Managing Editor
During a family visit this week from eldest son and his wife and our two grandchildren, my daughter-in-law Casie mentioned to me a psychic experience that she had back home in Connecticut where she was visited in the middle of the night by what she described as “aliens.”
Back when my father was struck head-on and killed by a drunk driver while returning from his sister’s house in Florida in May 1991, I was staying with my parents after moving there from New Mexico. I had not lived in their home for more than four months when my father died, and I didn’t know a whole lot about their home.
There was a shower in the bathroom off my mother’s bedroom, but my father never used it because he preferred taking a bath in the bathroom off the hallway. When he would turn on the tub faucet, the pipes in the home were loud and echoed through the walls as water rushed through them. After a while of staying there, I became accustomed to the sound and overlooked it.
Several weeks after my father died in the accident, my mother flew to Ohio to visit friends and to just get away and try to process what had happened. That left me in their home all by myself for several weeks taking care of their dog, a 5-year-old dachshund named Mitzi, who would sleep at the foot of my bed.
On a Saturday night early in June, I stayed up late and watched Saturday Night Live before turning in around 1 a.m. or so. Sometime after I had fallen asleep, something odd happened.
I was awakened in the middle of the night by the dog who had barked twice. She apparently thought that she had heard something in the hallway, and she was listening intently for further sounds. I turned on the light and didn’t see anything and went back to sleep.
About half an hour later, the dog barked again, and I could hear water running through the pipes into the hallway bathroom tub. I got out of bed, walked to the bathroom, and opened the door. Although I could still hear the water in the pipes, the tub was dry, and water wasn’t filling the tub. I went back to bed and when I woke up that morning, I forgot all about it.
The next evening, at about 3 a.m. the exact same thing happened again. The dog barked, I could hear water in the pipes, and it sounded like someone was drawing a bath. This time though when I walked into the bathroom the tub faucet was on and water was filling the tub. I checked the entire house and made sure all the doors were shut and locked and they were. I was all alone there in the house and had not turned on the tub faucet for the bathtub.
When I mentioned the incident to my mother when she got home from her trip, she told me it must have been my father trying to communicate from the other side. I told her that was crazy, and she said the same thing had happened to her a few days after my father’s death. She said she was startled by the dog barking, and she found water running in the tub which she turned off. When she went back to sleep, she said she felt a tap on her shoulder and my father was standing there and he said everything was fine and that he was OK.
My father was skeptical of many psychic things during his life, but he did believe in fortune tellers. Just after I had moved to Florida, he asked me if I had ever heard of this town called Cassadaga. He told me it was a town of mystics and fortune tellers and he wanted to take me there on a Saturday morning to have a fortune teller read my palm. He drove me there and the fortune teller told me I would get married to someone whose name started with the initial “N.” Not knowing anyone with a first name starting with “N,” I didn’t think much of that prediction. But 14 years later, Nancy and I were married, and as it turned out, the fortune teller was correct.
Leaving Cassadaga that day, my father asked what I thought about the fortune teller. When I told him the jury was still out on that, he said he drove me there so I could feel good about myself. I asked if he believed in ghosts and he joked that if he ever came back after dying, he’d want to take a bath first.
I told Casie that I am not going to discount her late-night visitor experience because I’ve experienced my own strange occurrence. <
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