Visits from the Afterlife The Truth About Hauntings, Spirits, and Reunions With Lost Loved Ones

Introduction Thousands of people, many of them currently on earth, contributed to this book. There are the spirits and ghosts around the world who've been kind enough to show up and tell me their stories for the last half a century or so. There are the 2,014 visitors to my Web site who had the courage and generosity to e-mail their experiences to me, some of which you'll find in the pages that follow'and let me make it clear right now, I read every single one of those e-mails. Those 2,014 brave people were on the receiving end of some fascinating appearances by spirits and ghosts, some of them deeply comforting and some of them terrifying. There's a victim of an unsolved murder who told me the name of her killer, and there's a Spirit Guide who left her voice on an audiotape, repeating a single word that gave a woman the key to her husband's criminal life. There's a woman who was given strength by a visit with an ex-boyfriend on The Other Side who she didn't know had passed away, and a man who would never have found out he had a stillborn baby sister if her spirit hadn't come to introduce herself when he was four years old.To the thousands of us collaborators on this particular book, and the many millions who don't question any more than we do that of course there's an afterlife, there are those who will always be ready with a list of handy explanations for what we ?think? we're seeing, hearing, and feeling. ?Grief hysteria,? ?oxygen deprivation,? and variations on terms for both ?mental illness? and ?scam? are among the most popular. What these skeptics and ?experts? are usually insisting on, though, is the same cynical demand, over and over and over again, which boils down to: ?Prove that there's life after death.' I'm sixty-six years old, and I've never spent one instant doubting that there's life after death. The thousands of us who contributed to this book, on earth and beyond it, don't doubt it. The millions we represent don't doubt it. God certainly doesn't doubt it, since He's the One who told us it's true in the first place, and we take His word for everything. We're not the ones who are having a problem with this. You are. So why do we keep knocking ourselves out trying to prove something we already know with absolute certainty? Here's my suggestion to the skeptics and ?experts,? for a refreshing change of pace. We're done proving that there's life after death. We've proven it well past our own satisfaction. From now on, let's do it this way: You prove that there's not. Chapter One THE TRUTH ABOUT GHOSTS AND SPIRITS I believe in ghosts, and in the real and magnificent presence of spirits among us from The Other Side. I believe because, like so many of you, I've seen them, heard them, been startled by them, even smelled the faint familiar fragrance of a lost loved one, urging me to notice, to embrace their assurance that they're not gone at all, they're right here, not some trick of my imagination or wishful thinking, if I'll just open my eyes, ears, mind, and heart and pay attention. I believe because, surrounded by so much overwhelming evidence of their existence during my sixty-six years on this earth, I'd be insane not to believe. Most of all, I believe because I know to the core of my being that the majority of the world's great religions are right'we are all eternal, every one of us, as our birthright from God who created us. Our spirits always were and always will be. Our physical bodies are only temporary housing for the essence of who we are, that divine part of us that feels joy and sorrow and love and reverence and holds our truth and our timeless memories and our wisdom intact. Death will take our bodies sooner or later, but it can never, ever destroy us. God promised us everlasting lives, and He doesn't break His promises. And it's precisely because I take God at His wBrowne, Sylvia is the author of 'Visits from the Afterlife The Truth About Hauntings, Spirits, and Reunions With Lost Loved Ones', published 0015 under ISBN 9780525947561 and ISBN 0525947566.