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Tying The Threads Together

gattino

Justified & Ancient
Joined
Jul 30, 2003
Messages
2,517
My various accounts of paranormal seeming sagas which relate to/interconnect with past ones are becoming ever more difficult to keep track of as there are now multiple different threads in which new events can be posted. To try and make sense of it all here's my best attempt to bullet point everything that's happened so far in one place. Two past storylines and how they've recently merged. Nothing new here, but its for my benefit as much as yours.

[NOTE: I've edited my postings in this thread 2/7/18 to make it easier to read/follow. I've deleted the original written summary of events and am replacing it with the illustrated version of the same information which was originally several posts later. I've also put all of the corroborative photographic material inside a single post. ]
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I'm pretty sure this is the most epic synchronistic chain of events I've come across - knocks spots off anything I've experienced.

I've always tried to maintain a degree of rationality with my own- thinking that the type incidents are happening all the time and that I myself am in some way, on a subconcious level lighting up the pointers and then conciously making the connection.

I think the evidence here as you present it here completely kicks that theory into touch.

Personally I have no experience of coincidences that I can tie to anything of any signifigance - for me, they've just been interesting if slightly confusing moments of mystery that lead to nothing in particular and don't seem to have any true or decipherable purpose.

Yours on the other hand do have more than a strong suggestion of something much more meaningful and with a purpose.

Very, very interesting.
 
As a one place resource here are other original photos. The two quotes from the Blatty book are from the original review I read rather than the pages of the book itself. The letter in the FT was from June 2016.
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I don't want to rain on your parade, Gattino, but maybe your grief is damaging your sense of clarity. With this thread you're tying a lot of elements together to create your own version of your world and it's one step away from adding Bible quotes and conspiracy theory YouTube videos. Maybe leave this alone for a week or two, then go back to it and see if you still feel the same way?
 
HAhahaha! (genuine laugh ..i was thinking today about people who obsess over certain numbers they see everywhere etc, looking out for them and ignoring all others)

I appreciate the sentiment, and understand where its coming from. But I promise you - as objective as anyone can be about themselves - I'm not driven by grief to see signs, and certainly not to look out for them.

How can I be sure? Well the lack of emotional content on my part is one element, but more than that each of the incidents here described are years apart, unsought, occur spontaneously outwith any immediate circumstantial or psychological trigger and are individually striking in isolation. The stringing together is an unavoidable observation from their content. Nor have I just recently looked back now and tied them all together..its grown organically with each isolated incident over the years reported on here. The similarity or apparent connection of one event to the preceding out of the ordinary experience is so evident that not to draw attention to it would seem wilfully obtuse.

My various repetitive attempts to collect all these things in one place as "parts of a puzzle" are attempts at clarity and succinctness (the latter i clearly fail at!)

To suggest this collection of data owes more to my personal psychology than any objective reality fails at least for me (though if i am delusional im clearly not going to be the best judge of it!) on the fact that the incidents themselves are a) out of hte ordinary/extraordinary b)objectively and externally real as opposed to fabrications or fancies of my own - the various matching accounts of identical incidents involving identical objects are in published material to be read and checked by anyone. c) genuinely linked on multiple levels one to another beyond my ability to reasonably ignore the fact.

So for example. The initial incident with the cross that reappears on request. An extraordinary event and objectively real. Perhaps the "reappearing" itself is down to some mental quirk and all such incidents are. But none the less the experience happened and is worth reporting. So when an identical experience occurs in a book i'm reading..should i notice and point it out? And in doing so should the added elements of the experient having my father's name, and my reading it on the same day my mother "hallucinates" his presence and quite separately retrieves the object involved int he original incident be overlooked? Not referred to? It's the extraordinary multiplied by the extraordinary isn't it? Regardless of my personal mental state (incidentally at this point in the tale my father had been dead 12 years and i wasn't grieving for anybody!)

