Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

If I may, I must preface this account with the fact that for 34 years of my life, up to the night it happened, I had been expecting to see something one day. Although generally a hard line rationalist, I have always ‘felt’ something in particular places.

Even as a very young child I remember somehow knowing that I should not go into certain houses or rooms in other people’s houses. I would, and still do feel an intense cold sensation in places that I sometimes later find out were believed to be haunted.

Rarely do I feel anything other than the cold. However, I inevitably come away from such an experience knowing details about the cold chilled rooms or houses. When I say details, what I mean is I know without thinking about it, the reason the cold sensation is there. I cannot say I understand how or why this happens, it simply does. An example may help to explain. I can look at a photograph, a random snap of people, such as you might find stuck on someone’s desk or stuck to their mirror at home with blu tack, and know who is no longer alive in the photograph.

This has happened so often now that it ceases to amaze friends or family.

My mother put just such a photograph at the side of her bedroom mirror a few years ago. I recall needing to borrow some cotton tips so I went into Mum’s room and got them from the draw and looked up to see the photo. There were five people in it, but there were, at least to my eyes, dark marks, almost like damp moldy patches over the faces of three people in the photograph. I grabbed it and went and asked Mum, the following “What happened to these three people? I know they are no longer alive.”

Even though somewhat used to this, Mum did have a slightly fearful expression in her eyes. She explained that yes, the three people I pointed out were all work friends but each had died in some way.

I must explain, we are not talking about frail old people (well, one of them in the photo was rather old) but the younger man, and the woman, whom I somehow knew was from South America, had indeed passed away.

The lady with the dark mark over her face was my mother’s age, she was from Peru and had recently died from some sort of cancer.

These ‘mildew’ marks are not physically there, I see them, but only in a flickering sort of way. If I ‘try’ to see them I can’t. It will only work when I am not really thinking about it. The instant I try to get analytical about any of these sensations, they cease. So I switch that part of my brain off and ‘feel’ without thinking. I am in fact a rather over – educated man. Two degrees and a very analytical mind would, you would probably imagine, make it difficult to switch to mentally ‘switch off’. It is however not difficult at all. even since being a very young child, I have gone into states of numb oblivion and spoken and done things which I later do not recall.

I’m not talking about anything scary really, just a bit odd. I must say it has taken me now forty years to completely understand that not everyone sees things when their eyes are closed, or hears things when in almost total silence. I truly believed for a very long time that everyone feels these sensations.

I recall saying to people over the years things like “You know when you walk into some empty rooms and you can hear conversations that happened in there from years ago…” and “You know when you can feel and sometimes smell things that haven’t been in a place for a long time…”. Experience had taught me by about age twelve that I shouldn’t actually say these things because it actually really scares people.

I must say though, with some friends and my family, I am comfortable enough to just switch my brain off and talk. That is when I will say things like – “The old  Greek man who lived in that shed out the back is still in there, you know. He doesn’t know he’s dead yet. He’s very confused, I think he had Alzheimer’s syndrome. Well he isn’t angry or dangerous or anything, but he would prefer it if you didn’t store things up against the far wall, because that where he sleeps and if there are things there he can’t sleep.”

Well, that situation was one that my poor friend Glenn wished had never happened. He is so fundamentally scientific that anything which does not rationally make sense disturbs him. His girlfriend (now wife) was working at a real estate office and looked up information about the house they were now living in. Yes, it was owned by a Greek family (from whom, through and agent Glenn and Tara were now paying rent.

Tara asked a couple of the people living in the street about the house.

It turns out that only seven years before they moved in, the house had been lived in by an old Greek couple. The man had dementia and would wander around the house turning on electrical devices like the stove or oven and forget that he had done so. It became a fire and general safety hazard to allow him any real freedom.

It is just the Greek way, that you don’t put people into retirement homes or hospices. You keep them at home.

