by John Pinkney
the Shout from Nowhere
The incident, which would linger in Queenslander Barry Johnson’s memory, occurred when he was 16 years old:
I was cycling home from a friend’s place at about 9.30 pm when I heard a strangely familiar male voice, so loud it almost knocked me off my bike. It said, ‘GO BY COOPER’S YARD!’ When I got over the shock I realised that the words hadn’t come from anywhere around me, but from inside my head.
I felt I knew the person who’d yelled, but was unable to place him. However, I couldn’t resist heading for Cooper’s Yard, which was on a different route from the one I normally took home. The place was little more than an empty lot, owned by an old bloke who’d sold chopped wood to my grandfather. Before he died I’d often helped Grandpa load Mr Cooper’s logs into the family ute.
When I reached Cooper’s Yard I saw it no longer existed. A house had been built on the site. Increasingly sure I’d imagined the voice, I kept cycling home. It was drizzling when I passed through the shopping centre. I was skirting past a half-circle of people gathered by the kerb when I saw they were looking down at a woman, lying unconscious. As with the voice I’d heard earlier, she seemed oddly familiar. Then I realised with horror it was my mother. Nobody had called an ambulance - everyone imagined someone else had rung - so I rushed off to do it myself.
My mother had lost a great deal of blood - and a doctor at the hospital later told me she’d have died if she had lain on that road much longer. By this time I’d realised who had shouted the command at me. It was my grandfather, who died when I was 12. By sending me past Cooper’s Yard he’d ensured that I would save my mother’s life.
In my experience, people who report an event of this kind tend to react acceptingly. Because of the circumstances surrounding the case they find it hard to doubt that the contact with what seems to be a dead relative has actually occurred, or that it has produced a benign result. Any sceptic who resorts to circuitous logic to dismiss the incident is likely to receive a response along the lines, ‘I was there - you weren’t.’
Another example of a lifesaving intervention was offered to me by a South Australian correspondent, Stephen Bax of Leigh Creek:
Many years ago some friends and I were travelling by car from Katherine to Darwin. It was the Christmas season and I’d been doing most of the driving. Finally Val, a member of our group, took a spell at the wheel while I rested in the back seat.
I was nodding off when I was jolted awake by my father’s voice, loudly calling my name. A part of my mind knew this was impossible, because Dad had died five years before. But another part prompted me to look ahead - just in time to see another car coming straight toward us. I could see the driver’s face - and he seemed to be frozen with fear. Apparently my mate had dropped off to sleep at the wheel. I yelled at him, ‘Val! Watch out!’
He woke up just in time, swerved and barely missed the oncoming car. My other friends didn’t even stir through all this - but I knew that my dead father had saved their lives as well as mine.
A Heart Attack Warning in the Night
A disembodied ‘someone’ (he was never sure who) roused a grandfather from sleep and ordered him to see his doctor immediately. ‘If that voice hadn’t whispered in my ear - and kept on whispering till I obeyed it - I’d have died,’ Stefan Dobrowny of Berala, New South Wales, told me.
While Stefan’s wife and daughter were holidaying in Austria with his grandchildren, he was sleeping in the house alone. ‘Soon after 5 am I was woken by someone whispering gently near my right ear,’ he recalled. It said, in Ukrainian, ‘Stefan - wake up and hurry to hospital!’ I lifted my head and looked around the room, but it was empty. Then, when I lay down again, the ghostly voice returned, much stronger this time, saying, ‘Wake up and hurry!’ - again in my native tongue.
I decided I’d better do what it said. I dressed, then hurried out to catch the early train from Berala to Lidcombe where my doctor practised. Just as I arrived at his surgery I collapsed unconscious. I woke in the intensive care unit of Auburn District Hospital where it was found that I’d suffered a heart attack. I was transferred to Concord Hospital and remained there for six weeks. I recovered, thanks to the staff’s excellent care, but I always knew that I might have perished in my bedroom, had it not been for that voice. I’ve often wondered whether the warning came because it was not my allotted time to die.’
