Patricia Pearson stopped in for a visit a couple of weeks ago. Recall that Patricia wrote the original Who Killed Theresa? articles for Canada’s National Post newspaper in 2002 (French and English here). Patricia spent the week at The Rhine Research Center Institute for Parapsychology located on the Duke University campus doing some follow-up research from her last book, Opening Heaven’s Door: What the Dying Are Trying to Say About Where They’re Going (go pick it up on Amazon). It’s all fairly spooky stuff, and I got the opportunity to spend an evening at The Rhine doing some fairly elementary psychological parlor games.

If you’ll recall, in those original articles Patrica wrote about a story my mother related to her in 2002. It was Valentines Day 1979. Theresa had been missing for just over 3 months. My father, mother and I were seated around the dining room table eating dinner and my mother said something like, “I wonder how Theresa is doing / I wish I knew how Theresa is doing?”, something like that, I’m not going to look it up.  At that moment a piece of plaster fell from the dining room ceiling and landed on the carpet in the shape of a heart.

I remember this story… I remember the event? I’m not sure. It get’s  cloudy.

Recently my parents downsized their home and moved in a condo. One of many things I inherited was their bedroom dresser which contained an envelope containing the original plaster pieces (now broken) from that event. The envelop reads (in my mother’s handwriting), “Valentine Ceiling Fallings from Theresa, Feb – 1979”. I have tried to assemble the pieces, but several are lost:

I never knew until a few years ago that my mother had actually kept the pieces. Since she wrote about it, I figured Patricia would appreciate seeing these things. Patricia tells me that there is a name for this in parapsychology. If you believe in it, when another dimension attempts to contact this dimension by means of physically influencing this world it is called an “apport”.  From Wikipedia:  “According to parapsychologists and spiritualists, an apport is the paranormal transference of an article from one place to another, or an appearance of an article from an unknown source that is often associated with poltergeist activity or spiritualistic séances.”  Again, if you believe.

Today is Theresa’s 56th birthday. 37 years ago to this day would have been the last time I saw her. She came home for thanksgiving, got on a train from Saint John to Sherbrooke that Monday evening, and I never saw her again. So this is sort of a Canadien thanksgiving ghost story.

One of Theresa’s favorite things was David Bowie, specifically David Live which I heard repeatedly from the bedroom adjacent to hers growing up in Montreal. Happy Birthday Theresa:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TEckcEICUM