Communications From the Other Side. Anthony Quinata

      I seriously doubt I would even be doing this work if it weren’t for my aunt Sue. Sue isn’t from Guam, but from Japan. She is married to my uncle Joe, who is my mother’s brother.

      It’s very common for young men from Guam to sign up for military service. My father was a career Navy man, working on an aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Yorktown, up until I was ten years old. My uncle was career Army. Both of them served overseas during the Korean and Vietnam wars. My family and my Aunt Sue’s family lived in Southern California, so we spent a lot of time at my aunt’s home.

      One night, when I was eight years old, my aunt told me a Japanese ghost story that frightened the living daylights out of me. It scared me so much that I jumped out of my chair, and to this day I believe I actually had to use my hands to keep my head from hitting the ceiling!

      Everyone laughed at me, but after that, I was hooked. Every time I’d spend the night at her house, I’d ask her to tell me another ghost story which usually meant I’d be so afraid that I’d have to change my underwear and lie in bed terrified of the ghost I was sure was going to come for me, either out of the closet or from under the bed.

      “Were there really such things as ghosts?” I wondered. The answer to my question came one night when I was watching television with my mother. My sister Meridith and my brother Eddie were both asleep, and after watching an episode of “Batman,” I was ready to fall asleep as well. The television set that my mother and I were watching was in the bedroom I shared with Eddie. As soon as the show ended, I asked my mother if she wanted to keep watching television.

      My mother asked me if I was ready to go to bed. Since I indicated that I was, she told me to go ahead and turn off the television. As soon as I did, we both heard a very loud, male voice call out my mother’s name.

      “Rosalia!”

      I stood next to the television looking at my mother. We were both wondering the same thing, “Had someone broken into our house?”

      “Who are you?” my mother asked.

      Once again we heard the same voice say, “Rosalia!” “What do you want?” my mother asked, clearly afraid.

      After that, we heard muttering and what sounded like the front door being slammed shut, followed by the screen door. “Go check the front door and make sure it’s locked,” my mother told me.

      I ran out into the living room and checked the front door. “It’s locked!” I called out to my mother.

      “Check the screen door!” I opened the front door and let her know that it was locked too.

      I don’t know how long it took my mother to finally fall asleep, but I fell asleep rather quickly, happy to have had what I thought was my first experience with a real “ghost.”

      The next day my mother decided we were going to spend the night at my Aunt Sue’s house. When my mother told Sue what had happened, my aunt said (of course, I was eavesdropping on their conversation) that someone had been knocking on her back door for three straight hours! Sue told us that she kept asking, “Who is it?” When no one answered and the knocking persisted, she picked up a carving knife, held it up in the air, and said, “Come in!”

      No one did, but the knocking on the door continued.

      The next day my mother received a call from one of her sisters. Their father was ill and in the hospital. At one point, my mother was told that my grandmother was unconscious and kept muttering, “Rosalia, José,” over and over again.

      Technically, what happened is what is referred to in parapsychology as a “crisis communication.” Typically, crisis communications occur when someone is seriously injured, ill, or dying, and that person telepathically reaches out to someone close to them. Usually the person who is doing this isn’t aware that a message is being sent out.

      I didn’t know about crisis communications when I was eight years old, but what my mother and I heard that night convinced me that ghosts do, indeed, exist, and it was the beginning of what would become an obsession that would last for years.

      When I was ten years old, my father was assigned to duty in Iceland. We were living in Norfolk, Virginia at the time. He went first, and we followed a few months later so that Meridith, Eddie, and I could finish school. While we were still in Virginia, there was a new addition to our family—my sister Nadine.

      When we finally arrived in Iceland, one of the things I remember is because it was so cold that when my father saw us, he started crying and his tears literally froze on his face. Still, to this day, I loved living there.

      There was a small library on the military base where we lived. I found and read the book A Gift of Prophecy written by the psychic Jeanne Dixon. It was my first real introduction to anything “psychic.” In her book she wrote that she knew she was “special” because the lines in one of her palms formed a star. I looked at both of my palms—no star. I wasn’t a psychic, and I can’t tell you how disappointed I was. I was, however, so fascinated by her story that I think I read her book, cover to cover, at least three times.

      I saw another book in the “base exchange,” which is kind of like a Walmart store for military personnel and their families, entitled How to Tell Fortunes with Ordinary Playing Cards. It was on the same shelf as the monthly magazines my mother would buy that had daily horoscope predictions for every sign in the zodiac. All I saw was the cover of the book. I didn’t pick it up to look at it because I didn’t have the money to buy it, and I didn’t think my mother would buy it for me either.

      A few days later my mother was reading the predictions for the day in one of her magazines, and I saw a deck of cards that my parents had been using the night before to play poker with their friends. Remembering the book I had seen about telling fortunes with ordinary cards, I asked my mother if she’d like me to tell her fortune for her.

      “How are you going to do that?” she wanted to know.

      “With these cards,” I told her, shuffling the deck.

      I don’t think she had ever received a “card reading” before, but I am sure that she thought the idea of receiving one from her ten-year-old son was amusing. “Sure,” she said, “Tell me my fortune.”

      As I said before, I didn’t look inside of the book, so I really had no idea what I was supposed to do. I hadn’t heard of tarot cards and knew nothing about card spreads. What I did do was lay the cards out in three rows of seven. I got the idea from a card trick my father had taught me.

      After I laid the cards out, I looked them over and said the first thing that came to mind. “Your father’s in the hospital.”

      “What?” my mother asked. She didn’t seem to find what I was doing as funny as she had a moment ago.

      “Your father’s sick. He’s in the hospital.”

      “How do you know that?” my mother demanded to know. She wasn’t taking what I said seriously; she just couldn’t believe I had the gall to say what I was saying.

      “That’s what the cards are telling me,” I said. “Your father is sick, and he’s in the hospital.”

      “If my father is in the hospital, I would know about it. One of my sisters would have called and told me.” With that she got up and

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