Читать книгу Communications From the Other Side - Anthony Quinata - Страница 11

I seriously doubt I would even be doing this work if it weren’t for my aunt Sue. Sue isn’t from Guam, but from Japan. She is married to my uncle Joe, who is my mother’s brother.

It’s very common for young men from Guam to sign up for military service. My father was a career Navy man, working on an aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Yorktown, up until I was ten years old. My uncle was career Army. Both of them served overseas during the Korean and Vietnam wars. My family and my Aunt Sue’s family lived in Southern California, so we spent a lot of time at my aunt’s home.

One night, when I was eight years old, my aunt told me a Japanese ghost story that frightened the living daylights out of me. It scared me so much that I jumped out of my chair, and to this day I believe I actually had to use my hands to keep my head from hitting the ceiling!

Everyone laughed at me, but after that, I was hooked. Every time I’d spend the night at her house, I’d ask her to tell me another ghost story which usually meant I’d be so afraid that I’d have to change my underwear and lie in bed terrified of the ghost I was sure was going to come for me, either out of the closet or from under the bed.

“Were there really such things as ghosts?” I wondered. The answer to my question came one night when I was watching television with my mother. My sister Meridith and my brother Eddie were both asleep, and after watching an episode of “Batman,” I was ready to fall asleep as well. The television set that my mother and I were watching was in the bedroom I shared with Eddie. As soon as the show ended, I asked my mother if she wanted to keep watching television.

My mother asked me if I was ready to go to bed. Since I indicated that I was, she told me to go ahead and turn off the television. As soon as I did, we both heard a very loud, male voice call out my mother’s name.

“Rosalia!”

I stood next to the television looking at my mother. We were both wondering the same thing, “Had someone broken into our house?”

“Who are you?” my mother asked.

Once again we heard the same voice say, “Rosalia!” “What do you want?” my mother asked, clearly afraid.

After that, we heard muttering and what sounded like the front door being slammed shut, followed by the screen door. “Go check the front door and make sure it’s locked,” my mother told me.

I ran out into the living room and checked the front door. “It’s locked!” I called out to my mother.

“Check the screen door!” I opened the front door and let her know that it was locked too.

I don’t know how long it took my mother to finally fall asleep, but I fell asleep rather quickly, happy to have had what I thought was my first experience with a real “ghost.”

The next day my mother decided we were going to spend the night at my Aunt Sue’s house. When my mother told Sue what had happened, my aunt said (of course, I was eavesdropping on their conversation) that someone had been knocking on her back door for three straight hours! Sue told us that she kept asking, “Who is it?” When no one answered and the knocking persisted, she picked up a carving knife, held it up in the air, and said, “Come in!”

No one did, but the knocking on the door continued.

The next day my mother received a call from one of her sisters. Their father was ill and in the hospital. At one point, my mother was told that my grandmother was unconscious and kept muttering, “Rosalia, José,” over and over again.

Technically, what happened is what is referred to in parapsychology as a “crisis communication.” Typically, crisis communications occur when someone is seriously injured, ill, or dying, and that person telepathically reaches out to someone close to them. Usually the person who is doing this isn’t aware that a message is being sent out.

I didn’t know about crisis communications when I was eight years old, but what my mother and I heard that night convinced me that ghosts do, indeed, exist, and it was the beginning of what would become an obsession that would last for years.