Coincidental Herbal Tea / Signs and other ghost stories

Weekly Special

Hi my dear beloved customers,

What can I get you today? What about our Weekly Special : Our magical Coincidental Herbal Tea ?

Is it really magical, will you ask me? Who knows? It depends essentially on what you believe…

As most people, for a long time, I thought that events happened randomly into our lives and that when you died, there was just nothing to be hoped for, you just ceased to exist. No need to tell you that when I was in my teens and, later, a young adult, I was terrified by death, dreading to die everyday, and thinking that every tiny ache in my body was the forcast of an awful deadly disease. I could spend a sleepless night over a pimple ending up convinced that it was an uncurable cancer.

The most curious thing about this is that living wasn’t a happy place for me either, I was suffering from deep depression, and yet, dying was not an option, well, until it ended to be one but not for long. What happened then? As I’ve related it in my first Monthly Book Selection on Café 42, at one point, I found God or, rather, God found me and showed me that there might be a little more to life than I could see. I first learned how to get acquainted with myself through therapy, to second love myself and third to pay attention to my intuition and my inner self which is still currently a work in progress but I am much better at it when my mind don’t try to hack them.

So when new beliefs entered my life, I began to look at things differently, specifically at the possibility that I was a spiritual being gifted with an immortal soul. This concept, as you can imagine, deeply alleviated my death terror, which came back very heavily when my daughter was born because I was very scared by the idea I would die before I could see her growing up. It took me a few more months of therapy to deal with that.

Nevertheless, while I was so afraid by death, I had a very weird ongoing relationship with ghosts. Though I didn’t believe in anything after death, I believed in ghosts – Go figure! – and was as fascinated with them as terrified. I would go for ghost stories in books and on screens and wouldn’t sleep for weeks after that. When I saw Night Shyamalan’s “Sixth Sense” in which the young boy who sees ghosts wants to go to the bathroom to pee in the middle of the night and stays terrified at the threshold of his bedroom because he knows a ghost awaits him in the other room, I haven’t been able to go pee at night for weeks, holding it uncomfortably until morning. Quite recently, I read “Shining” by Stephen King and was terrified by the half decomposed woman in the hotel room bathroom’s tub that tries to strangle Danny, the young hero. Up until now, when I am in a hotel room with a tub in the bathroom, I need to close the bathroom door to be able to sleep. The strangest thing is, as I relate these two stories, it is the first time ever I notice the resemblance between the two: two young boys terrified by a ghost in a bathroom…

This leads me to the very weird long week-end I spent at my mother’s a few weeks ago. My stepfather, my mother’s ex-husband and brother’s dad, had past away a few weeks earlier and it was the first time we would gather ever since. At that period, I was reading a very interesting book from Laura Lynne Jackson called “Signs” which, through stories of people she encountered during her life as a psychic medium who talks to the deceased, explains how everyone can receive, as long as they are attentive, signs from their past away loved ones. As I have always been interested in those kinds of things, especially since my guides have appeared in my life, I wanted to learn a few more tricks to be more receptive. Sometimes, you have to be very careful with what you wish for…

So, before we arrived at my mother’s, I asked my past stepfather, as my brother was coming to dinner with his family, to send us a sign over dinner to say that he was okay and always with us. During apetizers, my husband told me that he didn’t feel well and went on the terrace to breathe fresh air. I went back and forth a few times to see how he was doing. The third time I went, I found him sitted straight like a stone statue, his hand clunched to his glass of limonade so tight I couldn’t remove it and his eyes following something in the sky, deaf to my calling him. At first, I thought he was having a stroke or a seizure but he came back a few long seconds later, as if nothing had happened, thinking that I was making a fuss out of nothing. At that moment, I knew without any doubt that my stepfather had tried to come through him. As I’m not completely insane, I gave my husband two aspirines though and sent him to bed, checking on him every thirty minutes or so, but he enjoyed a very quiet and peaceful evening in bed, reading and playing on his Ipad, and was quite revigorated when I came to bed a few hours later. He’s been very fine and healthy ever since, thank you for asking!

Image created with Midjourney

But that wasn’t the end of it that evening, far from it… After my dear hubbie was being stayed put in bed, I went back downstairs to have a coffee on the terrace with my mother, brother and sister-in-law. As they already know I am a little weird as a person, I shared with them what I thought had happened. My brother laughed and dismissed my comments with a benevolent compassion for my lack of mind sanity - and for my family who had to put up with me -, his wife who is more open to this kind of things accepted the possibility I was offering and – you have to understand the setting of what is going to happen next for it is just incredible: we were sitting in the garden around a wooden table, almost in the dark, and I was facing my mother in that very dim light at the other side of the table -, at that very moment, my mother looked straight at me and said, out of the blue, “I know, when you were kid, you told me you were seeing dead people and one had scared you”. I was so stunned at her words that I could barely breathe. After a few speechless seconds, I asked her: “Why haven’t you told me that before?” and she very casually answered as if we were talking about the weather: “I don’t know. It never occured to me to talk about it before tonight.”

Something broke open inside of me that night. As my brother and his family had left, my mother and daughter went for a walk and I burst into tears in the kitchen. Suprisingly, what I felt was a great deal of relief, as though I had been given back a long forgotten part of myself. My terrified fascination for ghosts always seemed too intense to be “normal” to me, I knew there was something more to it, I just didn’t remember what, and with that post now, I am convinced that the ghost that scared me when I was a child was in a bathroom… My next step will be to try and remember what happened then.

You would think that it would be enough for one week-end. How wrong you are, my friends! Though the following events were far more joyful. The next day, I went for a walk to the church near my mother’s house which I love, especially its blue vaulted ceiling. One of the specificity of this church, apart from that ceiling, and the cathedral in the nearby small town in which my brother lives is that they are both dedicated to a local saint: Saint Germaine. It could be a coincidence that Germaine was also my maternal grand-mother’s name, right?

So, I go to that church and, as always, I sit in the front row, say a small prayer and say “Hi” to my grandma. My eyes wander on the floor at my feet and I recognize, bewildered, the carpet in front of me: it was the exact same one that stood in my living room when I was a child, in the late 70’s, on which my stepfather used to teach me how to dance rock’n’roll. Of course, it could just be a coincidence, couldn’t it? I go back to my mother’s and tell her what I just saw, showing her pictures and she couldn’t believe her eyes… What were the odds that the exact same carpet would end up in that nearby church?

Do you want more? ‘cause there’s more! A day later, we were sorting out old boxes of photos my mother hadn’t opened since her moving in a year ago. There were loads of things in one of the box, old papers and documents from my maternal great grand-mother, photos of my mother as a child, of her parents and photos of my dear beloved maternal grandpa – Papy Pierrot – as a child with his four brothers and as a young man. He was very handsome with black heavy hair and magnificent blue eyes.

Portrait of my grandpa in his early 20s

I adored him and was telling so to my mother, dwelling on a beautiful portrait of him in his early 20s, when a long rectangular torn piece of paper fell on the table. My mother said “Look, it was written by your grandpa. He signed it”. Indeed, it was the very end of a letter from my grandpa which had been ripped off and which said: “See you soon. I end sending you kisses from the bottom of my heart.” It could just be a coincidence, right? But could it? Really?

That was the end of it, my dear beloved customers, but what a grandiose finale! Parting with my grandpa’s deep love for us, what better end could we hope for such a very weird and ghostly week-end!

I would very much love to read in the comments about the kind of weird coincidences you have encountered in your life. Have you ever lived a week-end as strange as mine?

Lots of love,

Geay

PS: If you like her stories but are not ready to subscribe yet, tip the Bartender.