When he searched the building, however, he discovered he was alone. He locked the front door and then witnessed a phantom figure walking through the store several more times before the night was over.
The specter continued to make appearances, and eventually Rocky was able to size him up long enough to recognize him. It was the spirit of Paul Sharp, dressed in his typical attire of dark pants and white shirt. Rocky also noted that the ghost always cut the same path through the store—from the office to the spot where the register sat for fifty years.
The encounters, he admitted, changed him from a skeptic to a believer.
three
The Third Eye
“I can’t get his face out of my mind,” the girl told me. “I saw him so clearly. He murdered someone.”
I had just finished giving a ghost talk at the library, and the twelve-year-old girl was troubled, as she described the recurring scenario in her dreams. “It’s near a baseball field, and there is a body in the Dumpster,” she continued. “It is the same every time I dream it.”
In each dream, the girl saw the victim’s long hair rippling in the wind but could not see her face. She had never seen the man in real life, did not recognize the baseball field, and had no idea of the identity of the victim.
Yet she felt that she was experiencing something that had actually happened or was going to happen. If there was something she could do to help, she wanted to do it. But what could she possibly do with the information? The nightmares disturbed her.
I told her that she may very well be psychic and could be having visions, and that she had choices. She could either work to develop her gift, or she could pray that the visions would stop.
While psychic talent is not unusual, it can be a burden, especially if the medium tunes in to violence. Throughout my life, I have had psychic dreams, and when I was young, they disturbed me. Some were just strange.
For instance, I once had a dream about a funny man doing an odd dance. Suddenly his hair caught on fire. I woke up and turned on the radio, only to hear that Michael Jackson’s hair had caught fire while he was dancing as he filmed a Pepsi commercial.
Other times, the things I saw in my dreams were so horrible that they haunted me throughout the day. I could not discern what was a vision and what was just a nightmare. I prayed that the dreams would stop and that God would take away my premonitions. It worked. For a few years, the dreams stopped, and they did not return until I was able to emotionally handle it.
I wished I could do more for the troubled twelve-year-old who could not banish the visions of homicide. That night, I spent hours on the Web, trying to find a scenario that matched what the young girl had described. It was a frustrating task with no definitive results. I knew there was little I could do for the girl with the visions or the possible victims of a monster.
If it is difficult for a twelve-year-old girl to psychically connect with the horrors of homicide, imagine how hard it is for a four-year-old!
I found one such child in San Antonio, Texas, after reading a post on psychic Da Juana Byrd’s Web site.
“My four-year-old sees ghosts,” the mother wrote. She described the invisible playmate the little girl had recently acquired. The boy, said the child, was named Alex, and he had been murdered.
San Antonio paranormal investigator Martin Leal and I met with the mother and her three small children in a Texas park where the boy said he had been murdered.
While I normally use real names, I will give the family pseudonyms here, because I do not want to put them in danger. If indeed a boy was killed, a murderer roams free. Chances are, the killer will never read this book, but I choose not to take any chances.
The trouble began shortly after the Everson family moved into a new apartment in San Antonio. Their daughter, Kelsey, who had always slept well, suddenly began having nightmares.
“She would wake up, kicking and screaming,” said her mother, Theresa Everson. “By the time my husband and I could wake her up, she had no memories of her dreams.”
The description of the episodes sounded like a sleep disturbance known as “night terrors.” Many children are afflicted with this, particularly around ages three and four. While adults also suffer from the sleep disorder, it is most common in children. Though night terrors do not fall into the paranormal category, I was not ready to dismiss the child’s experiences.
Kelsey told her mother that a little boy, covered in blood, visited her nightly. She claimed that he hit her in the back with an object. His name was Alex.
Theresa phoned a psychic friend, Cathy, who agreed to visit their apartment. Unaware of the details of Kelsey’s experiences, Cathy, too, picked up on the ghost of a little boy.