Paranormal Story Archives
April 2002 –
Page 10
The Inner
Command
by William Q.
It was a cold early Sunday afternoon, although the sun was still shining in a nearly cloudless sky, in mid-winter. I had just gotten out of church service and was preparing to go home, as I usually did. However, I started having a strong, nagging inner prompting to go over to my great aunt's house, which was in nearby walking distance. Actually, the house was more like an unpainted shack than a beautiful home. This didn't really bother me much because I would visit her once in a great while and inside it was neat, orderly and cozy. ( In later years such houses were torn down and the district - which was a poorer side of town - was to become a "historical district.")
First, I should tell you that this was in the 1950s, and various houses were fitted with old-time heating stoves instead of central heating as we have today. They were gas heating stoves. The first important and significant thing I noticed when I entered the front room of the house - a fairly large room - is that she was lying in a bed, which was kept in that room as well as other unpretentious furnishings. She proclaimed that she was very ill and had a terrible headache, but before I could talk, the inner urgent prompting came to the surface of my consciousness again and commanded that I move quickly to the nearest window and open it as high as I could. This just didn't make any logical sense to me because it seemed nothing was amiss, but I respected the inner voice and did it anyway. I must explain a few things here before I get too far along with this true experience: In the winter when I visited her now and then, it seemed too warm for me at times. But she was a very elderly lady and probably had poor circulation (she was in her late 80s. The gas heating stove was more localized and did not always heat the big room uniformly. This day it seemed even hotter. It was also turned up full blast. I will also explain here that in such older "shotgun" houses, as they were called, with three rooms in a row, usually of different sizes and no doors in between rooms. A number of them unpainted also in those days - it was not unusual to get cold drafts, especially at night coming through small cracks or under doors.
Back to the main story. Immediately after the first inner prompting (or command if you prefer), another one came to me. "Now walk quickly through the middle room - all the way to the back." I didn't hesitate to do so because I felt it was urgent - which it was. As I entered the middle room on the way to the kitchen in back, I was suddenly startled with the strong smell of natural gas (used more in those days for heating and cooking in people' s homes). By the time I got to the kitchen - the last room - the strong gas smell was nearly overwhelming. It was then that I glanced over to the gas kitchen cookstove and noticed a front burner knob turned all the way up! I darted quickly to the stove and turned the burner off immediately. Then it hit me. "So this is what it was all about!"
An additional explanation is necessary here also: Evidently, in the larger front room my elderly aunt was in there was hardly NO strong gas smell because the heat, or probably most of it, was carried along with the gas from the heating stove, toward the higher ceiling. If I hadn't followed those three strong promptings, it's quite possible there could have been an explosion from the open burning fire in the gas stove and the mixture of gas from the kitchen. I now knew why my aunt was so sick and with a bad headache. Even disregarding a quite-possible explosion, she could have been overcome with the fumes. Let me say here that I DO NOT think of this incident as a psychic experience. To me it was good evidence that a Higher Power watches over and protects his/its children. both young and old.
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