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More Tales From My Guests

This character, "Cernunnos" apparently, just popped up on an ad on my screen

Reminiscent of his tree man, I wonder?
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I don't know if it's a vague possibility, but from having heard from someone who found the explanation of 'moving objects' and 'strange noises in the night' - any chance that the house had rats?

They can vanish like magic at the first appearance of a human, but they can be quite hefty and move objects some distance, and also break things without their existence being suspected in some cases.
 
catseye said:
I don't know if it's a vague possibility, but from having heard from someone who found the explanation of 'moving objects' and 'strange noises in the night' - any chance that the house had rats?

They can vanish like magic at the first appearance of a human, but they can be quite hefty and move objects some distance, and also break things without their existence being suspected in some cases.
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Easy to find out, just leave anything vaguely edible out overnight. It'll either be half-eaten or carried away by morning.
 
Well this one is a doozy.....


" Doctor"/ biochemist is staying here.. he mentioned having been around a lot of death. Great opportunity to ask the question if he'd had any uncanny encounters in the process. Oh yes.....


During Covid he returned to help out in hospital. This is in Italy, where he's originally from.

There was one patient, a young man who'd been in with leukemia, and now in a coma. He'd been in the hospital for a long time before his illness because of his drug problems. He was admitted/committed by his family. His mother was deeply religious and filled the room with candles and religious iconography and would pray in her son's room every day for 8 months.

She told my guest that she wasn't praying for his recovery but for his soul as her son had not been a good person.

Guest occasionally joined her in prayer and on what turned out to be the last day of the patient's life she actively asked for him to be there to do so with her. A third person, a female nurse also joined them. The mother warned it was going to be a heavy/intense one today.


You're not going to believe what he claims happened next ....

Kneeling in prayer , heads bowed , the mother suddenly gasps quietly that the Madonna was here in the room. He felt a presence, turned around and ..he swears all three of them watched what they understood to be the full apparition of the Virgin Mother walking back and forth around the bottom corner of the bed repeating audibly/ vocally in Italian "I wish I could do more for him" .


The patient's mother accepted what they were seeing, his colleague was calm, but my guest was utterly wide eyed and dumbstruck and started crying at what he was witnessing. .


Answers to questions I asked: it was a solid full sized woman. He could see her face clearly. He didn't mention a colour but suggested she had an appearance similar to the lens flare like image that he showed me in relation to another story. She had a headscarf/cloak flowing about her. She walking up and down around the corner of the bed ( I should check if he said walk or meant float ) . Essentially he was describing a full bodied apparitional ghost. She was speaking out loud. The interpretation that it was Mary/ the Madonna was from it being clearly so/ understood instinctively. I asked and he affirmed that it categorically wasnt a case of a flesh and blood woman entering the room behind his back.

How did it end? He and his colleague left the two mothers, so to speak alone to communicate as they backed out of the room. So never saw it disappear.

They were three witnesses but never spoke to others about as it was a private thing.

He was so affected he later had a tattoo of the Madonna on his leg.


And that's the story. My first guest tale with a fully religious/ miraculous theme.


Make of it what you will.
 
I don't normally dissect other people's stories this way, though I often do with my own, but ive some thoughts/interpretations if we start from the assumption it was an accurate description of a genuinely paranormal experience.

I have a built in personal reticence to accepting religious flavored encounters as what they appear to be, which I don't show with ghosts and UFOs. Largely because the Sunday School notion of an afterlife of angels, devils, saints and worship is an uncomfortable and unpleasant one. And if we limit it to the subject of Marian apparitions it seems to be hard to credit that the Mary in the bible , who's cult is very much centuries post mortem , is hovering around for eternity fretting ..and seemingly helpless to do much given her quoted words... over one random individual in a hospital bed among billions of souls on earth.

It's also notable that ..as far as I'm aware ..the apparition/s understood to be biblical Mary has never identified herself as such directly or by name.

But "she", the apparition, is nonetheless experienced.

My two thoughts in this case - accepting it to be real and paranormal - is could it have been the spirit of a deceased grandmother or great grandmother or the like making her deathbed appearance at his crossing over, and the religious piety of the mother the surroundings, and her initial words, imposed "Mary" upon the "ghost"?

