Theresa Lewis



I hesitated plenty before writing this piece. Those who know me well, but didn’t know these things about me, you will probably think that I have slipped over the edge, but I can assure you that I still have all my buttons in the right place. One thing I know for sure is that there is more to life than that which we can relate to with our five senses. I also know for a fact that hearing about the other side of life is very troubling to some people. If you are troubled by stories about the other side of life, then read no further.

Ever since I was a child, I knew I was different from most people. I was and still am empathic even though I didn’t know that word when I was a child. All I knew was that other people’s problems greatly distressed me, more than they seemed to affect other kids my age. Not much has changed in that respect as my life proceeded. I am still very much the same even though I have learned how to manage my emotions better.

It took me many years of silent suffering to get to the point where I am now. It also takes an awful lot of on-going prayer time.

As a child, and throughout my life, I have had many premonitions about personal upcoming events. The events were not of much consequence, but the impressions I had before an event were strong enough to make me warn my mother, and others, at times.

Precognition and premonitions plagued me at different times in my life. I have never been able to control what comes at me, but I have learned how to accept and manage my gifts. My gifts are usually at their peak during highly emotional and difficult times in my life. During those highly emotional times, there is a kind of knowing. I am able to tune into not only a situation, but also to a person’s thoughts as they pertain to me, or to my situation. I can sometimes see their thoughts through my own eyes. When I was younger, I found it really creepy. Now, I realize that it is a privilege to be given access to another’s mind when I need it.

When I was ten years old, I saw my first apparition. We had rented a country house for that summer. The upstairs had a bathroom and a large dormitory where all of my siblings and I slept. In the dormitory, there were several beds lined up, side by side. My bed was closest to the door. That night, I was the last one to use the washroom and the last one to go to bed. When I came into the room, there was a lady wearing a long, loose fitting white nightgown. There was a white misty glow around her. Her brown wavy hair cascaded down her back to her waist. I was startled, but I was not afraid. I stood in the doorway to the room and watched her as she paced back and forth holding a baby in her arms.

As I stood silently watching her, she walked over to my bed and lay down on top of the covers then she and the baby faded into nothingness. I immediately ran downstairs to tell my parents about what I had just seen. To my child’s mind, I thought it was the Blessed Virgin and baby Jesus. That’s what I told my parents. I can’t even imagine what that announcement did to my parents. My father was sitting at the dining room table drinking a beer. He told my mother to go upstairs with me, since he didn’t feel that he was in any condition to meet his Holy Mother and baby Jesus at that moment.

Mom came upstairs, but the beautiful lady and her baby had disappeared, back into the ethers. I saw her again on two other occasions that summer, but never after that. Even though all my siblings were present in the room at the time, none of them had seen what I had seen.

When I was thirteen, our family had rented another house in the country for the summer. We had made friends with the local children. One of them who lived in town had a party for the older teenagers. My mother thought I was too young to go. My older sister was just sixteen and she wanted to go. I told my mother that I had a bad feeling about that party. I felt like something bad was going to happen that night. My mother decided not to let my older sister go to the party that night. The next day, we heard that the police had raided the party because of the rowdiness of underage drinkers. It was not a very serious event, but one that I felt would have put my sister in danger. I was glad that Mom had kept her home.

When I was nineteen, I went to bed early one night because I had a pounding headache. While I lay sleeping, I heard a phenomenally loud crash and I saw a simultaneous enormous bright light. It woke me up and I shot off the bed. I was dazed and trembling. When I went downstairs to investigate the noise, I was surprised to see that my parents were sitting at the dining room table talking to each other. I asked my parents what that horrible explosion was. They both looked quizzically at me. They had neither seen, nor heard anything. I was still trembling like a leaf.

