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Lake Michigan is known as a place of strange and mysterious activity, ranging from ghost ships and ghosts to UFOs. Twenty-one years ago, 911 operators at Holland, Michigan were flooded with UFO reports from around Lake Michigan and police officers who were dispatched to investigate. Some sources said 300 witnesses, including several police officers, saw the lights. Mysterious objects also showed up on radar. There have been so many sightings of strange objects over Lake Michigan that the Federal Aviation Administration created a special lake reporting service to catalog the sightings.

We’ve written about mysterious happening on  a sailboat, a personal experience told to us by Kathy Doore. Now we have a story from the air, above Lake Michigan. Jules, a scientist from Montreal, was flying home from Chicago in 2005 and was meditating as the commercial jet flew over Lake Michigan. After a few minutes, he was overcome by a strange sensation.

“I got the feeling that the upper part of my cranium was split open. Having done meditation  before, I knew what to expect, and this was not the type of feeling that I was used to. Although the feeling didn’t hurt me in any way, I was aware of it as long as I maintained the meditation.” He also had the impression of expanded hearing capabilities. “I could hear everything throughout the plane.” Upon landing in Montreal he noticed that the face of a passenger behind him was rather strange, like he was afraid of something. “He was looking above my head, while I was half-standing, waiting my turn to exit the plane.”
 
A few years later, Jules flew over Lake Michigan again, this time with his wife on a flight from California, and he suggest they try meditating. He didn’t give her any information about his previous experience so as not to influence or deter her. He recalls: “It wasn’t long before she started to move frantically in her seat, trying to find a brochure in the pouch in front of her, putting down her small table, making noise, and so forth. This forced me out of my meditation.” But before doing so, he again noticed the open skull sensation, though not as noticeable as the previous time.  “Looking at my wife, I asked what was going on, since she is more experienced than me on the field of meditation. She answered by swiping her thumbnail across her forehead, indicating that she too felt as if her upper-cranium was split open.

At first, Jules didn’t link the experiences to UFO. But after hearing about the well known sighting at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and watching documentaries about UFO sightings over Lake Michigan and the possibility of an underwater UFO base, he began to change his mind. He suspected that during his meditations over the lake, he had encountered a force related to UFOs.
 
“In itself, it might seem like nonsense,” Jules admits. But then something else very strange happened to him after he recently borrowed about ten books on UFOs from the Montreal public library. He put one particular book into the bottom of his handbag, the one he was most interested in reading because he had read other books by the same author. He later realized that he had held the book in such a way so that he didn’t notice the image on the bottom half of the cover. At least, not until he was ready to read it.

When he saw it, he instantly recognized the synchronicity. The cover image was identical to his experience that he had already attributed to UFO contact.

In this very young new year, it seems that every time I turn on the news or read something on the Internet, the news is, well, bad.  So here’s an energetic flash mob dance in NYC that chases away the bad stuff.

There’s a new docu-drama TV series in the making, called The Unexplained, which focuses on unusual mysterious experiences. It will be a combination of interviews with experiencers and actors performing the experiences. We were contacted by the casting director because of an article I wrote about Connie Cannon’s childhood alien abductions. They wanted to interview Connie in Los Angeles for the show, but her health issues prevent her from traveling.

Connie has Parkinson’s and thinks her neurological condition is related to her contact experiences. Here is what she wrote about that.

“Just as an aside, and relative to something I’ve mentioned to you in the past, I wonder how many experiencers develop neurological diseases and symptoms. As an RN, I certainly understand that EVERY patient who has a neurological disorder is NOT an experiencer (via encounters/abductions, etc.), but I’ve run across several folks in my acquaintance who have had sucn encounters and DO have neurological ailments such as MS, Parkinson’s, brain tumors, (both benign and malignant), and other brain/nervous system diseases.

“I’d really like to do a study on that just to see how widespread it is among us, and approximate the percentage of known experiencers who have developed such disorders. Please thank Nicole for me, and give her my regrets.” C

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After Connie bowed out, I contacted Charles Fontaine, whose experiences were detailed in our book, Aliens in the Backyard. I asked him if he would be interested in being interviewed in Los Angeles in front of a camera, and he said he was interested in pursuing the matter. Then he wrote this:

“Very weird for me to hear about Connie’s condition… Parkinson’s. Did I tell you that my mother-in-law is in a nursing home because she also has Parkinson’s? Do not ask me the technical name of her Parkinson but it is supposedly the worse type. The shaking is inside the body, not on the outside. This type is said to be the deadliest, because it acts directly on vital organs.

