If I weren’t a radio talk- show host speaking every night with callers who have had paranormal experiences in their lives, I would be downright astonished at the number of people who said they have seen, and communicated with, the spirits or ghostly manifestations of their departed relatives. Mainly these communications come from parents or grandparents, but I have also heard
stories about communications from departed children.
GHOSTS AND COMMUNICATING WITH THE DEPARTED
On Coast to Coast AM we discuss the question all the time: what are ghosts? Do all of the departed become ghosts or just those spirits who don’t know they’re dead? In his forthcoming book, Haunting of America, my friend and repeat guest Joel Martin tells an amazing story he heard about a person recovering from surgery in a hospital. One night he was awakened from a deep sleep by the jingling of bottles. He thought that it was one of the nurses bringing him some medication on a tray, but when he looked up, he could see no one in his room. The jingling was coming from
outside his door. So he got out of bed and crept to the door where he saw a very pale, strange- looking man in a white laboratory coat rolling a medicine cart down the corridor. Odd, he thought. Why would a person be making that much oise with a medicine cart at night? Normally it’s the nurses who deliver the nighttime meds to patients. So he followed the strange .gure as he walked right by the nurse’s station, where the nurse on duty didn’t even look up. This was even weirder. Didn’t she see him?
So he asked her, “Hey, who’s that guy?”
The nurse looked up and said, “What are you doing out of bed and walking the halls?”
“Wait a minute,” the patient said, “forget about me. What about that guy? Who is he?”
“Oh, him,” the nurse on duty said. “That’s just a guy who used to work down in pharmaceuticals. He’s delivering the prescriptions to the nurse’s stations.”
“Used to?” the patient asked, now getting very ner vous about this.
“Yeah, used to,” she said very nonchalantly. “He died a few months ago.”
“You mean that’s a ghost? And you’re not scared to death?”
“We know the guy. He’s been the night pharmacist at this hospital for de cades,” the nurse said. “Everyone here knows him. He’s just doing his job, then he disappears. He doesn’t know he’s dead and we don’t want to tell him.”
Sounds very blasé, I know, but people who are used to ghosts, and know the ghosts they’re used to, remain very unfazed.
Take, for example, a story from History Channel’s UFO Hunters as they made their way across En gland. They were shooting a scene one night in a 450- year- old pub- and- restaurant near Leeds. As they were interviewing retired police of.cers there about UFOs they’d seen, one of the pub managers, who had just sent her two teenaged daughters home for the night, walked up to the producer and told him about the UFO sighting she’d had right down the road from the pub. “Let’s get her on camera,” the producer said.
During the ensuing interview, the UFO hunters asked her about her sighting, when she had it, and what the UFO looked like. Finally they asked, remarking how calm she seemed about her sighting, whether or not she was scared at having seen this pulsating orb of light right in front of her on a dark country road.
“Oh,” she said almost casually. “After seeing the ghost we have down in the basement at night, nothing like that frightens me that much anymore.”
“What?” the team asked. “Who?”
It was an old ghost, she said, who’d been killed in the pub sometime in the 1600s during the wars between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads after King Charles I was overthrown and was still angry about it.
“Angry. You mean he kills people angry?” they asked her.
“No,” she said. “He fumes and he fusses and sometimes even throws things at people in the basement, but he’s never killed anybody that I know of. I just tell him to go away, and he does. Everybody knows about him here.”
Ghost stories can be exciting and thrilling. I hear them on Coast to Coast AM all the time, and the people who tell about visitations from their relatives seem to have experienced a sense of peace at having heard from the other side. Ghost stories are so common, in fact, more common than UFO sightings in my opinion, that I’ve often wondered whether there are ways to open yourself to ghostly visitations so that you can almost call them to you on command so as to communicate with them.
There are plenty of stories of mediums who claim they can communicate with the departed, stories that range all the way back to ancient times. Those who say they can communicate with the departed have been both celebrated and reviled in pop u lar culture and even host their own radio and televi sion shows. Even in American political history there are stories of mediums and channelers who visited presidents in the White House to reach the spirits of the departed.
In one of the most famous stories, Nettie Coburn wrote a book about her experiences in the Lincoln White House. She had originally been asked to conduct séances to contact the spirit of Willie Lincoln, who died during Lincoln’s .rst term of a fever said to have been caused by bacteria in the White House water supply. But young Nettie Coburn found herself more involved in presidential policy- making than just trying to reach out to Willie to provide solace to the president and Mary Todd Lincoln. During one of her invitations to the White House—called there to provide advice on a very serious matter—Nettie was asked to contact a spirit to help the president reach a very serious decision that could affect the outcome of the war. Lincoln had written the Emancipation Proclamation, but, he said, he was still not certain whether to sign it. Nettie’s ghostly contact was the great American orator, Daniel Webster, who, speaking through Nettie, urged the president in an impassioned plea to sign the Emancipation Proclamation and so give a high moral purpose for the Union to pursue the war that had ravaged the nation. Whether this story is accurate or not— after all, it was recounted by Nettie herself years later in her book, Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist or Curious Revelations from the Life of a Trance Medium— we do not know, for we only have Nettie’s version of the story. Lincoln himself, however, does not attribute his decision to issue the Proclamation to Nettie Coburn’s channeling of Daniel Webster. Rather, as he wrote to Albert G. Hodges, he was “anti- slavery because if slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong.” For President Lincoln this was an absolutely moral decision.
Nettie’s story, however, has captivated historians of the paranormal because it shows just how almost conventional it was for presidents, Franklin Pierce and Woodrow Wilson included, to seek advice from people who said they could talk to the “other side.”
Can you talk to the other side? Many of our contributors recount stories of their loved ones communicating with them just after death or even years later. Some— and you can do this, too— have told and written to me that all they had to do was to ask for a sign from a loved one in order to receive a message. In one particularly warm story, a woman recounts her years with her live- in boyfriend, a man who was abusive to her, but whom she loved nevertheless. After his death, our contributor, still hoping for a sign from him, began dating other men. Then, one day, lonely and disconsolate over the loss of her lover, she asked for a sign that he was still with her. That was when the refrigerator died. Oh, great, she thought. That’s all I need. To spend hundreds of dollars on a new fridge when I barely have enough money to buy food.
So she opened the refrigerator to see what she could make out, and what do you think she found inside? There, on the top shelf, were three cans of beer. Three cans that her deceased boyfriend always kept on the top shelf, right in front. That was her sign, she said, that her boyfriend was there by her side, staying with her through the rest of her life.
Ghosts, it seems, don’t have to materialize or even talk to people. They can just perform acts that let others know they’re still present.
We suggested a number of exercises in Worker that can help people communicate with the departed in waking life as well as in dreams. In dreams, we said, because the logical mind has stepped back from its mediating function over our sensory input, you are open to all sorts of images that might not make sense or might challenge your grip on reality in a waking state. But in a dream state, all possibilities are open. Therefore, if you want to try to communicate, try it as a form of a lucid dream, as many of our contributors have done. As you do your deep breathing and repetition of your mantra, hold the person’s image you want to communicate with .rmly in your mind. Actually begin the conversation, even conjuring up mentally what you think you might say and hear. Doing this enough times over a repeated sequence of eve nings, I have been told, will actually bring the person into your consciousness while you are asleep. And in that state, you may discover things about that person, things the person might have wanted to say to you in life, that you could not otherwise discover. Our contributors have reported this, and I have no reason to dispute any of their sto...
