0230 - Surviving Death Ghost Apparitions
Jeff also experienced something similar to an apparition, but perhaps more beautiful. Three or four months after Gabriel died, he was in his son’s room in deep mourning. He was sitting on Gabe’s bed with all the lights off and it was totally dark. At the foot of the bed and to his right, he saw a golden, oval ball of light about twelve inches wide by eighteen inches high, suspended in the air six or seven feet away. It had soft edges and a distinct shape. He tried to determine what it could be. Moonlight reflecting off a car window, or maybe a streetlight? No…if that were the case, the light would be on the wall or ceiling, not suspended in one place in midair. He thought, well, maybe there is some particulate matter there; but light would still go through the matter. No, this was a self-contained, suspended ball of light; there was no unusual particulate matter. Jeff watched it for over a minute, and intuitively he felt he might be seeing Gabriel so he concentrated on the light intently. Then it slowly faded away. He told Janet later, “I think I just saw Gabriel…”
Several months later, Jeff went to see the well-known mental medium George Anderson. Anderson told him in the middle of the session, “You’ve seen him. You saw him as a light in a darkened room. You didn’t know if it was him, but he’s telling me to tell you that it was.” Jeff was astounded. He gained the confidence to meditate and ask Gabriel why he showed himself like that rather than as an apparition, which would be something recognizable. Gabe answered that he came like that in order to teach an important lesson. “Gabriel explained that the light I saw was the very same light that exists in all human souls,” Jeff said. “Everyone has, everyone is, that same golden light.”
Even so, on the question of the survival of consciousness after death, Jeffrey Kane recognizes that the most anyone can actually say is “I don’t know.” There is no certitude about it, and there never will be. “We will never have proof because the knowledge that life after life is possible emanates from an intuitive level of experience. If you think that even proof within a high degree of probability is ever going to satisfy you, it won’t. But there are sufficient questions here so that you can’t just dismiss this. I’m not saying life after life is the only answer, although I do believe it is correct, but I’m saying that no materialist framework can accommodate it.”
Ultimately, experiences like this teach us something; they are transcendent. If one embraces them, their power and intimate quality of connection are very hard to convey in words. Those with similar experiences understand. Jeff’s final thought to the question of survival was “I can’t see a reason not to believe.”
Finally, the most disarming event of all occurred over a year later, in August of 2015. I had not experienced any ADCs for about a year and was no longer focused on them at all. Once again I was staying at our family’s summer house, where we had spent every summer while growing up. My brother had always loved this special place as his lifetime home.
We had a full house that summer night—my father and stepmother, my other brother and his wife, and my grown son were all staying there as well—and my sister had been with us for dinner. It was unusual for the whole family to be together like this. The full moon in a clear dark sky made a path of light on the ocean water as magical as it was when we were children. When I went to bed, the night was still, with no nearby neighbors or lights, or any human sounds. I was sleeping in Garry’s former room, where his bed was a few feet from the wall. There was a window at the foot of the bed, and a second, open window was across the room. When I went to sleep at around midnight (I had had nothing to drink or smoke), the moonlight was coming in the open windows, making it relatively easy to see inside the room.
I had just dropped off to sleep when, suddenly, I was woken by something in the room. In a split second, I was totally and completely awake. This was not normal; usually there is a transition between sleep and waking up, but this was instantaneous. I saw a dark figure standing nearby, beside the window toward the end of the bed. I saw it move very slightly from the window toward me in the moment I woke up. I blurted out, with alarm and without any forethought, “Hey, somebody’s here!!” My heart was beating fast and I was scared, like when your breath is taken away and you’re frozen in shock. This figure was right next to my bed! I thought for a second that maybe it was my other brother snooping around the room for some reason, but I could hear him snoring through the wall. The thought that this could be an intruder never crossed my mind; it was so safe there that we have never locked the doors at night.
I could see the shape of a head, and the body was like a dark cloak—no arms or legs, just a cloaked form. I stared, and the head was slightly lighter in tone than the darker, rounded body underneath. I couldn’t see any features of the face but I felt it to be a male. The lower part was blocked by the bed, in a dark space. The figure seemed full-size, and I saw clearly in the moonlight that it blocked out the picture on the wall behind it. It was so close, I could have sat up and touched it.
But I lay there without moving, fixated on it. Somehow I knew it wasn’t going to hurt me. Then it registered that this was not a normal person. My fear increased. As I felt the fear, the form began to slowly dissolve. I felt intuitively that it was reacting to my fear—as if to say, “Okay, you don’t like this, I’ll go…” and I watched it dissolve like a fog slowly melting in the sun. That was unbelievable—watching what appeared to be a solid figure disintegrate before my eyes into shimmering little particles, and then nothingness, leaving empty space where it had stood moments earlier. That was when I knew: this really, actually, and without question was something otherworldly, ghostly, inexplicable, an apparition that I had witnessed right there next to me. As it evaporated before my eyes, I could only think, Oh my God, it’s for real. I honestly did not want that to be the case in that moment.
Shaken with disbelief, I lay immobile for a long time with my heart pounding, staring at the space in the moonlight where it had been. I thought right away that this must have been my brother. It was about forty-five minutes before I managed to move and get myself up to turn on a light. I kept it on all night and barely slept. Anxious and exhausted, I couldn’t stop thinking about this throughout the next day, but I didn’t tell anyone in the family about it—what would they think? It would only make them uncomfortable. Instead, desperate to talk to someone, I emailed a friend in the UK who was experienced with such things, and that helped.
I thought about all the times I had asked Garry to show himself to me. But this just seemed over the top; something for which I was entirely unprepared. If this was him, maybe he felt drawn to make contact at that moment because all the family were present in the place he loved most, and I was sleeping in his room. It seemed that the full moon created perfect conditions, because although it was dark in the room, it was light enough that I could see in the moonlight streaming through the window next to the bed. But I was so disarmed that I did not experience it as something positive.
