by Hans Holzer
In many recorded instances, people who have died will nevertheless retain an interest in the affairs of those they have left behind. It is moot what drives them to do this. Is there a law over there that rewards them for shepherding or watching over their people? Are they doing it because virtue has its own rewards? Are they compelled to continue the bond from a motivation of ego importance? Do they want not to be left out of the continuing lives of their families? Or is it because the living so strongly need their help that they are drawn back to intercede by the very need for their intercession? I am rather inclined to think that there are set rules as to when there may be this kind of communication and how far they may go in warning the living of impending dangers or other future developments.
What this law is in detail is not easy to fathom, and even more difficult is the question of who originated the law and who created the originator. Suffice it to establish rationally and methodically that the law exists and that there are bona fide instances of an interest taken in the affairs of the living by their dead.
This interest can take many forms, but the common denominator is always the fact that the communication results in some benefit to the living from the knowledge obtained through the communication. This may be a warning of disaster or a foretelling of events to come that cannot be changed, but if one knows what is in store ahead of time, the blow is softened for him.
The interest in the living may be less striking and merely gently supervisory, a part of seeing how things are going or of encouraging a depressed person. It is not at all like a Big Brother feeling, with the invisibles watching you, but it gives a warm, comfortable impression that one is not alone and that forces greater than oneself care.
Thus this interest is an expression of love, and as such it is certainly a positive force, far from frightening or dangerous.
The living who are fortunate enough to have a deceased relative take an interest in their lives should accept this as natural and live with it. They should not defer decisions to the spiritual watchdog, of course, but make their own mundane decisions as they feel best. Nevertheless, sometimes the greater knowledge of the ones beyond the veil can help the living understand their own problems better and thus provide them with ammunition for a better judgment.
Mrs. Harry C. lives near a large city in Pennsylvania. Of Irish-English ancestry, she was born in North Carolina and came from an old family that was given a land grant there by George III. The psychic gift was not unknown in her family, mainly on her mother’s side. After a year in college, Mrs. C. became a trained practical nurse. She married a soldier from Pennsylvania in 1945 and over the years bore five sons.
Although she had had clairvoyant experiences from time to time, it was not until she was eleven years old that she received a visit from the beyond. At that time an aunt was living with her family to look after the children while their mother worked. Thus it happened that in her childhood Mrs. C. spent many hours with her aunt; they read and sewed together, and there was a strong bond between them. Until the aunt died, Mrs. C. had shared a room with her mother, but after the death of the aunt she was given her aunt’s bedroom. A few weeks after the funeral, Mrs. C., then eleven, was sitting on the porch of the house when she heard her name being called. She glanced up and saw her late aunt standing in the door, holding it ajar.
“Gretchen, will you please come in here for a moment. I have something to tell you,” the aunt said in the same tone of voice Mrs. C. had heard her use while alive. Obediently and not at all frightened, the eleven-year-old girl put down her sewing and followed her beckoning aunt into the house. But as she started to go in, the apparition slowly faded away! What did the aunt want to tell her little companion? That life continued and that she still cared how the family was?
A few weeks after this incident, a girlfriend of Gretchen’s by the name of Maxine F. stopped in so that they might attend a movie together. Just as the two girls were about to leave, Mrs. C. heard her name being called. All set to go to the movie, she decided to ignore this. But the voice called again: “Gretchen! Gretchen!”
“Your mother’s calling you,” Maxine said, and waited.
So the two children went back to the kitchen, where Gretchen’s mother was washing dishes. The mother had not called her. Other than the three of them, the house was empty at the time. But Gretchen knew her late aunt was calling her.
As the days went on, the aunt continued to make her presence felt in the house. She was not about to be abandoned at the cemetery but insisted on continuing with her duties—and rights—in the household. At night, Gretchen would hear someone drumming fingernails on the table. This was a lifelong habit of her aunt’s. Often she would awaken to see the aunt standing at the foot of her bed, looking at her. Gretchen was by no means alone in observing these phenomena. A friend of her mother’s by the name of Mary L. once occupied the same room. She too heard the drumming of the invisible fingernails.
It also fell to Gretchen to go through her late aunt’s effects. This was a very difficult task. On certain days she felt her aunt’s overpowering presence hovering over her, taking a keen interest in what she was doing. When the pressure became too great, Gretchen threw her aunt’s old letters down and ran out of the house for a breath of fresh air. Somehow she knew her aunt would not follow her there.
Many years later, when Gretchen had become Mrs. Harry C., she and her husband occupied a house in Pennsylvania. At first Mrs. C. thought they had acquired a “resident ghost,” something left over from the past of one of the earlier owners of the house. The house itself had been built in 1904 as part of a “company town” for the Westinghouse Corporation. The houses then were occupied by workers of that corporation, but in the 1920s the company decided to get out of the real estate business, and the houses reverted to individual ownership. A number of tenants then occupied the house in succession. Several ladies had died on the third floor of the house, center of the psychic manifestations during the time Mr. and Mrs. C. occupied the dwelling. But none of these people had died violently or were part of a tragic situation of the kind that may sometimes create a ghostly phenomenon. Of course, the early history of the house when it was company property could not be checked out as there were no records kept of the tenants during that time. Mrs. C. thought that perhaps one of the early owners of the house had been the victim of a tragedy and that it was the restless shade of that person that was staying on. Her belief was reinforced by the fact that since her childhood and the encounters with her late aunt, she had not experienced anything so strong in the other houses they had lived in. But her clairvoyance had been active elsewhere, and she has never been entirely without some form of ESP experience.