Many Australian survivors of NDEs (near-death experiences) have asked a similar question:
Are we predestined to perform certain tasks on earth? And does some power forbid us to die before our work is done?
Go Back - It Isn’t Time!
John Grey of Darwin believed the mystery merited serious debate. At a point in my life when I least expected it, I was struck by an unexplained illness,’ he told me. ‘The condition caused excruciating pain and confined me to bed. I couldn’t walk and felt sicker than I’d ever been before. The crisis point came one night when I had the distinct feeling that I was floating out of my body. I could see myself lying on the bed and struggled to drag myself back down to it. But what felt like a powerful magnetic force kept pulling me upward.
After I’d floated for a while I came to a white gate. As I stepped through, my father - who had been dead for 15 years - appeared on the other side. He pushed me and said, ‘Go back - it isn’t time yet!’ When I kept trying to get in he called another man to help him. To my surprise it was my uncle, my father’s brother. This shocked me because I had no idea he had died. I moved away from the gate and floated for a long time over calm seas and towering cliffs. Then I found myself descending to my body on the bed and I re-entered it.
‘I woke in the morning feeling completely fit, with no hint of the malaise I’d experienced the previous day. Several months later I visited my family, whom I hadn’t seen for many years. My mother told me for the first time about my uncle. He had died in his sleep 10 years earlier. If my death flight was a dream, it was extremely vivid. And it also offered me information about my uncle that I hadn’t possessed before.
All my other dreams fade. But the picture of my father at that white gate remains strongly in my mind and I think about it every day.’
A markedly similar story, in which a dead mother waved her dying son back with the words ‘Not yet’, appeared in Melbourne’s Herald Sun on 7 January 2005. Industrial reporter Wayne Howell interviewed mechanic Gary Culvert who was severely injured when the 13-tonne bus he was working on shifted from its moorings and crashed down on him:
After the bus fell…Mr Culvert clinically died four times. Yesterday the 54-year-old wept as he remembered seeing a vision of his recently dead mother. ‘I saw my mum while I was under the bus,’ Mr Culvert said. ‘I really knew something was wrong then. She was standing there looking 20 years younger, wearing a floral dress, but the funny thing was she didn’t have any legs and she was shaking her finger at me saying, “Not yet, not yet.”’
…Three weeks after the accident a doctor told Gary Culvert he would never walk again. His pelvis had been crushed and most of the bones in his body had been broken. ‘I rang my fiancee and cried my heart out and told her, “I have just been told I am going to be a cripple for the rest of my life,”’ Mr Culvert said. But the never-say-die fitter and mechanic refused to give up, and worked so hard at his rehabilitation that two weeks ago he amazed doctors by walking without a crutch.
A number of NDE subjects have written to me to describe meetings with parents who died before they were born. One was Jack Paulden of Redcliff Park, Western Australia:
I don’t have the slightest trouble believing the resuscitated patients who report having strange experiences while they were clinically dead. It happened to me. In November 1963 I was one of a carload of young sailors returning from leave in Melbourne to our base at Flinders Naval Depot. The car rolled and I was hurled out onto the kerb on my head. My mate died - and the doctors assumed I was gone too, until a nurse noticed my eyelids fluttering.
They rushed me to the theatre and rem
oved part of my left frontal brainlobe. I then lay unconscious for 21 days, and in that time some remarkable things happened. The first was that I met my father, Flying Officer Jack Ahearn who had died while serving with the RAAF in World War II. I had never seen him before, because I was born three months after his death. But there was absolutely no question about who he was. He told me, ‘Jack, you mustn’t die yet. We’re not ready for you. You must go back, get married and have a son of your own. And you’ll live long enough to see him marry and father a son of his own.’
The doctors had predicted that if I survived I’d be mentally retarded. But to their surprise I was not only lucid when I woke, but seemed to know what had been going on during my coma. My first words to the nurse were, ‘Something terrible has happened to the world. Someone has been killed.’ She then told me that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.
