Ghosts Among Us - James Van Praagh [47]
Eventually, the assistant director yelled, “Cut,” and the crew broke for lunch. All the extras went to the holding pen to line up at the food truck. At that moment, I felt obligated to help the blond extra, so I walked over to her table and introduced myself.
She looked up at me and was practically speechless. “I’m such a big fan of yours,” she told me. “It’s such an honor just working on this show. You know, it’s so weird that you came over to me. It must mean something, don’t you think?”
“It might,” I replied. “Can we go over there and sit down under the tree?” I asked as I pointed to an unoccupied corner of the set.
Surprised by my offer, she quickly responded, “Of course.”
After we sat on a bench, she introduced herself. “I’m Donna, by the way.”
The ghost who had been there earlier appeared right in front of me. She made some sort of hand gestures. Tell her it’s not her fault.
I told Donna what I had witnessed for the past hour, and she began to cry. She seemed quite upset by my description, and I wasn’t sure that I had done the right thing by giving her the ghost’s message. However, I know it’s not my place to pass judgment one way or the other. My job is to give the message, so I continued.
“She is telling me that it wasn’t your fault. Do you understand?”
Donna continued to sob, and the ghost began to rub Donna’s shoulders. Donna looked up at me with tear-filled eyes and slowly began to explain what the message meant.
“My mother, Sheila, had been in and out of the hospital for a year with bone cancer. It was terminal, and she suffered so much.”
I sat there and empathized with her.
“Toward the end, she fell into a coma, and I would visit her every day. It was so hard to see her life slowly drift away. I knew she was in pain because she was on a morphine drip by then.”
Donna explained that she wanted her mother to die with some dignity. “One evening I went into her room and whispered into her ear, ‘It’s okay to go home now. I’ll be all right. I want you to be at peace.’”
Donna told the doctors to take her mother off the respirator, and within two hours Sheila died.
“Ever since then, I’ve lived with regret and guilt. What if I did the wrong thing? Who am I to tell them to pull the plug? My brother, Jack, still accuses me of murdering my mother.”
Sheila began to speak to me through my thoughts. I told Donna what her mother wanted her to know. “She is telling me that you did the right thing for her. It was an act of love. She cannot thank you enough. Your motivation was pure,” I said to Donna. “You meant to help her, not hurt her.”
Donna wiped away her tears.
“Your mother is saying that she has been trying to contact you for the past year. Do you have a lamp on the table to the left of the bed?”
“Yes,” she responded.
“Your mother has been working very hard to manipulate the electricity by making the lightbulb go on and off all the time.”
“I thought there was a short in the lamp, so I unplugged it.”
“Your mother says that she even moved things around in your room, like books. Have things been disappearing? She is saying that she moved a picture of her that you had on the nightstand.”
Donna’s eyes opened wide. “That was her! I didn’t know what happened to the picture and was afraid I knocked it into the trash can by mistake. I was wondering why weird things were happening.”
“Now she is telling me something about the laundry room.”
“Oh, my goodness, I found the picture on a shelf in the laundry room and wondered how in the world it got there.”
“She also tells me you misplace your keys a lot.”
“Yes, I do, James. This is remarkable. I even