I like to tell stories. That, of course, must be obvious from my website, which has links to my three novels as well as Short Stories, Poems and Blogs, which are really essays.
So I have three incidents to relate to you. I suppose this is technically an essay, since it is a Blog post. However, the unusual nature of one or more of my experiences may become the basis for fiction.
Our daughter, Katie, died in September of 1992, having suffered a severe birth accident in February of that year. This event was the basis for my series of three fantasy novels, The Ur Legend. But what was the motivation for me to write fiction, something I had never attempted?
About a month or so after Katie died, I was driving home from work and all of a sudden was in the grips of extreme sorrow. I pulled over at the top of a hill overlooking our house and just put my head down on the steering wheel. Then out of the corner of my eye I saw a figure in the passenger seat. It was of human form but was grey, with no other distinguishing features. I lifted my head off of the wheel and cocked my head, as if to rest it on the shoulder of this apparition.
Immediately, I felt better, rejuvenated. A few months later I had an idea for a short story that became a novel that became a series of novels, giving Katie a fictional life since she had been deprived of the real experience. Did this entity serve as motivation? I don’t know, but I would like to think so. And I believe it was one of the characters in my books, who reveals his true identity near the end of Book 1, Sun Valley Moon Mountains. No spoilers!
My sister is psychic and an empath. She has had numerous paranormal experiences. However I don’t share her gifts and never again had an ‘unusual’ encounter until my wife, Linda, went into hospice in early November 2023. She was alert and doing well the evening she was admitted to CHOMP hospital on the Monterey Peninsula. So I decided to spend one last night in my own bed before she was entirely sedated.
I left the hospital around 3 AM and took the short ride back to our house, only five minutes away. As I went through the gated entrance to 17 Mile Drive and drove down the rather steep hill I saw the most unusual thing. A person on a bicycle riding up this very steep grade. They were aware enough to have a light attached to the handlebars. ‘What in hell!’, I thought. The person was definitely ‘off”. But I later changed my opinion.
Linda died the next Sunday morning in the wee hours, around 2AM. I had awakened at around 1 and after a pit stop gave her one of those little sponges on sticks so she could have a little refreshment. Reflexively, I guess, but enthusiastically she sucked on the sponge, though she was sedated. The nurses awakened me just before 2 to tell me she had ‘passed’. I spent some time alone with her and was deeply saddened by the fact that I had not been awake and holding her hand when she took her last breath. Why I felt that way I did not know and still don’t.
But a paranormal experience also happened the evening before, Saturday, around 6 PM. All of the power in the hospital went out, as it did elsewhere on the Peninsula. Odd. My sister was adamant that this was her life force leaving her body. Perhaps.
But when I drove home from CHOMP that Sunday morning, after a glass of wine I pondered those two incidents. As I said, my sister gave me a valid explanation for the power outage. But the bicyclist… What or who was that? I have come to the conclusion that it was Death riding up to the hospital and went there for Linda.
