Do you believe in the supernatural? (with thanks to dave barry)

Ken Gargett · March 27

i am a huge dave barry fan. have been for decades. nearly lost my breakfast reading his latest. this is the beginning. he has a free substack thing for those keen.

Do you believe in the supernatural?

If you don’t — if you’re a skeptic who believes only in science — then please explain the following documented incident:

Early on the morning of April 17, 2016, 54-year-old Ramona Fendecker was asleep in her home in Zanesville, Ohio, when she had what she later described as a “terrifyingly real” dream — a dream in which her 21-year-old son, Todd, a student at Boston College, was involved in a serious automobile accident.

At exactly 3:21 a.m., she was awakened from that dream by the ringing of her phone. Disoriented, drenched in sweat and trembling in fear, she sat up in bed and answered it.

The caller was a Massachusetts state trooper.

Are you getting chills yet? Well you should be. Because as unbelievable as it may sound, the trooper was calling to remind Ramona that she did not, in fact, have any children, so she should stop worrying and go back to sleep.

Go ahead, Mister or Mrs. or Ms. Skeptic: Explain THAT with your “science.” You can’t, and I will tell you why: I made that particular documented incident up. But that does not detract from my central point, which is this: Strange things happen. We all know it. There are inexplicably weird, sometimes disturbing, phenomena that we cannot account for using logic and rationality. The Kardashians are only one example.

Recently I encountered such a phenomenon in a Florida town called Manalapan, which gets its name from the Native American word “Manalapan,” which means “Napalanam spelled backward.” I was in Manalapan to attend the wedding of two fine young people, Ashley and Jacob. The wedding — which, as is typical of the modern American wedding, had been in the planning stages for approximately 311 years — was to take place on a hotel lawn overlooking the Atlantic, a popular local ocean.

In other words, it was going to be an outdoor wedding. This meant that the weather forecast for Manalapan for Saturday, March 14, was crucial. Am I saying that it was as crucial as, say, the weather forecast for the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944? Of course not. It was WAY MORE CRUCIAL than that, because (a) the D-Day landings did not involve professional hairdressers, and (b) the Allied Forces had not paid a large nonrefundable deposit for the use of France.