Stranger Angels - Part 1
Have you ever encountered strangers in stressful or dangerous circumstances whose interventions or assistance seemed supernaturally timed or miraculously unlikely?
Helpers who magically step in, deftly orchestrated by fate, then just as quickly and mysteriously disappear?
Maybe you felt that the Universe had used someone as a vessel or messenger or assigned him or her a divine walk-in part in your story…
Has this phenomenon ever occurred in such a way that you were left wondering if they were even human at all?
I alluded to this as an awareness that might possibly present itself as a result of doing the Soul Counting exercise.
Strangers who may not be human
I’ve had a variety of encounters over the course of my lifetime with all kinds of entities — but I didn’t always realize who was who, what was what, which ones were which. In a few cases, I was clued in much, much later. (Of course, in many cases I simply don’t know — I may suspect — but I have no way of knowing.)
Paranormal Memoir
Here comes another one of my (many) little personal paranormal episodes…
In January 1992, when I was twenty-two years old, I traveled to Europe. I flew to London with a small group of friends and stayed for a few days before splitting off from them to go meet up with my friend Allison who was waiting for me in Paris. We had arranged to connect at a specific hotel between the Latin Quarter of the 5th Arrondissement and the 13th Arrondissement on a Saturday morning — but the only trains I could take required that I arrive either half a day early or half a day late. I opted to travel in the wee hours of Friday night/ way too early Saturday morning and arrive in Paris at 1 am.
I figured I could check in to my own room for one night at the same hotel and sleep for awhile until Allison woke up.
I had only a little bit of British cash when I left London, but I wasn’t concerned — I could go to a money exchange when I arrived in Paris and turn in some American traveler’s checks for francs. Even in the middle of the night, all the train stations I’d ever been to in large cities like New York and London were bustling with activity at all hours.
The J’s
After the Channel crossing, there were only four other people in the car on the train with me — two girls from New Jersey who were traveling together, Joanna and Julie, an Australian guy who eventually introduced himself as James, and a nondescript man in a khaki-colored trench coat who remained several rows away, never joined in our conversation, but nevertheless seemed to always be staring and closely watching us whenever I glanced over at him and made eye contact.
The Jersey girls made entertaining companions, they were chatty and fun to talk to; James from Australia was very shy and although he moved closer to sit near us, he mostly just listened to the conversation.
A Guardian at the Gare du Nord
I was unprepared when I arrived at the Gare du Nord train station in Paris and found it to be an absolute ghost town — every kiosk, cafe, ticket booth, and bank was dark, locked up with those roll-down gates like you see on the front of mall stores when they’re closed.
The Jersey girls snatched one of the only waiting taxis, and James melted away into the streets with the small crowd who exited our train from other cars.
I wandered around in an awkward circle, looking for any sign of activity that I knew I wasn’t going to find. This was a really ill-planned arrival. I had been so comfortable in London — I was traveling with friends from the US; staying in the apartment of British natives; there was no language barrier; not to mention a kind of “past-life” familiarity that was at least partially practically supported by recognizable landmarks from years of studying English literature. Now I was alone in an abandoned metropolis with just enough high school French vocabulary to read signs and grunt nouns and adjectives and to possibly grammatically butcher verb conjugations in a pinch. I was an obvious tourist carrying everything I had in an enormous pack; an easy target for a mugging.
I was actually thankful there was a freezing fog everywhere to ensure the streets were emptier than they might otherwise have been.
There was only one other person anywhere nearby that I could appeal to for direction.
It was then that I realized I was being watched.
The man in the khaki-colored trench coat, who had been staring at me on the train, was lingering, lurking around at a casual distance.
At least he was a familiar face, and if he had just arrived from England too then chances were very good that I would not have to pull out a classroom foreign language that hadn’t been tested in real world circumstances.
