Lonely Robin & Other Tales
Link to Amazing True Stories
Last night was strange for occasionally I am awoken as new ideas flooded my mind. It is usually ideas that then I write about. Last night it was a flood of memories. The first one was about a lonely Robin Red Breast bird that when my wife and I have driven back late from a course we had run; there perched under a street light in the middle of the night with no cars passing and no people was a little robin singing its heart out. We saw it several times and as robins only sing when its light, the street light must have led it to sing so joyously. This was at 3 in the night.
Apparently artificial light often triggers the singing of the robin.
To see and hear the robin sing click on RobinRedBreast
Tale Two
Tale Three
‘At about two or three in the morning my wife Olive and I were suddenly awoken from sleep by a noise. As we lifted our heads to hear we identified it as the handle on our children’s bedroom door being turned. The house only had two bedrooms, and the children’s room was directly opposite ours. Both of us had the same thought – ‘Oh no, it’s the children again.’ Much to our annoyance they had been waking in the middle of the night claiming it was morning and time to play. We had tried to suppress it, but here it was again.
As these thoughts went through our minds we heard the sound of feet clomping down the stairs. This was strange as the children usually stayed in their room. Olive got up determined to get whoever it was back into bed. I heard her switch the light on, go down the stairs, switch the sitting room light on, and I followed her via the sounds of her movement as she looked in the kitchen and even toilet – we didn’t have a bathroom. Then up she came again and opened the children’s door – strange because we had assumed it had been opened. When she came back into our room she looked puzzled and a little scared. ‘They’re all asleep and in bed’ she said.
We talked over the mystery for some time trying to understand just how we had heard the door handle rattle then footsteps going down the stairs, yet the door wasn’t open. Also, the door handles on our doors were too high for the children to reach without standing on a chair. There was a stool in the children’s bedroom they used for that, yet it wasn’t even near the door when Brenda opened it.
Having no answer to the puzzle we stopped talking and settled to wait for sleep again. Suddenly a noise came from the children’s bedroom. It sounded like the stool being dragged and then the door handle turning again but the door not opening. ‘You go this time’ Olive said, obviously disturbed.
I opened our door quickly just in time to see the opposite door handle turn again. Still the door didn’t open. I reached across, turned the handle and slowly opened the door. It stopped as something was blocking it. Just then my daughter H’s small face peered around the door – high because she was standing on the stool. Puzzled by what had happened, I was careful what I said to her. ‘What do you want love?’ I asked.
Unperturbed she replied, ‘I want to go to the toilet.’ The toilet was downstairs, through the sitting room, and through the kitchen.
Now I had a clue so asked, ‘Did you go downstairs before?’
‘Yes’ she said, ‘but mummy sent me back to bed!’.’
Mostly such experiences are described from the point of view of the person projecting from their body and are therefore difficult to corroborate. Here, three people experience the event in their own way. From my and Olives point of view what happened caused sensory stimuli, but only hearing. H’s statement says that she was sure she had physically walked down the stairs and been sent back to bed by her mother. I and Olive felt there was a direct connection between what they were thinking and feeling – ‘get the children back to bed’ – and what H. experienced as an objective reality.
What I feel certain about is that ghostly noises are often not dead people parading about but the living wandering in their dreams.
Tale Four
“The first time it happened to me I was totally unprepared for what happened. There was almost an unendurable pain, that I felt occurring while living with my wife and her family. Every time I came home the grinding pain would begin in my belly. I mean literally a physical pain. I picked fault with her and felt I was going mad. It got so bad a few days ago I couldn’t talk to or get near anybody. Yesterday I exploded over her mother’s action in our home.
That day my wife had gone out with her mother and I was left alone in our house. For the first time in my life I had a tremendous desire to go out and get drunk to drown the pain and avoid the madness. Instead of that I went off in my car to moorland and explored the feelings to see if I could find out what was going on. As I lay in the car it was as if I searched through my whole mind and psyche to see, or to find, the madness. Everything seemed healthy and normal. So, I went searching again with the same result. It seems I had a healthy and sturdy structure in my mind. So, this time I asked a different question, not ‘What is wrong with my mind?’ but ‘What is causing such pain?’ – and what I found was that I had an intuition that her mother was trying to influence my wife to get rid of me, and take over the house so they could live together. When I got home I put this to my wife, she said her mother had been talking in that vein. This was like an enormous load taken of me. And for the first time I realised that people could enter into one unconsciously and cause great pain.”
This was truly strange. I had experienced difficult feelings about my mother in law, but I had never suspected she was plotting to get me out of my wife’s life and take over the house! In past ages that would have been named witchcraft and the woman or man found responsible burned at the stake. Unfortunately, it was used to get rid of people indiscriminately.
Tale Five
Something happened to me while working with a friend, John, who owned a hotel. I was mending something for him on a flat roof of his private house. Meanwhile he had driven away to the hotel. About twenty minutes after he had gone I heard him shout my name with great urgency. In fact he called me twice. I was puzzled and thought he must have returned without me noticing. As the tone of voice carried urgency I climbed off the roof and went in search of him but could see or hear any signs of him. Moments later the telephone rang in his house. It was John, still at the hotel. He had just turned the water on for the first time after a spell of cold weather, and bad pipe bursts were apparent all over the hotel. He had rushed to the phone to call me for help. In some way I had ‘heard’ him call before he reached the telephone.
The hotel was about a mile away on the other side of the town. There was obviously no way I could have heard his voice with my physical ears. So, whatever signal John’s anguished desire for my presence created, my mind had turned it into what appeared to be his actual voice calling me. It was a powerful emotion and a desire to contact me in John that my mind sensed and presented as the actual sound of my name being called. I had experienced telepathy.
Tale Six
Suddenly there were two beings with me in my room.
I could not see them with my eyes,
But they were standing in my awareness,
To my left, suspended above the bed
Where I lay musing.
Surprising, because I had not sought them.
Frightening, because they were the living dead.
Radiant, because they were angels.
Inspiring, because they shone with wonderful life.
Uplifting, because of the gift they brought.
The living dead!
Yes. That I knew of them.
It was everywhere about them,
Communicating itself to me.
Telling me the majesty of death.
Speaking to me without words
They led knowing in me,
As you might lead a friend
Through your new house,
Revealing its secrets.
Thereby I knew,
All that I considered human,
In them had died.
Desire, longing to possess, sex, ambition,
All had melted away.
And I understood in their presence,
If I surrendered to the Highest,
This was my path.
My own person would melt away,
My desires fade like shadows in the sun.
Fear – Yes – in the loss of myself.
In the sense of my own futility.
In the knowledge of my littleness.
In the confrontation of majesty.
At the loss of what I thought my wisdom.
In them I saw beyond myself.
Through their emptiness
Of all that I so valued.
I saw shimmering light,
Cosmic in its vastness.
Their death allowed,
Shining through them,
Dimensions of a life
Beyond the very best
Of all my mind, or love, or art.
Radiant they were
With all the mystery of life itself.
Suns shone through them;
Not just with light,
But with ungrasped joy and love.
Inspiring me
By showing me the possibility
Of my life,
And all the lives
Of those myriads around me.
Uplifting too,
By unveiling to me
The meaning of the story He told,
Where, having lost ones cloak,
You offer your coat also.
Not, as I had thought,
An act of selfless generosity.
They said it was a statement.
“How strange. You want this old coat,
When you could have the life unbounded?”
That was their promise.
If I dared lose my self,
Let that coat be taken from me,
My being too would shine.
As theirs shone on me that day.