up and saw this huge white oak rising up at the head of his grave. It looked vaguely familiar to me, and sure enough, when I went home, I found the painting. He’d painted a tree, oil on canvass, that was exactly like the white oak at his grave…about 50 years before he died. So when I go to his grave, I always look at that tree, and wonder if his angel might be sitting there, still catching its breath.

I believe in ghosts. My mother saw one when she was a child….and told us the story. I will always remember it. She wasn’t afraid and because of that I do not fear ghosts.

Unfortunately no I don’t believe in ghosts nor being contacted from the other world. I say unfortunately because my mom did and she used to talk about coming back and contacting me after she died… and I wish it were true. i wish i felt her presence I wish I could see her and talk to her. I don’t know about out of body experiences. Haven’t had one. Not sure i’d want one. Wouldn’t be totally unable to believe that our consciousness is capable of looking in from the outside. but haven’t experienced it.

Well I have to say Yes to it all. I have had an out of body experience. I have clinical been dead twice. The first time I was in Septic Shock(a 99% mortality rate). I knew I was dying and the pain I was in was overwhelming. As I laid on the gurney in the pre operative room, my first thoughts were of what would happen to my children , I was a single Mother of two at that time. I started praying in their name’s sakes. Suddenly a calm came over me and I no longer felt any pain,Just then I saw the Nurse hit the Code Blue Button and I heard the loud speaker announcing, their is “code blue in the pre op, all personal report”. I tired to tell them not to worry about me anymore, I was O.K. and no longer was in any discomfort. No one seemed to be listening to me, it was at this point I saw them working on me. I was looking down on them and my body. I say, “body” now at the time I saw me. I could see the panic and how feverishly they were working. Again I tried to tell them,” I am O.K.”. I figured they were all to raped up in saving me, to hear me. That is when I heard a voice from within tell me to relax and rest, it was so reassuring and comforting. I watched them roll me into the O.R. and on to the table, then I , I just went blank. When I woke in my hospital bed, their were all sorts of people telling me how lucky I was to be alive, that I had clinical been dead for over 3 minutes. I told them I had seen the nurse hit the code button, I was informed that that was impossible, I was unconscious at the time and could not have seen anything. This event changed the course of my life. Having been raised in an anesthetist household, I had never prayed before and I could not forget what I had seen and felt. I still at this point was not clear on what had taken place and it would be years before understandings would come to me. I started seeking! I went to Church , which was less than comforting, I would break out in tears and feel this vast sadness, I would try another Church, the results were always the same. Time pasted and the memory of this event went to the back burner! It would surface occasional but I really did not know what to make of it. The second time I experienced clinical death was in 1997. It was July 5th on a Saturday. I had an extensive surgery, almost 9 hrs. When I woke up this time,,,, I saw all my loved children( biological and surrogate) standing around my bed in tears and my 18 year old son was handing a clipboard to a nurse. I sat up immediately and pointed to the T.V in front of me and said, “That my brother’s rover, The Sojourner landing !”. The look on their faces was quiet astonishing! Shortly there after my Son who had been hand off the clipboard said to me, ” do not ever want to be put in that position again”. I asked what he was talking about, he went on to explain that he had just signed the paper work to allow them to do heart surgery. I had been in bradia cardia for over 30 minutes , they could not get my heart rate over 31 beats per minute. That is considered clinically dead. I had woken in just the nick of time! Once again it would still be a few more years until I truly understood this event as well. for the time being I was just lucky and I promised my son I would never have a surgery with out a living will. Once again I started seeking.T his time I started talking to people about what they thought about spirituality. I began to open myself up to the possibilities of their being something to this God stuff. The first book that really clicked and brought me to the real possibility was “The Celestine Prophecy”. It spoke to me in ways nothing else had ever done before. I had had so many of these experiences, but had never put them together or outwardly spoken of them. I started to remember things all the way back to my early childhood. But I still had issues with God and most assuredly with religion. I would still be 2 years before I gained clarity and knowing my relationship with God. I will write about that latter! I have to run, the gardens need water!

I haven’t felt nor seen any ghosts or anything like that. I always dream something and it comes true. It happened once and I thought it was a conwidence but it has happened many times since then. I don’t say anything to anyone but stuff like that would scare most people.

