I can’t even begin to rival some of these stories and pictures. But since I now cannot sleep (thanks a lot), I have a couple stories of my own. Not even about me mostly, but about others in my family. Nothing preternatural has ever happened to me, except maybe once (I’m sure it has a rational explanation, but it was scary at the time).

My brother and I were staying home during a Christmas vacation, near Chicago. My parents and younger siblings went down South to visit relatives. This was the first time they let us stay by ourselves, but we were in high school and had part-time jobs and didn’t want to take off for the whole week. One night, rather late, I went outside to look at some freshly fallen snow. It was just a beautiful scene–all hazy blue (you know how the sky in winter reflects the snow and seems blue, not black?), and I felt sentimental about something, so wanted to go check it out.

When I got outside, I noticed some weird lights in the sky to the southwest. As I watched them, they became clearer and more distinguished. Finally I realized that they were becoming three crosses: one large one in the middle and two smaller ones, one on each side of the large one. I blinked my eyes, and the crosses were still there. They seemed high up in the sky, but not like overwhelming the entire universe, just off in the distance. I ran in to get my brother, and he, too, saw these crosses. We were so scared, thinking that it was a sign of the end of the world, that we called the police. The police said they’d received several calls, and the only explanation they had was that Argonne National Labs, nearby, was doing some kind of testing with gas emissions. (Holy!). We called our parents, too, and they were worried.

The crosses stayed in the sky for maybe half an hour, and then just as gradually as they came to a distinguishable image, they faded out. My dad has had two weird things happen to him. My dad awoke around four in the morning once, because he heard a little voice say “help”. Dad got kind of freaked out, and woke my mom up. About a minute later, they got a phone call that my mom’s dad had just died–three states away. The other story also involves my dad. He had been talking with a lady at his church whose son had just been killed in a freak automobile accident.

The woman was obviously distraught, and my dad was trying to help her out by some kind of encouragement. The woman was afraid that her son wouldn’t go to heaven because she wasn’t sure her son had really believed in God (forgive the religious stuff), and he had been kind of rebellious and stuff–a partier, etc. One night my dad had a dream that the young man spoke to him. The words were in Latin, and my dad, not knowing Latin, woke up after the dream and wrote the words down. Later he told the woman at his church what the words had sounded like, and she, knowing Latin, smiled and said that they meant, “Don’t worry. I’m in heaven.”