Nursing Home Ghost Visitations: True Stories?

Since I was just a toddler, I've been around the elderly.  My own father was 54 years old when I was born, and my mother was two months away from being 38 at my birth.  Their aunts and uncles all died during my childhood, so I have never been a stranger to losing those I love.

Seeing so many elderly persons exit this life also showed me what happens during their final days.  Almost always they are visited by those loved ones who have gone before.

I know this sounds crazy, but I promise you it is true.  Ask any nursing home or hospice worker and they will tell you stories too.  Some may try to explain it away with medication or the brain's chemicals altering before death, but those explanations pale when you see it for yourself so many times.

My boy, Buster, was a registered Therapy Dog.  We visited a nursing home weekly from mid-2006 until a week before Buster's death in December 2013.  I can tell you with certainty that dogs know and see things that people do not.  Buster was amazing.

I'm fairly convinced that humans are the stupidest of all creatures, if you want to know the truth, but I digress....

Buster saw things in that nursing home that I couldn't see.  He would often wag his tail and look up expectantly like someone should pet him outside a room where the patient had passed away the previous night or a day or two ago.  It was like they came to tell Buster good-bye.  Buster wouldn't even let me lead him into those rooms.  He somehow knew that person was no longer there. 

This is just truth.

Buster and I would often visit an elderly patient who would tell me all about how their mother had been to see them that day.  They would chat happily and tell me all about the visit.  I'd mention it to the nurses, who would give me a wary look and almost always tell me that person had other visitations that week too.

By the next week when Buster and I visited, that person would have passed away.

It happened over and over and over, so I decided to try some Google searches to see if it happens to others and guess what?  Yup.  Happens all the time.

Some people call the visitors angels or Jesus or some other religious figure, but most people recognize the visitor as a deceased family member.  I find that fascinating.

The Google searches also turned up a LOT of stories about how Grandma's ghost (or whomever's ghost) visited her family the night she died, etc.

Hallucinations?  Maybe, but I personally believe not.  I believe we merely live in these bodies while we are on this physical plane.  The energy that is us never dies.  Only the body returns to dust, so it makes sense to me that someone on a spirit plane might be able to communicate with someone on a physical plane. 

I believe we are never truly alone.

Doesn't really matter what anyone believes though.  What is true and real is true and real whether we believe it or not and that real  truth might be different from anything any human has ever imagined before. 

Still, it comforts me to think my loved ones who have passed away are still alive and well in the spirit world and I will get to see them all again someday.  I like to believe that.

Just something to think about today.  We'll all know the answer soon enough.