Do the deceased really visit us?
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There are two minds. Some believe, when not mere imagination, it’s always a deception: dark spirits in masquerade. Others believe it’s what it seems: the dead coming back to console the living, warn, or ask for prayers — to indicate something. Or, because they are overly attached to a person, circumstance, place, or event that happened in their lives (earthbound).
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We’re of a mind that great caution has to be used (never communicating with such possible entities), and that many times it can be a deceptive spirit, but that there are also cases in which souls are allowed to manifest (as Moses and Elijah did to Jesus, Mark 9:4 or as Samuel did to Saul, 1 Samuel 28). “When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. ‘It’s a ghost,’ they said, and cried out in fear,” says Matthew 14:26.+
Anyway, let’s go to the mailbag.+
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Wrote a viewer recently: “Shortly after my husband died, I was awoken by something touching my forehead. I turned around and there was [husband] Dick just standing there…. There was such peace as I knew he was fine. I was going to write it in my journal, but knew I would remember it, so went back to sleep. The next morning I remembered a conversation we had in bed before he died. He said, ‘I am going to miss you’… I said, ‘No you won’t….you will be in such gloriousness’…. He then said, ‘No, I will miss touching you.’ There it was so plainly. He must have been allowed to come back that once just to touch me. God is Good!”
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Noted a viewer named Arlyn from San Antonio, Texas: “In the early years of Medjugorje, the visionaries asked our Blessed Mother if ghosts are real. She told them that God allows souls to manifest themselves so that people pray for them. I personally have had a number of ‘ghost’ manifestations, and after reading what our Blessed Mother said about them, I put prayer for them into practice.
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“One day while visiting my parents on a summer vacation, I was up late watching TV in the living room. My parents had an old rocking chair in the living room that required some effort to get it to rock. Well, my wife and I watched as the rocker began rocking all by itself. The next day I told my brother and his wife about it and they said they too had watched it rock by itself. Later that night I thought about what our Blessed Mother had said and so I prayed for whatever soul was ‘stuck’ there. After praying I fell asleep in my chair.
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“A few hours after l fell asleep, a color picture of a man dressed in a suit with a red tie came vividly into my head. The man said, ‘Thank you for your prayers, I am free now.’ I recognized him as the man who lived in the house before my parents bought it. So what our Blessed Mother said, is true!
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“Another story of ‘ghosts not being bad: My grandmother was a very holy person. After she died there were many strange things that happened. The night before she died, ALL the clocks in my house stopped at 9 o’clock. She died the following morning at 9 a.m.
“A few days later my daughter was looking for a paper she needed for school. One night she said the door opened to her bedroom and she saw a figure walk in but thought it was me. The next morning when she awoke she found the paper she was looking for next to her bed.
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“On a Friday night I loaded the dishwasher, turned it on, and went to bed. The next morning I opened the dishwasher and there on top of the dishes was a picture of my wife, taken years before, when she had long hair. Numerous times my grandmother would tell us that she thought all girls should have long hair.
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“About ten days after she died, I had a very vivid dream of her. In the dream I helped her up some stairs and when we got to the top she turned and went through a door way with a very bright light. She said to me, ‘Don’t ever think of me again as being in the old body.’ She was 98 when she died. There were other manifestations that occurred after her death. Remember that Jesus remained on the earth for a while before ascending into heaven. So all ‘ghosts’ shouldn’t be put in the evil category. How many souls could be released from their purgatory if people would just pray for them when they encounter a manifestation?”
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All these facts should be taken to discernment.
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The Church has never ruled on such issues. Until recent modernistic rationalism swept the Church, which has caused such hyper-skepticism and aridity, priests, bishops, and cardinals even wrote about visits from the deceased, calling them “revenants.”
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A mysterious place, is earth. Very mysterious. More mysterious than we even imagine.+
[Michael Brown’s latest book, which include such stories, along with many phenomena, is Lying Wonders, Strangest Things]
[Feedback from Maria Robertson, Spruce Grove, Alberta:
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“I couldn’t resist sharing this photo with you. It is of a tree on the road to my parish, Holy Trinity Catholic Church. The Church is on the edge of town in a field, and you must drive almost to the end of a tree-lined dead end gravel road to get to it.+
“Many years back a woman was driving down this road toward the Church and crashed her car, which caught fire. The woman was fortunate enough to escape and walked down the road to our Church for help.
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“The scorch marks on a nearby tree have always seemed to look like the face of a demon with wings. The image remains to this day. I also found it interesting that this incident took place on the feast of St. Teresa of Avila. We have a strong Carmelite presence in the area. St. Teresa, pray for us!”