So having noted and reported these events - justly and rationally I would argue - what do i do when the the same story comes to my attention again, with yet more overlapping elements.?I'm not inventing the story, i'm not imagining it, not seeking it out, it just turns up. And then again. And again. Nor am I putting a sheen of eeriness on everyday happenings. Disappearing-reappearing objects, dopplegangers, purported after death communications etc are not widely considered everyday happenings. In the whole sequence of events here recorded the only single element that could justly be seen as subjective on my part is the perception the homeless man looked like my brother. What can I say. He genuinely does.

Do the normal debunking arguments for clusters of "coincidence" apply? Can one apply the law of big numbers to incidents which are supposed not to happen at all?
 
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OK, I was just getting a bit worried, but to answer your question, yes, if you're looking out for coincidences, consciously or not, you're going to see patterns that may or may not be there. And even if there are patterns, they're no proof of a higher purpose. Anything may not be possible, but many things are probable, and I'm not seeing anything in your posts that is objective, it's all filtered through what you are expecting to see. It's the old curse of confirmation bias.
 
But what am I expecting to see?

Let's work our way back from my conclusions - I have none. Well clearly certain inferences are invited by repeated references to dead individuals (but i can't do much about their lack of living) and the involvement of books on after death communication. One might think I'm implying the spirit of X is causing these events to occur (whether or not my motive, conscious or unconscious is to comfort myself or confirm existing opinions on that subject). The problem with that inference is that I don't believe that. At least not as some all encompassing agency. I don't think my dead father is behind it since it involves people who have nothing to do with him having experiences before he died..and the same applies to my brother. Plus in either case to imagine they or any other dead individual were "doing" anything to engineer all this would require me to see them having the powers of a god, not a ghost.

Nor do I believe some deity or other cosmic entity is sending me messages...they're being annoyingly opaque if they are.

What I believe is only that it is a sequence of events with all the appearance of interconnectedness which is both extraordinary and very very curious. No more than that. But that's surely enough. It hints at something, but ive no sense of what that something is and am neither comforted nor disturbed by it.

You say you don't see anything objective but only things filtered through what I expect to see. It's a point hard to argue with since I'm not sure what it means! I'm using the word objective to mean externally materially real - ie a paragraph in a book, a photograph, an event. They exist with or without my input. The "meaning" I give to these things consists entirely in pointing out their existence, their coming to my attention (unsought) and observing their - again objectively real - parallels. If a disappearing reappearing cross is only connectable to a disappearing reappearing cross , or the Prophet is only relatable to the Prophet because of a "filter" of my own that makes them seem so rather than as a simple fact in its own right, then I have to concede I must be seeing the world in a different way. And conceding that, I may be subject to poor thinking processes. But as I can't see it I'd struggle to correct it.
 
Well, I can illustrate with a recent experience of my own. Last week I was reminded of the film version of Eugene Ionescu's play Rhinoceros, which I saw about twenty years ago on TV. In the days since, I have been haunted by rhinos, they keep getting mentioned wherever I look, or so it seems - and today I opened the newspaper to see the Ionescu play had been revived in Scotland and yesterday won an award.

Now, according to your pattern-seeking, this is all deliberate on the part of some mysterious agency. But without that thinking, this is the sort of thing that happens to everyone, there will always be clusters of incidents and references to certain things you can group and connect, it's a natural part of life. So I don't think your experiences are exclusive to you, they're universal, and a matter of the apparently random becoming apparently contrived.

I don't think your thinking is poor, though! You're just doing what everyone does once in a while, but placing far too much significance on it.
 
Now, according to your pattern-seeking, this is all deliberate on the part of some mysterious agency.
But that's not according to me. Firstly because im not seeking a pattern and secondly because i've explicitly ruled out "the deliberate mysterious agency" (or at least any obvious candidate for one)

Seeing repeated references to random objects, people or terms which have initially caught your attention, because your subconsicous mind is scanning your surroundings and alerting your conscious mind to any examples it comes across and would otherwise ignore is something I'm very well aware of like everybody else. I still don't see how it relates to the material here.

The differences are easy to identify.

