Signs From the Other Side
Though I was raised atheist and am still on the fence as to whether God actually exists in the sense of a sentient creator, I have always believed that spirit survives death and moves on to an unseen realm.
I wouldn’t call myself psychic, I guess you could say I’m an intuitive or empath – terms that paranormal investigators these days often use – I often know what someone is thinking or feeling without them having to say a word because I’m able to tune into their energy. I’m also something of an animal whisperer and have had some of the most unruly animals feel calm enough in my presence to fall asleep in my arms.
Friendship that survives death and life-saving intuition
When I was 19 my best friend died tragically in a car accident and after that my ‘sixth sense’ seemed to become stronger, or perhaps I became more open to it because I couldn’t let go of my friend. I dreamt of her a lot in the days after her passing and felt she had come to say goodbye, but I continued to dream of her for years after and still do. I feel her presence at times and I believe that she is one of my guardian spirits. Twice, I was very nearly hit by a truck when crossing a street and the driver wasn’t paying attention and it was as if a hand grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back in the nick of time.
After her passing I started having intuitive feelings and dreams that came true. Nothing dramatic, just strangely coincidental. I dreamt one night that one of my college lecturers had broken his leg. The next morning he walked into our lecture hall with his arm broken and in a cast. The most significant of these ‘coincidences’ was when I had a dream about a body being found under the floor of a house in District Six (an area in Cape Town). The next morning a man sat down on the seat opposite me on the train and opened his newspaper. On the page facing me was a story with the headline Body found under floorboards in District Six.
I had other things demanding my attention at the time so I didn’t give these odd coincidences much thought, and it wasn’t until I had moved to New Zealand that I experienced something I could not brush off as an odd coincidence.
At the time, I was living in a one-bedroom flat which was part of a three-flat situation and a young woman had moved into the flat behind me a few weeks earlier. She kept to herself and I had not yet met her.
One morning I was in the shower getting ready to go to work when a random thought popped into my head: how will we know she's dead if he kills her. It was so bizarre and weird. I had no idea why I would think such a thing or what could have prompted me to come up with such a random thought. I hadn’t been thinking about anything in particular, just going about my routine on autopilot, yet this thought had popped into my head, interrupting the usual fluff, almost as if someone had shouted it at me. I brushed it off, thinking I must have still been half asleep and partly dreaming, and carried on about my day as normal.
That night I was in bed asleep when I was woken by someone banging on my neighbour's door. I could hear it was a man and he sounded drunk. He kept shouting at her to let him in and when she refused, he walked round to her bedroom window (which was next to mine) and began banging on it. He kept hitting the window until it broke and he climbed in. They began shouting and arguing. The fighting intensified and I could hear banging as if he was throwing her against the wall. It was at this point that I got up and called the police because I realised she had no way of calling for help herself.
The police soon arrived and quickly removed him from the scene. It was obviously serious as she moved out the same day. I never found out more about the situation, but I feel if I hadn't called the police when I did, he may very well have killed her. And the truth is, if it hadn't been for the voice in my head that morning, I might not have called the police because I might have ignored the commotion preferring not to get involved.
It was my parents who instilled in me an interest in mysteries and the unexplained, so in around 2004 I bought us tickets to a live show of a local psychic as their Christmas present. I remember sitting through the show hoping she would call on me with a message from my best friend, but sadly she didn’t. At the conclusion of the show she instructed us to sit quietly, clear our minds and silently ask a passed-over loved one to send us a message in the form of a song title. She said spirit often find it easier to send messages in phrases, such as song titles, that we are already familiar with. I sat there expecting Everything I Do by Bryan Adams to pop into my head as that was a song I associated with my friend. Instead, I Swear by All-4-One came into my thoughts and even though I tried to focus on the other song, I Swear stayed put.
The next day I dug out an old cassette tape recording of the song (this was before Spotify) and as I listened to the words, I went cold and my hair stood on end. The song begins with (paraphrased so I don’t infringe on any copyright laws): I can see the questions on your mind, I know what’s weighing you down, you can be sure I’m always by your side, I’ll never leave you. I was shocked. If it had been autosuggestion, if I had chosen to think of a particular title, then the one I would have chosen would have been Everything I Do. The popular All-4-One version of I Swear came out ten months after my friend died, and at the time that my parents and I attended the show I hadn’t heard it in years and had forgotten the lyrics, so the fact that it was the song that popped into my head, meant that this time I could not put it down to coincidence.
Numbers with meaning and disappearing objects
While I have a leaning towards spiritualism, I’m not into all the spiritual woo-woo stuff such as crystals, chakras and numerology. Yet, I can’t deny that elements of these have cropped up in my life. I see the number eleven with more frequency than can just be put down to normal statistical averages. The number is meant to signify spiritual enlightenment or intuition and that you are on the right spiritual path. This is interesting to me since these days I feel like my life is so far off course that I’ll never find my way back. If I was looking for a number that had significance to me, eleven wouldn't be it. So, it’s not like I’m purposefully looking for elevens, yet I'll look up at the time and it’s eleven past the hour, or I stop a video to take a break and it stops at exactly eleven seconds past the minute.
I also often find white feathers, which is said to mean that a spirit is thinking of/guarding you. After my mother passed away I was walking to meet some friends of hers for coffee and I found exactly eleven white feathers, one after another as I walked to the café.