Of course I have no way of knowing who or what this apparition was, and I could never prove to anyone that this occurred. I was wide awake and I was not hallucinating, of this I am absolutely certain. The form seemed completely foreign and external to me, and really frightened me. This presence woke me up, suddenly and instantaneously. By what mechanism? And how could a form dense enough to block out the space behind it disintegrate in the moonlight as I watched? If I had welcomed it and tried to communicate, what would have happened, and how long would it have stayed? Could I have captured it on my cellphone camera if I’d thought of it? In retrospect, I wish I had it to do over again, and I regret that I was too unnerved to think along these lines.
At that time I had been grappling with the question of whether my previous ADCs could have been self-generated by my unconscious mind—by “motivated psi,” as defined by Stephen Braude and others. I found this hard to come to terms with; the inner conflict it generated was on my mind during that summer. I felt as if Garry were saying, “Okay, I’ve tried hard and you’re still not convinced. Let me really how you something and you will never doubt again!” It was so totally unbelievable that in the moment it seemed clearly to be a manifestation of another reality, more than anything that came before. This time, I could not possibly conceive of it being a creation of my own psi, even though my detached rational mind knew that this is what some experts would suggest. This was an adult-size form, which moved and then dissolved from shiny particles into empty space. And if indeed it was my brother, then some aspect of him survived death.
Sir William Barrett (experimental physicist and parapsychologist, 1844–1925) reported on an experience investigated by Henry Sidgwick (economist and philosopher, and first president of the SPR) in 1892. Sometimes “the phantasm is not only seen but also apparently heard to speak; sometimes it may announce its presence by audible signals,” Barrett wrote. This particular case involved “rapping” made by an apparition seen by Rev. Matthew Frost of Bowers Gifford, Essex, who made the following statement:
The first Thursday in April 1881, while sitting at tea with my back to the window and talking with my wife in the usual way, I plainly heard a rap at the window, and looking round at the window I said to my wife, “Why, there’s my grandmother,” and went to the door, but could not see anyone; still feeling sure it was my grandmother, and knowing, though she was eighty-three years of age, that she was very active and fond of a joke, I went round the house, but could not see anyone.
My wife did not hear it. On the following Saturday, I had news my grandmother died in Yorkshire about half-an-hour before the time I heard the rapping. The last time I saw her alive I promised, if well, I would attend her funeral; that was some two years before. I was in good health and had no trouble, age twenty-six years. I did not know that my grandmother was ill.
Sidgwick learned that when Frost last saw his grandmother two years earlier, she had promised to appear to him at her death. The conditions were decidedly nonspooky: he saw her in full daylight and even, for a moment, thought it was his grandmother physically present. “Had there been a real person Mrs. Frost would both have seen and heard her; nor could a living person have got away in that time,” Barrett states. The house stood in a garden a good way back from the road, and Mr. Frost immediately went out to see if his grandmother was really there. Actual news of her time of death came to Frost by letter two days later.
In 1985, Donna McCormick, a knowledgeable and very careful researcher whom I worked with for a few years, provided me with an example of an interesting, ongoing apparition case. In the following interview, Donna mentions three psychics, “Alex, Ingrid, and Ann.” One is Alex Tanous, a well-known, gifted psychic with many academic degrees, who taught theology at Manhattan College and St. John’s University in New York City.
It began shortly after her [the woman of the couple] grandfather died. She was extremely close to him. They lived on the second floor of a two-family house. They would hear footsteps coming up the stairs, the lock being turned, the door opening, the door closing, the footsteps coming in, then ending up at the children’s bedroom, the nursery, or going straight to their room. They’d go out and look. They wouldn’t see anybody, they wouldn’t hear the footsteps anymore. This was a repeated pattern.
They’d see apparitions of this individual. Some of them were clear sightings, very concrete seeming, to the point where people who were visiting would ask, “Who’s that in the house?” Other times, just vague shadows would be seen.
They determined on their own that it was her grandfather. We brought Alex in, and Ingrid, and Ann, and they all gave descriptions of the grandfather. She had a picture of him, so we put that among several others for the psychics to choose from, and each one picked the grandfather’s. They all gave good descriptions of what he was like in life, interactions that occurred, where the phenomena occurred, really an excellent case of everything being very clear-cut.
Also, the family moved recently, and the phenomena are still continuing at their new location, which suggests that it’s person-related rather than house-related. The psychics had given the explanation that the grandfather was watching over them. He’s not “earthbound,” as some people like to characterize these things. He knows he’s dead and is just keeping an eye on the family.
The family really doesn’t mind at all. And it’s not like they’re clinging to this for any strange purpose. It’s just not frightening to them. In some ways it’s a little reassuring. They have had experiences that suggest that the children are being looked upon; blankets being pulled up over the children. The baby a few months old lying in the crib wouldn’t have a blanket on him, but then they’d find a blanket on him.
The grandfather had not lived with the family, and the activity was seemingly independent of the activity of the grandfather when he was alive. But one case in particular, early in my career, pushed me much more firmly into the survival camp.
During the early-to-mid-1980s, when I was on the Core Faculty of John F. Kennedy University’s Graduate Parapsychology Program (which ended in the late 1980s), I received a call from a woman named Pat in Livermore, a city east of Oakland, California. It was a bit atypical of the usual fear-filled “help us” calls; Pat was simply refreshingly curious.
Pat was an attorney and lived with her husband, Mark, and twelve-year-old son Chris. Her mother lived nearby. Only a short time before the call, she learned that her son had been having conversations with a “ghost” he identified as that of the woman who had been the previous owner of their home. She also learned that these almost daily conversations had been going on for well over a year.