Firstly the nature of the incidents themselves are independently extraordinary/fortean/"paranormal", regardless of their similarity to all of the subsequent ones. They are not random things encountered on normal days like the word rhinoceros. I've not included eg The Prophet because i once saw a reference to it and then saw a copy in a bookshop, or someone told me they'd read it. I include it because of the head scratching or connected circumstances under which it arose on the first two occassions and the re-emerging reference to it in parallel to a subsequent Fortean experience.

Nor is there an obvious proximity in time between most of the incidents to indicate either a chance "clustering" of related things in time or that "its on my mind" and therefore some unconscious part of me is seeking it out. There's a 9 year gap between the first two incidents and the first one had been all but forgotten until the second one's obvious parallels brought it to the fore again. The next two cross incidents are 1-2 years apart so again not "on my mind" with my unconscious scanning the horizon to alert me, nor have they clustered closely together.

And thirdly there's the fact there is no selection process going on. At least I don't think its reasonable to imagine I've had just as many accounts or experiences of disappearing/reappearing pencil sharpeners, bathing caps or tickling sticks but have erased them from my memory because they didn't fit the cross pattern I'm on the alert for. And there's no secret file drawer stuffed with such incidents but without the additional flourish of the person bearing my father's name.

The incidents here in which repeated and interconnected motifs are noted are not every day life but it's far from every day and out of the blue interruptions which involve objects appearing from nowhere, a computer screen filling in its own search items, a woman seeing her dead husband, false awakenings, dopplegangers, a post-mortem dated photograph and sundry other isolated extraordinary things. The connections between them are an additional fact ABOUT them.


I do understand the process of pattern spotting your refer to. We all experience it but I genuinely struggle to make it fit these events.
 
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I can only comment on how your posts seem to me, and there's an apparent need to make connections between things that are not as significant as you're making them in your mind. The fact that they happened a while apart should clue you in to the fact that anybody could create a series of "important" events out of their memories, and while some could be legitimate - what led you to a turning point, for example - plenty more could be the pattern spotting I mentioned above.

Please don't think I'm singling you out for this behaviour, we all do it, I simply see you getting lost in it and that's not a good place to be.
 
Fair enough. If that's how it reads to you I can't deny you your perceptions, perplexing as they may be to me.
 
GNC's concerns noted, let me continue with a development.

I've just seen again and finally spoken to the homeless man.

His beard was gone and head shaved. He caught my eye and said hi. So I knelt beside him and asked his name. Simon. I told hm about having been shocked the first few times i'd seen him by the resemblance to my brother. I confessed to having taken his pic and he said he thought he'd seen me do so.

To cut our story short he was lovely man with an extraordinary story, which i won't go into just now. Enough to say he was a man in need of redemption and buoyed by faith (I asked him about teh cross around his neck. He said its what keeps him going and how someone's looking after him/id be amazed by how things work to help him/us or something to that effect.) He'd just been offered a hostel bed that night for the first time, which would give him an address so he could start to get back on his feet. He'd almost reached the sum of money he needed. Maybe this is a line he says to everyone. I don't believe so but it wouldn't matter in the slightest if it was. I obviously gave him what he needed, and then I got up to leave....

Then I paused. I remembered my duty to you dear readers. You'd never forgive me if I didn't ask the question... "By the way, when is your birthday?" Of course I wasn't expecting it but given May 17th was my brother's birthday, Blatty Jr's and the other homeless man's as well as the day I encountered him, we had to make sure. So "When's your birthday?"

"January"
Ah well, I shrugged to myself as I stood up
"..January 11th"

You've got to be shitting me.

He doesn't share my brother's birthday. He shares mine.
 
My various accounts of paranormal seeming sagas which relate to/interconnect with past ones are becoming ever more difficult to keep track of as there are now multiple different threads in which new events can be posted. To try and make sense of it all here's my best attempt to bullet point everything that's happened so far in one place. Two past storylines and how they've recently merged. Nothing new here, but its for my benefit as much as yours.


Sign of the Cross



1) 2003 small cross vanishes from chain around my mum's neck. Given to her by my dad. Nowhere to be found. I address the air and ask "them" for it back. Re-enter room and its slap bang in the middle of the floor id searched on my hands on knees.