I guess I told you before that my in-law is an experiencer. She told me about some encounters more than 26 years ago that happened when they were living on a country road 5 miles away from here.

Not more than a year after our own experience that took place on March 2011, my wife picked up her mother at the nursing home for dinner with us on a Saturday evening. She had a hard time eating and holding her fork and then she said: ‘Damn Parkinson’s I know the reason I got it, it’s because of them!’

‘Who do you mean by them?’ I asked.

She said: ‘The UFO’s near the house. They are the reason why I got this.’

My wife discretely made a sign to me not to say a thing about our own experience a year earlier.

+++

So there it is, an unusual synchronicity. Connie wonders how many other experiencers have contracted neurological disorders and within a few hours I received a story about another case. And the woman is certain it was ‘them.’ They were the reason she got Parkinson’s.

As we near the end of 2016, we’ve noticed a lot of hits to this page. There won’t be any dailies for 2017, but  something new that provides 3 years of monthly astrological readings for all 12 signs, from 2017-2019. The Biggest Book of Horoscopes is available now from all bookstores, physical and virtual!

Available in print and e-book.

Every year for decades, the Sydney Omarr series of books usually appeared in bookstores in June of the previous year, and provided 18 months of daily predictions for the 12 signs. Around June 2014, when the 2015 books should have been arriving in bookstores, Rob and I began receiving email from readers asking where the 2015 books were. The closer we got to 2015, the more email we received.

We told every person who emailed that the publisher, NAL/Penguin, had discontinued the series and that 2014 was the last year the books would be published. We also told them that we hoped the series would be picked up by another publisher, that we had a lot of fun writing the books and were sad that our ten-year run with them had ended.

Many of the people who emailed us had been reading the books for 10, 15, 20 years. During the Christmas holidays and right through the new year, we received a slew of emails. We’ve offered a very small sampling here that illustrates, I think, how passionate people can be about books they consider to be companions, friends, old buddies.

What happened to the Sydney Omar 2015 book. Are you going to do another one. Please continue!!!

My name is Kathy  I live in Streamwood, IL (a NW suburb of Chicago). I’ve written to you a few times before. I have a question for you.What I’d like to know is, do you know what’s going on with the Sydney Omarr daily astrology guides? I know you’ve been writing them, for the past few years now. But I can’t seem to find the 2015 edition anywhere. Are the Omarr guides still being published? This is the first time in ages, that I’ve started out the new year, without a Sydney Omarr guide to turn to for guidance. I’m feeling rather lost without it. I have written to Penguin Books, about the status of the Sydney Omarr guides, but who knows when I’ll hear back from them, if at all. If you know of anyone who can help me out with this matter, I’d really appreciate it.
That’s all for now. Thank you for your time. I look forward to hearing from you. Take care. 🙂 Sincerely yours, Kathy

And from another Kathy:

 First let me thank you for writing the sydney omarr daily astrology books which I have been reading everyday for about 15 years……..(or as long as you have been writing them). Since I assume you are not writing them any more, can you please recommend something similar. I am an Aries and I counted on these books to let me know the day’s tendencies and what sign the moon was in every day I will miss these books terribly. Thanks so much, Kathy

My name is Kimberly  I’m 62, still working and live in Oregon with my husband and am hoping for your advice. I didn’t realize you’d decided not to continue with the day-by-day astrological guides. Thank you so much for all the years that you published a book that really made a difference in my life. I totally get that it was not so profitable, with a decreasing consumer base, and sure can’t blame you when there are so many exciting things to write about. The problem is, I just don’t know where to get this information now that your work is no longer available.