The old guy had been locked in the shed for years before he died. Obviously they fed him and he was looked after well. But he was in a state of terrible confusion when he died. Part of him just stayed there.
Enough preamble. The ghost I saw was not this old man.

It was in my bedroom door way four – five years ago. I was sleeping and woke up with the familiar cold feeling. Even before I opened my eyes, I could see through my closed eyelids a bright white light. I think, (although I can’t really know) that the light was what woke me.

I could smell a lovely sweet floral scent. It wasn’t of fresh flowers it was a perfume smell. I didn’t know what the smell was exactly until I smelled it a couple of months ago again and found out that it was Lily of the Valley.

Now, you must understand, I was not thinking, I wasn’t afraid, there just wasn’t a feeling of fear at all. If anything, I felt so incredibly comforted. I saw, as plain as day, a solid figure in my doorway. She was glowing with white light (the light I spoke of). She would have been in her mid to late seventies. A normal looking old woman with long grey hair done up in a bun on her head. She was wearing a pink and white floral dressing gown. Her hands were loosely clutched together and held in front of her. The scent of perfume grew much stronger as we looked at each other.

She was… what can I say? Beautiful, serene and incredibly gentle. She had shown up for some reason and simply filled me with peace.

We looked at each other for perhaps five minutes. I didn’t hear anything. She didn’t move or say anything. She just smiled with a wonderful, peaceful smile before she faded away. The light remained and slowly faded for the next three or more minutes.

I had imagined that I might be scared when I did finally see a ghost. I could not have been more wrong.

If anything, the experience has given me a very strong sense of faith in an after life. A state of peaceful surrender to the inevitable. I have no fear of death at all. In fact I often feel that half of me ‘lives’ in the other world and half in this.

I generally feel more comfortable with the other world than this one. I don’t really seem to belong here, but I don’t belong there yet either.

She came to me for no other reason than to assure me that everything was fine and death was only a physical, biological thing.

Now comes the part that I cannot explain in anything but the loosest terms, I knew that the old woman, although technically still somehow ‘alive’ was just a small part of her. The actual essence of her had been reborn in the form of a young girl in England.

In summary, I learned without any doubt that yes, there is an after life. Yes, we go into a state of peace (if that is the way we lived our lives) but we also reincarnate.

Perhaps I should conclude with the simple statement that this vision opened me up to Buddhism. Reincarnation is real. Have faith in a higher order. Relax and live your life fully. Don’t worry about death at all. It will happen and it will be fine.

The only thing we must do is to challenge ourselves, every day we are here on earth, to be better people. To overcome negative responses to life. Over come our anger, our fear and our pettiness. Be kind to people and animals. Love fully and deeply. Be vulnerable, be honest and be true. That is the simple recipe for happiness in this life and the next.

Thank you so much beautiful ‘Alice’. I didn’t mention that, the old woman’s name was Alice. I knew it as soon as I saw her. I knew also that ‘Alice doesn’t live here anymore’. She is now an eight year old girl in the South of England. All I know is this – the village she lives in with both parents and a younger brother, is called something like ‘Trentonville’ or very close to that. Her last name is hyphenated. The first part of it is ‘Chestener – ‘ Her first name beings with ‘M’ but isn’t a common name. The only other thing I know is one day I will meet her – we may not say it but we will both remember. The way I will know her is this – she will have a freckle on her right pinkie finger. Hands otherwise like porcelain. A little brown freckle with a faint outline of the upside down letter ‘A’.

I will be an old man when I meet her. Two weeks after meeting her I will die in a state of peace. I will remember it all and I will go in peace.

Thank you dearest Alice for making my life and my death mean something. I’m far from death now but I am already largely at peace.

Matthew. In Sydney 27th of September 2010.

P.S. Please, nobody try to find her. She has yet to grow up, marry and move to Australia after training as a nurse. She must be allowed to live her life.

Sent in by Matthew in Sydney Australia, Copyright 2010 TrueGhostTales.com