2) 2012 All one day: mum (dementia/uti) refers to seeing my dad at the door or her bedroom; I recieve in post a book id sent for on synchronicity being communication from the dead and in its first few pages is a story of a woman with my dad's name - Jeri Gerrard (my dad was Gerry short for Gerard) - and a CROSS pen, vanishes, nowhere to be found, demands it back, reappears slap bang in middle of place she's searched; my mum - unaware of this - goes loopy angrly demands "the tin box". Only tin box i can think of is a biscuit tin in her bedside drawer. Give it to her. She searches and pulls out the chain with the cross on it.


3) 2015 Author of the Exorcist , W P Blatty, writes book claiming his dead son is sending signs through weird coincidences. In a review of the book it details one incident...a "miraculous medal" (catholic holy medal) belonging to dead son disappears from chain round Blatty's neck. He and wife search shower cubicle a dozen times. later asks for it back. Enters shower cubicle and there it is bang in the middle in plain sight. I look up what a "miraculous medal" is and find its identical to one on my mum's chain, next to the cross.


4) 2016 Letter in Fortean times. Woman in Puerto Rico. Dead sister... "mary medal" (miraculous medal)...in safety deposit box (tin box!)..key disappears..she's distraught..prays, asks for it back, and finds it in the place it previously wasn't.


Is this what you're looking for? - the book/Prophet saga.


1) May 2016 Day brother dies a book "appears" on his bed, a book on Deathbed phenomena titled One Last Hug Before I Go. I write to author to tell her about it.


2) July 2016 I have a false awakening dream in which i hear brother leaving his room and shouting about something being haunted. I'm then "attacked" by something invisible"..wake up. In morning i switch on computer, open amazon and find the search box already filled in. Joni Mayhan. Name means nothing to me. Click search and find she's the author of books on "true life" paranormal events. "Signs of Spirt: when loved ones visit" and "Ghostly defences" stand out. Later that day I go into my mum's room after the carers have left and find on the floor beneath her bed a bracelet of prayer beads with two tiny items attached. A cross and holy medal. The latter depicts St Anthony of Padua...the tradtional catholic saint in charge of the return of lost objects.


3) 3 weeks later I send for the former book, which tells me if the deceased communicate through signs it will be distinctly relevant to them. Dawns on me ive had two book related events and my brother was an absolute bibliophile. As soon as i note his down another book incident happens.... Friend tells me he's to be a pall bearer at his birth mum's funeral (he was adopted) and read a poem but doesn't know what. unsolicited i go looking for somethng to suggest, and think a book my dead brother had given me, Kalil Gibran's The Prophet might have an appropriate passage. Find one, tell friend. He replies "That's weird" He'd been carrying around a book given to him by his mum when they first reunited and signed inside by her saying how much it had given her over the years. Shows me. Kalil Gibran's the Prophet.


4) September 2016 The author of One Last Hug finally gets back to me. Knows none of the above but randomly tells me a book themed incident of her own. When her mum was dying her best friend looks for a book to give her comfort. In book shop one falls off shelf at her feet. A book that was popular at the time and helped people in their transition from this life she explained. It was called ...The Prophet.


The sagas merge


1) 2018 Tuesday May 15th was the second anniversary of my brother's death. Thursday 17th was his birthday. So on the latter day i visit the park were his ashes were scattered. On the way home, in town, I passed a homeless man, who was sitting upright on the pavement with his eyes closed. The more I looked at him the more i couldn't take my eyes off him and my heart started pounding. He was the absolute double of my brother. To the extent that i was wondering afterwards if it was real.
Later I remembered another anecdote from WP Blatty's book. His wife was drawn to a homeless man on the street because he reminded her so much of their dead son, when suddenly he reached out his hand and shouted "my birthday is May 17th". She went pale...that was the birthday of the dead son. And of my brother. That same day..the day i saw the homeless man.


