Strange Events Shortly After Learning of a Sibling's Death

Many a person reports strange inexplicable events around the time of a loved one's death, such as a clock mysteriously stopping at the time someone died. Prior to this year, I had only one such experience around the time of a loved one's death.  The experience was that within an hour after learning of a sibling's death, I observed an inexplicable shower of leaves. While working a short distance from the edge of a park to a pond, within an hour of learning of a sister's death,  I saw during 60 seconds about 100 to 200 leaves fall from the trees, even though it was only September 24th (long before leaves tend to fall in my area), and even though there was no unusual wind.  Returning four days later to the same spot, and keeping track of how many leaves fell, I saw only one leave fall during three minutes. 

Yesterday evening (April 18) I heard of the unexpected death of a  sister. There followed two very hard-to-explain events. 

The first event involved my Samsung tablet device. It suddenly froze up.  I turned it off, hoping the problem would go away when I turned it back on. But it was then impossible to turn the tablet device back on. I must have pressed the "on" button 30 times, without it turning on. Then finally I was able to turn the device on.  I checked the battery, thinking that maybe I had been low on charge. But I found instead it was still 85% charged.  I can't explain this strange behavior of the device, which I have never seen before. 

The next morning (today, April 19, 2021) something else very strange happened. Shortly after waking I was very surprised to see a 10-inch-long scroll in a particular corner of my apartment, parallel to the left edge of a black bookcase. I opened the scroll (about two inches in width) and found two portraits of my daughters that some artist had made years ago. I was very delighted to discover the portraits, which I do not remember ever seeing before. But hanging unresolved was the question: how did they get in that spot? My wife was as baffled by their appearance in that spot as I was.  Neither of us (the only ones in the apartment that day) had done anything related to the bookcase that might have caused the portraits to appear where I found them. We had both barely touched the bookcase on the previous day. My wife said she last remembered the portraits being in some other place in the apartment, in a drawer on the opposite end of the large black bookcase. 

The position where I found the scrolled-up portraits was very plainly visible from the place on the sofa where I sit most of the day, about three meters away, so I should have noticed them in such a spot on the previous day, but did not. To make things all the more baffling, I took a few photos of my living room around midnight at the end of April 18, and upon examining such photos on April 19 I saw they showed the paper scrolls parallel to the left edge of the black bookcase (where I discovered them on the morning of April 19), in a position where they should have been very visible to me during the evening of April 18, when I sat for hours three meters away from them, but failed to notice them. It is as if near the end of April 18 the scrolls had been inexplicably teleported to the position parallel to the left edge of the black bookcase, where I noticed them very quickly after waking up on April 19. 

The photo below shows the paper scrolls just as I found them on the morning of April 19, and the photo is taken from the spot 3 meters away where I sat through most of the afternoon and evening of April 18. You can see how clearly noticeable such scrolls are from such a spot, from which I never noticed such scrolls on that day. 

See the pdf file here for a discussion of many accounts similar to the account given above, some of which seem to involve objects mysteriously appearing, and some of which seem to involve objects mysteriously showing up in unexpected places.  Such cases have been studied by Mary Rose Barrington of the Society for Psychical Research. 

In the book Advances in Parapsychological Research, page 122, we read the following written by CUNY psychology professor Gertrude R. Schmeidler (who uses PK to mean psychokinesis, although the events described do not seem to be caused by the people witnessing them):

"Many cases of apparent spontaneous PK are reported by persons who say they have had only one or a few such experiences. A clock stops, a picture falls, glasses shatter, a chair starts rocking when no touches it and there is no air current or floor vibration, and the odd event coincides with a crisis that makes it meaningful. Many cases are reported to coincide with death or with a dangerous accident to a loved person at a distant place..."

On the same page we read an example of this. We read an account of three siblings in three separate houses who all heard about 2:00 AM a window shade rolling to the top making a loud noise. The

next morning they found their mother had died.