The Second World War soldier who had a ghostly experience

For months, as I’ve visited Evan as his hospice social worker, he’s been praying to die. He’s in his 90s, and he’s been fighting cancer for more than four years. As he sees it, his life has turned into a tedious, meaningless dirge with nothing to look forward to other than its end.

On this visit, though, he’s engaged and upbeat. His sudden about-face arouses my suspicions.

“You seem to feel differently today,” I say casually. “What’s going on?”

He looks at me cryptically.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” he asks.

It’s not the first time a patient has asked me this. People can have unusual experiences when they reach the end of life: visitations from spiritual beings, messages delivered in dreams, synchronicities, or strange behaviours by animals, birds, even insects.

“There are all kinds of ghosts,” I respond seriously. “What type are you talking about?”

“You remember me telling you about the war?” he asks.

How could I forget? He’d traced his long-standing depression to his time as a supply officer for a World War II combat hospital.

“I remember.”

“There’s something I left out,” he says. “Something I can’t explain.”

Evan goes on to describe one horrific, ice-cold autumn day: Casualties were coming in nonstop. He and others scrambled to transport blood-soaked men on stretchers to triage. “I’d been hustling all day. My back felt broken, and my hands were numb with cold.”

He grimaces and swallows hard.

“We were hauling one guy, and my grip on the stretcher slipped.” Tears roll down his face. “He hit the ground and his intestines oozed out.”

Evan rubs his hands as if they were still cold.

“That night I was on my cot. I couldn’t stop crying about that poor guy, and the others I’d seen die. My cot creaked, I was shaking so hard.”

I nod, waiting for him to continue.

“Then I looked up,” he says. “Saw a guy sitting on the end of my cot. He was in a World War I uniform, with one of those funny helmets.”

Evan starts crying and laughing at the same time. “He was looking at me with love. I could feel it. I’d never felt that kind of love before.”

“What was it like?”

He pauses. “I just felt all the pain and cruelty wasn’t what was real.”

“What was real?”

“Knowing that no matter how cruel the world looks, on some level, somehow, we are all loved. We are all connected.”

This turned out to be the first of several paranormal visits. Each time the spectre arrived, he would wordlessly express love and leave Evan with a strong sense of peace and calm.

“After the war, the visits stopped,” he says. “Years later I was cleaning out Mom’s stuff after she died, and I found an old photograph. It was the same guy. I looked on the back, and Mom had written the words ‘Uncle Calvin, killed during World War I, 1918.’”

We talk some more, then I ask, “What does this have to do with your being in a better mood?”

“He’s back,” he whispers. “Saw him last night on the foot of my bed. He spoke this time.”

“What’d he say?”

“He told me he’s going to help me over the hill when it’s time to go.”

As I’m formulating more questions, Evan surprises me by asking one of his own.

“You ever have something strange happen? Something that tells you that no matter how bad it looks, you’re connected with something bigger?”

A memory from 35 years ago flashes into my mind. I was asleep in a graduate student apartment at Syracuse University. A siren’s blare woke me. I sat up, adrenaline pumping, heart pounding like a hammer.

From outside, I distinctly heard someone say, “Bring it here quick.” Then I heard a gurney being rolled across asphalt.

I went to the window and pulled back the curtain, certain there was trouble outside. 

No one was there.

Just before daybreak, Dad called to tell me that a few hours earlier, my Uncle Eddie had been killed in an automobile collision.

On the kitchen table sat a beat-up radio. It suddenly switched itself on, and I heard the opening chords of the Beatles song “Let It Be.”

I’d never listened closely to the song before—but this time, I did. The music and words filled me with an otherworldly sense of peace and comfort.

For years, I tried to explain away those events. Inside, though, a part of me knew they were real.

After nearly 30 years as a hospice social worker, I’m certain of it. And I have patients like Evan to thank: dying patients who have convinced me that the world we inhabit is lovingly mysterious and eager to support us, especially during times of crisis.

I return to the present. Evan is look-ing at me, waiting for an answer to his question about connecting with something strange, something bigger. Outside, a flock of crows takes off in unison from the branches of an ancient oak.

“Yeah,” I say with a nod. “I guess I have.”