And from a guy:

 My wife loves your Sydney Omarr’s Day by Day astrology Book. My question is: Have you discontinued these series because I wasn’t able to order it anywhere. I would love to buy a copy for 2015 for my wife for Christmas.
Thank you Looking forward in hearing from you
Kindest regards

Here is one of my favorites:

Is there no Sydney Omarr Horoscope for 2015 book? How will I live my life? Plan my days? Seriously, is there a 2015 version? If not, can you suggest an alternative/substitute?
Thank you!
Judy

This last one arrived on New Year’s Eve, which we spent with my agent and his wife on Sugarloaf Key. I read it out loud to them.

Here was the view at sunset of the last day of 2014. Rob, ushering 2014 out and welcoming 2015 in.

There WILL be more astrology books for 2016, which will be published through Crossroad Press.  We’re calling the series Genie in the Stars.

Can you see it? It’s more than a hundred feet away, but the snow owl stands out at the edge of the rutted drive on this rural Quebec farm. Owl are mysterious creatures of the night. We used to have a family of burrowing owls in our backyard and one perched right above of door for hours on the day a friend of ours died.

Here’s the story about the snow from Jorge, a Quebecois woman.

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My husband and I live in Montreal, but my husband’s parents own a big sheep farm an hour and a half outside Montreal, in a city called Sainte-Clotilde-de-Horton. In November, we went to visit his parents, and while my husband and my in-laws were working with the sheep, I decided to go for a walk in the fields. The farm is huge and they even have a section of a little forest in the property.

One thing I need to explain it’s my spiritual side. I do meditation every day and I’m always thinking positive. I’m also aware of some sort of connection with the paranormal. I’m not a psychic, medium, nor a healer; I’m very ordinary but very sensitive to energies. Once in a while I see white shadows or little marvel size orbs that fly around me and disappear within a second. But nothing that causes me fear. Of course I believe in UFO and in our family we all have beyond this planet experiences, and somehow… really deep in my core I know we are been watched even if we don’t see them, they are here.

Anyways, I love to meditate in the middle of the fields, as you can imagine it’s the most peaceful and beautiful place to be with oneself. In that particular occasion, going back to my story, I stood up after my meditation and I said aloud:

“My work it’s for my own upliftment and that of this planet, if you are in alignment with this upliftment, you are more than welcome to manifest yourselves, your mentoring will be truly appreciated. If you are not in alignment with this upliftment, please do not come around, you are not welcome.”

After I finished saying this, I noticed 3 or 4 big black crows flying in circle and diving as if they were attacking something around 100 meters away, next to a little river that passes through the middle of the fields. I started walking toward them to see what they were attacking, and that’s when I noticed a big white thing, easy 3 times bigger than the crows.

When I was around 50 meters from it, I noticed it was a big snow owl staring at every step I made. I could see his eyes and head following me ignoring completely the crows, which I found strange because the owl did not respond nor move to any of the crows’ near-miss attempts to scare him off. When I finally got closer from it, the owl just took off, flying a few meters to my side but staring at me the whole time. I didn’t feel any negativity or had the sense of any malice.

Because of the scenery, I had my camera with me to take pictures for a future painting and I was looking for ideas, which I was going to do after my meditation.  After seeing the owl, I went back to the family to tell them what I just saw. They were very surprised. My in-laws have been living there for more than 26 years, and in that time, my father-in-law saw one of them only once more than 10 years ago, and Fréd (my husband) saw one when he was a child; but my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law have never seen one.

I do have a lot of questions and that’s why I’m always researching. My conclusion, I do believe that everything I have experienced is not luck or coincidences. I build my life, my path, my surroundings, so I think everything that is happening to me it’s an answer to questions I have.

Kilt and Noah in the aftermath of a tug-of-war

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Sometimes, synchronicity is comical- not in the trickster sense, but just flat-out humorous.

This evening, Rob, Cassie and I were watching cable news. Cassie, who works in the equine industry in our area, is living with us until April with her two Border Collies. After the horse competition ends, she’ll move back to Asheville, North Carolina. She takes the dogs to the barn with her during the day and in the evening, our dog Noah, is delighted when the dogs return home and he has some canines to play with.   He particularly likes playing with Kilt, who has an inexhaustible energy.

