Signs: gifts from dead?
Scientists study question; many bereaved believe
Five years later, as she prepared to move away from south Texas and remarry, she sat at the grave again, saying goodbye. And as she sat — there was no wind, she recalls — an olive fell off the tree and landed on the grave.
Were the two olives a sign, or just a coincidence? A message, or just something that happened to fall off a tree? With no way of text messaging us from beyond the grave, would the dead be forced to rely on something as inconclusive, as inconsequential, as a tiny fruit in order to communicate such a momentous piece of information ("I'm still here!")? Dowdy, now living in Salt Lake City, is certain what happened in that Texas cemetery was significant. She had sat at the grave many times, she says, but the olives only fell "when I needed a confirmation."
Butterflies, rainbows, garage doors that go up and down for no reason — these are the kinds of stories the living tell about signs they believe they have received from the dead. Often these are stories shared tentatively, if they're shared at all, kept close to the chest for fear that they will be debunked by skeptical listeners.
"The consensus was that we who were the so called 'believers' were experiencing a more positive movement through our grief," Phran says. "The knowledge that our kids were still with us gave us the hope we so desperately needed just to survive each day."
So Phran and Bob began what they call Afterlife Discussion Groups in their home state of New York in 2003. There are now groups in eight states, and the Ginsbergs hope there will be at least one in every state, including Utah, within a couple of years. All that's needed, Phran says, is "10 to 20 people in drivable distance of each other, and a facilitator." In 2004, the Ginsbergs incorporated the nonprofit Forever Family Foundation to coordinate the groups and support research into survival of consciousness.
Here's one of the stories Bob tells about his daughter: About a year after Bailey died, Phran started noticing that whenever she drove past the accident site, a sound came out of the radio, even if the radio was off. Bob describes the sound as "a Morse code cadence," and at first he dismissed it as an electrical problem. A few weeks later, driving their truck instead of the car, Phran heard the same sound. Then the Ginsbergs started hearing it in other places — on the telephone and on the TV, even when the TV was turned off, and once over the public address system when University of Arizona researcher Dr. Gary Schwartz was giving a lecture about afterlife research.
Recent comments
Who was running the website? Why did they let the name expire? Why...
W P Blakey | March 25, 2008 at 9:26 p.m.
its a pity there is no evidence of the results of the experiments...
helen herring | Feb. 19, 2008 at 11:11 a.m.
