Mary and I visited my Dad and Step-Mom on Friday, and had a wonderful time, as we always do. They are both very young for their age (my Dad is 80 and my Step-Mom is in her 70′s, yet act much younger), and are such a joy to talk with. We always look forward to our visits as we can discuss just about anything with them, and always leave with a warm feeling in our hearts as they are so loving and welcoming.
When we arrived, we all hugged as we always do, and then settled in on the couch in the living room, my Dad sitting on the couch on the opposite wall, and my Step-Mom in her rocker. We talked about the normal things, work, family, friends, the political climate, the state of the world, and then the subject shifted to the paranormal. Usually I bring it up, but this time my Step-Mom broached the subject first as she was very excited to tell us about something that happened to her about two weeks earlier. She wanted our opinion as she wasn’t completely sure what she had seen.
According to my Step-Mom, she was awaken quite abruptly in the middle of the night to very loud dog barking. This is especially interesting as they no longer have a dog (their dog Jackie died a little over a year ago), and the barking was coming from within the house! Wondering what in the world was going on, my Step-mom sat up in bed, and looking towards her door she saw something that gave her quite a start. Standing in the doorway was her daughter’s dog that had gone missing at their vacation home in Lake Tahoe over a year ago. No one knew if the dog was alive or dead, but everyone had accepted that the poor thing had been eaten by coyotes as it had gotten out of the yard through a hole in the fence, and wasn’t seen since. To my Step-Mom’s surprise, here was this dog, standing as clear as you or I in her bedroom doorway; drooping ear, etc. She was so shocked at seeing this dog that she didn’t see the second figure standing next to it until almost too late, as it was turning to walk away. Looking up at the second figure, my Step-Mom knew who it was immediately; it was her sister that had died in the 80′s of breast cancer. She was seeing a double apparition; her daughter’s dog and her long lost sister. Thinking it was her sleeping pills causing her to hallucinate, she lay back down in bed and fell back to sleep. The next day, however, she started to question the influence of the sleeping pills and decided to tell us about the incident the next time we came for a visit.
The thing she didn’t think to combine with the visitation was the strange things that had been happening around the house. The most intriguing was finding her throw blanket that sits on the edge of their bed, folded up and sitting on a chair in the guest bedroom. Perhaps her sister was doing these things to let her know she was around, trying to help with my Dad, etc.