Feeling like a child who’d lost his mom in the mall, I walked up to him and began babbling about my circumstances — where I was trying to get to in the city, where I might find a money exchange…
I felt no sense of danger from him. Honestly, I suspected he might be cruising me, and I was more than willing to play the damsel in distress in exchange for crucial information, confident that I could politely fend off any sexual invitations, if that was his motive.
Preternaturally Normal
As I talked to him, I realized there was something vaguely off about him, and in the back of my mind I was cataloguing the details of his manner and appearance.
He introduced himself simply as “Uh… John” and something about the way he spoke the name sounded like a white lie made up on the spot.
When he spoke, his voice was soft and polite, yet he made no facial expressions. He was absolutely emotionless. He spoke English, yet I could detect no traceable accent — it wasn’t British, or American, or Australian — and traveling always heightens my awareness of dialects, even within my own country.
I can see his face clearly even today and would recognize him immediately if he walked in a room — but I can not describe much about him that might be identifiable or unique.
- His eyes were an unusual icy blue, but other than that…
- He could have been thirty… or he could have been forty or even fifty.
- His hair might have been a dirty blond… or maybe a light brown, or even silvery-gray.
- He was dressed from head to toe in monochrome — his pants and shirt were the same colorless beige. Only his shoes were a different color (and I noticed that, despite the cold, he was not wearing socks).
- His clothes had creases in them, as if they had been taken directly out of packages. I felt like if I could have checked inside his collar I’d find price tags still attached. It reminded me of the way body forms we would dress for window displays in retail stores appeared before the clothes had been steamed.
That was it — he looked like a living mannequin.
- He looked too new, too perfect — yet totally unremarkable.
- He had absolutely no (zero) body hair — no stubble, no shadow, no hair on his wrists — not even the faint down that a woman or a child might have.
- He gave off an overwhelming yet anonymous perfume that smelled exactly like… dryer sheets. Even his breath was like a warm load of clean towels.
John was… supernaturally ordinary.
He offered to informally exchange the small handful of British pocket money I had on me — I handed him what amounted to less than five bucks, and turning away from me for a moment (perhaps to protect from my seeing into his wallet, I suppose) he produced a bill that, although still a modest amount, was at least double the value of what I’d given him.
“But it’s not enough for a taxi all the way from here,” he warned me. “You’ll need to walk quite a way first, as far as you can.”
Using a rail map posted on a wall for reference, he showed me where I was and where I was headed. “Once you are in view of Notre Dame, or come to the Seine, you should be close enough to hail a driver to take you the rest of the way to your exact destination… Would you like me to walk with you?”
I told him that wouldn’t be necessary — I appreciated his kindness but I anticipated it might be more difficult to get rid of him later if I needed to. Before we parted ways outside the station he warned me about the dangers of walking through this part of Paris in the middle of the night.
“Be invisible,” he ominously advised.
As far as ensuring that my path was relatively deserted, the weather was probably a blessing; but the grace of the cover it provided me came at a price — it was miserably freezing cold. The moisture in the air was just light enough to remain a dense fog, but it soaked me as well as any steady drizzle might have…
It was a long, harrowing (shitty) night
I would need another thousand words here to itemize the petty trials of that night’s walk. My feet were blistered and swollen for days… I could not get warm the entire week that I spent in Paris… To simplify the story and focus the events, I can’t recall many times that I have felt that physically vulnerable.
Had I been a crow, I could’ve kept moving directly south, but the streets were a crooked, uncooperative labyrinth that required constant course correction.
I expended a lot of energy “being invisible” as I had been instructed. I encountered very few people — several prostitutes propositioned me from the caves of doorways and shopfront awnings; I constantly crossed and recrossed streets to avoid anyone on the sidewalk; I ducked into phone booths from time to time to collect myself and maintain my bubble of cloaked energy.
It did not take me long to realize that John was following me. He remained a block or two behind me, and stopped when I stopped. Who has nowhere to be and nothing better to do than to follow me through the streets of Paris at 3 am in the middle of January? A serial killer? But I think maybe I was comforted a bit by his strange yet at least somewhat familiar presence over the alternative.