Or... Could the same piety and intense prayer/faith have created what we on here know of as a tulpa? Might this "Madonna" have been conjured into existence like Philip the phantom?

Just a thought.
 
gattino said:
could it have been the spirit of a deceased grandmother or great grandmother or the like making her deathbed appearance at his crossing over,
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That crossed my mind as well, that it was described as being the Madonna but it's taken for granted it's the Madonna. Maybe all angels appear as the Madonna? Maybe it was just an ancestral spirit wearing the same sort of thing that the Madonna wore? But you're right, it makes more sense that it was a family member who came back than anything else.
 
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Aydee_Aitchdee said:
That crossed my mind as well, that is was described as being the Madonna but it's taken for granted it's the Madonna. Maybe all angels appear as the Madonna? Maybe it was just an ancestral spirit wearing the same sort of thing that the Madonna wore? But you're right, it makes more sense that it was a family member who came back than anything else.
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That would be my interpretation as well. I've never read of a credible account of a talking ghost though which puts this account into the top category of such encounters.
 
Steven said:
In my experience, Italian people tend to believe in the reality of such incidents (as I, kind of, implied in my recent Exorcism thread entry).
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I think the church aspect would indicate that, which raises a valid point; that they see what their faith has taught them to see, which may or may not be what it actually is.
 
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gattino said:
Or... Could the same piety and intense prayer/faith have created what we on here know of as a tulpa? Might this "Madonna" have been conjured into existence like Philip the phantom?
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:nods:
Sounds possible. Tulpas are fascinating.

This process crossed my mind when I heard the Uncanny episode about the cook at Ampleforth College who heard a child sobbing every night.
An independent inquiry found that the school was where appalling sexual abuse [was] inflicted over decades on children as young as seven.
If ever there was a tulpa, it was at Ampleforth.
 
I got the chance to ask him follow up questions:

He was vague , with a plethora of adjectives , about the physical consistency of the apparition ...it was shimmering, it was energy, , ephemeral....it ( rather like people describing the white light in NDEs) was a sense of pure love....The one concrete descriptor was that it was essentially white in colour. He didn't see the bottom of it and the impression was of it floating back and forth rather than walking one foot in front of another.

I ran my alternative paranormal theories past him and he was willing to entertain both, except to emphasise the insistence on this angelic loving presence about it. He conceded willingly it was the mother's identifying of the apparition as the Madonna that primed him to read it as such but the long cloth draped over the head and body and the sensations here described both seemed immediately appropriate to the claimed identity so he didn't question it at the time.
 
Not to be a tease but something potentially interesting is happening.

Firstly he told me another story involving apparent messages from his own deceased brother. I would have reported that here and will later if I don't forget the details, but things took a turn for the ....hmm...tantalising when i told him my stories and he became fixated with the photo of my own deceased sibling on the mantlepiece. (He's in a striking pose, with hat , cigarette and squint straight at the camera. Touch of the Hemingways about it).

I should first explain that in telling his own tales he revealed he's that catch-all term "spiritual" and had been taught from childhood by his grandmother to talk to dead loved ones....in the form of conversations in his head. He never used the word medium or psychic at any point I ought to emphasise, but im not sure how you would otherwise label such claimed interactions. Hence it wasn't completely out of the blue that he talked about feeling my brother looking at us from the photo etc. I told him in passing that he had promised to come through with an agreed message before he died and its never happened. I half jokingly challenged the photo out loud to give the message to my apparently gifted guest to pass on to me. Guest was all for the idea......


But it's late. I'll finish this story tomorrow....(i won't over egg the pudding. No secret code yet. But as i say something intriguing happened with the expectation of more to follow tomorrow. I've seen the trailer...im waiting to see if the movie lives up to it. And now you're in the same boat.)
 
So...he said he was going in the garden for a cigarette and would have one with my brother to commune with him ...

Unlike him ( he frequently goes off on tangents and side stories) I'll try and stick to the most relevant details. When he first came back in he said my brother said I ( me) needs his help with something. Nothing I can think of. And there was a significance to something blue...a toy or game ...something blue. No...nope...no associations in my recall. He supported Everton I guess but not in any dominant or defining way.

