An Angel Set Me Free: And other incredible true stories of the afterlife. Dorothy Chitty
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a Warning
Most people report hearing their friend’s or relative’s voice during a visitation, but some ‘feel’ their presence as well. It’s a sense memory, similar to the feeling you had when you were in the womb. You can feel a feather-light touch on your face, the weight of a hand on your shoulder, or maybe just a tightening of your skin all over. Many people have described feeling an arm around their shoulders at times of trouble, and then experiencing an overwhelming sense that things will be all right. If it is an angel they knew on earth, whether that person died a week before, or thirty or forty years before, they get a sense inside their head of who it is. You don’t necessarily hear the voice; sometimes there is just what I call an ‘inner knowing’.
Pure souls are omnipresent. The physical body doesn’t weigh them down any more so they can be with you at your work, with your sister in her car, and with your child at school, looking after every single family member at the same time.
Our guardian angels can come to bring comfort or they can come with a warning. Sometimes the message is as clear as crystal and other times it is just a general piece of advice to take care, as in this story about a woman called Donna.
I was standing at the sink doing the washing-up, not thinking about anything in particular, when suddenly I felt my mother was there and I picked up a clean tea-towel to hand to her so she could start drying. Then I stopped. What was I doing? My mother had died fifteen years before.
My brain had often played tricks on me in the past (or so I thought). I’d be in the middle of some chore when the thought would come into my head: ‘Call your mother. You haven’t spoken to her for a while.’ And I’d think, ‘Oh, I must do it,’ before remembering that she is dead and I can’t call her any more.
But that day in the kitchen, the feeling that she was present was so strong that I just knew something was wrong. I dropped the tea-towel and called my husband at work.
‘Are you OK?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, fine,’ he said. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
I rang the school to check if our son was OK, and they said he was fine but I still had a funny feeling that we had to be extra-cautious.
The next morning, a Saturday, the three of us were going shopping together and we were in a hurry to get going, but I was still aware of this strange sense of unease. I was just reversing out of the driveway when all of a sudden my husband yelled ‘Stop!’ so I slammed my foot hard on the brake.
At that point a lorry came thundering round the corner at top speed and clipped the back of our car. The crunching noise was horrible but we were all unharmed. It was only when I got out to look at the damage, I realised that if I hadn’t braked when I did, that lorry would have gone straight into the back seat of the car where our son was sitting. And then I looked at the passenger seat where my husband had been and realised there was no way he could actually have seen the lorry coming from that angle.
‘Why did you shout “Stop”?’ I asked him.
‘I’ve got absolutely no idea,’ he said. ‘I didn’t consciously think anything. The words just came out of my mouth.’
I realised then that my mother had come back to warn me to be careful and her intervention had probably saved our son’s life. Since then, whenever I get a thought in my head that I should call her, I make sure I sit down somewhere quiet and have a little conversation with her in my mind. She’s looking out for me, and at last I have learned to listen.
I believe that Donna’s mother not only put the thought into her head that she should be cautious, but she also put the word ‘Stop!’ into her husband’s mouth. She wasn’t taking any chances with the safety of her beloved family.
Father Knows Best
In this instance a woman called Margaret, who lives in Cumbria, was saved from a horrible accident by her father.
It was a bitterly cold day in March and I was walking my two young sons to school. We were wrapped up warmly but still the driving sleet stung our faces. We stopped at a newsagent’s and I picked up a newspaper while the boys got a packet of crisps each. It was a relief to reach the warmth of the school, but then I faced the prospect of the journey home again. I decided to catch a bus back but I waited and waited at the stop without any sign of one so eventually I realised I would have to walk again.
There were some tiny lambs in the field opposite the newsagent’s so I thought I would go and have a look, worried about how they were coping with the freezing weather. I was about to step off the pavement when I heard my father’s voice just by my right ear: ‘Go and buy a paper.’ Dad had died twelve years earlier. I shook my head. It was silly. I already had a paper that I’d bought earlier. Disregarding the voice, I stepped into the road to cross over.
The voice was angry now. ‘Do as you’re bloody well told. Go and buy a paper!’
I’d never argued with my father when he was alive and I wasn’t about to start now he was dead, so I turned and went back to the newsagent’s. I’d just bent down to pick up a Daily Mail when there was a screech of brakes outside and then an almighty clattering sound.
The newsagent and I rushed out to find that a lorry had skidded and a huge pile of girders strapped on the back had come loose and fallen off onto the pavement at exactly the spot where I had been planning to stand and watch the lambs. I was so shaken, I sat down on the kerb, sleet or no sleet. Dad had saved my life.
Once my heart had stopped racing, I went back inside to pay for my Daily Mail. When I got home and opened it, between the pages there was a white feather and I felt instinctively that was a sign from Dad telling me he’d been there.
Finding a tiny white feather after an angel visitation is quite common. It’s like a little calling card from the other side. I’ll explain more about this on page 98.
The Smell of Smoke
Some people report smelling a scent similar to one worn by their relative, such as the lavender eau de parfum of a favourite granny, or a flower that your mother was especially fond of. A lady called Jane told me the following story about the way her father let her know he was still around:
I had just split up with my husband and moved into a place of my own, so it was a very difficult time. One Sunday afternoon I was tidying up when all of a sudden I smelled a familiar smell of cigar smoke. It was exactly the same as the cigar my father used to smoke after lunch on a Sunday—but he had been dead for three years.
I sat down and sniffed, and the smell just got stronger and stronger. Suddenly I knew that Dad was there with me, in the room. I cried a little bit, and then I started talking to him, telling him what was happening in my life. I knew instinctively that I didn’t need to talk out loud—I could tell him things in my head. It was a huge comfort to feel his presence and it really lifted my spirits.
As the smell began to fade, I said ‘Dad, please keep coming back. Come as often as you can.’
From then on, I started to smell his cigar smoke every Sunday afternoon, around the same time, and I would sit down and have a chat with him in my head. It helped me a lot in that difficult period, and one day I mentioned it to a girlfriend of mine.
‘Why don’t I come over to your flat and see if I can smell it?’ she asked, and I agreed.
The following Sunday she came, along with another friend. One of them said straight away, ‘Oh my goodness, I can certainly smell it.’
The other looked doubtful. ‘I think I can,’ she said, screwing up her nose. Then, all of a sudden, she cried out. ‘Oh my! I think he just blew a cloud of cigar smoke in my face!’
I knew that he was giving me absolute proof that he was there with me. I never smelled cigar smoke on any other day of the week, but every Sunday afternoon it was there. I asked him questions about anything