Hours later I spotted the recognizable architecture of Notre Dame. Soon after I was across the Seine and in the Latin Quarter. Thinking surely I was close enough to afford a cab the rest of the way, I stopped a driver and sputtered my destination. He laughed and pointed to the street I was seeking, only a few hundred feet away.
I walked up and down that street for another hour — not only was the hotel not there, the very street number itself did not exist. After pacing back and forth and carefully tracking the building numbers to convince myself I wasn’t hallucinating, I was literally in tears. In frustration, I sat on a bus bench and surrendered to having arrived at being finally and totally lost.
That’s when I saw John again, across a square formed by a jumbled intersection of streets. I was just pissed off enough and desperate enough at this point to walk right up to him and demand to know why in the Hell he was stalking me.
He disappeared down a side street that looked like an alley and I followed. It was an improbable, completely eccentric continuation of the street I had been pacing up and down. The numbers picked up and continued. No sign of John, but there was the hotel.
That Monday, a few days later, I was with my traveling companion Allison and her friend Natalie. We were walking from the Champs-Elysees headed to the Eiffel Tower when someone waved at us from the window of a restaurant.
It was Jersey Joanna and Julie, smiling brightly and waving excitedly at me. I felt the quick joy of such a synchronicity, of the most unlikely familiar friendly faces. There were two males sitting with the girls who turned around to see who they were waving at. One of them was James the Australian guy — Wow! They ran into him again too? That’s kind of cool. What are the chances? And then I made eye contact with the Other.
It was John.
Why would he be with them? They never spoke on the train…
“Do you know those people?” Allison asked me, her eyebrows together in a subtext of How is that possible that you would just run into someone Here?
I was too overwhelmed in that moment of processing to offer much of an explanation. “They came over with me on the train from London.”
And that was not the last time I saw the stranger John.
It was over ten years before someone even clued me in to who (what?) my experiences with this stranger might have been about. And that Someone was even more questionably a “real person.”
image credit mdezemery via Creative Commons on Flickr
Contacting Your Spirit Guide 101
Free resources for Shift Your Spirits readers:
- Read the eBook by Slade Roberson especially for beginners who want to know who/what spirit guides are and how to communicate with them
- Listen to the mp3 preview of the Spirit Guide Attunement portion of the Talking to Your Spirit Guides class by Slade Roberson
- Try the meditation to Meet a Guide contributed by Jeff Lilly of Druid Journal
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15 Responses to “Stranger Angels - Part 1”
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Love a good mystery story Slade, even,maybe especially, the fact you leave us hanging in the balance…
What better way to captivate, entice imagination, especially one that often still longs. You are the kind of person I wished for in my childhood, to enchant, but really just to be read to would have been enough. It’s so nice you can recount in this slow, smooth manner. The story teller I wanted, being a fantasic one is an absolute bonus.
Do you read to groups of kids sometimes? If hearing you tell this story, like I did in my head today, is this good to a big person, I can only imagine the affect on children would be magical. Maybe looking to you or at you much like your role and involvement with the character or characters in scenarios you’ve portrayed here.
Slade there is one thing I forgot to say. For a long time I did use my imagination, what your voice sounded like. I think reading your posts may have been my first realization that a lot of what I read actually had an’ interior’ storyteller speaking to me.
I think what made this all the more vivid for me was I have actually heard your voice, today’s story was all the more bright, crisp, alive. None of your readers should miss the chance to put you, your image, your speaking voice and what you write to all of us, together.
A funny thing came into my head just now, Slade amplified. Please take that only as a compliment…
From what I have read about angels, life and death situations are the one area that they don’t have to wait for us to ask for their help. It is great to know that we are never alone. Slade, I love it when you share your personal life experiences.
After not much consideration I realized that I have a “guy in a trench coat” story too. I saw him across the tracks through the open doors of two separate NYC subway trains in 1989. In contrast to yours, I looked for him for the next week I was there chasing a feeling that I just knew who he was… or was meant to know him.
