My Mother's Cigarettes
I have had an experience that leaves no other explanation but unexplained or supernatural... My mother passed away at the age of 40; I was 12 (my sister was 16). My mother was from Wisconsin and one summer when I was 14, my sister and I flew up to visit my grandparents. They lived in a big white house with a wrap around porch on a beautiful tree lined street. During that visit with them, I noticed a pack of cigarettes, the kind my mother smoked (KOOL) up on a wall in their house. My grandfather had evidently seen and taken them, while at our home in Maryland for her funeral. I guess it was his way of taking part of his daughter back home with him and my grandmother. He had what I called his "porch room", where his collection of all sorts of "stuff" would be stuck up on the walls, some of which consisted of matchbooks, coasters, bottle caps, and yes, packs of cigarettes. He wasn't a smoker, but collected them anyway (??). He had stuck my mother's last pack of cigarettes, still just about full with the matchbook that she always stuck in between the cellophane and pack, centered up over and the doorway that went out to their driveway. That particular observation remained with me for years. After my grandmother passed away and he was in a nursing home, my sister and I visited again, this time staying with my aunt. It was the early 90's, I was in my early forties and had 4 kids of my own Their house had been sold and was standing empty. My sister and I wanted to walk through one last time...it was such a "neat" house! My aunt gave us the key, dropped us off and said she'd be back later. When we walked in, I went straight back to the "porch room" hoping that I could retrieve that pack of cigarettes to keep as my own memento, but to my disappointment, the entire room was empty and the walls bare. Nothing was left. My aunt told us that she'd hired a company to completely empty and clean the house of what was left after family members and antique dealers took what they wanted. None of the workers would have known to keep anything, especially stuff (trash, to most) that was stuck up on plywood walls! Though I was disappointed, for the next hour we walked around the house taking pictures and remembering vacations there while we were growing up. Too soon my aunt was waiting out front for us, so we headed to the front door, my sister leading. As I walked out the front door, the only way I can describe what happened is that I "heard a voice" in my head telling me that should, "check the porch one more time". I told my sister to wait a minute and I ran back to the porch room.... Low and behold, to my absolute surprise, there was my mother's pack of "KOOL" cigarettes, stuck up over the doorway, seemingly untouched! I was, to say the least, stunned.... I yelled for my sister to come and help me. Since there was nothing to stand on, she had to heist me up and I pulled it down from the wall. I was still in disbelief when we left. After getting back to my aunt's, I told her what had happened, and she, more or less, shrugged it off, but was able to find a small tin for me to put it in. To this day, my mother's pack of cigarettes still sits in that tin, which I have stored in a cabinet with my other "saved memories". Writing this, I still get "butterflies" in the pit of my stomach, while still trying to make sense of what happened. All I know is.. that pack of cigarettes WAS NOT there when we arrived for our last walk through, and when we left, IT WAS.. "Something" or "someone" told me to go back and look one more time... I don't know if it was, what some people would refer to as a "Guardian Angel, or if it was my Mother speaking to me from the "afterlife".....I can't explain it. That pack of cigarettes just seemed to appear out of nowhere..just for me. Something as insignificant as my mother's unfinished pack of cigarettes after her death, was very significant to me, but I don't know why. I captured, and kept, the memory of it being displayed on my grandfather's wall in my mind when I was 14 years old. I'd only found out, for the first time then, that it had even been saved. I don't know why I fixated on it to the point of "expecting" it to still be there for me years later. I still question how it happened and I'm still stunned that it did!
If anyone has any explanation to this unexplained, supernatural, or phenomenon occurrence, please enlighten me! I feel lucky and very fortunate to have been given a piece of my mother's past, and to have experienced it in the way it was "given" to me.
If anyone has any explanation to this unexplained, supernatural, or phenomenon occurrence, please enlighten me! I feel lucky and very fortunate to have been given a piece of my mother's past, and to have experienced it in the way it was "given" to me.
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by Sandybyrd