About ten days ago, I sent an email to a friend of mine who is a British psychic detective, and told him I was about to leave for Paris for a week. He (and everyone else I spoke with) told me to be careful. Paris isn't what it used to be, he noted, what with all the terrorist activity these days. Yes, I am always careful, I said. Besides, I have noticed a sort of weird pattern in my life. I seem to frequently miss being in the exact spot where mass murders occur by a few minutes, hours or days. This has happened to me on many occasions, to the point where it seems to have developed its own delicate - yes, possibly coincidental - pattern.
Back in 1987, I went to visit my father who was on sabbatical (he is a medical scientist) in a tiny "one-horse" town about an hour or two outside London called "Hungerford." It was a sweet town, with one Tudor-style pub on the only main street, and lots of thatched roof cottages dotting the surrounding bucolic countryside. My ex-husband and I stayed the day, and then drove to the airport to catch a plane to up to Scotland. The next morning we got a call from a lawyer friend of ours in the U.S. He asked if we were okay. We laughed and said, "Of course we are!" He said, "Thank God!" "Why do you ask?" We were confused by his anxiety. "Haven't you heard?" he asked. "No!" "Well, I heard on the news that Hungerford was the site of Britain's first mass murder by a gunman. Fourteen people were killed!" Long story short, we realized in retrospect, when we saw how the gunman had carefully gone through the entire town killing a total of 14 people at random (e.g. the gas station attendant, people on the street, etc.), that we had missed being in the exact spot where he had killed several pedestrians only minutes after we left the vicinity. The story was worldwide news. At that time, gun crime in Britain were unheard of and the British bobbies (policemen) only carried sticks, not guns. It was a shocking crime that changed the course of history in Britain.
Fast forward to 2007, I decided to take a rare extended 2-week vacation with my (current) husband and two children around England and Wales. We stayed in London for a day, then drove up toward north toward Cambridge so I could show the kids where I grew up as a teenager. As soon as we left town, we heard that three devastating synchronized Islamic terrorist bombs had been detonated in the London Underground train stations. Fifty-two people were killed and 700 injured in Britain's deadliest incident since the 1988 bombing of the Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The attacks became known as "7/7." Of course, I breathed a secret sigh of relief that we had had the luck to exit London on that day.
We traveled around for the next two weeks, visiting castles, universities and crop circles, and finally returned to London in order to catch our flight back the next day to the United States. As we drove through the city, I noticed something strange about the "Tube" stations. They had been cordoned off with police barriers and there were people milling around everywhere. I learned later that the London had just been subjected to the July 21, 2005 terrorist attacks - four new synchronized bomb explosions in the Underground and one on a bus at around noon. Fortunately, the bombs were not as powerful, no one was hurt, and the suspected terrorists were arrested soon thereafter. But, to my point, we seemed to graze lightly past this double brush with mass murders in England.
Again, fast forward to July, 2016. Our next family trip was in France, this time. We flew to Paris, took a leisurely drive to a family wedding in the western part of France, drove to the southern coast, took a boat trip around Corsica, returned to southern France, and drove to Nice, where we had originally been scheduled to fly back to the United States on July 15. However, before we left, I had a bad feeling about the flight. We changed it to July 12. Again, we seem to have brushed against a weird synchronicity. On July 14, 2016, a 19-ton cargo truck driven by a terrorist plowed road barricades and into the crowds of more than 30,000 people celebrating Bastille Day along the famous Promenade des Anglais along the famous waterfront of Nice. Eighty-six people were killed and 458 were wounded in this truck attack. It was one of the worst terror attacks ever in France. Thank God we did not stay in Nice for those couple of extra days where, in all likelihood, we too would have been celebrating Bastille Day with the others on that boulevard. Again, it felt uncomfortably like another close shave with death and mass murder.
Fast forward to the present, I told my British psychic detective friend these stories in my email before leaving for Paris. I planned to return home for one week before flying out again to Las Vegas, Nevada, for the next three weeks. Thankfully, Paris was uneventful in terms of terrorism during my stay. However, during my flight back to the United States, on October 2, 2017, I learned that Las Vegas had just become - on that day - the site of the worst mass shooting in modern United States history! As of today, October 4, 2017, there are 59 dead and 527 wounded. The shootings were committed by a man from his room at the Mandalay Bay Hotel from the 32nd floor as he shot unsuspected concert-goers at an outdoor country western music festival below. This time, it seems the unprecedented historic mass murder occurred just before my visit. Although I did not have plans to stay at the Mandalay Bay Hotel, which I know well, I too have planned to stay on the famous Las Vegas Strip.
As a psychic detective, I tend to look at life differently from most people. I look for patterns in things that appear inconsequential or merely random to others. It is in these delicate, partially-formed patterns that new information about ourselves and our world emerges. My continuous brush with these historic events may be mere coincidence, but its recurrence over time begins to feel like something else is happening...
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