My mother made me a cup of tea and asked me to explain what I was talking about. I was so distressed. I was shaking and my voice was trembling. I explained what I had seen and had heard. The noise was so loud that I had a hard time believing that neither of them had heard it. As I was explaining my experience to my parents, I had the overwhelming feeling that somehow it had a connection to my boyfriend and his sister. In a weird flash, I suddenly saw my boyfriend and his sister driving in car up a dark road.

I was unable to go back to sleep for the rest of the night. Later, I heard that a passenger plane had crashed just North of Montreal. I also learned that my boyfriend had heard about it on the news and that he, his sister and her friend had driven out to the crash site. There was no way that I could have heard the crash and seen the explosion because it was too far away. The fact remains that psychically, I did hear it and I did see the fireball that resulted.

Hardly a few months later, again I was awaked by a blast and simultaneous flash of light. However, what came to me in my sleep was nothing like the magnitude of the plane crash. Later that morning, my boyfriend called me and said that his cousin had committed suicide by shooting himself. His cousin committed the deed more than two hundred miles away from where I lived. I should not have been able to hear the shot, or have been able to see the flash from the sawed off rifle, but psychically I did hear the deafening blast as though I had been right there.

There have been many instances where little things happened in the course of my life that I had seen before they happened or at the exact moment they happened at a far away distance. For me, it was all normal. To others though, I was some sort of freak.

My maternal grandmother was a psychic and a medium. My mother also possessed those gifts, but like me, she had little control over what came at her. Neither she, nor I were able to turn it on at will.

One thing that nearly drove my husband nuts was that I frequently would tell him to answer the phone and I would name the person who was calling. My husband asked me to at least wait for it to ring. It never failed. I was always right. What he didn’t understand was that psychically, I had already heard the phone ring once before it actually rang for him to hear.

There were so many scenarios in our marriage where when he was away from home, I could psychically see what was going on with him. I have to say, it gave him the willies when I would tell him what I had seen. The scenarios would frequently present themselves to me in a sort of movie reel, or flashes of images.

For some reason, I had foreseen the deaths of two of our friends and also my father’s death. The very day before my father’s death, I had seen it in a momentary mental flash.

My sister and her family lived in and ran a Bed and Breakfast. I stayed there whenever I went to visit them. On the first night I was there, I had my niece’s bedroom. Since it was an inn, all the doors had dead bolts on them. I locked my door that night. I got into bed and turned off the light. No sooner had I just snuggled down and got comfortable when all of a sudden, the covers were rudely snatched off me. I sat up in the dark and pulled the covers back up to my chin and snuggled back down again. Within seconds, the covers were again snatched off me. I tried to pull them back up, but I could feel that someone was holding them so I couldn’t get them back up all the way.

I was really annoyed and I spoke out loud into the darkness. I told them to stop the nonsense and to let me sleep in peace. Since I couldn’t get the covers back up, I scrunched myself down in the bed with my knees up to my chest so I could cover myself with what little slack there was. I finally fell asleep without anymore nonsense.

The next morning, my nieces and nephews were anxious to see me so they came and rapped on my door. I unlocked it and let them in. I told them I was not happy about the night before. I said that whoever was in my room last night should not have been there. Since I hadn’t seen any of the kids in my room that night, I could only assume that one of them had been hiding under the bed. The kids showed me that the bed only had about a two inch clearance from the floor and they pointed out that the door had been locked from the inside, so it couldn’t have been any of them.

My sister always had a nightlight on in the hallway in case one of the children had to go to the washroom during the night. The light wasn’t bright, but it was enough to see down the length of the hallway.

The next night, I met a man in the hallway on my way to my room from the bathroom. He was a big fellow. I nearly bumped into him. At first, I thought it was my brother-in-law waiting to use the washroom. When I took a step forward, so did he. I went to smack him on the chest when I told him that he startled me. My hand didn’t make contact with anything. I realized that I could see my brother-in-law lying in bed next to my sister and could hear him snoring.