2) Next week I tell all of the above on the comments section of a paranormal blog. Immediately below me another person addresses someone else, arguing for reincarnation by quoting a passage from - and advising anyone who hadn't to read - Kalil Gibran's the Prophet. I then remembered that the weekend before this I had an airbnb booking from someone with my brother's name and the weekend after it I had one from a chinese man with the adopted name Kalil. As in Gibran the author of the Prophet.
So now both the cross saga and the book/prophet saga have re-emerged simultaneously and started to merge into one unified story.


3) A day or two later i see the homeless man again. He's real, flesh and blood and so i sneak a pic of him to prove im not imagining it. To make a side by side comparison with my brother in his last year I look for any pics on facebook of him as he looked then . What i find is a photo ive never seen posted last year on May 15th (the anniversary of his death) by a friend of his I've never heard of. Under the photo is a long description/commentary by this friend, which ends with a side note..that in order to determine when it was taken he'd just looked at the date on the photo and can't explain it as, he claims, it says 17 May 2016. This was my brother's birthday and two days after he died. How then that date was on the photo he couldn't fathom "Weird hey!" he wrote.
On the photo I took of the homeless man i later noticed he has a plastic rosary around his neck.. a cross upon a chain.


4) last night in bed, reading a book called "Things You Can Do When You're Dead" i come across an account of a woman with a cross on a chain which vanishes and reappears weeks later.

Full details and appropriate photos of all these things are in the various other threads. But for now, we're all up to date.
 
Thanks for this gattino,very interesting...and useful, I keep getting lost with all the different threads.
 
As I was just editing/merging my posts in this thread to make it easier to read/follow I may as well add yet another update. A further small cluster of curiosities that occurred last week. I was originally reluctant to include it lest it gave credence to the concern I'm forcing meaning on the truly trivial, and perhaps in this case I am as unlike all that's gone before none of the following is in isolation fortean in nature, but what the hell. No point in following an ongoing series if you're going to miss an episode. So for what's it worth...

On Wedneday (27th June) I encountered - once more unsought (and I promise you this is only the second time ever) - the face of another doppleganger for my late brother. Just a random stranger online, but this likeness was more striking still than the first fella as in this case he has Conor's eyes staring straight back out of the photo at me. This is something I appreciate you have to take my word for and can't be easily conveyed to anyone who didn't know him. But it is truly quite an unsettling resemblance. Anyway after momentarily being taken aback by this face I hear GNC's words ringing in my ears and choose to shrug and draw no attention to the image.

The next morning I pick up a graphic novel i'd bought the week before and continue reading. The following panels catch my eye
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And one footnote. Given the significance in the earlier incidents of my brother dying two days before his 53rd birthday you may see something in the title of this comic book. It's called "52". :p
 
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Hi Gattino.

I think that sharing such material takes a certain amount of courage, and I appreciate you allowing us to peruse this fairly compact yet potent segment of the larger picture that is your life.

Whether one takes the view that such synchronicities are a result of grief, links to the great unknown, or even subtle communications from those who have passed along....this is still, most importantly, personally significant to you.

I think that many of us have experienced odd chains of events and curious synchronicities at some stage in our lives, yet how these ‘meaningful patterns’ might suffer in their translation to a larger, more impersonal audience might cause most of us to steer away. I think you’ve made a fabulous attempt to map something that would seem to me unmappable!

I might view such experiences, whether the catalyst is grief or just common or garden randomness, to be of absolute significance to the self. I experienced my own set of numinous patterns many years ago, which persisted for over 12 months (I kept a journal), and which culminated in a set of rather gigantic changes in my life, and a lot of self realisation. It was, in the Jungian sense of the word, a battle with my shadow. Previously obscured fragments of merricat coming into focus...

How we choose to perceive or analyse such experiences will also depend upon our unique, individual scientific/spiritual/religious perspectives, which will probably vary so wildly from fortean to fortean that outsider opinions and thoughts might even serve to obfuscate any previous clarity or certainties you may have gained from these experiences. I’m not at all sure if this makes sense or translates well in words! However much I love them, words tend to tie me in knots.

