The short answer is No.
When Josie was 10 years old, she was going to church camp.
At around 6 in the morning she got out of bed, showered, washed her hair and sat in the living room in the dark before her parents awoke and got ready to fix breakfast and take her to the church.
She was already feeling homesick and she hadn’t even left yet. She went into the kitchen, turned on the overhead light, went out to get the newspaper and sat at the kitchen table to read it.
Josie didn’t hear anyone come into the kitchen, but she felt as though she was being watched. She looked up and saw a young woman with straight blond shoulder-length hair, a flowery blouse, black jeans and white tennis shoes.
“What are you doing here?” Josie asked. She didn’t see anyone when she went out to get the paper. Did she forget to lock the door?
She just stood there with her arms crossed looking at Josie.
Josie got up and ran to tell her mother some stranger was in the kitchen.
Her mother immediately got up, put on a robe and slippers and went out to confront this stranger in her kitchen.
When Josie and her mother got to the kitchen, no one was there. They searched the house, but found no one. The door was locked and bolted from the inside.
Josie knew what she saw. Her mother tried to explain it away, but it looked like a real person, not a ghost.
At breakfast with her parents, she tried to put the incident behind her. They spoke about camp and what a great time she was going to have. Her father spoke of the fun he had as a kid going to camp and camping with his family.
When Josie arrived at the church camp after a long bus ride, one of the camp counselors looked exactly like the woman she saw in the kitchen that morning, but she was dressed differently.
This unnerved Josie. When she was assigned to the cabin of this particular camp counselor, she burst into tears. She didn’t know how she was going to survive a week with the “ghost” in her kitchen as her camp counselor.
Immediately, the woman took Josie aside to see what was bothering her. Josie explained the events of the morning. The counselor asked her where she lived. Three years ago to the day, the camp counselor’s twin sister was visiting her boyfriend who lived at that address. They were having an argument and he killed her right in the kitchen.
The camp counselor took it as a sign that her sister was telling her she was all right and perhaps knew Josie would be seeing her later that day to pass on the message.
“But she looked so real,” Josie said.
Since the apparition said nothing and was standing with her arms crossed, it didn’t seem at all friendly, but defensive. That may have been how she stood, facing her boyfriend before she was killed.
It’s not a pleasant story as far as the deceased twin was concerned, but for Josie and the camp counselor it explained something about the afterlife and how we are messengers for them, even when they don’t communicate with us. They do come to us in the form that we will accept . . . and sometimes scare the wits out of us.
Apparitions can be transparent and they can also be very lifelike. Here are other experiences:
Melonie was a high school math teacher.
She was working late at the high school when a little girl wearing a long black dress and boots with buttons up the side asked her, “Have you seen my mama?” Melonie said no and the little girl disappeared, just vanished. Melonie had seen apparitions before so this didn’t alarm her, but she did feel sad that this child was looking for her mother. Melonie wanted to show her to the light. That was probably where her mother was waiting for her.
Matt saw a pirate walking around the mall one night.
Matt was a security guard at the mall. All the stores were locked up and the cleaning crew was leaving. He was just going to go through the mall one last time before taking his dinner break when he saw a man dressed like a pirate with a patch on one eye and a sword in the sash that was tied around his waste.
Matt thought it was a man in costume. He called out to him to stop. He shouted, “The mall is closed and you have to get out!”
He looked all over the mall for this pirate, but didn’t see him. His buddy was in the security room with all the cameras and recordings. He asked if he had seen a pirate walking around the mall. His friend thought it was some kind of joke and waited for the punch line.
He checked the recordings, but there was no man dressed as a pirate walking around the mall.
Any doors that opened, would sound an alarm and that didn’t happen.
Three experiences of seeing ghostly apparitions that were three dimensional lets us know that apparitions are not always transparent.
This probably happens more often than we realize. I’ve been known to talk with apparitions at my local grocery store, believing it was a person shopping just like me … but later seeing the apparitions floating a few inches above the ground and walking through cars while crossing the parking lot.
So … just remember we’re not alone … there are apparitions all around us — some we can see and some we can’t.
I hope you enjoyed this post.
Thanks for stopping by!
Sharon