Not all survivors of clinical death report meeting relatives. Some describe encounters with spiritual figures. In 1986 Gordon Walton, a former shire president of Ballarat, Victoria, experienced a catastrophic accident on his farm. While loading oats he slipped and became entangled in the tractor’s grain auger. The shaft smashed his jaw, broke seven ribs and punctured a lung.
‘There was no immediate pain,’ he told me. ‘Just blackness, then the experience of waking up in agony 13 days later. But along with consciousness came an astonishing memory which I knew had not been a dream or hallucination. I remembered dying - and finding myself walking up to a set of dazzling white gates. Everything was so beautiful and I felt ecstatically happy. Then, however, my way was blocked by a bearded man dressed in robes. He said, ‘You are not ready. You must go back.’ Immediately I felt myself drifting into my body. But I was so keen to pass through those gates that I tried again, with much the same result. The more I struggled in their direction the more they seemed to recede.
‘It was all absolutely real - and I need only shut my eyes to see it again. I know that I travelled to a different world. I’d always believed in the afterlife, but now I know factually that it is there. I’m glad I’m still alive, but I no longer have the slightest fear of death.’
One of his doctors described Gordon Walton as one of Ballarat’s most respected residents: ‘His injuries were so severe we all expected him to die. His recovery astonished everyone.’
Mrs Ellie Wilson, also of Ballarat, told me a markedly different story about a meeting with deceased relatives in ‘another place’:
I had been extremely ill in hospital for three days. Finally, with my family’s permission the doctors decided to chance an operation. I learned later on that I clinically died during the procedure and was ‘dead’ for 10 minutes before I was brought back.
During that time I had a wonderful experience. I found myself in a sunlit garden lane in early autumn. The curious thing was that the leaves were changing colour while I watched. As I stood there, hypnotised by the beauty of it all, my mother and father walked into view. Both of them had died many years before, but they looked just as I remembered them in life. They stood there at the end of the lane, both smiling and gently beckoning to me.
I wanted very much to stay in that exquisitely beautiful place with my parents - but something deep within me insisted I should leave. With an enormous effort of will I turned my thoughts back to the life I knew. When I recovered consciousness the doctor said it was a miracle I had survived. Now I wonder if it would have been all over for me if I had remained in that autumnal garden.
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Can Ghosts Use the Telephone?
In his controversial book Phone Calls from the Dead parapsychologist Scott Rogo interviewed several hundred Americans who bizarrely claimed that deceased relatives and friends had telephoned them. Purported phenomena of this kind have been sporadically described in many countries - most notably Thailand, where telephone hauntings are virtually taken for granted (see below). A number of Australians have approached me with similar reports.
In 1993 John Sierins of Ryde, New South Wales, told me that his mother had spoken by phone to his best friend: 14 hours after she died of a stroke. ‘It happened 30 years ago, but I still think about it every day,’ John said. ‘At the time I was living in a flat in Bondi. It was an unhappy period in my life. I’d recently been divorced from my first wife and was only casually acquainted with the woman I’d later marry. My mother, who was living in Riga, Latvia, knew all about my troubles because I wrote to her regularly. At 7.30 am on October 11 my Latvian friend Arvids rang and asked me to go around to his place in Earlwood for breakfast. It was a very unusual invitation as we’d never breakfasted before but I decided it would cheer me up.
‘When I arrived Arvids said that a lady had rung at around six o’clock that morning. She had told him, in Latvian, that I would like to see him. That’s why he called me. This was puzzling, because I hadn’t planned to see Arvids at all that day - and I certainly couldn’t think of any woman who would have called him with such a message. But several days later it all fell into place. I received a letter from my father in Riga, saying my mother had died of a stroke. This had happened 14 hours before that mysterious phone call. I could only conclude that my mother, knowing how much her death would grieve me, had telephoned from some unknown place, to ensure I had companionship and support.’