I see no harm in pursuing whatever inspires your heart in this aspect, so long as doing so does not create anxiety or pain for you or others. These meaningful connections are a valid part of your own personal journey through this odd chaos we call life. A sense of connection to the wider universe...Whether this is a psychological or spiritual unfolding could not be determined by anyone other than yourself - and who is to say it might not be a merging of the two? It should be fascinating to explore both....this could be magical or terrible, illuminating or blinding, depending upon how we process it.

I obviously cannot comment upon any single element of your experiences and findings, but I am glad you shared them. I am also very sorry to hear about the loss of your brother.
 
Oh - my late father’s name was Gerry and his birthday was May 15th :)
 
Gattino, your brother and you had/have the same birthdays as two of my family members.

I say this with respect - as I know you already know, human nature looks for synchronicities. We're wired that way.

But something else came to me when I was re-reading your post, just now. I have had family members with dementia, and sometimes the onset is sort of 'hidden' - long before anyone could realise anything was going astray. I wonder if your mum didn't, during the earliest stages of her dementia, put the cross there herself, and then her conscious mind 'forgot'. But some part of her remembered..?

I say this because I can recall not dissimilar things happening with my step mother who now has full blown dementia. But even thirty years ago - long, long before she was diagnosed or diagnosable - she'd do things like "lose" silver spoons, then accuse people who had just that second walked in the house of stealing them. Not that utter, obvious paranoia that many people with dementia have towards the end - but just small, subtle shifts in behaviour like that - in her case decades before she obviously had dementia. But when I look back now, I wonder.

My FIL now also officially diagnosed with dementia, has done weird stuff for years - but only really low level.

I also think when you start looking for corroboration, inevitably you find it - because life is like that. And even the act of casting your net wider and looking is, in a way, inviting it. Especially as the "things going missing then turning up again" is a paranormal trope. (And I'm not dismissing it as a phenomenon as I lived opposite a house where this happened regularly, consistently, and to more than one person, so I know it is a possibility).

Not to minimise anything you describe, in the least, just a few thoughts I had when re-reading your post and remembering some stuff my step-mother did, decades ago. We knew she had moved her spoons (and that is just the example that comes to mind but I know this kinda thing happened more than once with her) - and on some level, but maybe in denial about it - she knew it too. And it wasn't directly vindictive, or attention seeking behaviour - just some sort of blip that I now think was harbinger of the condition she was to have, later - or rather, part of its etiology.
 
It's absolutely right to question these things..its certainly far better than assuming what must have really happened without asking. So I'm more than happy to clear up any questions.

To try and answer your points individually. First the birthday thing.. the significance here is not that two individuals out of a random group share a birthday. It's that two or more relevant individuals within a cluster of separately connected events share a birthday.

So my brother's birthday of May 17th is not relevant because i can find or encounter someone else with it, but because its the same day on which I encounter the homeless man who reminds me of him AND that was shouted out by the homeless man who reminded Mrs Blatty of her son AND/BECAUSE it was the birthday of her son AND the birthday of that homeless man.

That- to me anyway - makes it a very different propositon to "there are at least two people in this room withthe same birthday as each other". It's the context of the repetition, not the repetition in isolation.

That my homeless man - to whom I asked the question to see if that same date recurred yet again in this same story - had not my brother's birthday but my own is *contextually* striking. It's not that there's another human being born on january 11th, nor that I get talking to one, but that this particular human being was and that it was discovered in these particular circumstances.

On the question about my mother and a very long predementia being behind the reappearance of the cross, I can rule that out for you instantly again because of the context in which it occurred. She couldn't have placed teh cross on the floor of her room because she never entered her room. She was wheelchair bound. She was in in the living room and I pushed her chair into the bathroom. The only person in the room to witness the cross not being on the floor and then being on the floor was me.

In addition to this we again come back to the wider context of this clustering..suppose circumstances had been different and she had been in a position to make the cross reappear by her own hand..would it make a difference to the tale? Because unless Blatty had pre-dementia, AND the woman in Puerto Rico, AND Geri Jerard, AND the Grants..then the mystery remains. But more than that if there is no magic in any one of them, we would still be left with the same story with the objects and elements recurring again and again and coming to my attention from different sources.

