January 10, 2010
The web doesn't seem to have enough information on the experiences of old people seeing ghosts. I had spent some time scouring the web, and came up with very little. I'd like to know more about this phenomenon. Why does it happen? How often does it happen? To whom does it happen more often?
My girlfriend's father, A., is very old. Lately he's been seeing strange things such as phantom children and loved ones who have been long dead. Sometimes these dreams or, perhaps, visions had seemed so real to him that he asked if we had seen them too. We told him that he was merely confusing dreams with reality while in the process of waking up. It was a practical, no-nonsense explanation and, being a practical guy himself, A. Accepted it.
I wouldn't have believed that something uncanny was actually taking place if I hadn't had some kind of verification, and I may have gotten it last weekend.
Since the death of his wife three and a half years ago, we often stay at A's house on weekends. We sleep on a foldout couch in the den. But on this day I had just painted the basement floor, and the odor wafting into the den was so strong we were forced to move to one of the corner bedrooms upstairs - at the opposite end of the hall from A's bedroom.
Sometime during the middle of the night, we were startled awake by a knocking on the door, followed by A. Entering the room appearing confused and shaken. "Ma?" he said. "What's wrong?" He sounded like a scared child. I threw the blanket off me, got up, and went to him.
I put my hand on his shoulder and said that everything was fine. "You were dreaming," I said.
"No!" he shouted. "I saw my mother. She was standing by my bed!"
A. Hadn't known that his daughter and I relocated to the upstairs bedroom. By that time, he had been asleep for a couple of hours. When he asked why we were in the bedroom instead of the den, I told him about the paint fumes and that it was keeping us from sleeping. Once again, I reassured him that everything was okay.
The following morning, I asked him what his mother said. He told me she said something was wrong. She didn't say what - only that something was wrong.
What I find interesting is that, according to A., he never had a dream or supposed visitation with a message as urgent as this before, and it happened to coincide with the only time we ever slept in either corner bedroom. What's more, the room my girlfriend and I had decided to sleep in is, in fact, the same room that, decades ago, A's mother used to stay in whenever she visited for a few days. She had been very fond of it.
It is also from this room that A. Said for months he's been hearing her calling him. Even with his door closed, hearing aids removed, and across thirty feet of dark hallway, he hears her.
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