Considering how helpful spirits, aka ghosts, have been in my life and the lives of people I know, I’m somewhat baffled by the bad reputation that ghosts have among many of us living humans. For some of us, it must be true in life as it is in fiction: Without trouble there is no excitement, no story, so ghosts are seen as poltergeists or evil fiends. Yet, when it comes to spirits, I prefer to stick with the truth: I’ve encountered more helping spirits than any other kind. The two that I’d like to tell you about now came forward, each on a separate occasion, with news that contradicted everything the doctors had said.
The spirit of my own father brought a message to one of my sisters. She said she was at home alone one day and was in the large walk-in closet in her bedroom. She heard the front door of the house open and then heard footsteps coming down the hallway toward the bedroom. At first she thought her husband had returned, but then she began to feel that these were the steps of our departed father. The footsteps came into the bedroom and approached the closet, and, as my sister said, she felt goose bumps pop up on her arms. The footsteps stopped just outside the closet door, so she turned and looked toward it. She saw a hand – with only the middle three fingers extended and the little finger and thumb held under – reach around the door frame. Then she felt certain that it was our father, and he was telling her that her pregnant daughter was not going to have twins, as her doctor had said, but triplets.
My sister immediately walked to the door of the closet and looked into the bedroom then rushed to the bedroom door and looked down the hallway but saw no one. She still was alone in the house, and she was convinced that the spirit of my father had happily brought her a message. It was one she needed so she could prepare herself for the three new grandbabies that were on their way. Not long afterward, an ultrasound revealed triplets, not good news for the mother, but she got used to it. The triplets recently celebrated their eighteenth birthday at a casino on the Mississippi coast, and two of them just graduated from high school, one with a full scholarship to college. The other one will graduate next year.
Many years ago a message was brought to me by a different spirit. The message was a word of hope for a young expectant mother. I was working with Medicaid at a public hospital, and one morning the wife of a man whom I had worked with several years earlier came into my office. She was extremely upset, and she told me that one of my appointments that day was with her daughter.
She said, “She is down the hall talking to someone, but she’ll be here in a few minutes.” Then she explained that her daughter was pregnant with her first child.
Doctors had said that a sonogram had shown the fetus to be extremely deformed and the baby probably would not survive. The entire family was disturbed about this, and they were trying to accept the doctor’s advice to be prepared for the worst. She and her husband had lost all hope of their daughter’s having a healthy baby.
Then her daughter arrived, and I was left alone with her for the Medicaid application interview. The daughter told me the same story that her mother had. As she was speaking, I felt a spirit enter through the wall and window behind me and stand just behind my right shoulder. I could feel the young expectant mother’s suffering and the same emotion from the spirit.
I could feel that the spirit was someone who loved the young woman very much and didn’t want her to suffer. The more the young woman talked, the more I felt that the spirit was bringing the message that the baby would be completely healthy. I so wanted to tell the young woman that, but there was no way that I could give “spirit” messages on my job, especially a message that totally contradicted what the doctors of the hospital had said.
The spirit seemed to give me a nudge to remind me of something I had read recently, as if to say, “Tell her about that.”
So, I told her. “I read a magazine article about sonograms not long ago,” I told the young woman. “It said that many times sonograms have been read incorrectly and the mothers were told things similar to what you’ve been told. But somehow it was wrong, and the baby was healthy. Doctors aren’t always right, so don’t give up hope. I think things will turn out better than it looks right now. I think you should keep hoping.”
“In the end it’s up to God,” she said. “I’ll keep hoping and praying.” She stopped crying and for the first time had hope in her eyes.
When her baby was born, doctors found that his abdomen had ruptured slightly and his little intestines had floated outside his body. They pushed them back in and situated them correctly, put a Band Aid on the small rupture, and the baby was a perfectly healthy beautiful little boy.
G. W. Lupo is retired from social work and newspaper reporting/editing and now writes about the supernatural, mostly her own experiences. She also writes spec scripts and fiction for children in her home just north of New Orleans. Her blog can be found at http://www.supernaturaltraveler.blogspot.com.