While I do believe in the paranormal and spirit realm, I am also a committed skeptic and always look for logical explanations before considering a paranormal one. I’m sure I have overlooked many signs and messages from the other side as being coincidence and explainable things like wind, faulty electrics or tricks of the light. In the last few years or so I’ve had trouble finding things, that they aren’t where I remember leaving them. I am entering my senior years so this isn’t anything particularly unusual, so I haven’t given it much thought and have put it down to absent-mindedness. Also, I have moved house so many times in the last few years that I just haven’t had the chance to get my things properly organised.
However, in January 2024 I had the first occurrence of something having been moved that could not have been me.
I had been doing a lot of gardening and decided to make up an extra bottle of fertiliser mix next time I did some spraying so that I could refill my sprayer quickly without having to mix a new batch every time I needed to refill the sprayer. I had an empty water container but had lost the cap ages ago. After some digging around, I found an old milk bottle top that fit perfectly. I screwed it on tight and then left the bottle with the cap firmly attached in my garage for when I was ready to use it. Several days passed and each day I’d pass and see the plastic bottle sitting on the floor with its bright yellow cap reminding me to make up the fertiliser mix and feed my plants.
When the day finally came, I reached for the bottle and stopped suddenly. The cap was gone. I scanned the floor and there was no cap to be seen anywhere. The bottle itself had not moved which wouldn’t have been possible if I had removed the cap or if it had somehow popped off in the summer heat or if rats had somehow pulled it off. I looked all round the container for the cap but there was no sign of it. I found a new cap and got on with spraying my plants and brushed it off, thinking that maybe I had imagined that I had left the cap on and must have instead taken it with me. After all, we see what we expect to see. I thought I’d left the cap, so every time I passed the bottle I assumed I must have thought I saw the cap on the bottle even though it wasn’t there.
Several months later I was doing some potting up of rooted cuttings and when I moved some bags of potting mix I found the yellow cap under the bags, bags I had purchased, and left in a corner unmoved, several weeks before the bottle cap saga!
My father promised that when he got to the other side, he would send a sign and I believed this had to be a sign from him. I imagined my dad’s spirit moving objects around trying to get my attention and getting frustrated when I blamed my own forgetfulness. This was something that I struggled to put down to being absentminded as I had made such a point of screwing the cap on tight to make sure I wouldn’t lose it.
In December of that year another object went missing and reappeared that I left me in no doubt at.
I was in the process of shifting house and packing, so things were pretty chaotic. I was making my dog’s breakfast one morning and after adding a couple of scoops of kibble to his bowl I set the container down in its usual place on the kitchen counter. I continued with my day of packing boxes and didn't notice anything out of the ordinary until the evening when I went to make his dinner. I went to add kibble to his bowl, but the container of kibble was gone. I looked everywhere in the kitchen and there was no sign of it. Thinking, I must have absent-mindedly carried it into another room or that my dog might have taken it outside, I searched the whole house, garage and garden. I couldn't find it and eventually gave up, and made up a new container of from the large bag I kept in an outside cupboard. I brushed it off thinking I had probably packed the container in a packing box without realising it, and that it would turn up at the new place.
"Oh! You've found it," I exclaimed. He asked me what I was talking about and I pointed to the container and said I'd looked everywhere for it. He went white and put down the chair. He replied that when he had entered the room seconds before there was nothing on the floor. We were both dumbfounded and couldn't explain how the container had got there as there was nothing it could have fallen out of or rolled out from under. Everything had already been moved out. When the other removals guy joined us in the room, he also had no explanation for how it got there.
The reappearance of the container minutes after my words at the cherry tree was like my dad was saying they had heard me.
A warning from the other side
Sadly, though I seem to have some kind of sensitivity to the other side, I’ve never been able to develop it as any kind of skill. But, then I am not the most patient person so I probably don’t have the patience to put in the time and effort it would need to develop real psychic skill. Also, I am already the kind of person people tell their problems to, so I’m not sure I would really want an endless stream of those in spirit coming to me with their messages either, after I got a taste of this in a dream.
I was in a deep sleep and thought I woke up, but was actually still dreaming, and saw an old woman in the hallway. She was saying something but I couldn’t hear her so I reached out my hand and asked her to come closer. I realised she was someone in spirit form and I thought she might be the previous owner of my home who had passed away before I purchased it. She took my hand and I could feel the warmth of it. She sat down beside me and told me that she used to work for my ancestors and that she had a message from them. Although she didn't say so, I understood that she meant my great-grandfather’s family who were quite wealthy. She told me they were worried about me and that I needed to look after my health. She then faded away and I found myself in what looked like an old shopping mall and suddenly there were people rushing up to me asking me to take messages from them to their loved ones, and for a moment I thought I had died in my sleep and was having a near death experience. Then a man came up and ushered all the people away saying I wasn’t staying and could not help them. I woke up shortly afterwards. It was one of those dreams that felt very real and stayed with me for the rest of the day.
Almost 24 hours later, almost to the minute, I was asleep again and woke up to squeezing chest pain. I didn’t think much of it at first, but when several hours passed and the pain was still lingering, the dream started to play on my mind and I decided to get it checked out. I was admitted to hospital and found to have had a rare form of heart attack. As one with chronic illness and regular unexplained weird aches and pains, I honestly wouldn’t have bothered getting checked out if it hadn’t been for the warning in my dream.
So, while God remains elusive, I know there is life after death and those we have loved and lost are still with us, even the ones we have never even met.