The phenomena were mainly footsteps on the third floor of the house and someone walking down the stairs when the occupants knew no one was up there. In 1961 Mrs. C. learned that their unseen guest was a woman. One of her boys was in delicate health and had major surgery when only seven weeks old. One night Mrs. C. woke up to hear the baby crying. At the same time, however, she became aware of another voice, someone singing softly as if to quiet the baby. Wondering who it might be, Mrs. C. rose and went into the baby’s room.
There, near the crib, stood a lady. She was a small woman with a lovely face, dressed in what seemed World War I clothes and hairstyle. The dress was pale lavender trimmed with black braid and filigree buttons. It had a lace bodice and jabot and a hobble skirt in the manner of the turn-of-the-century clothes.
Far from being terrified by the stranger, Mrs. C. stepped closer. When she approached the crib, the lady smiled and stepped to one side to let her pass so that she might tend the baby. When she looked up again, the lady was gone. The visitor’s presence was no longer required; the mother had come to look after her own.
After that first time, she saw the lady several times—sometimes in the baby’s room, sometimes going up and down the third-floor stairs. Later Mrs. C. had another baby, and the stranger also occupied herself with the new arrival,
as if tending babies were something very natural and dear to her. But who could she possibly be?
When Mrs. C.’s five-year-old son was sick in the fall of 1967, he once asked his mother who the strange lady was who had come and sung to him, and he proceeded to describe her. Mrs. C. had never discussed her own experiences with the boy, but she knew at once that he too had seen the lady upstairs.
By this time it began to dawn on her that perhaps this lady was not a “resident ghost” but a deceased relative continuing an interest in her family. But she could not be sure one way or the other, and there the matter stood when her oldest son Lonnie and his wife Sally came to spend their Christmas weekend with her in 1967. Sally is a registered nurse by profession and scientifically minded. For that reason Mrs. C. had not seen fit to discuss psychic experiences with her or to tell her of the unusual goings-on on the third floor of the house.
It so happened that the young couple were put into the third-floor bedroom for the weekend. Because they were both tired from the trip, Mrs. C. thought it best to put them up there, as far removed from street noises as possible. The room is rather large, with one bed on each side and a dormer window between the two beds. The daughter-in-law took one bed, the son the other. They were soon fast asleep.
On Saturday morning Lonnie, the son, came down first for breakfast. He and his mother were having coffee in the kitchen when Sally arrived. She looked rather pale and haggard. After Mrs. C. had poured her a cup of coffee, Sally looked at her mother-in-law.
“Mom, did you come up to the room for any reason during the night?”
“Of course not,” Mrs. C. replied.
“Did you get up during the night, Lonnie?” Sally turned to her husband. He assured her that he had not budged all night.
“Well,” the girl said, swallowing hard, “then I have something strange to tell you.”
She had been awakened in the middle of the night by a voice calling her name. Fully awake, she saw a lady standing beside her bed. She was not sure how the apparition disappeared, but eventually she went back to sleep, being very tired. Nothing further happened. What she had seen, she was sure of. That it was not a dream—that, too, she knew for a fact. But who was the stranger? The two young people left a couple of days later, and nothing further was said about the incident.
About three weeks after Christmas, Mrs. C. went to North Carolina to spend a week at her mother’s home. During a conversation, Mrs. C.’s mother mentioned that she had recently been going through some things in an old trunk in the attic. Among many other items, she had found a small photograph of her grandmother that she did not know she had. If Mrs. C. wanted it she would be happy to give it to her, especially as Grandmother L. had always shown a special interest in her family.
Mrs. C. thanked her mother and took the little photograph home with her to Pennsylvania. In her own home she propped it up on the dresser in her room, until she could find a proper frame for it. But after it had stood there for a couple of days, Mrs. C. thought that the old photograph might become soiled and decided to put it away in the top dresser drawer.
That night Mrs. C. was almost asleep when she became aware of a humming sound in the room. She opened her eyes and noticed that the air in her room was as thick as fog and she could scarcely see the opposite side of the room. In a moment, her grandmother walked in from the hall and stood beside her bed. Mrs. C., now fully awake, raised herself up on one elbow so that the apparition would know she was awake and observing her. Immediately the figure turned and put one hand on Mrs. C.’s dresser, on exactly the spot where the picture had been until two days ago. Then she turned her head and looked directly at Mrs. C. Somehow Mrs. C. understood what her grandmother wanted. She got out of bed and took the picture from the drawer and put it back on top of the dresser again. With that the apparition smiled and walked out of the room. The air cleared, and the humming stopped.
