Noone outside of a psych ward claims to have seen or heard God. OTOH lots of people down thru history claim to have seen and heard ghosts and continue to do so. That's not just your one black swan showing up, but thousands of them reported over and over again all over the world by totally credible normal people who have no reason to be lying. Face it, they are the real deal. We share our reality with ethereal entities that occasionally make their presence known to us for whatever reasons. You now have the choice to deny again the compelling evidence in front of you or simply accept it and embrace the mystery of it. It's just one more surprising facet of our amazing and fascinating universe.
Here's an excerpt of a thread OP I posted in Sci Forums about "crisis apparitions" a few months ago. These are lucid and unexpected visitations by friends and loved ones who have just died, and it is a well known phenomenon that occurs all over the world. This is a brief excerpt of a CNN story on the phenomenon. The whole article contains several other fascinating personal accounts of crisis apparitions. Overall it is a moving and comforting glimpse of the reality of survival after death. I would think someone of your faith would welcome such evidence. But then again you're not a really soulful person are you?
CNN —
"Nina De Santo was about to close her New Jersey hair salon one winter’s night when she saw him standing outside the shop’s glass front door.
It was Michael. He was a soft-spoken customer who’d been going through a brutal patch in his life. His wife had divorced him after having an affair with his stepbrother, and he had lost custody of his boy and girl in the ensuing battle.
He was emotionally shattered, but De Santo had tried to help. She’d listened to his problems, given him pep talks, taken him out for drinks.
When De Santo opened the door that Saturday night, Michael was smiling.
“Nina, I can’t stay long,” he said, pausing in the doorway. “I just wanted to stop by and say thank you for everything.”
They chatted a bit more before Michael left and De Santo went home. On Sunday she received a strange call from a salon employee. Michael’s body had been found the previous morning – at least nine hours before she talked to him at her shop. He had committed suicide.
If Michael was dead, who, or what, did she talk to that night?
“It was very bizarre,” she said of the 2001 encounter. “I went through a period of disbelief. How can you tell someone that you saw this man, solid as ever, walk in and talk to you, but he’s dead?”
Today, De Santo has a name for what happened that night: “crisis apparition.” She stumbled onto the term while reading about paranormal activities after the incident. According to paranormal investigators, a crisis apparition is the spirit of a recently deceased person who visits someone they had a close emotional connection with, usually to say goodbye.
Reports of these eerie encounters are materializing in online discussion groups, books such as “Messages” – which features stories of people making contact with loved ones lost on September 11 – and local ghost hunting groups that have sprung up across the country amid a surge of interest in the paranormal.
Although such encounters are chilling, they can also be comforting, witnesses and paranormal investigators say. These encounters suggest the bond that exists between loved ones is not erased by death.
“We don’t know what to do with these stories. Some people say that they are proof that there’s life after death,” said Steve Volk, author of “Fringe-ology,” a book on paranormal experiences such as telepathy, psychics and house hauntings....."
"De Santo, the former New Jersey hair salon owner, has taken the same self-inventory. The experience affected her so much she later joined the Eastern Pennsylvania Paranormal Society, which investigates the paranormal.
She said she checked with Michael’s relatives and poured through a coroner’s report to confirm the time of his death, which was put at Friday night – almost 24 hours before she saw him at her salon on Saturday night.
She said Michael’s body had been discovered by his cousin around 11 Saturday morning. Michael was slumped over his kitchen table, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot.
De Santo was baffled at first, but now she has a theory.
Michael started off as a customer, but she became his confidant. Once, after one of her pep talks, Michael told her, “You make me feel as if I can conquer the world.”
Maybe Michael had to settle affairs in this world before he could move on to the next, De Santo said.
“A lot of times when a person dies tragically, there’s a certain amount of guilt or turmoil,” she said. “I don’t think they leave this Earth. They stay here. I think he kind of felt he had unfinished business. He needed to say goodbye.”
And so he did, she said. This is how she described their last conversation:
As they chatted face to face in the doorway of her shop, De Santo said they never touched, never even shook hands. But she didn’t remember anything unusual about him – no disembodied voice, no translucent body, no “I see dead people” vibe as in the movie “The Sixth Sense.”
“I’m in a really good place now,” she recalled him saying.
There were, however, two odd details she noticed at the time but couldn’t put together until later, she said.
When she first opened the door to greet Michael, she said she felt an unsettling chill. Then she noticed his face – it was grayish and pale.
And when she held the door open for him, he refused to come in. He just chatted before finally saying, “Thanks again, Nina.”
Michael then smiled at her, turned and walked away into the winter’s night."---
https://www.cnn.com/2011/09/23/living/cr...index.html
May 12, 2024 11:25 PM
(This post was last modified: May 12, 2024 11:26 PM by Leigha.)
