Another very common way for spirits to connect with us is through music. Almost as much as numbers, music is a part of our everyday lives. It is an easy way for spirits to reach us, assuming, of course, that we are paying attention.
When Amy and her family traveled to North Carolina one summer to visit her father-in-law, they made a side trip to South Carolina. It was a short excursion that meant the world to her because of the memories it brought back of her time with her own father, who was now deceased.
“I was eighteen and living in California at the time. Dad lived in Virginia. I went out to visit him for a couple weeks, and we decided to take a road trip to Charleston, South Carolina. We had the best time,” she said. “We talked about life and our goals. I was more mature, and we had more ‘relatable’ conversations. We spent time walking the streets, going to the open-air market, and just bonding. I remember he told me how proud he was of me. Now, twenty years later, I was taking my own kids there.”
Some time before her family vacation, when I had given Amy a reading and her dad had come through, he’d told me to tell her that he would give her signs through music. There was no specific song that he mentioned. Music in general was all I could share with Amy.
“I remembered as we were driving to South Carolina that Bill had said that,” Amy said later. “So, I started to talk to my dad in my mind, asking him if he would join us in some way on this vacation. I didn’t know what to expect or to look for. If the sign was going to be music, the only remote possibility I could think of was the song ‘96 Tears,’ but I knew that probably wasn’t going to happen, so I tried to keep my mind open to anything.”
The song “96 Tears” was recorded by? and the Mysterians. Yes, that was their real name; it started with a question mark. They were pretty much a one-hit wonder. They recorded “96 Tears” in 1966, it reached number one, and it was ranked by Rolling Stone magazine as one of the greatest songs ever.
“It was my dad’s favorite song,” Amy said. “I was born seven years after the song came out, so my dad taught it to me when I was little. We would sing along to it and laugh every time it came on the radio. I told my kids after he died that that was his song.”
The family went to Fort Sumter, a sea fort in Charleston Harbor where the Civil War began. “After spending the day touring the island, we went back to the hotel to swim in the pool. It was a very small, quaint hotel. Nothing special. No frills. In the background there was some music playing. It was coming from a hotel speaker somewhere. It wasn’t very loud, but we could faintly hear it playing one country song after another.”
Until . . .
“My son yelled, ‘Mom! Do you hear that?’ I couldn’t. I was in the pool, where some kids were splashing, so I got out and listened. . . . ‘Are you serious?’ I exclaimed. I had to listen some more to make sure I’d really heard what I thought I heard. It made absolutely no sense. Coming out of that same speaker that had been spitting out nothing but country songs was ‘96 Tears.’ We were at a small hotel on an island in the middle of the ocean after I had just asked my dad to join us on our trip, and that song comes on? The looks on the faces of my family were priceless. Honestly, I rarely hear that song on the radio because it’s so old. In fact, I have it on my iPad because I know I have almost no chance of ever hearing it anywhere else. And, wouldn’t you know it, as soon as it was over, they went right back to playing country music.”
The family sang the song and laughed, just as Amy had always done as a little girl with her dad.
“I didn’t hesitate to tell the kids that I had asked their grandpa to join us and that his spirit really was right there with us,” she said. “There was no other logical explanation for a rock-and-roll song that was nearly fifty years old to suddenly play in the middle of those country songs. It just made everything on that trip that much better.”