That's surely still a thing of note.

The sequence of events ive gathered here roughly follow a pattern. 1) An individually extraordinary event (eg disappearing/reappearing object, computer screen filling in its own search box, doppleganger), then 2) a subsequent discovery or experience of a mirror image event, 3) the fact that in the mirror image event there are included details (names, birthdays, the cross, the prophet,etc) which are an additional flourish to the mirroring and seem to forcefully underline the parallels between each incident. And then to round it off 4) each of these major incidents appears to be surrounded by a cluster of smaller ones which had not other wise been present and which also link to all that has gone before in earlier incidents.
 
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I agree it's wise to take a step back and try to find rational explanations for events as and when they arise, but surely Gattino's experiences are about as synchronistic in the Jungian sense as it gets : meaningful coincidence, significantly related patterns of chance.
Personally I see little value in disassembling the individual events, as the story as a whole is just so, well...undeniably bizarre.

I'm fully behind Merricat on this one!

These meaningful connections are a valid part of your own personal journey through this odd chaos we call life. A sense of connection to the wider universe...Whether this is a psychological or spiritual unfolding could not be determined by anyone other than yourself - and who is to say it might not be a merging of the two?

My own synchronicities have been a bit thin on the ground lately, bit I will post a couple of recent events on the weird coincidences thread shortly.
 
I don't want to rain on your parade, Gattino, but maybe your grief is damaging your sense of clarity. With this thread you're tying a lot of elements together to create your own version of your world and it's one step away from adding Bible quotes and conspiracy theory YouTube videos. Maybe leave this alone for a week or two, then go back to it and see if you still feel the same way?




i have had to ask "them" to return lost items, and they did seem to suddenly reappear, but had I been too anxious to properly search before, and did the ritual of asking take the pressure off me, and allow me to see what i had perhaps unconsciously ignored before, or been too nervous to notice?

there ARE innate human psychic skills, that forteans tend to ignore, while giggling at them. the asking ritual is a cool down, that allows psychic skills to come to the fore. you are drawn to the missing object like a dowsing rod.

theres also improbable physical occurrences. as in, the medal's jump ring was slightly opened, allowing it to fall off the chain, and perhaps stick onto a soapy shampoo bottle or the suds on the shower wall? It showed up later, when perhaps the water adhering the medal to the wall dried out or was dislodged thru vibration? i don't doubt the author had asked MANY times for its return, and that last time, he found it.

And there are situations where even though you are present, you don't have full understanding of the intentions of others or the meaning of their behavior. even though she had dementia, you cant discount the possibility that your mom remembered the necklace's location. and was trying to get it.

its hard to be objective when the desire to make things that occur randomly seem meaningful is strong.
 
To answer the two points in hte above. I can't speak for Blatty's experience - again the practical explanation for the individual incident is secondary to the matching facts of the incidents themselves - all i can tell you from memory is he did not report any such multiple requests. In fact to be precise his "request" as recorded in the book was actually an affirmation "Petey will bring it back" he found himself saying aloud, having failed to find it through desperate searching. All preceding searches were of a purely practical nature on the assumption it had dropped off and must have done so in the shower. As in all reports of unusual events, speculating on what he "probably" did (in this case "asking for it many times") in the absence of any supportive statements in the available data doesn't really have much evidential weight it seems to me.

In terms of my mother i can speak to that with more confidence. I'm not quite sure what you mean by "even though she had dementia, you cant discount the possibility that your mom remembered the necklace's location. and was trying to get it." Well she was either looking for it - which is kind of implied in my telling of the tale - or she found it accidentally. I'm not sure what difference either option makes. If you mean she was searching for it in response to the things which had preceded it (namely my finding the Geri Jerard anecdote in the book), that we can rule out very simply..she had no knowledge of that or any other incident. It wasn't pointed out to her in any way by me as she would have had no comprehension of what i was saying. So the only connection that could exist between her deliberately searching for it and the matching events of that day would indeed be "psychic".
 
