When Ghosts Speak - Mary Ann Winkowski [71]
Luckily Becky walked right up to me the next morning as I sat throwing toast crumbs to my friends the fish. I managed to find out that she had two half sisters and a brother. She and her siblings had lived with her mother and her stepfather the next county over, maybe a hundred miles away from the ranch. Her biological father, who was being sued by his ex-wife for child support, had taken her and her brother to his home, which was in the same county as the ranch I was staying at. He’d set his house on fire and killed them.
Becky told me that she had made her way to a library, where she remembered her mom had once taken the kids for story hour. There she’d seen a little boy—Jackson, the grandson of the owner of the ranch where we were staying—and had followed him home. Jackson and his parents lived in their own house across the road from the main house, and Becky was very happy playing in their yard and visiting the goldfish.
I did help Becky to cross over. I made the Light and told her that she would be able to find her brother if she went into it. Before we left Arizona, Buck came by the ranch to let us know that they had a solid lead. The police had been looking hard at the girl’s stepfather, an ex-con, but had not been able to get any breaks in their case. When they shifted their focus to Becky’s biological father, they began to uncover some incriminating information. They thought they would be able to issue a warrant for his arrest shortly and expected that they would be able to convict him for the murder of his two children.
The saddest cases I’ve seen in my work, however, have not been children who choose not to cross over, but parents who refuse to let a beloved son or daughter go into the Light. In one tragic case, a mother’s desire to keep her son close to her after his death was so strong that she was actually able to sense his presence and, on some occasions, feel his touch.
I had received a call from the woman’s mother, who was distraught at her daughter’s actions in the months following the death of her young son. The boy was nearly five when he died and had been the light of his parents’ lives. They were an older couple who’d had a very difficult time conceiving. When Joey was finally born, they were ecstatic. To their horror, he contracted a rare form of childhood blood cancer, and they did everything in their power to get him healthy. It seemed as if the chemo and the transfusions were working, and Joey was in remission, when suddenly the cancer returned and he died.
At first, the mother’s grief was immense. She told her parents and her husband that she was never going to let Joey go. As most people would, they believed she was referring to the memory of her son, but soon her behavior became so irregular that her husband moved out. She told her mother that she could feel her son snuggling with her in bed at night, that he still played in his room, and that she would kill herself if he ever went away.
Her mother was naturally distressed and called me to see if I could tell her whether the boy’s ghost was indeed still at home with his mother. I really wanted to help this family. I told the mother that, if she could get her daughter to call me from her home, I would tell her if Joey was still there and help her talk to him.
It took some time, but one day I finally got a call from the mother, Mindy. She started by saying that she didn’t need me to tell her if Joey was still with her; she knew he was. And she was right. As I spoke to her on the phone, I could see a thin boy with short brown hair and big blue eyes. I described the yellow plaid shirt he was wearing, and Mindy started to cry. “He loved Bob the Builder,” she explained. “He always wanted to wear that shirt and pretend he was doing construction.”
Mindy decided that she did want to talk to Joey and invited me to her house as soon as possible. Given her obviously fragile state, I asked her to have her mother present as well. I didn’t really know what to expect when I arrived, but the home was tidy and well kept, with Joey’s room just as it must