“The first time Jude Allman died, he was eight years old.”
This is the first line of Waking Lazarus, a story about a troubled man who becomes an unwilling celebrity after he dies three times over the course of his life. Jude Allman doesn’t know how or why he survived and goes to great lengths to protect himself from the media after he moves to Red Lodge, Montana. Under the assumed name of Ron Gress, Jude works for the local elementary school as a janitor.
He leads a very solitary, paranoia-ridden life until a strange woman named Kristina shows up on his doorstep. Naturally, he thinks she’s a reporter and tries to shoo her away. She convinces him that she is a dying woman looking for answers to the Other Side. In the meantime, children have started disappearing from neighboring towns.
Jude is aware of this and is afraid for his five year-old son, Nathan. He begins experiencing premonitions, first with a suicidal waitress and then with a man he met after a fatal pedestrian accident. When Jude bumps into this man (named Kenneth Sohler) in the men’s bathroom of the local restaurant, he experiences a strong vision that Sohler has someone trapped inside his house against their will. This vision spurns him to Sohler’s house and under the watchful eye of the already paranoid police department.
Suddenly everyone wants to know who Ron Gress really is, including his estranged girlfriend. The police are certain that he is the perpetrator of the child abductions until Nathan is kidnapped with his best friend and his best friend’s mother. Jude is let off the hook, but now he must face his past as he seeks the whereabouts of his son and friend.
T.L. Hines did a great job of weaving this paranormal thriller together. Just when you think you’ve identified the abductor, he throws in another twist to keep you guessing. Highly recommended.
One of the things I love about the latest web technology is that you can watch the TV shows that you missed because of the network schedule or your own. You can also see full previews of upcoming shows. Next Monday’s episode of Medium promises to be a doozy. Alison has an incredibly long dream of a young woman who finds herself stranded in the parking lot of the place she works. She calls her mother on her cell phone, but the mother is not much help. Then comes a stranger, eager to lend her a hand. You can pretty much guess where this is going, right? The end of the dream might surprise you.
Melba Goodwyn, an experienced parapsychologist and member of the Texarkana Paranormal Investigators shares her thoughts on ghosts and why we search for them in an interview with About.com. I found myself skimming through a good portion of this interview because I wasn’t reading anything that I felt was new. Towards the end of the interview, she caught my interest with her answer for why people search for ghosts. I’ve been reading about how people have embraced the supernatural and adopting new age beliefs because their religion couldn’t satisfy their questions about the afterlife. Her answer did not surprise me.
Goodwyn’s book, Ghost Worlds: A Guide to Poltergeists, Portals, Ecto-Mist, & Spirit Behavior, is due to be released tomorrow. Judging by the synopsis, people who are new to ghosts and the supernatural realm will benefit from reading this book.
Celebrity psychic Derek Acorah will star on Living TV’s Paranormal Egypt, which is scheduled to air on September 4th. According to The Sun Online, Derek had a harrowing experience in the bowels of one of the Great Pyramid that nearly cost him his life.
“It took me completely by surprise, and it wasn’t a pleasant one,” Derek said.
“We were filming in the main chamber of the Great Pyramid and I could tell there was a lot of spiritual activity going on.
“Forget Most Haunted, this was a stronger force than anything I’d ever encountered before.
“I heard something approaching and then ‘bang’, it hit me hard in the face and I started choking because I couldn’t draw a breath.
“There was a paranormal substance or powder that went across my mouth and into my nostrils, basically suffocating me.
“Thankfully the symptoms subsided but then I felt really sick and had to rest until the nausea passed.
“I’ve no idea what the entity was, but it’s obvious something didn’t want me there in the Great Pyramid.â€
Fans of Living TV will get to watch this scene in its entirety. Another segment of the show involves Acorah establishing that the Curse of the Pharaohs was a myth. While I forget the names of the scientists who debunked the curse as a myth (years ago), I remember them explaining how the Egyptians would bring fruit into the tombs as part of the burial ceremony. The fruit had rotted, sending spores and bacteria into the air for those archaeologists to breathe. It will be interesting to see what Acorah has to say.