My various accounts of paranormal seeming sagas which relate to/interconnect with past ones are becoming ever more difficult to keep track of as there are now multiple different threads in which new events can be posted. To try and make sense of it all here's my best attempt to bullet point everything that's happened so far in one place. Two past storylines and how they've recently merged. Nothing new here, but its for my benefit as much as yours.

[NOTE: I've edited my postings in this thread 2/7/18 to make it easier to read/follow. I've deleted the original written summary of events and am replacing it with the illustrated version of the same information which was originally several posts later. I've also put all of the corroborative photographic material inside a single post. ]

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Are you going to make a book out of it? Looks almost like you have started already.
 
It would be a very short book..ive pretty much included everything in the - apparent - sequence which has happened. It would be a two page pamphlet at best!

I was tempted initially to add the other, seemingly quite distinct, years long saga ("The 5 year sign"..the one involving balloons and the dead friend) to this thread so they're both in one place and easily referenced. But somehow thought better of it.
 
Ok now this is weird! Well unfortunate anyway. I've just reread my intial posts on here including hte graphic summary...and a whole section of the tale is missing! Part 2 doesn't appear anywhere on here at all..and would make a lot more sense of some of the links i refer to! No wonder ive been getting so many "I don't see it" comments. Was it here and has vanished? Or did i accidentally omit it in editing the initial post? *scratches head*

I've re-edited the first post to put the middle section ("part 2") back
 
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I don't know if this is a comment on your posts, Gattino, or synchronicity, but I was listening to a programme on the radio the other day and someone was quoting the statistic that you only need 23 people in a room before you get two who will share a birthday.
 
AS i understand it (having just looked it up) the actual statistic is that in a group of 23 there is a 50% probability of a match. Like tossing a coin a 50 50 chance may only become apparent over the long term. You could have long string of groups of 23 with no matches turning up within each group. I recall reading of a coincidence debunker mentioning the "birthday paradox" to prove his point on a tv show with an audience of 200 people (or at any rate considerably more than 23), and his embarassment when there was not a single matching birthday among them.

More relevant to the birthday references in my posts here is that the the statistic often quoted relates to the chances of *A* match among that group, not the chances of a particular person sharing a birthday with another specific individual which would remain at 365-1 I assume. Add a specific and relevant 3rd, 4th and 5th individual to the equation and the odds would multiply dramatically.

I should say as always any confident tone of "this is so" when it comes to maths, statistics and the like coming from me is misplaced. I know nothing!
 
Before these boards disappear a final small but curious addition to this saga's links to The Exorcist.


I've seen the movie a number of times over the years and read the book. But presumably not for years as a lot of it seemed fresh to me when i watched it again a few nights ago. Throughout the film (not as far as i know the book) there is a very curious unexplained and presumably somewhat arty/symbolic/pretentious imagery not directly referenced in any of the dialogue. That of a particular holy medal - one depicting St Joseph (curiously depicted in a manner almost indistinguishable from that of the the medal of St Anthony on the bracelet i found)

The Exorcist Father Merrin finds it/one out of place in a pre christian archeological dig at the start of the movie and remarks how strange this is. There is no further reference to it. But an identical medal on a chain is seen falling for no expressed reason in a vision the younger Father Karras has later in the movie of his mother descending. During hte final battle with the possessed girl she tears the medal from the chain on his neck. Finally when all is over the girl's mother tries to give the same medal to Karras's friend and fellow priest. Nowhere in the movie is the meaning of this repeated motif made explicit. There is an online article about it, but i'm not sure it leaves you any the wiser.

Something makes all of this doubly curious. The movie came out in '73..presumably before Blatty's son was even born, let alone before he died and the author had his mysterious disappearing medal from a chain incident. He makes no mention of its use in the Exorcist in his account of the incident as far as i recall.

http://exorcist.wikia.com/wiki/St._Joseph_medal
 
Well, gattino. While these boards are disappearing (and they will now have a new home by the sounds of things) at least you have the whole catalogue of events backed up in image form. :)

A curious series of bizarre coincidences or a guided synchronous sequence of events? I'm unsure. But it does make one wonder... :)

And thanks for sharing such personal stuff.
 
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