The Truth About The "Close Encounters" Stories ...

As I promised at the end of my post for the 58th edition of the Carnival of Genealogy, I am now announcing the truth about whether or not these two stories were true or fiction, but before I do, I am going to post the results for the poll I created in relation to that post.

For the poll, I asked, "What Do You Think About the Stories in the 'Close Encounters ...' post? Four people voted in my poll, and the results are:

• Story One is true but the second one is false - 1 vote
• Story Two is true but the first one is false - 1 vote
• Both are true - 2 votes
• Neither are true - 0 votes

Of course, I should also mention that five other people left comments at the end of that post, and those five believed the stories were true.

Well, guess what? I apparently can't fool you. Both of the stories are true. For the first story my great-grandfather really did die three days before my mother and her family found out. Of course, this is according to what my mother told me, and from the way she told me, it sounds as though my grandma had a dream about him around the time he died, which was three days before they learned about his death. As for the lapse in time, my great-grandfather lived in the United Kingdom, and when something did happen, my mother's family was usually the last to hear about it because family members over in the U.K. would have been the ones taking care of the arrangements. Of course, by the time my mother's relatives in the U.K. had a chance to contact my mother's family, three days had gone by. (As strange as this might sound.)

As for the second story, I did start shaking in the car as my grandpa drove out of the cemetery. To this day, I still do not know what was the cause of the shaking. We visited the cemetery in late July, so there wasn't any reason for me to start shaking. Of course, unless I was reacting to the air conditioning in the car, but I do not recall it being an extremely hot or humid day. The other possibility that I can think of is that it was an unconscious reaction to being in the cemetery. I did write in a post last year that I do not like visiting cemeteries, and it could be that my dislike of being in cemeteries resulted in me shaking. (Well, I think cemeteries are creepy.) Of course, those are the two most likely possibilities, and I don't think I want to think about any other possibilities ...

Before I forget, I just want to say thank you to those who voted, read my post, and left comments on the post. Thank you for doing so.