I absolutely believe, in “something”. First, I have believed since I was a child (probably a by-product of being sent to religious schools) that the spiritual world co-exists with ours. It was never something I gave much thought to, but always considered to be there. It never shocked me when I would hear of “ghost stories” and I grew up in a historic home and experienced a fair share of things that one could deem “supernatural”. During a trip upstate touring historic homes a few months ago, I shared some of these with my fiance who jokingly called me Dr. Venkman (Bill Murray’s character in Ghostbusters) for the rest of the car ride. So I buttoned my lip and decided to keep it to myself. Then over the following month not only did I lose my beloved grandmother but my great-aunt, the only remaining sister of my other grandmother who had passed 12 years earlier. When we returned from the funeral there was a cat outside the home that had never been there. She parked herself outside the door and kept trying to enter the home and would rub up against anyone that approached the door to visit my grandfather, who had been married to my grandmother for 63 years and nursed her through dementia, Alzheimer’s and ultimately, cancer. When he would walk outside the cat would purr uncontrollably. Since the day we came home from the funeral luncheon, she has sat either at the door, on the bench under the tree that my grandmother loved, or underneath his car in the driveway. I do not doubt for a moment that the animal was sent to watch over him. As for my other late grandmother and now late great-aunt, I have been writing a book inspired by a secret of my grandmother’s that only came to light after her death. As I started writing it, and would hit dead ends, I would visit her grave and just ask for directions. Without fail, within hours I would find little signs that led me on a goose chase for over a year and ultimately to my great-aunt who provided the last pieces of the puzzle. She loved fresh hyacinth and ever since I learned she was dead I have been smelling it when there are no flowers around. Finally, I had a very vivid dream a week ago about a woman’s name and woke up to research it. This morning I went to interview this woman, an old childhood friend of the family that I tracked to a nursing home. However, I was unsure if our breakfast would help me find the clue I was looking for. When I walked into the rest home I found arrangements of hyacinth all throughout the visiting quarters. The woman I came to visit also remembered a key part to my family’s history. I know it sounds like a string of coincidences but I truly feel it was a sign from my late aunt to point me in the right direction for the information that she passed away before she could tell me. So imagine my surprise to get an email alert of this topic when I emerged. I have goosebumps. In addition, much like Joni Evans’ experience, I too doubted horoscopes and astrology. Then almost three years ago, I spoke to a psychic at the insistence of a friend. I thought he’d tell me a bunch of garbage. Instead he made what seemed like odd predictions at the time (such as “a house by the sea will change your life”); that then came true within a matter of months. I sat up and started to listen and now no longer mock it.

Ghosts. Spiritual beings. Guardian Angels. By any name you give them, we share a link through our spirit, our soul, our awareness of self. Perhaps the spark of life connects us to the after-life. Provable? Not so much. Can we experience it? Just read the stories here. Thanks for expressing these touching moments in your lives.

I am lucky enough to have had quite a few of these experiences through two different psychics I have known. I have also been in a position to observe others having the same experience, many, many times. There is no question in my mind that this stuff is for real. But you can’t convince people who don’t believe in it, and I don’t try to. A lot of people I love have died, and I feel their presence around me all the time.

I’m a very pragmatic person and non-religious too. But to my surprise, when my daughter and I were visiting Tombstone AZ, we went into the Birdcage Theater which used to be many things including a house of ill repute. The minute we went into the large main room where the “cribs” were like a mezzanine all round the room we both felt the sorrow and pain coming from above. It was unmistakable and very very uncomfortable. When I was living in Bizbee AZ, a little mining town just south of Tombstone, a friend wanted me to go with him to see a place he was thinking of renting. It was a gallery with living quarters downstairs in the basement. Everything up in the gallery was OK, but when I went downstairs it was cold and sort of ‘thick’ in the air. I only had to go into one of the rooms and I was hit with this terrible feeling of sorrow and illness. It was so deep and awful, I had to run upstairs, almost in tears, to get to the sidewalk outside. I couldn’t have stayed in those rooms one more minute. I don’t even want to think what had gone on in that place. I had a session with a medium years ago, just after my divorce. When I went in I was a total non-believer in such stuff, but she told me about my whole family and warned me about my dependence (a former problem) on not only my ex but my son who was only 18. I suddenly understood what she meant. I’ve been careful ever since. People leave a trail behind them all their lives and past that. Patrice

The closest I get to an other-worldly out-of-body kind of experience is when I write. Sometimes my characters will start talking to me in my imagination. Or will show up in my dreams. Does this count? I’ve often said that being a writer and also a southerner gives me the latitude to be a little nuts.