My Spirit Grandfather

My story occurred over the length of my childhood, beginning when I was 4 years old. I awoke one night and went to the bathroom. I returned to my room and got back in bed when I became aware of a presence in the hallway just outside my door. As I was only 4, and scared to death, I pulled the covers up over my head, and told the presence to go away. I cannot recall if I actually heard a disembodied voice, or if I was only able to sense it, but the being said that it would go but that it would return.

Four years went by, and no other activity was noted, until the night when the experience repeated itself, with an identical response from both me and the ghost. Again I had gotten up before the occurrence and I am positive that I was awake when it occurred.

Fast forward again, to my early teen years. I had become involved with a group called the Inner Peace Movement, which on the local level in my town was a group of folks who met every Friday night in a private residence, to hold spiritual development sessions. There was a youth group (mostly the children of the adult couples that met upstairs) that held meetings in the basement.

The basic tenets of the group were that we all have the ability to get in touch with our extra-sensory gifts, and that one could practice developing them with exercises and by paying attention to one's relationship with the spiritual realm beyond our normal range of sensation.

The woman Helen M. who ran the local group and who hosted the meeting was a sensitive who would give readings. She sat me down in a comfortable chair and provided me with some tract literature to read, while she sat across from me. She achieved a trace state and after about twenty minutes, she awoke and we recapped her assessment. All of this was written out on an assessment form that was pre-printed and had spaces for individual comments.

I still have this to this day. One piece of paper had an explanation of the various types of perception: Prophetic, Feeling, Intuitive and Visionary as well as the order that I relied on these skills in my daily life. On another paper was a diagram showing the number of guardian angels a person had (these were folks who had evolved enough through reincarnation to avoid rebirth. They then elected to function in the spiritual realm as individual guardian angels for those who were living).

I had five, whose last incarnations were: A Roman charioteer, a Roman Senator, a "Forest Woman" who lived amongst the animals and had herbalist skills, a Privateer (Pirate) and a British Mathematician.

Then she dropped the bomb. She said, "You have another spirit attached to you that is between realms. Do you have a male relative that died in a fire or an explosion?

My Grand Daddy Clyde Redenbaugh had died years before my birth during an explosion at the Kansas Power and Light plant in Topeka. He had gotten out safely during an evacuation of the plant but had gone back in to rescue someone left behind when the plant was ripped apart by a gas explosion. I had never met him, and had no living Grandfathers. He had been married to my favorite grandmother, and I had always been curious about him

Helen explained that folks who have died in a violent or sudden way may have not been aware that they had indeed passed on, and that they could become entangled in the environment in which their deaths had occurred, or caught up in the emotional needs of their survivors. We planned a very simple ceremony to contact Clyde's spirit, to thank him for his concern and to give him permission to cross over to the light. I have never felt or heard from him again. But it has provided me with personal proof of the afterlife. I hope when it's my time to cross over he will be amongst those who welcome me in the light.