Ghost Voices In My Head

I cannot say that mine is really a ghost story, but something which happened to me twice has made me realize that there really is someone - or something - in my personal ether that manifests itself when it knows something bad is about to happen.

My first encounter with my "ghost voice" came when I was 10 years old (more years ago than I care to admit). I had gotten a kitten about 8 months earlier, and Smokey slept in my room every night, usually in her own bed. One night, about 3 AM, I awoke from a very sound sleep with a voice resounding in my head telling me to "get up and pet the cat". It kept saying it over and over, until I did its bidding - I had no idea why I was supposed to, but it was clear that I had no choice in the matter. So I got Smokey from her bed and brought her to mine, spending a good 20 minutes petting and kissing her. Finally, she jumped down and went back to her bed; I briefly considered getting her again, then decided to go back to sleep. Around 6 AM, my mom got up and, as was her usual practice, let Smokey out of my room, fed her, and let her out for the day. This meant that when I got up at 7 AM she was gone. I went to school, and when I got home that afternoon, my mom met me at the door, tears streaming down her face, to tell me that Smokey had been hit and killed by a car that morning.

If my voice had not woken me up in the middle of the night, she would have gone out in the morning and been killed without my getting a chance, totally unknowingly, to say goodbye, and I will always be grateful it was so insistent that I wake up and spend a few last minutes with her.

Unfortunately, the second time I heard the voice, some 25 years later, I was not as smart, didn't follow its command, and paid dearly for it.

By now I was living in New York City, the East Village to be exact, and it was a pretty rough neighborhood. I had lived there for 10 years with no untoward incidents, but one morning, as I was getting ready for work, the voice was back, telling me to "hide your jewelry". Remembering my experience with Smokey, that very morning I took all of my good jewelry (of which I had a fair amount, since my great- grandfather had been a jeweler in Germany), and squirreled it away in some dark corner in my closet. Problem was, I had stashed it so thoroughly that it was a real pain in the neck to get to, so, after several weeks I stupidly dismissed the voice's warning and put the jewelry back in the boxes I kept it in.

Two weeks later, my boyfriend and I went out to dinner, and when we came home, we discovered that someone had broken into the apartment and stolen all of my jewelry. They had taken nothing else. None of it was ever recovered.

So I am batting 50-50 as far as the ghost voice goes - once I listened, to good effect, once I did not, and will always regret it. I am not sure I will ever hear the voice again, but if I do, I can certainly guarantee that I will unquestioningly do everything it tells me to!