By chance I was watching something related to ghosts last night and it struck as some described these ghosts. How is it remotely possible or even thinkable to believe ghosts exist with clothes on?! Some were describing this man ghost seen on streets wearing a red plaid shirt. So are clothes spiritual? Then if we die with $20 dollars in our wallet wearing jewelry do we wander through eternity fully clothed wearing jewelry? Should not all spirits be at least naked??!! I know this sounds sarcastic but I am being serious. I don't recall a single testimony of a sighting describing the spirit as naked. If there is a feasible explanation it has to be something like we travel across some kind of barrier or other dimension at the precise moment of death............with our clothes on.
Everyone here can call me crazy if they want to, but I believe. Now, do I believe in ghosts? I'm not sure what to call them. But I've experienced things that I can't explain otherwise.
For example, I was at Petersburg VA National Battlefield walking across the main field when I looked down and then back up. When I looked back up there was a small cloud of whispy smoke right in front of me and I walked right through it. It smelled like tobacco smoke from a pipe. I took another step or two, and stopped to turn around to see what in the world I had walked through. When I turned around, there was nothing there.
I was working for the National Parks Service helping them recovery after Hurricane Isabel. That's what I was doing there. A few days later, I was eating lunch with the Park Superintendent and a few other people. One of the guys that works for me (Buddy) asked if any strange things had ever happened to any of the park guys while working there. One of the guys asked what he meant, and Buddy said he thought he smell smoke in the main field one day. I dropped my drink and everyone looked at me. The park guy asked if I had smelled it too. I said yes and that I had also seen the smoke when I walked through it. The park guys all started laughing and the superintendent aid that what we experienced was the "doctor."
Of course, we asked what he meant. He went on to tell us that a Confederate field hospital was located in the area that is now the main field of the park. He said that the story goes, that the "doctor" was a Confederate doctor that was killed while walking outside the hospital tent to have a smoke on his pipe, by a cannon shell and killed him instantly by taking off his head. He said that sometimes people will see him as well. He didn't describe if he was wearing any cloth or if he was naked. All I saw was smoke. Supposedly, the encounters happen at the same time of day, which the story is, is the same time that the "doctor" was killed. All of them had experienced also.
Now, did I encounter the "doctor?" I don't know. But... the park guys told me the exact time I smelled the smoke before I mentioned it, and that was also the same time Buddy said he smelled it. Buddy, by the way, is a 70+ y/o retired engineer. He isn't a person that would make up something. The reason he asked about the pipe smoke smell in the first place was because he wanted to know if there was some explanation for it, like some kind of plant that would make that smell that he had never heard of before. What he and I were told was not what either of us were expecting.
Also, as a combat medic, I have seen other things that I can't explain. For instance, there have been two separate times that I was working on guys in combat that had been hit, and they died; there was nothing I could do for either of them except make them as pain free as possible. Both times, when they died, the atmosphere around us got dark. Not real dark, but darker than it was before. And then almost at the same time, a glow came from them, rose above them, and then disappeared as the darkness faded. I can't explain that at all. It didn't happen except those two times.
The same thing happened in the hospital room when my father-in-law died in the ICU. The doctor and the two nurses said they had never seen anything like that before. The doctor, a friend of the family, was so stunned that I had to tap him on the arm and ask him if he needed to check him to declare him. He said yes, and then walked out of the room without doing anything. Later, his wife came into the room to console my wife. She came over to me before going over to my wife and asked what had happened. I told her that Bill (my father-in-law) had died. She said, and I'll never forget this, "Doug (her husband the doctor) is sitting behind the nurses station staring straight ahead and won't talk to anyone." I then told her what we had seen, or at least thought we had seen. She just looked at me and didn't make any comment. Later that evening when we had gone home, Doug came over to our house to talk about what we had seen. He said that he had heard of this happening from some of his doctor friends, but it had never happened to him. None of us could explain it, and just decided to believe that it was Bill saying goodby.
Anyway, like I said, I don't know what to call it or how to explain it exactly, but, I believe. In what? I don't know exactly.
There's something that happens to the energy and consciousness in our bodies when we die. That I do believe. That's the only way I can explain it.
