June 10, 1999: Ghost to Ghost | Open Lines
The stories grow increasingly bizarre as a parapsychology researcher at a university sleep lab describes watching a translucent apparition of an elderly woman in a flower-print dress float through walls and pass directly through his sleeping research subject. A commercial pilot flying a Cessna over Northern California at night recounts hearing a disembodied voice say "check your six," then watching a phantom World War II flying boat pull alongside before vanishing. He later identified it as the Philippine Clipper, which crashed in the Ukiah area decades earlier.
A mother shares how her three-year-old son's imaginary friend Irving turned out to be a real person buried in the community cemetery, confirmed when the child pointed directly to Irving Riggs' headstone during a walk. Years later, a photograph of the great-grandfather matched the figure her son had described visiting him at night.
Key Moments
Navy radioman smells his aunt's perfume the moment she dies a world away: Michael from Manhattan Beach, a former Navy radioman aboard an APA off Okinawa on April 1, 1945, recounts waking in his bunk at 3 a.m. on D-Day night to a strong, sweet bath-powder smell - the unmistakable scent of his Aunt Melanie back east. Weeks later his mother's letter revealed Aunt Melanie had died Easter Sunday afternoon - the exact moment, after time-zone conversion, he had woken.
Sleep-lab researcher and assistant watch a woman ghost float through their EEG chamber: Patrick, a parapsychology graduate student at Sac State, was running a Kirlian-photography sleep study at 4 a.m. when his assistant Mike yelled over the intercom 'she walked right through me' and burst into the experimental room. They both then watched a 60-something woman in a flower-print dress, with no visible feet, float through one wall, across the lab, and out through the anechoic chamber wall.
Long Island boy's invisible friend 'Irving' turns out to be a real grave nearby: A Texas caller recounts that her three-year-old son on Long Island had an invisible friend named Irving who 'floated up through the ceiling' and took him to 'a box of bones in the ground.' Days later on Memorial Day, while walking through the community cemetery, the boy pulled at her sleeve and pointed: 'There is where Irving lives' - at the gravestone of Irving Riggs. A coworker later confirmed Irving Riggs as her own great-grandfather.
Pilot escorted by ghostly Pan Am Philippine Clipper near a 1943 crash site: A pilot flying a Cessna 172 home from Ukiah at night describes the cockpit suddenly going icy cold, his yoke locking, and a giant four-radial-engine flying boat creeping up alongside him. The pilot in the window waved, then peeled off and vanished. A Pan American history book his mother had given him identified the aircraft: a Martin M-130 Philippine Clipper that crashed in the Ukiah area on January 21, 1943.
Caller refuses to let his dead grandmother in, hears 'there is no heaven': Brian from Philadelphia describes a hyper-real dream three days after his grandmother's death: a friend brings her to his house in bare feet in unseasonable snow. She scratches at the glass, begging to be let in, but Brian senses something masquerading and tells her 'you are not my grandmother.' She scratches back: 'There is no heaven. There is no heaven.' Brian's father later reveals he had the same encounter 20 years earlier with their dead neighbor Miss Esther.