He was insistent on this blue thing. But then he did something that made me sit up and take notice. He said he just felt something in his back and started rolling his shoulders. I didn't comment and when I told him ten minutes later he'd said something relevant he needed me to spell it out as he'd already forgotten it. My brother died of bone cancer which manifested as months of misdiagnosed back pain.

Then the intriguing thing happened. He came back in to the living room again asking if I'd seen his second, work, phone and was fretting and agitated wondering if he'd left it in a taxi. We searched down the back of the sofa and round the table, the only places he'd been sitting. Nothing. Obvious thing ..ring it. He did. And we heard it ring. And ring. And ring.

The next 15 to 20 minutes were spent in an insane game of trying to locate where it was coming from. It was never nearby but which ever direction you moved it it seemed further away. It was ridiculous and the longer it went on it seemed impossible not to think, amusedly , this was some kind of puzzle or demonstration from the deceased.

Eventually I went methodically from one side of the room to the other and finally heard the volume of the ring get clearer when my ear was near the back surface of the couch. . it's in the sofa somewhere! Of course it was down behind the seat cushions near where he'd been sitting... but so far down in the crease it had been impossible to find it the first few times of searching. Nothing supernatural but...the idea we were being lead there by the departed was already in the air so we retrieved any small past piece of fluff and crap trapped in those gaps in case we were going to find something relevant .. only thing that looked meaningful to me was a small piece of newspaper with my sister's work number hand written on it.

And a small blue strip of plasticy paper advertising Cancer research. Apt to his illness but otherwise inconsequential to me ....but he immediately emphasized the fact it was blue. A few minutes later he asked me what that blue thing was and where I put it....I said I'd put it all in the bin. No, it maybe important...he went and retrieved it from the kitchen bin.

"It's actually a pen" he discovered when he brought it back. Weird...so it was ..despite appearing to be a flat piece of paper.

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And then a lightbulb went off in my head. I didn't tell him but went searching for a written record of what just hit me , while he went back in the garden to get answers from my brother ( yes I know!)

He returned implying he'd gotten a lot ...I'll tell you now he's yet to actually convey what that was other than brother was saying all the information needed will become apparent soon, and he himself was confident more will come to him in the night. We shall see.

Then I told him what I was looking for and had found.

What it was is intriguing, entertaining to me but I'm not excited by it as yet ...he however was over the moon about the connection. , the sense he was meant to be here etc, and like it was an answer to his prayers after months of nothing of this kind happening. You could see he was sincerely emotional like a priest whose faith was waning and just had it reaffirmed.

On 17 August 2020 I reported to one of my remaining brothers s phone call id received from the eldest brother ....
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(BtW if any of you are putting the pieces of this potential puzzle together you may be tempted to the dark thought ...I need his help ..the pen is relevant to me..cancer research...throw in that Guest expressed his intention to do some new agey quack diagnosis procedure in me this morning ...you might be tempted to think I'm being told I too have Cancer. He assures me he didn't get that sense at all. So that's ok....)
 
gattino said:
My brother died of bone cancer which manifested as months of misdiagnosed back pain.
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I'm sorry this happened, how awful for everyone.

My mother believes that unexplained back pain indicates cancer. I put this down to her knowing people who've had lung cancer, which sometimes first shows up as localised back pain.

So I listen hard when people grouse about back pain and will advise them to get it looked at.
Same applies to voices that change momentarily to a raspy tone and back.
 
So this morning i came down and he's up and about and says how exhausted he is...again suggesting he got a lot from the spirit world through the night, but again nothing concrete has been said that i can relate to. As I indicated earlier - and openly to him - he both goes off on tangents and the tangents themselves are detailed. So trying to keep the narrative on a straight path is very hard. His enthusiasm and sense of excitement is also such that he has - to my more linear and practical mindset - an unhelpful habit of seeing every last comment, remark or piece of information as significant or profound and part of the puzzle. It's difficult to say anything without him declaring in disbelief that he had been thinking or feeling that very thing or something relatable to it earlier.

I said to him and will repeat here it is absolutely evident he is sincere and genuine, not someone putting on a performance...he's feeling/perceiving great mystery here...whereas I am still waiting for a concrete solid statement, a name, a coherent sentence purportedly from my brother...or indeed anyone else. He talked about the energies of a certain female he described...description meant nothing to me. He said he's telling him he needs to talk to me about something. I'm still waiting.

