The longer I live, the harder it becomes to ignore the dozens of times over they years when the thought of a friend or family member pesters me until I call them. When they answer the phone, I sometimes just say, “You were on my mind, and I thought I’d better find out what’s going on.” I can think of very few times when my “something is going on” feeling was wrong. I suspect some will dismiss this as coincidence, but I’ve come to believe in ESP…or at least in something like ESP.
When I was in High School, our American Problems teacher Mister Chamberlain brought up the subject of ESP. I don’t know why he did that. But the class jumped in with all sorts of opinions from ESP being nonsense to it is the work of the devil. Just for fun, I wrote the names of five of my classmates on a scrap of paper with a list of times I would “mentally” wake them up during the coming night. Then I handed the list to Mister Chamberlain.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll wake up five of you sometime tonight. I’ll ‘think’ you awake. Your job is to write the time down. Then we’ll see if it matches what I’ve given Mister Chamberlain.” (In truth I wasn’t very serious about the “experiment.” I was just having some fun with the notion of ESP.)
I might have been cheating some because I knew the bedrooms of the classmates I had chosen so I could visualize where they were sleeping. (And, no, none of them were girls. We weren’t allowed in a girl’s room in those days.) Anyway, I woke at 1:00 a.m. and visualized Bob’s bedroom and told him to wake up. I concentrated until I figured I had about used up my ESP power for a while. And I repeated the exercise for the remaining four people at different times during the night.
The next day, four of the five classmates turned in their “woke up” times to Mister Chamberlain. The fifth didn’t wake up during the night. But I nailed the times almost exactly as reported by the four who did wake up. And I think I scared all of us into moving on to other more comfortable topics. We did not repeat the experiment.
Do I believe in ghosts? I’ll give that a strong maybe, although I’ve never seen a ghost, but I have “felt” the presence of people I was close to after they had died. Other family members have seen ghosts…or at least they tell me they have.
Do I believe in Angels? Absolutely. Once I had this conversation…well, it was more like a butt chewing than a conversation…with an Angel. I highly recommend you not try to bargain with God.
Do I believe there is magic in this old world? Absolutely. It’s all around us. How else can you explain thousands of varieties of flowers, the pattern of butterfly wings, life in a dry seed?
Do I believe in ESP? Yep, but do I think I can control it? Not really, but I almost always follow up on my “something is going on” feelings.
I wonder how many other people have had the same experience? More than those who admit it, I’m willing to bet.
Rod
p.s. I don’t know if this counts as seeing a ghost, but it just occurred to me it might. I was in the little waiting area next to the birthing unit at Salem Memorial Hospital waiting for the birth of my first child. I was alone until the elevator door opened and a man who looked just like my dead grandfather Truman Collins got off.
He came in, sat one chair over from me, unfolded a newspaper and read while never saying a word. When the doctor came out to tell me I was the proud father of a healthy baby girl, the silver haired old man folded his newspaper, walked to the elevator button, got on the elevator when the door opened and left. I was so dumbfounded by his appearance…and his disappearance…to mention the event for about ten years. Spooked me, it did. But was it a ghost? I’ll never know for certain.