I See Dead People . . . or Maybe I Don’t

I don’t believe in ghosts. But I have met dead people and communicated with them.

As a Zen Buddhist teacher, I shouldn’t be telling you this. The Zen stream of Buddhism is known for a kind of rational mysticism. We don’t generally talk about stuff that would be considered paranormal or supernatural. It’s all about chopping wood and carrying water, ordinary mind is the way, and all that. 

But there may be ways to talk about some of the stranger things that we encounter without getting too woo-woo about it. Let’s see what I can do.

My father, Dan Warner, died at around 1:00 a.m. on Friday November 19, 2022. He was 81 years old.

At the time my dad died, I was sleeping. At 1:00 in the morning, I shot upright in bed, wide awake. I was like, what the hell? Why am I wide awake? For a while I was pacing around my bedroom wondering what happened. I finally took some melatonin and went back to sleep. But it was weird. 

The next morning, my sister called to tell me that my dad had died in the middle of the night. She told me she’d had a funny feeling about him. He’d been living with a woman who did her best to keep everyone in our family and all of his friends away from him. It had been next to impossible for us to reach him for years. That morning, my sister called the local police department, where my dad lived, to do a wellness check on him. The police went to his house and were informed that he had died the previous night at 1:00 a.m.. Why had she gotten the idea on that particular morning to call for a wellness check just after he’d died?

When I heard the time of his death, I realized it was the exact time I had woken up. The same thing happened when my mom died, in 2007. I woke up, for no apparent reason, really early in the morning, just as light was starting to creep up over the horizon, and heard the song “My Mummy’s Dead,” by John Lennon, just as clearly as if somebody had turned on a record player in my room and put the needle down on that track. It’s the final song on his first proper solo album, Plastic Ono Band. I knew it was not actually playing in my bedroom because I didn’t have a record player or CD player in there. Yet I heard the entire song play through. Then I just went back to sleep. 

I wasn’t distressed or scared by this. In retrospect, it seems like I should have been. Why wasn’t I even a little bit bothered by having a full-on auditory hallucination at the crack of dawn? But it was somehow comforting. A few hours later I was woken up again by the phone. It was my dad calling to tell me that my mom had died during the night. 

At that point in her life, my mom’s Huntington’s disease was very advanced and she didn’t move around much, so my dad tended to let her sleep in as long as she wanted. That morning, after he’d been up and about for a bit, he went back in the bedroom to check on her, and that’s when he realized she had died sometime during the night. My guess is she died at the time I woke up and heard that song playing.

That was the only clear communication I had with my mom after she died. But my dad came back a few more times. A couple of days after he died, I was at a Jane’s Addiction concert. I think the music opened up a channel or something. I sensed his presence really strongly. But he was kind of spread out in time. He was every age he had ever been all at once. But he was mainly sticking with being around 16 years old. I mean he was communicating with me in that sort of a voice. But it wasn’t a voice I heard through my ears. 

He seemed to be saying, “You should see this! You would be totally into it! This is so your kind of thing! This is what you write books about! Only it’s for real!” That sort of thing. He felt very free and light.

After a while I started losing him. It was like when you’re moving away from a radio station while you’re driving somewhere far away from home. He seemed like he was trying to hang on to the connection but he couldn’t. I said it was OK. It seemed like he had other places he needed to be anyway. 

He came back two more times after that. Each one was a bit less clear. The last time he appeared, he seemed like he was ready to move on and wanted to wish me well.

Let me tell you another strange story.

My friend David Coady committed suicide on July 20, 2011, at the San Francisco Zen Center. He was a monk there.

About a month after David killed himself, I went to Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in California to work for part of the summer. During this visit I was asked to lead some of the temple services. It’s a job I hate because I never really learned all the dance moves a Zen priest needs to know to lead services. My teacher wasn’t into that stuff and never taught us how to do it. I can kind of fake my way through it after having received some lessons from a friend who is a Tassajara priest. But it’s obvious I don’t know what I’m doing.

The first day I was scheduled to do this it was hot as the dickens, and I was dressed in black robes with a brown sash called a kesa over top. It’s kind of like wearing a burka with a blanket over it. As the priest leading the ceremony, I had to meet my attendant at a nearby building ten minutes before the service. To avoid being baked by the sun, I stood under a small tree that offered precious little shade.

As I stood there, alone, a strange thing happened. All at once I felt David’s presence. It’s hard to explain, but have you ever noticed the feeling you get when you’re sitting next to a close friend without speaking or even really looking at the person? You just kind of sense the person near you? That’s what it felt like. It wasn’t like I was thinking of him or remembering him. In fact, I was thinking only about what I had to do once I got inside and all eyes were on me. I just felt David there. The feeling persisted for about a minute, and then it was gone.

After the encounters with my dad I decided to read the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol). Zen Buddhists don’t like to talk much about what happens after you die, but Tibetan Buddhists seem to love the subject! Dogen has an essay in Shobogenzo called “Doshin,” whose title my teacher translated as “The Will to the Truth.” In that essay he included a few sentences outlining what happens after you die, but it’s clear he’s not telling us he wants us to believe that. He assumes his audience already believes that and extolls them to keep on chanting praise to Buddha, dharma, and sangha even in these afterlife realms. 

What intrigued me while reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead is that Dogen’s lines in “Doshin” sound like a brief summary of much of what’s in that book. I assume they were drawn from the same source, maybe the Abhidharma. I’m no Buddhist scholar, though. I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong about that. The reason I bring it up is that some of what I read in the Tibetan Book of the Dead was mirrored in my experiences with my dad after he died. And I had not yet read the book when the encounters with my dad occurred. For example, according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, after someone dies they take on a persona of themselves in their youth, which is exactly how my dad appeared to me—not visually but in my mind. And the book describes the immediate postmortem experience as being very free and energized, which again is how my dad appeared to me. This doesn’t prove anything, but for me, it lent some credence to these experiences.

Have you ever noticed the feeling you get when you’re sitting next to a close friend without speaking or even really looking at the person? You just kind of sense the person near you? That’s what it felt like.

I’m not relating these experiences hoping to convince you of their validity. Nor am I looking for outside validation. I know what I experienced. I’m inclined not to believe in ghosts, and I’m part of a tradition that downplays or even denies anything that might be characterized as “supernatural.” So these experiences were surprising and unexpected. I can’t deny them. I don’t know if it’s a great idea to share them. But, then again, I can’t see how it would be harmful to write about them since there are plenty of other ghost stories out there already. Readers can decide for themselves what to believe.

The only place in the Zen tradition where ghosts come up routinely is in the tradition of offering part of your meals to the so-called hungry ghosts. This is part of the standard meal ritual at almost every Zen retreat, including my teacher’s retreats. You take a small bit of your meal and place it on a tray, which is then symbolically offered to the hungry ghosts. We used to leave that tray outside for birds to eat. I never knew if hungry ghosts partook as well, or if perhaps some of those birds were hungry ghosts in disguise. Could be!

It’s hard to say how many Zen Buddhists truly believe in the hungry ghosts, yet the tradition remains. It’s good to donate some of your food to those less fortunate, even if it’s merely symbolic, or even if they’re hungry birds, not ghosts. It can help us to remember to do the same sorts of things for real people or other beings having a difficult time.

As for my own encounters with dead people, I still don’t quite know what to make of them. I just know that they happened and that they had great meaning to me. I don’t care very much if anyone else believes in them. I’m not even sure I believe in them! I mean, I know those things happened, but what caused them to happen is a mystery I cannot solve. So I don’t even try!