I stood there and stared at the stranger. I reached into the bathroom to turn on the light without taking my eyes off the man mere inches in front of me. As the hallway was bathed in bright light, the man disappeared. The next morning I told my sister about my encounter the night before and she brought out a photograph and asked me if I could pick him out of a group. I had no problem picking out the man. Apparently he used to be a resident there, back in the seventies. He had died from a heart attack somewhere on the grounds in the late seventies.

A few years ago, I lived in a house where seeing spirits was a daily occurrence for me. At first, it bothered me. One day, I went outside and stood on the deck and spoke aloud to the spirits and told them they were welcome to come by and even peek in the windows if they wanted, but I told them they had to stay outside.

One night as my husband and I were watching television, we both saw a young man peering into our living room window. He had his hands cupped around his smiling face as he leaned his forehead against the window pane. My husband jumped up to run the young man off. I told my husband that the man was just a spirit. All we could see was his head and his hands. I could see the deck railing in its entirety. His body should have blocked out a portion of the railing, but the apparition was incomplete. There were a few apparitions during the daylight hours, but most were after dark. Because there were so many apparitions by that house, I believe the house was in a vortex to the other side.

Most of the time, I do not tell anyone about what I have seen. It seems to be disturbing to others. Once in a while I mention an incident only to be told that they don’t want to hear about it.

When I moved from that house, I went to live with my sister for a year. Before I moved in with her, she told me not to bring any of my ghostly friends with me. She said her house was clean and she wanted to keep it that way. I laughed because I cannot control what I see. For the first four months, I didn’t see any spirits at my sister’s house.

On Christmas day, all that changed. It was two-thirty in the afternoon and we were waiting for the rest of the family to arrive for our Christmas dinner. I sat down in the recliner to relax for a while and to watch a show on television. I heard a click sound come from the corner of the living room. It sounded like a finger ring being knocked on a piece of furniture. Without moving, I glanced over and saw a girl about fifteen years old standing in the corner, staring at the television with her mouth open in a look of surprise. I watched her for about ten seconds. Suddenly, she noticed me and she gasped inaudibly, took two steps backwards and disappeared into nothingness. Mentally I asked her name and she said Mary Rita as she disappeared. She was a solid apparition. Her clothes and hairdo made me think she was from the fifties or sixties.

I used to work in dentistry. I had heard of a woman who believed she could pick up radio stations from the metal fillings in her teeth. She claimed that when things were very quiet, she could hear music and people talking when no radio or television was turned on. To remedy the problem, she had all her metal fillings replaced with a resin material. The problem did not go away. Out of desperation, she finally had all her teeth removed. Still the problem persisted.

I also hear music and talking when there is nothing turned on. I can’t tell you how many times I get up at night to turn off the television or radio only to find that they were already turned off. During the day, there are a lot of life’s distractions, so I am not aware of the music, or the voices. At night though, it’s a different story. Many nights, it feels like there is a party going on and I am not invited. It feels like I am hearing it from down a hall, or from another room. It’s a strange feeling to hear music, singing, talking and laughing. I can almost make out what is being said, but not quite. I can always tell if it’s a man or a woman talking, or singing. I am not sure though what causes it to happen. Perhaps, I am picking up something through the radio waves that bombard the atmosphere. I really don’t know. Every night it’s a different scenario. I have a niece who also shares this experience.

That is one phenomenon that I have never been able to figure out. Another phenomenon is that just before I fall asleep, I see random images. The images can be of local people, or people from the other side of the world, or animals. If I had to describe what the experience feels like, I would say that it feels like I am in a darkened room as I watch random scenarios from the lives of others. I do not feel connected to the people I see, but I do feel logistically close as though I am passing by, unseen. It’s sort of like casually walking by an active scene on a street. I see the events, but I keep going on my way.

Many people have a hard time getting to sleep because they are plagued by worries, or they rehash the events of their day. Some people have to turn on a radio, or a television to help them get to sleep. Normally, I like to pray before sleeping. Many nights though, I am distracted by the partying I hear. All I have to do is close my eyes and the party begins.

The End