Ghostly Phone Calls?

There are some questions I repeatedly hear when people talk to me about ghost hunting. “Do ghosts follow you home?” “Can ghosts have sex with you?” and “I have this friend who got a call from her dad after he died. Is that possible?”

Here’s my own strange experience. My sister, Tina, died in 2005. When she passed on, she and I had just been talking about my ghost hunting and desire to reach our family members we’d lost. She said she’d be joining them at Aspen Grove some day when she passed on (she didn’t know she would die a month later).

When she passed quite suddenly, I remember settling down from the sobbing long enough to say, “Tina, please give me a sign. You know me. Give me one sign you know I’ll get.” At the time, I was sitting on my bed and the shade on the lamp beside me swung fully to its extension one direction then the other. I tested the shade and it was so stiff I had to push it against resistance to make it move. Then, once it was in one direction, it stayed there until I pushed it the other way. At the time, I told her it was a lame sign and was not at all obviously her communicating to me.

I went back to work and was sitting at my computer where I always had e-mailed Tina several times a day. Sometimes, the most mundane things, “I’m making tacos tonight,” “Alex just got an A on his final in geometry,” “It’s finally raining!” I felt like a limb was missing. I wanted to write her every time something happened. I’d open my hotmail account and stare at the screen. I realized then that it said in the corner whose birthday was coming up. It listed “Tina January 1st" as the only birthday and it was not even the right birthday. Her name was there in big blue letters, taunting me. I thought about removing her address from my contacts, but that would make her completely gone for me. I left her on there for years, learning to ignore the sign that showed her wrong birthday.

Several days ago, while cleaning up files and deleting things I'd kept too long, I finally went in and removed her from the list of contacts.

I went on the next day and she was still listed as a birthday on the fictitious January first. In fact, her email was still there along with a pop up message box with “Send Tina a quick message.” I shook my head. I’m too logical to believe my sister was putting herself back into my contact list over and over again and begging for a message. I removed her address again. Still, the next day she popped up. To test it, I removed someone else from my list. That person remained off the list. Tina, however, continued to pop up with the request to message her.

I couldn’t resist. I went into the box that said “send Tina a message” and wrote “Are you there?”

Are you getting shivers now?

Well, the shivers aren’t necessary--yet.

I got a message back from her husband who couldn’t get rid of her email address and used it himself now. He hadn’t communicated since her death. She was the one who did all the letter writing and communications for the family and he wasn’t the writing type. He updated me on my nephews and then told me, “Did you write because it’s the anniversary of her death? I can’t believe it’s been four years today.”

I was shocked. She had died so suddenly during the holiday time that I didn’t actually mark the date in my mind. I was so confused, I could barely think straight. I just knew it was between Thanksgiving and Christmas some time, unsure if it was November or December.

Sounds kind of coincidental, until you consider this: When I got his return message, I wrote him back and then proceeded to remove her again from the contact list. This time, she remained gone.

The manipulation of electronics wouldn’t be how a spirit would communicate with you. It would be done on a psychic level. The feel of a warm hand on your shoulder when you’re having a very bad day, their favorite song on the radio when you drive past their neighborhood, perhaps even the introduction of someone who will help fill their role in your life and serendipitously find that person also loves oil paintings and playing chess just like your loved one.

When you love someone, you really do become a part of them. You become spiritually intertwined. If you’ve lost someone important you probably remember driving around on the road and seeing people rushing to jobs and daily routines and you feel strangely removed and other-dimensional as if time stood still for you. That strange disconnect is important to taking on a big shock and a new reality, but another part of that could very well be that a fraction of your spirit intertwined with theirs in the spirit world. The more time away from the person, the more break between your spirits, but it’s never completely broken. It’s that connection that makes it possible for psychic connections, a kind of missing limb sensation, as it were. It also explains why it's usually in the first days or week of a person's passing that you are "visited" by them--the connections psychically are still very powerful.

Is there a way to enhance the communication with the other side without involving a ouija board or séance? Yes! As bizarre as it may seem, depending on what I’m facing in my life, I call upon a different missing relative. If I’m dealing with my career issues, I actually talk to my mother. I don’t know why. She wasn’t a big career woman, but she had strong aspirations for me and seemed to intuitively know which way I should go with my talents. If I have issues with major decisions, I talk to my father. My sister Tina is purely for motherhood issues. My brother, Scott, is for courage when I’m afraid to do something. With dozens more relatives and friends, I have plenty to pick from. They become sort of patron saints of different parts of my life.

Periodically, I sit down and speak aloud, catching up my parents on what’s happened since their passing or telling my sibling what’s up with their children. It’s an odd thing to do, but in a weird way I’m making it real to me and putting the need to communicate out there so I’m relieved. I also find that after catching them up on the news, I miraculously receive little signs and often times small resolutions or even big resolutions in the issues I was speaking to them about. I’m not a hocus-pocus kind of person; however, I am impressed with the results.

Will your loved one leave you a text message? Not likely. It’s more likely to go down in a strangely psychic manner. You’ll pick up a conversation with someone, feel immediately comfortable with him, ask his name and find out it’s the same one your loved one had. You’ll think about taking a shortcut through a parking lot to miss an intersection that’s bogged up and you’ll pass by a restaurant sign and realize it was the one she talked about all the time, a place you’ve never been and didn’t know where it was located, but today you happened to go through that part of town and cut through that lot and look up to see that sign…

You might ask, "but why couldn't you erase your sister from your hotmail unless she had a hand in it?" Truth be told, I went back and studied what I'd done in the process of removing her from the file and I hadn't verified taking her off. In my subconscious or perhaps my ties to her psychically, I had not confirmed removing her from the list...until I was ready to.

Yes, I do believe there is magic that occurs between the dead and the living and I believe it is recognized only by your soul and not your consciousness. Ask anyone who's lost someone how many times they dream of their deceased loved one? There is no better time, no better state of mind to make the connection.

If you want them to "call" you, they'll do so without a phone.