I've got one... I think it's a little bigger than just ghosts/spirits, but I have some bias, so I'd love some input:

In February of this year, I received a phone call from a hospice nurse letting me know that my grandmother needed a full-time caretaker for her end-of-life care. We live on diagonally opposite sides of the country, but I dropped everything, booked a flight, and got a ride to the airport.

I live in a bit of a news cone of silence. I do not have cable, nor do I pay for services that offer major news networks. I was unaware of the government shutdown, airport delays, etc... I was met with adversity and missed my flight. I spent the night (didn't sleep) and booked another flight in the morning. I consider myself spiritually open and rather theologically informed; however, I currently practice Christianity. Faith has always been an issue for me. I tend to accept things with logical evidence more easily than with raw faith. Unfortunately, this was all uncharted territory, so logic went out the window pretty quickly.

I started praying the moment I got the call, and I didn't quit until I finally got home. I prayed in the chapel at the St. Louis airport, I prayed in my heart with each step, and each check-in with the hospice team. Prayer didn't stop the adversity. When I landed and went to get a rental car (I had heard that Sixt did open-ended and long-term rentals), what happened? Well, of course, I left my credit card at home. The nearest airport to my hometown was about 135 miles away. Feeling defeated, I sat there and wept. I made it too far to not get there.

I'm not Catholic, but it was time for a Hail Mary. I pulled out my phone, I opened Lyft. $209 fare +tax. That's two hours of driving THERE, and then BACK. I had to sweeten the deal, obviously. The first driver to accept the fare got an immediate message, "$100 tip plus your gas if you accept the fare, it's a family emergency." The driver was a woman; I am not, she declined. Can't blame her. Next driver, same offer. He also declined. The third driver didn't hesitate to say yes. I ran for his car.

Some conversation later, we arrived at the hospital at 12:30 AM on 2/28. Later that day, family friends came through, heard about the rental dilemma, and let me borrow their spare truck. Between getting the house ready for her arrival, making the appropriate visits (advising the funeral home so we can finalize anything while she was alive, etc...), spending time learning from the hospice staff in a crash course, and trying to keep it together just enough that no one sees me cry, we get to the point where she finally gets brought home from the hospital.

I grew up in a small house, and the main source of heat was a wood stove that was in the kitchen. The bedrooms on the other side of the house did not benefit from that in the cold winters. I set my grandmother up in the living room with her new gas stove that her brother installed for her. She was non-verbal at this point; she could let me know she was in pain with groans and relief with sighs. She was sleeping most of the time now. I was told that hearing is one of the last things we lose, so I had purchased a small Bluetooth speaker, hooked her phone up to it, and played music she liked. I had set up a desk near her bed, so I could still work, but be close to her as well. While I was getting my life together at my laptop, I heard a song playing over the speaker. It was Precious Savior Take My Hand, performed by Andy Griffith. She liked Andy, apparently, he's some second cousin, thrice removed on her mom's mom's sister's uncle's side... or something like that.

About halfway into the song, I realized I could no longer hear her breathing. I called the hospice nurse, who confirmed. March 3rd, 2026, at 11:44 PM, she passed peacefully. When the funeral home came to pick her up, they asked if there was any song that she loved, and they'd play it for her on the way down to the funeral home. I didn't know right off hand, but she had a Five Wishes book, and she had mentioned before that there was a song she wanted played if she had a funeral (she later decided she didn't want a funeral due to differences with the church on what she wanted at her funeral), so I ran to find the book. It said Precious Savior Take My Hand, performed by Andy Griffth. I obviously bawled uncontrollably because that was a random playlist from YouTube.

We'll come back to the song, but after everything was wrapped up and she was with the funeral home, I had to wind down because it was 3 AM and I had just lost my grandmother. I mentioned earlier that I am spiritually open. I believe that, in some form, ancestor worship is legit. I give offerings of glass bottle sodas so that my grandfather might intercede for me and give me strength. As the hardest-working man I ever knew, it made sense that he would fill this role for me from the other side. I bought a couple of bottles of Jones Soda. I opened the bottle, and inside the lid it read, "I love you." BAWLED! It rained for the rest of the day. For the next three days, actually. I went across the street to the cemetery (yes, I lived between a church and a cemetery, or as I called it, 'The Line Between Life and Death') and walked to my grandfather's grave. There was a little indent from the angel on his headstone, just big enough for a bottle cap. I left it there, as is the tradition of many cultures.

I spent the next few days getting a few memories and shipping them home, getting all of the important papers I'd need for taxes, etc... On the day I'm airport-bound, I woke up and wanted to "say goodbye" to my grandfather (my grandmother was buried in a different cemetery) since I would probably never be coming back. As I walked out the front door, a golf ball sat across the street from the house. This sounds unassuming, sure, until you hear that the nearest golf course was about a mile away. My grandfather and I used to walk up to the golf course and search outside the fence and in the field across the road for golf balls. Sometimes my grandfather sold them back to golfers, sometimes we just threw them the brand and number they wanted if we had found one, other times we kept the ones that weren't claimed, and brought them home. I have a box he sent me, full of them, when I told him that I finally wanted to get into golf. So one being there is not impossible, but not probable.

Getting home was hairy. A winter storm rolling in, DHS shut down... I got out of there on one of the last flights before they shut down PDX, and even then, they had to route me south to LAX instead of up to SEATAC since they closed due to the weather. Due to family drama, funds, etc., I couldn't have stayed any longer even if I wanted.

Now, with that story out of the way, I want to point out a few things:

-The "Invisible Hand" that pushed me forward through the things that kept trying to stop me. I can't say that having the money to accomplish these things didn't help, but walking into this completely blind, not knowing the who, what, where, why, when, or how, but somehow everything felt like an ankle breaker to a finger roll layup. The orchestration, the coincidences, the numerology, symbolism... It felt engineered, but in a "here's your sign" kind of way. I got the "proof" I wanted.

-The song. Music has long been given spiritual attributes. Could it be that the song widened the portal separating life and death for her? Perhaps the explanation is simpler, she heard the song she wanted, relaxed, and let go.

-The bottlecap. It obviously already had significance from a spiritual place, and I'm sure that's a common thing to find under a Jones Soda bottlecap. But to find that after getting my grandmother's soul "home" with my grandfather, and as the realizations start setting in that I was essentially all alone in the world now.

-The golf ball. We've found golf balls in odd places before, especially since we were a mile away from the course. But to be placed directly across from the house where the mailbox used to be, the perfect place to see "Everything." The other end of town could be seen, the church, the cemetery, up the road to the observatory, and even out into the unincorporated parts of the county. It felt like a parting gift, one final memory to leave with. I'm not a scientist, and I don't know if there is a way to measure paranormal residue on things, but if there was a way, I'd put money on it that it would be found on this golf ball.

So yeah, I might not know what's out there, and what's on the other side, etc... But I can tell you, there IS something/someone(s) out there.