So the three of us are watching Chris Hayes on MSNBC, who is talking about the latest NFL scandal that occurred Sunday, on January 18, during the AFC championship game between The New England Patriots and the Indianapolis Colts. The scandal is that the Patriots, who won 45-7, used deflated footballs, that actually 11 of their 12 footballs were under-inflated. League rules state that footballs must be inflated to between 12.5 and 13.5 pounds per square inch, and ESPN reported that the footballs were two pounds short.

While we’re listening to this, Kilt and Noah are playing tug-of-war with one of the dogs’ many toys. This playing is rather loud and rambunctious. Noah weighs around 110 pounds and Kilt, though smaller, plays hard. I happen to glance over at them and burst out laughing. Their tug-of-war toy is – a football!

We all got a kick out of the synchro, then turned our attention back to the news. When I glanced at Noah and Kilt, they have settled down – but the football has been shredded, with stuffing lying all over the floor. My first thought was that perhaps the NFL’s investigation will not be favorable for the Patriots. After all, deflated footballs are cheating and the Patriots have been fined before for infractions.

I’m not a football fan, but I’m interested in seeing how this plays out. I doubt that the Super Bowl will be cancelled – it’s too profitable- but perhaps the Patriots will be fined again.

Weird stuff, for sure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8LqG_Ld0Dw

Rob and I watched President Obama’s State of the Union address tonight. I found it fascinating that the president of a party that was so defeated during the midterm elections sounded feisty, optimistic, and definitive about what he hopes to accomplish during his last two years in office. It also seemed to me that he was wrong about how the US is beating back ISIS or ISIL, whatever acronym you want to give this sadistic terrorist group. That said, I feel that Obama has been and is a visionary president. Here’s why:

Ten million people who didn’t have health insurance now do because of the Affordable Care Act. I still think Obama didn’t set the bar high enough initially; it should have been Medicare for all. But ObamaCare beats what we had before.

Since the financial meltdown during Bush’s final months in office, the economy has rebounded with more than eleven million private sector jobs.

What Obama called middle class economics is a slap in the face of the Republican economic plan of trickle down economics, which Naomi Klein discusses so brilliantly in her book The Shock Doctrine.

The whole trickle down idea is that by giving tax breaks to the uber wealthy, the upper one percent, the people at the bottom benefit. The biggest problem I have with this theory, just from a human point of view, is that it smacks of elitism. And the reality is that the uber wealthy tend to hang on to their money and it never reaches the rest of us.

I liked Obama’s plan for taxing corporations at a higher rate and giving middle class families tax breaks for child care; making junior college free; and ushering in other benefits for the middle class, which has been shrinking at an alarming rate since the meltdown in 2008. Without a middle class, any economy becomes a kind of feudal system, the very rich at the top, the rest of us at the bottom.

I actually thought much of his speech was brilliant, particularly the parts that weren’t in the prepared speech. After talking about what has been accomplished economically under his administration, he flashed one of those wry Obama smiles and said, “This is good news, people.” When he talked about his agenda in terms of his not having to run again, there was sporadic applause from the Republican side. He quickly added something to the effect that he didn’t have to campaign again because he’d won the last two presidential elections. Ha-ha.

I liked that he talked about how he outlawed torture, had cut the population of Gitmo in half during his administration, and that he hoped to close the prison before he left office. I was disappointed that he didn’t call for an indictment of Bush, Cheney and company for war crimes. I mean, c’mon, the Repubs impeached Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Why can’t the Dems indict for war crime and torture?

I still feel that Obama has been and is a visionary president who has faced an intractable congress of idiots who are greedy, self-serving, and can’t get their act together as a party to define what, if anything , they stand for. Case in point: the Republicans didn’t have just one rebuttal to the state of the union; they had FIVE. The official choice, Joanie Ernst, a Republican from Iowa, had only one thing in her favor – she’s female. She wasn’t a water gulper like Marco Rubio (the last Repub to offer a rebuttal)   but was something worse, the kind of woman I hope I never meet on my way to toss feed to the chickens out back.

I will never understand how any woman, any minority, any person of color, any immigrant, can support any Republican. They hate you. They say they don’t, they say they are Hispanic friendly, but want to deport all the dreamers. They say they love women, but want to own your bodies and dictate what you can and can’t do with your bodies. They say they are friendly to the gay and lesbian community, but at every opportunity they block your ability to marry the person you love.

