I woke up at 3 a.m. and can't sleep, so I finished off reading the rest of forum. There are some really great stories with great story tellers.
No one, as far I can remember, has out right stated that ghosts really exist. That there is a spiritual world out there and that there is life after death. I have to admit I'm a seeker, but not willingly. It's almost like I'm drawn towards it and there is this sense of fascination. Some of us are born with the ability to sense this other world more in different ways. I struggle with it, because isn't life hard enough as it is? Now I have to worry about the spiritual world too? But once you become aware how do you turn back? How can you just shrug it off? And then to learn that there are real demons too. For some reason, ghosts don't scare me like the way demons do. Demons are powerful. Anyways, just venting some of my frustration and inner struggles.
Since you read that I owe you a first hand story:
When I was 21, 9 years ago, my family and I learned that my father was at his last stage of cancer and the doctors at Kaiser refused to treat him. They gave him his death date and my poor father waited for that day to come. When the death day came and went, he felt relief and hope again. My mother, in the mean time, was flying all over where ever she heard that there was a spiritual healer who could possibly help. It didn't matter if they were Hmong. She would go and beg, pay any amount they ask, and do whatever they asked of her thinking she could somehow save her husband.
I had no idea she was doing this. My father was also physically being treated by a home hospice nurse and his Caucasian co-workers would occassionally stop by to pray for him and sing Christian songs for him. At that time I didn't believe in the spiritual world nor did I think much about it even though I had witness things before. I did wonder why my father would allow his Christian friends to come over to pray and sing at his bedside when he was far from a Christian.
One day he pulled me aside and try to explain to me that there was a spiritual world and the physical world. He was trying to heal himself in both worlds. Not understanding what he was saying, I nodded my head and said okay.
Then one day, my father's pain became unbearable. The ambulance came and picked him up and he was taken to the hospital. No one was home, except for my grandpa and grandma on my mom's side and myself. I wasn't close to them because they lived so far away and we hardly ever saw them.
I remember this clearly, because the first thought that ran through my mind was, "How strange is that?". My grandparents were in the living room which is way up in front of the house and I was in back of the house in the last bedroom straight down the long, dark, narrow hallway. I absolutely hate long hallways.
I was folding a blanket in the bedroom with the door wide open, starring straight out into the hallway when I saw two white figures, one after another, exiting my father's room. They were 10 feet away from me. They did not look at me, but exited his room jumping up and down. Believe me, I did not have time to be scared. It happened so fast. It took me a minute to register what I had witnessed and then ask myself, "What do I do now and why where they jumping?"
I waited a few minutes in the room, what seemed like an eternity, to ensure that the two figures were gone from the hallway. This was when I remembered to be scared. No chance in hell was I going to pass them up in the hallway. As soon as I felt they were gone, I ran down the hallway into the living room to quietly sit with my grandparents. I didn't breathe a word, but sat there on the sofa silently thanking them for being there.
Later on that night, my mother called me to join her at the hospital where my father had to sleep over. I brought a sleeping bag to sleep on the hard, cold hospital floor. Before I knocked out, I told my mother I saw something strange at our home. I explained the two white figures and demonstrated their movements of jumping. She looked at me and said, "It's true. The spirits really did come home with me." She then explained that she had gone to go see a healer who had told her his spiritual healers will go home with her. The jumping movements I witnessed was them doing neeg.
My father didn't make it despite all the healing. When it's your time to go, I guess there isn't anything anyone can do to stop it. Even my father himself, who willed himself to live and did not want to pass to the other side, couldn't prevent it. He worried about leaving my mother alone and his children who would be without a father to lookout for them. He did not want us to suffer the way he did growing up without parents.
More to come on my father and his afterlife..... .............. .so when people tell me there is no such things as ghosts nor an afterlife, I know it to be different.