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| Death doesn't sever the connection between loved ones, say people who've experienced so-called crisis apparitions. |
STORY
HIGHLIGHTS
- Some people claim that loved ones have contacted them after death
- Paranormal investigators call these events "crisis apparitions" and say they take many forms
- Some witnesses say apparitions appear lifelike, and that the images are reassuring
- Woman who encountered apparition: "He needed to say goodbye"
(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.
Scientific
research on crisis apparitions is scant, but theories abound.
One theory:
A person in crisis -- someone who is critically ill or dying -- telepathically
transmits an image of themselves to someone they have a close relationship
with, but they're usually unaware they're sending a message.
Others
suggest crisis apparitions are guardian angels sent to comfort the grieving.
Another theory says it's all a trick of the brain -- that people in mourning
unconsciously produce apparitions to console themselves after losing a loved
one.
A
telepathic link between loved ones
Whatever
the source for these apparitions, they often leave people shaken.
Nor are
apparitions limited to visions. The spirit of a dead person can communicate
with a loved one through something as subtle as the sudden whiff of a favorite
perfume, Volk says.
"Sometimes
you just sense the presence of someone close to you, and it seemingly comes out
of nowhere," Volk said. "And afterward, you find out that person was
in some kind of crisis at the time of the vision."
Many people
who don't even believe in ghosts still experience a mini-version of a
crisis-apparition encounter, paranormal investigators say.
Did you
ever hear a story of a mother who somehow knows before anyone told her that
something awful has happened to her child? Have you ever met a set of twins who
seem to be able to read each other's minds?
People who
are extremely close develop a virtual telepathic link that exists in, and
beyond, this world, said Jeff Belanger, a journalist who collected ghost
stories for his book, "Our Haunted Lives: True Life Ghost
Encounters."
"People
have these experiences all the time," Belanger said. "There's an
interconnectedness between people. Do you know how you're close to someone, and
you just know they're sick or something is wrong?"
An eerie
phone call at night
Simma
Lieberman said she's experienced that ominous feeling and has never forgotten
it -- though it took place more than 40 years ago.
Today,
Lieberman is a workplace diversity consultant based in Albany, California. In
the late 1960s though, she was a young woman in love.
Her
boyfriend, Johnny, was a mellow hippie "who loved everybody," a guy
so nice that friends called him a pushover, she said. She loved Johnny, and
they purchased an apartment together and decided to marry.
Then one
night, while Lieberman was at her mother's home in the Bronx, the phone rang
and she answered. Johnny was on the line, sounding rushed and far away. Static
crackled.
"I
just want you to know that I love you, and I'll never be mean to anybody
again," he said.
There was
more static, and then the line went dead. Lieberman was left with just a dial
tone.
 |
| Nina De Santo says one of her friends stopped by her salon to thank her -- a day after his death. |
She tried
to call him back to no avail. When she awoke the next morning, an unsettled
feeling came over her. She said it's hard to put into words, but she could no
longer feel Johnny's presence.
Then she
found out why.
"Several
hours later, I got a call from his mother that he had been murdered the night
before," she said.
Johnny was
shot in the head as he sat in a car that night. Lieberman thinks Johnny somehow
contacted her after his death -- a crisis apparition reaching out not through a
vision or a whiff of perfume, but across telephone lines.
She's
sorted through the alternatives over the years. Could he have called before or
during his murder? Lieberman doesn't think so.
This was
the era before cell phones. She said the murderer wasn't likely to let him use
a pay phone, and he couldn't have called after he was shot because he died
instantly.
Only years
later, when she read an article about other static-filled calls people claimed
to have received from beyond the grave, did it make sense, she said.
Johnny was
calling to say goodbye.
"The
whole thing was so bizarre," she said. "I could never understand
it."
He had a
'whitish glow'
Josh
Harris' experience baffled him as well. It involved his grandfather, Raymond
Harris.
Josh was
Raymond's first grandchild. They spent countless hours together fishing and
doing yardwork in their hometown of Hackleburg, Alabama. You saw one, you saw
the other.
Those days
came to an end in 1997 when Raymond Harris was diagnosed with lung cancer. The
doctors gave him weeks to live. Josh, 12 at the time, visited his grandfather's
house one night to keep vigil as his "pa-pa" weakened, but his family
ordered him to return home, about two miles away.
Josh said
he was asleep on the couch in his home around 2 a.m. when he snapped awake. He
looked up. His grandfather was standing over him.
"At
first, it kind of took me by surprise," said Harris, a maintenance worker
with a gravelly Southern accent. "I wondered why he was standing in the
hallway and not in his house with everyone else."
His
grandfather then spoke, Harris said.
"He
just looked at me, smiled and said, 'Everything will be OK.' "
His
grandfather then turned around and started walking toward the kitchen. Harris
rose to follow but spun around when the phone rang. An aunt who was in another
room answered.
"When
I turned back around to look, he was gone," Harris said.
As if on
cue, his aunt came out of the room crying, "Josh, your pa-pa is
gone."
"No,
he was just here," Harris told his aunt, insisting that his grandfather
had just stopped by to say everything was OK. He said it took him a day to
accept that his grandfather had died.
"Honestly,
before that, I never believed in the paranormal," he said. "I thought
it was all fake and made up. But I just woke up and I saw him. It couldn't be
my mind playing a trick. He looked solid."
Fourteen
years after his grandfather's death, there's another detail from that night
that's still lodged in Harris' memory.
As he
watched his grandfather walk to the kitchen, he said he noticed something
unusual.
"It
looked like there was a whitish glow around him."
'Can you
come out and play?'
Childhood
is supposed to be a time of innocence, a time when thoughts of death are far
away. But crisis apparition stories aren't confined to adults and teens.
Donna
Stewart was 6 years old and growing up in Coos Bay, Oregon. One of her best
friends was Danny. One day, Danny had to go to the hospital to have his tonsils
removed. Stewart played with him on the morning of the surgery before saying
goodbye.
She said
she was in her bedroom the next day when she looked up and saw Danny standing
there. He wanted to know if she wanted to go out and play.
Stewart
trotted to her mother's bedroom to ask her if she could play with Danny. Her
mother froze.
"She
went white," Stewart said. "She told me that wasn't possible."
Her mother
broke the news. Danny had an allergic reaction during surgery and died, Stewart
said.
"When
I went back to my room, he was gone," she said.
Stewart,
now an Oregon homemaker and a member of PSI of Oregon, a paranormal
investigative team, said the encounter changed the way she looked at death.
"These
experiences have made me believe that those we love are really not that far
away at all and know when we are not doing as well as we could," she said.
"Just as they did in life, they offer comfort during crisis.''
 |
| Josh Harris says his grandfather, Raymond, pictured with his wife, Barbara, appeared to him in an apparition. |
Still,
Stewart often replays the encounter in her mind. She asks the same questions
others who've had such encounters ask: Did my mind play tricks on me? Could he
have been alive? Did it all really happen after he died?
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 PennsylvaniaParanormal 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.
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