Obama’s legacy is a done deal as the first Afro-American president. But as the saying goes, the devil is in the details. And despite his missteps in the beginning, his belief that the Republicans would be willing to work with him (ha), that he didn’t set some bars high enough, that he is dead wrong on the whole surveillance thing with the NSA and Snowden, my sense is that he, like Martin Luther King, like JFK, had a vision. And he has tried to live true to that vision. That’s no small thing.

In 2008, Rob, Megan, and I waited hours to hear him and Joe Biden speak in Fort Lauderdale. After eight years of Bush, we were riveted. I am still riveted. Obama is a powerful orator, and despite the fact that he won two terms as president, he’s an outlier because he’s also a visionary. He sees what we could become as a nation, a people. But he’s hampered. Maybe he was shown the MacGruder film of the JFK assassination when he took office; maybe all new presidents are shown that clip to keep them in line. Who knows?

So, to you Republican majority in Congress, let’s toss down the gauntlet and see what you can get done in the next two years. Frankly, I’m not holding my breath, not when you guys have FIVE rebuttals to the state of the union. What’s that say about the fractures within your own party?

Well, nothing good.

Onward, Obama. Follow your vision. Pave the way for an Elizabeth Warren presidency in 2016. And become an ex-prez with clout, a voice.

Today’s post is a followup from the one several days ago about Hannah’s discovery of the prevalence of #1 in her life.  Warning: it’s longer than most of our posts.

Mention was made in the earlier post of a man who is making a documentary on synchronicity. When Hannah wrote him about her numerological synchros, he surprised Hannah by saying that her numbers were meaningless.

However, he wasn’t saying that her pursuit was worthless. His intent was to invoke the idea that finding meaning in coincidences is subjective and the truth ultimately unknowable. His perspective is interesting in that he seems to combine some of the ideas of skeptics, who see synchronicity as a useless attempt to create cause and effect out of coincidence, with his own beliefs that a divine element might be at play.

Here are his comments.

Hi Hannah,

Firstly, apologies for the delay.  I’ve been inundated with work and
leaving email for a time when I can catch a breather, and today is
that day so here we go!

Secondly, thank you very much for sharing your incredible story.

As for knowing someone who might help you along your path,
unfortunately I probably don’t have a person to point you towards who
can help make sense of this, and perhaps help with an answer about
what the “1” really means and why it is prevalent in your life story.

But I think – at least in my own life – trying to make sense of
synchronicity is the wrong way to go about approaching them.  I think
we have a tendency towards trying to understand the world around us in
an analytical, left-brained sort of way that leads us to down perilous
roads towards conclusions like “this says this, therefore is means
this.”

Jung and his theory on archetypes  would likely disagree with me, but my own guess at your situation is that “1” itself doesn’t mean anything.  I very much doubt there is a big
answer at the end of the tunnel about why exactly “1” underlies themes in your life.

Before I go deeper I should explain that I don’t think anything I am
saying is right, either.  I don’t think there is a right answer for how
to deal with or understand synchronicity.  Every avenue I have pursued
to try and understand them better has lead me towards eventually
having to put my hands up and say to myself “ok that was totally
wrong, actually I have no idea.”

So it might be that the 1 synchronicities for you do have a big reason
behind them.  But my own hunch is that synchronicity is something more
like the carrot on the donkey, rather than the cryptic clue that
tantalizes to unlock a Great Truth if only it can be solved.

Ultimately I think, if synchronicity is leading us somewhere, is it
leading us into a deeper relationship with the Mystery, and out of the
mundanity that we often find ourselves stuck in in our lives.

However this ‘carrot on the Donkey’ concept is just another avenue and
framework for understanding synchronicity that I am pursuing, and
ultimately I think it very likely that I will soon again have to throw
up my hands in defeat when I learn that synchronicity is not a This or
a That, and it doesn’t have this defined purpose of doing This or
That.  Because it seems to do a lot of things; not a single one of
them predictable.

But in terms of effects, most reliably synchronicity acts to bust open
your mind; to show you that what lies outside your perception of ‘The
True Nature of Reality’ is a world of mystery that you will never
understand, so rather than trying, instead try to play with
synchronicity, with whatever divine intelligence is woven through the
fabric of reality, and see what happens.

