“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.

Marie D. Jones published a book this past November, entitled, PSIence, where she uses quantum physics to explore various paranormal phenomena such as ghosts and UFOs. I was aware of this book when it first came out, but didn’t buy it because I felt that it might be too dry. After listening to her speak on paranormalpodcast.com, I found myself fascinated, especially where ghosts are concerned.

Once again, I went to Amazon to check out her book and found that the Search Inside feature had been implemented. I enjoyed the excerpt as much as I did the podcast.

The Tunguska explosion was blamed on a meteorite or comet that, experts believe, exploded as low as 5 miles above the ground. Up until now, no one has found a crater or debris that supported this belief.

Marine geologist, Luca Gasperini, and his team may have located the crater about 5 miles north-northwest of the suspected epicenter. Lake Chesko has a strange funnel-shaped bottom that is consistent with craters. Future drilling may resolve a century-old mystery.

Freddie Mcguire, 47, was declared dead by doctors after he suffered a heart attack on Easter. As his family was coming to terms with his death and preparing his funeral, a member of the hospital staff saw him move his hand. Friends and neighbors dubbed him as Jesus Christ, due to his miraculous resurrection on Easter.

This isn’t the first case I’ve heard about, where a person is pronounced dead by medical personnel, only to be discovered alive days later. Some of these people regained consciousness while lying inside the morgue.

Hit by a car in 1976, George Rodonaia, a Soviet doctor, was left in a mortuary for three days. He showed obvious signs of life only after a doctor began to make an incision in his stomach as part of a postmortem examination. He claimed to be conscious for much of the experience, saying: “All about me there was darkness . . . I remembered Descartes’s famous line, ‘I think, therefore I am’. And it was then I knew I was still alive”

Source: Times Online