I did not ever see him again but now I am thinking that he was there and did not allow me to see him…
Thanks for these fabulous posts. I rarely comment but I am always inspired.
Slade,
You definitely have a story in you; I can’t wait to read the whole thing!
Blessings,
Mary
Slade –
First off, your storytelling skills are truly amazing — I’m very much looking forward to your book!
Second, I think I’ve had a similar experience myself. It’s a very long story, but it involved a really difficult point in my life. If it hadn’t been for his presence in my life right at that time, I would probably not be alive right now… Also, the guise he took was so completely unlikely (a very down-to-earth hustler) that the only explanation that feels right to me is that he was an angel.
Third, do we really have to wait until next week!?!?!
Much love,
Frank
I can’t wait for part deux! You should consider writing short stores
I enjoyed your story about “uh…John” and recently had a similar experience. My husband and I had headed south to a little town to go bowling. There had been over 1000 forest fires in California the prior summer but only a couple this summer. We got almost to the town when we realized that there was a forest fire right in the middle of town. There was a gas station to our right (we were basically out of gas and that almost never happens to us) and we turned in. Everyone had the same idea and it was packed to capacity AND they were turning off the pumps since the fire was headed right for us across the highway. I remember looking into the “face” of the fire and it was like it had a spirit or identity or something. I am a veteran of hard times and this still really frightened me. We made it through the gas station finally but every road that we took to get out of there was a dead end. Dead ends everywhere. There was a hospital on the main road and if we could just find one through street we could go there and get directions out. Suddenly there was a blond woman just walking from the dead end to us. (why?) She told us that she had a dog in her backyard and her husband was asleep because he worked nights and would we take her home? We said “sure hop in”. I asked her where her car was and she said she left it at the hospital. I wondered why because if we were driving to her house, so could she. She lived there afterall and knew the way. The way that she had us go was back towards the fire which we never would have done. Ever. It was about 3 or 4 miles to her house which would have taken her forever to walk in the smoke. She said here and we said well there are no houses here. And she said just a little farther so we went a little farther. Didn’t see a house that could have been hers but she got out, telling us the exact turns to make to get out of the town and over to another main highway. She walked into the woods and disappeared. About 1/2 mile later we ran into a main highway and there was a gas station right there.
Later I had a gadzillion questions (like why did she “leave her car at the hospital and walk” and where was her house?). All was lost until we took a side-trip to help her and then it happened so quickly that we were out of danger. She had to be an angel. And all I know is that we would not have chosen the direction she took us.
Ooh, I had chills while reading! (That seems to happen to me whenever I’m reading about or watching something that delives deeper into the more mysterious nature of reality–the ‘mystery’).
Reading your story is interesting, because more and more, when people speak with me I’m getting a subtle sense that there’s “more to” their words than I might realise.
I’m very used to having that experience with good friends or new people I’ve met that have a ridiculous amount in common with me—synchronicity and Divinely timed and inspired messages about with those people—but lately I’ve been getting some interesting things said to me by people who I’d say don’t really have much in common with me, and aren’t usually that supportive. While I listen them, when we speak I don’t tell them much about my life, and when I do I usually I tune out most of their advice because usually I feel it’s not that relevant or helpful.
That said, lately I’ve been noticing–not always, but at least, a few times–a similar sensation to what I experience when my guides share one of their shining sentences or a close friend says something uncanny. It feels kind of like the words come with an extra dose of “pay attention” energy, as if they have a “fresher taste” to them that causes you to do an internal (or sometimes literal) double-take as you hear them.
This article reminds me to Listen a bit more. It also reminds me that I might have more in common with the people around me (regardless of whether they seem supportive or not) than I might realise.
The distinction between Spirit, Angel, and human-Angel seems very (and wonderfully) blurred.
– Bruce
ps. After reading articles like this, I very much look forward to reading one of your books, Slade. I get the impression it (or “they”) would be good fun to read.