Sorry I can’t be of more help than that, but I think really words
begin to fail when we get anywhere close to tuning into the mystery of
synchronicity.

My only advise would be to play with and explore every idea and
feeling that your synchronicity invokes, because it seems there is no
right answer.  If you feel like Neo one day, play with that, try and
explore it.  If hearing about the Neo connection made you want to
watch the Matrix, do that and see what you got from it.  Maybe the
Korean connection made you want to go to a Korean Supermarket, maybe
it made you want to learn Korean, or see your Korean friend, or watch
a Korean movie.  Whatever you felt an intuition towards in association
with a synchronicity seems to be where the next cookie crumb along the
trail lies… but again, ultimately this is a guess at the mysterious
workings of the Universe and is only partly true, if at all.

Good luck ‘figuring it out’, in any case.
+++
As a follow up, I asked ace numerologist Connie Cannon for her take on Hanna’s numbers. (I didn’t show her the filmmaker’s response.) So it was somewhat startling that, similar to the filmmaker, the first thing is said was that numbers themselves were meaningless. But she goes on to explain. Here’s her response, in part:

Re Hannah, I’ve mentioned several times during discussions of numbers that numbers, in and of themselves, have no meaning. They are inert. It is only when a frequency number is used to REPRESENT a person, place, thing, or whatever, that it becomes animate and thereby exerts meanings and influences. I’ve also mentioned that each individual on the planet, whether they care to learn about it or not, has one or more “Operative Number Frequencies” which appear throughout that individual’s lifetime in virtually every aspect of the life, beginning with the birth name and birth date.

The (Operative Number Frequencies) is NOT information that is available in any of the more than sixty texts by almost as many authors that I own and have studied. It is information that has derived through the decades in my own personal extensive, intensive study and research on this subject, not only in the English language but in ancient Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, etc.

Hannah has found her Operative Frequency and has followed through on researching it. Her situation is not unusual. It is, contrarily, the norm in number frequencies where the Operative Number Frequency comes into play. Apparently the Soul, prior to coming into an invarnation, determines the experiences it needs to have, and with Helpers, designs a plan that includes the frequency most suitable for those experiences to occur.

It isn’t precisely “predestination”, because although the experiences are in the design, there are generally several paths, or choices, or decisions, that the individual can choose as he or she travels through the life. However, NO MATTER WHICH PATH OR CHOICE IS MADE THE OPERATIVE FREQUENCY IS THERE. We don’t escape it, and no choice is either negative or positive, simply different in its expression.

So I would say to Hannah to continue her study of her #1 frequency in all its aspects, and she will learn the lessons and experiences that her Soul has penciled into her pre-incarnation program. She has “downloaded” that frequency consistently, which indicates she wants to learn as much as she can. Just as Astrological influences represent certain characteristics, so too do the number frequencies, and especiaslly the Operative Frequency(ies).

Ever since I put up a contact form on our blog late last year, we’ve been getting a lot of emails: Omarr readers, asking where the 2015 books are; synchro stories from a diverse group; and well, odd complaints. Here’s one of them:

Hello dear friends, there are actually nine keys in your surreal image that you googled for your synchronicities website. 3 keys are half hidden by the outstretched hands. I know I sound like a terrible stickler, but 9 keys are 9 keys, not 7. I do believe in synchronicity, but I also think we need to be careful not to shoehorn in connections when they aren’t there. Even a good thing can be overdone!! Kindest regards, Bea

 Rob and I puzzled over this one. We couldn’t recall any image that had nine keys on it. I checked the cover of the British edition of the book: one key. So I wrote Bea and asked her what she was referring to. Never heard back.

Then, today, this email from Philip Watling:

FAS is a real syndrome. The brain is very complex and it can change in many ways for a variety of reasons: hemorrhage, brain trauma, migraine, stroke etc. I had a massive head injury after being hit by a car in 1994 and my voice changed. Was it that my brain neurons altered or… No, don’t be silly, I am now able to converse with someone from my previous life! Sorry, but what an idiotic thing to say! For more information please read my book on – we deleted the link because it may be spam.