However.........I've always been so vague on here about the post mortem code words my brother had settled with me that I've never even clarified if its a name, a phrase, a sentence, or what. But there is something directly ...very directly ....relevant in the house. And twice he has drawn attention to this something as having meaning in all of this. Luckily when he first mentioned it he was looking away from me so didn't see my eyes widen in intrigue and anticipation until he'd moved on to other things, so has no idea what he may have said.

He's having a phone call with a more experienced friend in Brazil later to see if he can help unravel the messages. I've also handed him my brother's (indecipherable) journal to see if holding it will give him anything beyond "energy". He's not been able to bring himself to pick it up yet. We shall see.....
 
gattino said:
He said he just felt something in his back and started rolling his shoulders.
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First, great account, reallly enjoyed it. As I digested this (mentally, of course) I wondered...did you notice any "tells" before this? What I mean is, was rolling his shoulders and back pain the first physical sensation he came out with? Or were there other thing he pointed out first? Did he mention head pain? Or his heart beating oddly or other things that may point to him trying to surreptitiously glean relevant information?

As for the pen, I'm not sure what to think. as you said, If it was a message from your brother or a deceased relative, what's the message? Was he interested in writing? Did he think you have a career in writing?

gattino said:
He's having a phone call with a more experienced friend in Brazil later to see if he can help unravel the messages. I've also handed him my brother's (indecipherable) journal to see if holding it will give him anything beyond "energy". He's not been able to bring himself to pick it up yet. We shall see.....
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Can't wait for the next chapter!
 
escargot said:
I'm sorry this happened, how awful for everyone.

My mother believes that unexplained back pain indicates cancer. I put this down to her knowing people who've had lung cancer, which sometimes first shows up as localised back pain.

So I listen hard when people grouse about back pain and will advise them to get it looked at.
Same applies to voices that change momentarily to a raspy tone and back.
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My dad only went to the doctor when his back pain got so bad, he couldn't sleep. It was because the tumor on his spine had grown so large, it broke one of his vertebrae.
 
No meaningful updates...no further mention of the Brazilian contact....

I'm full of willing to be impressed but beyond the definitely interesting synchronicity about the pen down the sofa there's nothing solid for me to respond to....yet he continues to interpret random thoughts as messages, and any information i give him about anything as profoundly significant and relatable to something he had thought or felt earlier but never said. Each time he sees such a connection you can tell he himself is impressed by the layers of a byzantine puzzle...but im just left staring blankly having been given nothing to react to.


I am not mocking, simply reporting, that he said that the thought "my little brother" was placed in his head earlier. Ok, im clearly by dead sibling's younger brother...and? But he repeated it several times with an expectant look as if it were an unusual phrase that would have been eerily significant to me. What does one do with that?
 
Aydee_Aitchdee said:
did you notice any "tells" before this? What I mean is, was rolling his shoulders and back pain the first physical sensation he came out with? Or were there other thing he pointed out first? Did he mention head pain? Or his heart beating oddly or other things that may point to him trying to surreptitiously glean relevant information?
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He never associated the back with pain...at least he didn't say so...until i told him its significance. HE just indicated he had suddenly felt sensation in his back and then he rolled his shoulders back as if responding to it. He made no other mentions of body parts or ailments then.... subsequently he's asked more than once about stomach or digestive issues. But that's about it.
 
gattino said:
He never associated the back with pain...at least he didn't say so...until i told him its significance. HE just indicated he had suddenly felt sensation in his back and then he rolled his shoulders back as if responding to it. He made no other mentions of body parts or ailments then.... subsequently he's asked more than once about stomach or digestive issues. But that's about it.
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It may be that he is unintentionally reacting to your suggestions. It is always difficult to remember, even immediately after, if a sensation occurred before or after someone has suggested that it might have meaning.

I do believe that people who are close can feel subjective pain in relation to the other person. Don't know if a random person can.

As to what he had experienced in the hospital room, I also wondered if the figure was a deceased family member, staff member etc. I even have heard that angels who appear to people put on a disguise as such, to look familiar to prevent fear in people. Angels supposedly are not humanlike.
 
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