Yay that was awesome! Specially considering I was myself stuck a the gare du nord a week ago late at night with only english currency and nowhere to go
I was heading back to London though. Hopefully a friend was there for me and he was a great help 
I’m in grad school so I haven’t had much time to catch up with my favorite bloggers but I was mesmerized by this story! Wow. You sure write well. Look forward to the next part.
Are you crazy!!?? How can you leave us hanging like that? Unlike Barbara, I am not enjoying the wait as I am going crazy with anticipation! I feel like I just read through a great book I found only to realize that right at the cliffhanger I discover the remaining pages had been torn out of it and now I’m walking around the room in a quandry tearing my hair out!!!
Finish the story! Pleazzzzzzzzzzzzz - I’d like to keep my hair
What a delicious cliffhanger - I know the story, and yet the way you write it makes it so fresh that it’s as if I’m hearing it for the first time!
Hey everyone! Let me start off by saying thanks for waiting patiently as I completed the story before responding to comments. I appreciate each and every one of them. Just wanted to get it all out there before conversing about it.
Barbara,
Thank you for the feedback on how the various aspects (the various voices that I employ) come together for you. Nice to know they gel together well instead of being conflicting or confused.
I’ve only ever read aloud to adults (usually in college writing seminars) but I’m sure I would enjoy reading to kids.
Patricia,
I’m glad you enjoy hearing some of my personal experiences from a more literal, first-person slant. Get a little burned out employing the Self-Help Blog Post Voice all the time… This series (and others like it) was requested by a friend who likes to hear me tell them. Thank you for the encouragement!
Kate,
I’m SO glad you did comment. Please never hesitate to let me know what you enjoy reading here and what resonates with you.
Mary,
I have so many stories in me. I’ve merely decided to stop withholding them.
I appreciate your excitement to read these types of posts.
Frank,
Thank you for that glowing compliment! I’m humbly grateful although it is delicious to receive… I would love to hear your Similar Stories — could you perhaps be talked into writing them up sometime on your own blog and linking back here/ leaving the link in a comment so we can all find them?
That Writing Assignment goes out to all of you with the web space to swap these tales!
Your favorite TV show makes you wait a week — can’t I?
Lauren,
Awesome — you’ll be glad to know that I DO write stories. I actually write more fiction than I do blogging, and quite a bit of memoir too… Not really sure how this format/medium will work for those lengthier pieces that use different voices… But, I thought I’d put a few out there for a little experimentation and variety.
Raindance,
Wonderful story! I’m honored that you would share that here on my blog — thank you so much. Questions indeed… I know what you mean. I wonder what you have made of Part 4 of this story in particular… Definitely so many aspects of your experience that match up, huh?
Bruce,
I think you’ve isolated a message that is very much a subtext here — that absolutely anyone can potentially be a Messenger of great significance, and there are more that we dismiss or ignore than pay attention to. It’s kind of like you identified “the moral of the story” for me (and anyone else reading this). I like that. It’s always nice to hear what bounces back to me as a result of my words.
Eve,
How WILD is that that you were just stuck at the Gare du Nord with only English currency?! Great little synchronicity — thanks for telling me.
Stephen,
Great to hear from you — I hope you are enjoying graduate school. I have a good feeling it’s an amazing experience for you. I’m a little envious. I love being in school.
Gil,
Sweetie, don’t harm thyself! 40 page 15,000 word posts don’t go over so well in blogging land — and this length has still been getting truncated by a lot of people’s emails.
How do you handle the anticipation between television episodes, seasons… The wait between Lord of the Rings sequels must have been torture for you!
I know, I find it a mix of delicious anticipation and infuriating.
C.Koo,
Glad to hear from the prose crowd on this one — thank you!
I just finished up Part 4 yesterday! It gave me a shiver. I know what you mean about trying to find the house! I would love to go back and try to find my way to the road that my hitchhiker’s house was on. I think I don’t mostly because I know I would have the same experience you did. She didn’t live on that road, there was no sleeping husband, no car at the hospital and no dog in the yard.