The First Butterfly

Late in August my sister, my son, and I took my dad on a tourist train excursion.  The Kiski Junction Railroad is located near where the Kiski and Allegheny Rivers merge and is only a short distance from where my parents formerly lived.  It was a gorgeous warm day.  We had been on this train trip several times when my son Henry was young - in fact we had one of his birthday parties on the train.  Dad had been through so much hell between the death, the funeral, and then moving into an independent living apartment.  We thought he could use an enjoyable day out.

The most interesting thing about this trip, at least for me, is the industrial ruins along the way.  The railroad itself is built on top of the filled in Pennsylvania Main Line Canal.  Timbers and rocks from the old canal are visible on some parts of the ride.  It also goes past at least two different abandoned mines.  One is the old Bagdad coal mine and the other was a tin mine, if memory servers.  In any case they are very creepy and interesting, and even more so for us since my dad's father (my grandfather) was a mine inspector (fire boss).

We choose the back porch of an antique caboose for our ride.  The train conductor was also sitting out there with us.  Twice during the trip a blue butterfly flew onto the train and hovered around us, sitting on the railing, the top of the door into the caboose, and once on Henry's head!  The second time it happened the conductor got a strange look on his face.  He told us, "In all the time I've been here, that has NEVER happened even once, let alone twice!"

I knew the butterflies were from my mother.  Years ago when these things happened to me I searched both the school and the local public library for information but came up with very little.  Just a few books with ghost stories and one book about scientists studying "ESP" with cards.  So I had to figure everything out on my own and never felt I understood it at all.  But this time - thank God for the internet!  There are many books published on the subject now and by this time I was buying them on amazon.com and devouring at least three per week.  I learned that ADC's (shorthand for After Death Communication) had been surveyed scientifically.  According to "Hello From Heaven" by Bill and Judy Guggenheim, ADC's are reported by millions of people all over the world.  And they fall into definite categories, one of which is odd visitations by animals.  Butterflies are common ADC symbols.  The fact that my mother spent years cultivating a butterfly garden and raising monarch butterfly caterpillars made it an even more obvious connection.

When I got home I told my husband about it and he casually dismissed it, but not long after he got a real shock!