Although there is no known photograph of Emmeline, this is her today.

What do you do when a ghost tells you that he knew you in a past life? That is the predicament I found myself in a year after starting volunteer work at a Civil War era house museum.

The museum was the former home of 3 generations of the family starting before the Civil War. I suppose "former" is not quite the right word, as the house had a reputation for being quite haunted. The ghosts were merry little pranksters. II enjoyed it and was honored when they chose to play their jokes on me. They could be sweet, too. Sometimes I would go over on my lunch hour to help out with things. A couple of times, I was aware that Oscar, the spirit of a 20 year old who was killed in the Civil War, was escorting me back to my office nearby.Since I was more than twice his age, I assumed that his mother asked him to make sure that I got back safely. He made me laugh, too, as he would show up in manly man huge mustaches and beards, as if he was trying to appear older than he really was.

One night around Halloween, I got locked into a bathroom, and could feel a palpable sense of amusement radiating from the other side of the door. After pleading, then yelling at the ghosts for a few minutes about it, the lock magically unlocked.

This got me curious about who exactly was responsible. The three main known ghosts there were 2 elderly ladies and Oscar. It seemed obvious that the college aged male was the most likely to think that locking someone in the restroom was funny. I decided that if he wanted my attention that bad, I was going to get to know him better. So, I went into meditation one night and tried to mentally project myself over to the house. Instead of finding myself in the parlor where they would normally receive guests, or on the side of the house where he was occasionally seen smoking, I found myself outside at night sitting on a swing, snuggled up with him as snow softly fell around us. There was a deep sense of contentment as we sat there, my head on his shoulder and his arms around me.

The scene was decidedly romantic, and I was bewildered by it. I knew it wasn't a fantasy, though. I am too much of a free spirit to be attracted to military types, was married and not interested in any romantic intrigue with anyone dead or alive, and he was way too young for my taste regardless. Adding into that was the fact that the snowy weather we were in was unexpectedly unlike the mid-autumn weather we were actually having at that time. A few nights later, I sent myself over there to ask him what the heck that was all about. He told me that I was the reincarnation of his wife.

I thought this was just another one of his jokes. I did suspect that I may have had a past life connection to the family. However, I assumed it was with his niece, with whom I share a lot of interests. When he kept insisting it was true, I thought I was losing my mind. I am one of the least romantic people I know, so being presented with a story like this was just bizarre. Finally, as I realized that it was for real, well, it was a lot to accept. I was kind of freaked out.

It took a long time to believe it. I consulted with some very talented psychic friends of mine about it. They independently picked up on the same things - my husband making my wedding ring himself, my parents not wanting us to marry, winter being a special time for us, and Oscar having a very forceful, impatient personality. He told them that since my parents would not allow us to officially marry, we made vows to each other in private without benefit of clergy or the law. Later on, psychics who didn't even know anything about my story would comment upon it, as well.

One medium in particular came up with information that was hard to dismiss. I met my friend Di in a psychic development group that I had joined to help me learn to communicate with Oscar better. After Oscar showed up at her home as a full-bodied apparition one evening, she started working with him to channel messages from him through automatic writing. There were three things she got in the writings that she could not possibly have known.

The first was a message saying that he was sad that I had not recognized him. That fit something that had happened earlier in the week. I had come across copies of some photographs of his family that had been given to the museum by their descendants. One was of him as a preschooler, one as a boy of about 9 years old, and the last was him as a teenager. By that point, I had been doing some meditation to recover my past life memories. The preschooler picture looked exactly like what I remembered him in memories of us as toddlers playing together. He was a couple of years older in the photograph than in my memory, but it was clearly the same boy. The one of him as a teenager also felt extremely familiar. However, the one as a boy didn't register at all. I would not have known it was him if the picture had not been labeled. I was disappointed and a little confused that I did not recognize him. I had not said anything about this to anyone.

Another time, he wrote through Di that he had "moved the sponge." A couple of days earlier, I had been washing dishes when I saw the sponge fall off the edge of the counter into the sink. It was odd enough to catch my attention, but I assumed that it had just been a matter of the sponge being set down too close to the edge of the sink. Since that seemed so inconsequential, again I did not bother mentioning it to anyone.

Finally, I decided to test this method of communicating by giving Oscar a secret password to give to Di. The first time that Di tried to get it, it came out illegible. She tried again. The first three letters that came out were "W I G." When she saw that, she thought it was nonsense. She became frustrated and quit before any more letters came through. As it happened, the secret password I had given Oscar was "wiggly."

I started having clear memories of that life. Then through a series of coincidences, I was led to the photograph album of a family that lived around the block from Oscar's family during the Civil War. In that album is an unidentified photograph of a young woman who looks almost exactly like I did at 17 as well as a picture of Oscar himself. My gut feeling is that the young woman's photograph was of a close female relative from that life, though.

The thing that finally convinced me of the past life being real was a conversation I had with the ghost. I asked him why he took so long to let me know that I had been his wife. He said that his family told him not to for fear of scaring me off. As he said this, an intense feeling of longing came through. I knew that I wasn't imagining that! Since then, I have gotten recordings/evps where the ghost flat out says that I was his I was his wife and he was my husband. (Click the links to hear the EVPs.)

As I put the pieces of the puzzle together, it started to make more sense. I had a friend in high school who was into Civil War reenactment. I could not understand why anyone would want to recreate a war that was such a senseless waste of life. Given that it took my beloved away from me, it is understandable that I would be disgusted with it. That also explains why when I first came to the house on a tour many years ago, I felt a little anger towards the portrait of the young Civil War soldier in the front parlor. I know now that his death hurt me so deeply that I nearly died from an illness that was exacerbated by the grief. There was a lot of anger over him having left me to fight in the war. I've had a prejudice against Southerners most of my life as well (and to my Southern friends, I am over it!). A more pleasant hangover from that life is my love for late 1870's fashion. From the glimpses of memory I've had, that was the happiest time of my life.

Through meditation, I have been able to remember some more things about that life. The clearest memory was from a decade later when I had remarried and was a young wife and mother. I also got an interesting confirmation during a hypnosis session. I remembered waking up beside the old canal at night with a bump on my head from an apparent mugging. A few months later, I found a book on canals that had a previously unpublished photograph of the local canal and surrounding buildings that looked exactly like what I had seen under hypnosis.

I have also been able to recognize some people in my current life as having been in the previous one. A close friend was my aunt in that life. Another close friend was my cousin, and yet another was my sister. The most amusing recognition was that of my current sister as my father. She and her husband married quite young against the advice of their parents, echoing what she as my father would not allow me to do. I guess now she herself has been married for over 30 years, she knows that she was wrong about assuming that Oscar and I could not have made it!