Altered Nature

My ghost story, one of the many that have happened to me, is not at all a scary or creepy tale. It’s more-so a testament to the awesome power spirits have.

Last year, I met an amazing man named Shane. He and I were both infatuated with the movie The Crow, and our mutual interest in that lead to the discovery of our mutual interest in many, many things. It was the Crow though, that we seemed to be most connected by.

Sadly, a few short months after I met this incredible boy, he was in a car accident and passed away.

I was taking it hard, to the point were it was affecting my health. I couldn’t sleep, and when I did, it was fitful and filled with eerie and disturbing dreams. One hit harder than any other though. I was laying on the ground at my house, staring at the northern lights (bare in mind I live in the southeastern US, NO northern lights here!) A crow flew over me and a single black feather fell and landed on my chest, right over my heart. My heart pounding, I shot up out of bed. For some reason, at that moment, I knew that dream was significant, though at the time I didn’t know how much so. That same night, my sister had a dream that I was riding in a gray SUV with some boy she’d never seen and he was wearing a hat. She had never met Shane, but she described him and his SUV perfectly. The hat, however, was odd. I’d never seen the boy wear one. Again, it seemed significant at the time, but not as much as it would be later on.

The day after I had that dream I was driving home from work. It was a dark cloudy night, an impending storm continuing to hover around, threatening to let loose with the occasional burst of lightning. I had the soundtrack to the Crow in my CD player as I pulled into my driveway and was listening to a song about losing someone you love, a haunting ballad from that movie called "It can’t rain all the time." Just when the girl began to sing the line, "he was telling me to still believe," lightning struck behind a cloud, mirroring the northern lights in my dream exactly. At that moment I KNEW Shane was communicating with me, telling me he was there, he hadn’t left me, and that everything would be OK.

As his family was relatively into the supernatural, especially his mom, I called her and told her about what happened. She too had had an experience where he seemed to alter nature to tell her was ok, only hers was a dream in which he appeared and told her to go the beach. It was just at dawn and they live on the coast, so this was no problem. She went to the beach and found a perfect conch, a VERY rare find in SC. The second she picked it up, there was a cloud in a sunrise that hadn't been there before, shaped like a crow. She said she knew at that instant it was Shane. I told her about both of the dreams, and at the last minute remembered that in my sister’s dream he had been wearing a hat. I mentioned this to her since I found it odd and at that point she broke down in tears. She then explained to me that, though it was odd for him to wear hats, his hair was a little long when he had died, and since he was SO meticulous about his appearance, she thought he wouldn’t want anyone to see him looking shaggy and ungroomed. She’d buried him in a hat, a hat exactly like the one my sister described from her dream.

He still sends me little signs now and then to let me know he’s still with me, a warm feeling, once or twice I’ve even felt him brush the hair from my face as I lay in bed trying to sleep, but none has had more significance to me than that series of dreams.

Our love was so strong he altered nature to let me know he was OK and that he missed me as much as I missed him.