Mrs. C. had been “aware” of her grandmother’s presence in the house for some time but never in so definite a way. She knew that Grandmother L. still considered herself one of the family and took a keen interest in the living. That is why she had appeared to Mrs. C.’s daughter-in-law Sally, not to frighten her or even to ask for anything or because of any unfinished business, but merely to let her know she cared.
As a member of the household, Grandmother L. had naturally felt a bit hemmed in when her picture was relegated to a stuffy drawer. Especially as she had probably instigated its rediscovery to begin with! Until the picture turned up, Mrs. C. could not have been sure who the lady was. But now that she realized she had her own grandmother to protect her family, Mrs. C. did not mind at all. With help being scarce these days, and expensive and unreliable, it was rather comforting to know that an unpaid relative was around to look for the well-being of the family.
But the lady did not show up after the incident with the photograph. Could it be that, like Lohengrin, once she was recognized her usefulness to the C.s had come to an end?
Mrs. Betty S., a California housewife, has not the slightest interest in the psychic. When her father passed away in 1957 she mourned him, but since he left his wife well provided for, she did not worry unduly about her mother, even though they lived in different cities. Shortly after, she had a vision of her late father so real that she felt it could not have been a dream. Dream or vision, there stood her father wearing a white shirt and blue pants. He looked radiant and alive.
“Is mother all right?” he asked.
Mrs. S. assured her father everything was just fine. The apparition went away. But a few days later Mrs. S.’s mother was on the telephone. She was in great distress. Someone had been in her bank deposit box, and two valuable deeds had disappeared without a trace! In addition, money and bonds had also been taken, making her position anything but financially secure.
All at once Mrs. S. realized why her late father had been concerned. Evidently he knew or sensed something she had not yet become aware of.
Her father never reappeared to her. But the missing two deeds mysteriously returned to the deposit box about three months later. To this day this is a puzzle Mrs. S. has not been able to solve. But it was comforting to know that her late father had continued to care for her mother.
It is well known that often grandparents get very attached to the offspring of their children. When death separates a grandparent from the third generation, a desire to look in on them can be very strong. Consider the case of Mrs. Carol S. of Massachusetts.
In 1963 her first son was born. On one of the first nights after her return from the hospital, she awoke in the night to see a misty light near the ceiling of her room. It hovered between the baby’s bassinet and the foot of the bed. A moment later the light took the form of her late grandfather’s face and continued to glow. At the same time, Mrs. S. had the impression her grandfather had come to see his first great-grandchild.
She herself had been a first grandchild, and her mother had been the grandfather’s firstborn; the interest would have been understandable. For a moment the face remained, then it drifted into a fog and soon disappeared altogether.
In 1969, Mrs. S.’s other grandfather—on her father’s side of the family—also passed away. A little later her grandmother gave his bed to Mrs. S. The first night her six-year-old son slept in it, he reported a strange “dream.”
His great-grandfather had come to him and told him he lived in heaven and was happy and could look down and see him. This “dream” was strange because the boy had no knowledge that the bed he slept in had any connection with the great-grandfather.
Mrs. Joseph B., a housewife living in a medium-sized eastern city, a member of the Girl Scout council, a Sunday school teacher, and a busy, average person with a good, healthy mind, has no time for fantasies or daydreaming. Of Pennsylvania Dutch background, she is married to a steel-worker of Italian antecedents. Her hobbies are bowling and reading, not psychic research.
She and her husband and son shared a house, while her mother lived acr
oss town by herself. But every ten days or so her mother would visit them. The mother was familiar with the house and would always let herself in by the front door. These visits became a normal routine, and the years went by peacefully until the mother died. She was not forgotten, but neither did the B. family go into deep mourning. Her death was simply accepted as a natural occurrence, and life went on.
One year after her passing, Mr. and Mrs. B. were getting ready for bed upstairs in their house. Their son was fast asleep in his room. The time was 1 A.M. Mr. B. was in the bathroom, and Mrs. B. had just gotten into bed, looking forward to a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow was Saturday, and they could sleep longer.
At this moment she heard the downstairs front door of the house open. Her husband, who had evidently heard it also, came to the bathroom door and said: “I thought I heard someone come in.”
“So did I,” replied Mrs. B., and she called downstairs: “Who’s down there?”
Her mother’s voice came back. “It’s only me; don’t come down—I’m not staying!” Then they heard her familiar steps resounding through the house as she walked about and finally left by the back door.
As if it were the most ordinary thing in the world for her mother to visit them at 1 A.M., the husband returned to the bathroom, and Mrs. B. went back to bed. The power of the routine they had grown accustomed to over the years had left them immune to Mother’s visits as being anything but routine. They were both tired and fell asleep soon afterward. In the morning, Mr. B. looked at the doors, both the front and the rear doors. They were locked from the inside, just as he had left them the previous night before retiring! As Mrs. B. came down for breakfast he silently pointed at the door. It was then that it hit them with sudden impact that the mother had been dead for just a year.