A Melbourne maths teacher was convinced her dead brother had telephoned her, four months after his funeral. ‘Peter’s death was a terrible shock to our family, as he was only 44,’ Olga Smith told me. ‘One afternoon, four months after he was buried, my husband and I were gardening when the kitchen phone rang. The moment I picked it up there was a kind of whining accompanied by static, rather like a car radio sounds when you pass a tram. Then the line went clear and I heard what was my brother’s distinctive voice saying, “I miss you, Mopey.” Mopey was the nickname Peter had invented for me (for reasons I forget) when I was a little girl. But he hadn’t used it since we were teenagers. I practically screamed into the phone, “Peter - is that you?” but all I got after that was the dialling tone.’
In September 1986 Shirley O’Brien of Cairns went into shock as the result, as she described it, ‘of my dead mother talking to me on the phone’. She recalled, ‘My mother had died three months earlier. As was my usual custom I’d phoned my father to see how he was getting along. The phone rang for several seconds, then I heard my mother’s familiar voice. Her only words, which are engraved on my memory were, “Hello? Hello? Bill’s not here.” Then she hung up. I stood by the phone, shaking all over. I knew I wasn’t hallucinating and my father didn’t own an answering machine. I was in shock for the rest of that day. I kept wracking my brain, wondering how my mother could possibly have been able to contact me through a telephone receiver.’
In Phone Calls from the Dead, Scott Rogo writes, ‘Poltergeist hauntings prove that non-physical entities are able to exert psycho-kinetic force, causing clocks to chime and ornaments to fly from shelves. If discarnate spirits can perform these tricks there seems no reason why they could not also generate electrical impulses into the telephone system.’ The British investigator David Blond agrees, writing, ‘Based on the considerable evidence gathered in the United States, Britain and Canada alone there seems a strong likelihood that what may be a form of residual after-life intelligence is sometimes able to communicate with us by electronic means.’
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Tears of the Tsunami Dead
On 8 January 2005 the Weekend Australian published one of the strangest reports in its history. From Patong, Thailand, correspondent Peter Alford quoted locals as saying that drowned people had begun making contact by telephone - the day after their lives were snatched away by the gigantic Boxing Day tsunami wave.
An extraordinary account of Thailand’s telephone-using tsunami ghosts appeared in the Weekend Australian on 8 January 2005.
The BBC’s reporter in Phuket, Tony Cheng, filed a similar story about a domestic phone in Khao Lak. Soon the phenomenon was being chronicled by media worldwid
e. Peter Alford described a pattern of inexplicable events at the Baan Bang Sak general store, whose owners had become loath to pick up the phone, fearful of what they might find on the other end:
‘When they answer that phone they hear screaming, they hear a lady crying,’ said Am, my Thai interpreter. ‘Sometimes the lady calls to them and she knows everybody’s name here. They don’t want to answer that phone.’
The hysterical messages began on 27 December, the day after the tsunami struck. The family imagined at first that they were being callously hoaxed. But on 28 December they were offered proof that something seriously abnormal was happening. A young boy took a call from the weeping woman, who identified herself as Jeenda Josakul, a cousin of Sutha, one of the store’s owners. Jeenda said her body could be found at a temple in Takua Pa. ‘Help me! Help me!’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be burned yet.’ She begged her cousin to go to the temple to say Buddhist prayers over her before the mass cremation occurred. At first Sutha was too frightened to comply - but that afternoon she forced herself to attend the temple, where she found Jeenda’s body.
However, the calls continued - often with messages from distressed farangs (foreigners). The family’s members needed the telephone for their livelihood, but they became so frightened of it that at night they crowded together into a single bedroom. If anyone went to the toilet, a relative would stand guard by the door. The BBC reported comparable events in Khao Lak, where a domestic telephone was ringing ‘day and night’, making sleep impossible. Whoever answered was greeted by the voices of relatives and friends crying out for someone to rescue them.
The Baan Bang Sak store’s business began to fall away. Some of its best customers, workers in the surrounding rubber plantation, fled, saying they could see phii (ghosts) walking through the trees. While Buddhist priests conducted ceremonies to calm and release the phii, a psychologist, Dr Wanlop Piyamanutham insisted that his countrymen’s paranormal experiences were the fruit of inflamed imagination, caused by post-traumatic stress disorder.