This story is called ‘Tufts’ and it is my first encounter from ‘the other side’. It came one night as I retired to bed when I still lived at my parents home. They were in the lounge room enjoying the remainder of their evening.
I had been through a harrowing experience of losing my future father-in-law. He had been out one evening and apparently had got into a nasty fight in a hotel. He was found later, picked up by the police and taken to the station for safe keeping overnight. When the police came across him in a large parkland, they thought that he was asleep from too much alcohol. When they tried to wake him in the morning they couldn’t! He was unconscious. When they searched him they found his wallet that was completely empty. He never regained consciousness and passed away a week later in hospital.
This particular night however, I went to bed as normal and was lying in bed when I felt a strange sensation come over me. The bed felt as though it was tilting backwards more, more and more. I couldn’t work out what was going on. My logical mind was telling me I was experiencing some kind of an illusion. Then I was staring around the room as this sensation stopped and still my heart was racing.
There beside me was a tuft, then another, more appeared . . .little white tufts of cloud like vapor spinning around in a circle! “What was this?” I remember thinking. Then beside me appeared a vision. Clear as a crystal. It was my father-in-law laying beside me with a white sheet over him up to his chest. His head was facing me eye to eye. His eyes were staring at mine wide open. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! I tried to scream I was so shocked! Nothing came out – not an utterance of sound. I can remember trying to scream with my mouth wide open. Then the strange tipping sensation of the bed started again and the vision went. The white tufts of vapor reappeared in their spinning motion. Gently everything stopped. Everything was then still, and I could hear my parents chatting in the lounge room. What had I experienced? I wasn’t sure.
I kept this to myself until about two weeks later. I was talking to his sister-in-law over the phone after the funeral. We were quite close at the time and our conversation became rather deep. I plucked up the courage to tell her what happened to me, and how I had seen him in the night. I expressed to her as best I could what my experiences had been. I made sure that she was clear that it had not been a dream, and that I had accurately remembered what happened.
She asked me “how was he laying and how did he look?” Well I replied that “his head was on one side and his eyes were wide open staring straight at me and he had a sheet over him up to his chest”. She exclaimed “OH, OH! That’s incredible, that’s how he looked.” “What do you mean?” I enquired becoming alarmed. “Didn’t you know that it was me who went in to identify him? When I went in they couldn’t straighten his head up or close his eyes because rigor mortis had set into his body and this is exactly how he had been laying on the slab when I last saw him,” she explained. It was then that I realised that I had had a vision and a visitation from my father-in-law.
I still can remember exactly how he looked staring at me from his last moments on earth. It was a curious experience to see these “tufts”. What were they? And why were they associated with the vision? What was the strange tipping sensation that I experienced before and after the vision? I still do not know. These ” tufts” of vapour were fascinating. Little did I know it wasn’t to be the last encounter I would have of these “tufts”.