We think FAS relates to foreign accent syndrome, a post we wrote on May 6, 2012. Rob emailed Philip and asked him what he was talking about. We haven’t gotten a response.

I have no idea who Bea and Philip are or why they took the time to write us through the contact form and why neither of them responded. Maybe some people out there have an abundance of free time. They have so much free time they can afford to troll blogs and websites and leave these cryptic reminders that we live in a whole new world:

Instantaneous communication. Books delivered to our devices in the space of a single breath, and usually for a fraction of what they cost in a bookstore. Netflix. Movies on demand. Or this, an immediate story about today’s holiday that celebrates the legacy of Martin Luther King.

I’m an information junkie and welcome all of it. But honestly, some days when I sit down to eat breakfast, when my iphone and iPad are in front of me, ready to deliver whatever is happening beyond my home, neighborhood, state, country, I’m tempted to just turn it all off. I feel this insatiable urge to to pull back, to just enjoy my coffee and my grapefruit and to allow my day to unfold without any news at all. Some days, I’m tempted to just be.

This story also comes from Hannah, whose synchros we’ve posted before. I found this one intriguing, since a lot of my fiction involves ghosts. Also, the story spans several years, which synchros sometimes do.

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When I was 16, I ran away from home for a week or so to be with my boyfriend. He lived in a van in the middle of nowhere with only a handful of other vans parked there. It was along a very old track so you wouldn’t really want to drive up there.

One night I woke up desperate to pee and obviously I would have had to go outside. I was never scared of the dark but something made me not want to go out so I got back in bed desperate for the toilet but just waited. It must have been one or two in the morning. As I lay there, I started to hear children playing outside – more than three kids. It was loud but creepy because I could hear them running past the van. It sounded like a ghostly giggling in the wind. Yet, no children lived nearby and I knew it couldn’t be sound travelling from the school because it was the middle of the night. The next morning I so wanted to say something but thought my boyfriend would think I was mad. I said nothing.

My boyfriend broke up with me not long after and I was devastated. One day I walked to the track to try and see him. Luckily he wasn’t there, but Rosie, who lived at the beginning of the track, asked me in for coffee and a chat.

“I’m absolutely knackered,” Rosie said. “Them bloody kids kept me awake again last night.”

I asked what she meant; I said there weren’t any kids up here. But she said it was haunted and they were keeping her awake all the time. I told her I was so glad she’d said that since I’d heard them one night. I think she was pleased that she wasn’t the only one who’d heard them.

A year or so later I bumped into my friend Emma. She’d been living in the van next to where I was when I’d been there. I asked her if she ever heard them and she said yes, many times sometimes even during the day. Since then several other people have confirmed they also heard them.

Years later, when I was a taxi driver, I was asked to be an escort on the school run with another driver, Jon. We happened to be driving at what is the main road now below the old track. You can look up and see the tops of the vans up the fields. I mentioned that there are still vans there and he said, “My aunties died up there years ago.” He thought they’d died from TB from the milk that came from a nearby farm. “They were young. Their names were Lilian and Doris.”

This struck me for a couple of reason. My dad always called me Lil and Emma’s boyfriend, who had died only he previous year, had called her Doris.

The next day when I picked up the school dinners, I told the whole story to Janet, the cook. She wanted to know who had told me about their aunts dying and I replied that it was Johnny Preddy, the other driver.

“Don’t listen to him,” she said. “He’s an old storyteller.” Then she told me I was related to him, so the aunts he’d mentioned had been my aunts as well. I’d never heard of them. It’s true he’s a storyteller but the connection seemed like such a nice idea it seemed like such a nice idea that I had worked out who the ghost children were.

The next day when I picked up the dinners, Janet told me she owed me an apology. She said that Lilian and Doris were her aunties and she hadn’t known they existed until her mum did the family tree. Apparently they had lost their house and had a hovel near where the track is now and that they died from tainted milk. She even showed me a photo and told me where they were buried. I went to visit their grave; they died when they were 12 and 21.

Were they the ghosts at the track?

Emma and I have visited the track a few times to see if we can hear them….nothing. We bumped into someone who lives there and he hadn’t heard them either so I guess they are gone. Apparently that was their favorite place to play.