I know a lawyer who sees dead people - all the time - just like the character played by Haley Joel Osment in the 1999 M Night Shyamalan thriller, The Sixth Sense. What makes it a little surprising is that he's not a person given to esoteric interests. Another lawyer friend in Seattle saw a man and his dog walk through her apartment in the early hours of the morning. The dog even put its paws on her bed hoping to receive a pat. After they disappeared into the thin air, she sat in bed wondering what it was that she'd just seen. While there's a certain satisfaction in knowing that lawyers are haunted by spectral apparitions, such experiences are relatively common and upwards of one in five people worldwide have a similar story to share.
Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense (1999)
When I was about 11 years old, I saw not one but two spirits. At the time, I used to live with my grandparents, uncle, aunt and cousins in Poes Garden in the city of Madras. At night, my grandmother, cousin and I would sleep on mattresses on the floor of the living room. It was my habit to wake up every night around 1 am, make a trip to the bathroom, and then lie wide awake in the dark for close to an hour before falling back asleep. Some nights I would walk up to the mottai madi, the open terrace at the top of the house, and enjoy the cool air and stillness for some time before coming back down to bed. Most such nights were uneventful, except this one. I woke up in the middle of the night to see two figures of light standing at the foot of my mattress, looking at me. They were both the size of children, vaguely but definitely human in outline, but otherwise featureless. Inexplicably, I felt no fear. After perhaps 20 seconds or so, the two spirits started gliding (not walking!) towards the dining room and disappeared into the darkness towards the kitchen. Bursting with curiosity, I got up and followed them into the dining room, but they were not to be seen. I searched the kitchen, the pantry room behind it and the closed verandah to the side of the house, but no luck. They had vanished into the thin air.
I never thought to share this experience with anyone until many years later. I was now 27 and living in Oakhurst, California. Amma was visiting from India. Appa and my brother Raghu were due to arrive a few days later. "You know", I said, "I saw ghosts one night as a kid in Poes Garden". I described the entire incident to her. Amma rolled her eyes. "It must have been the play of light and shadow from the street lights" she scoffed, "or maybe your overactive imagination". We let it got at that. When Appa and Raghu arrived, I opened with the same line. Raghu immediately interjected "Me too" he said, "I also remember seeing ghosts there one night". This was now getting interesting. Without sharing any further details of my experience, I asked him to describe what he saw. He'd come over for a sleepover one night to our grandparents', and was duly allocated a mattress on the floor of the living room for the night. He'd woken up in the middle of the night, and seen not two but three figures of light standing at the foot of the mattress. After a few seconds, the three figures glided towards the front of the house, passed right through the two inch thick teak wood of the locked door, and disappeared. Like me, it had not occurred to Raghu to share this event with anyone till now.
Lyrics from Spirits in the Material World, The Police (1981)
Needless to say, this unexpected corroboration of details almost two decades after the original events did nothing to quell Amma's skepticism. A good ghost story is perhaps meant to be enjoyed, not believed. While I have not had a similar experience since, I can't help believing that we live among spirits in this material world, each going about our business for the most part unaware of each other. Unless you are like my lawyer friend, which is a whole another story.
Post Script: While it tells well as a ghost story, in hindsight, I think what Raghu and I really saw was astral bodies engaged in a nightly out-of-body (OBE) adventure, as described by Robert Monroe. I saw my cousins; Raghu saw my cousins and me. As Indian spiritual guru Sri M describes it in his book Apprenticed to a Himalayan Master: A Yogi's Autobiography, all humans and even animals engage in this activity nightly, mostly without a recollection of it the next morning.
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