Proof useless family members can come again to us: My late father known as me and my aunt comforted my autistic son… and 1000’s say the identical occurred to them: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS

The voice was unmistakable. I hadn’t heard the mobile ring, but without question it was my dad on the line: ‘Hello, Chris? You there?’

That was how he began every phone call, since his hearing started to go. I usually took it as an instruction to speak up, but this time was very different – because my dad had died a month earlier.

Two thoughts occurred in the same moment. The first was that no one would believe me. I looked around my desk and reached for my pocket digital recorder, the one I use for every interview. I switched it on, hoping to capture proof.

The other thought was that Dad might bristle if I said anything about him being dead. He certainly hadn’t been happy about dying: He refused to admit he was ill until bone cancer left him unable to walk.

So, into my mobile, which I’d put on speakerphone on my desk, I said: ‘How are things? Are you all right?’

‘Yes, I’m fine. It’s all right here. Very good, really.’

That gave me an excuse to ask: ‘Where are you?’

‘Well, it’s sort of like a nursing home. A bit better, you know.’ He meant it was better than the care home where he’d spent his last weeks. And since there was nothing much wrong with that place, what he really meant was that he was better. He wasn’t in pain.

He sounded old and a little surprised by developments, but not speaking through gritted teeth any more.

‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘They’re looking after you, are they?’

‘Yes, they’re very good. And you know the best thing about this place? It’s not Catholic!’

That made me laugh out loud. And when I laughed, Dad’s voice vanished, along with the desk and the phone.

I was in bed, on holiday in Majorca, and it was 3am. I lay there going over the brief conversation, replaying it, wanting to tell my wife, but not willing to wake her. I knew I’d remember every word in the morning – because similar experiences have occurred to me before.

My Dad’s voice came to me in a dream, but it wasn’t an ordinary dream, the ones that last a few seconds, or perhaps hours, and soon melt to nothing.

For so visceral was the experience that I believe it to be real. You may think me crackers, but I am not alone, as studies have shown that thousands have experienced the phenomenon of ADCs, or After-Death Communications – more of which later.

I can recall the conversation with Dad verbatim, and it was typical of him to make that irreverent joke about his new residence not being Catholic – but it’s not a concern he’d ever expressed to me in life, so I couldn’t consciously have invented it.

He wasn’t religious. He didn’t even want a funeral service. But his own parents were strict Baptists, his mum especially, so the thought that they might owe the Pope an apology for following the wrong branch of Christianity would have upset him.

I am a believer myself, and didn’t need convincing of an afterlife, but to me this presented hard proof. Every word of that short chat was so vividly evocative of my father – the way he thought, the idioms he used, and his sense of humour.

I was looking forward to getting home and telling my Mum about it. She was in the same nursing home, suffering from vascular dementia – fading in and out, like a radio with a weak signal, but sometimes lucid.

A few days before we went away, my wife Nicky and I visited her and she sat holding our hands, talking about Dad. I asked her if she believed they’d meet again. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘It’ll be lovely to see each other. But if we don’t, it doesn’t matter, because we won’t know about it.’

That’s quite a piece of philosophy from someone who at other times was lost in a fog of confusion. It’s moving to know that, under the landslide of dementia, some buried piece of her real personality survived.

We saw Mum again, but she slept through our next visit. And that was the last time, because she died two days after we flew home.

I haven’t heard her voice in a dream yet, and I don’t expect to – it would be out of character. She enjoyed long chats on the phone, but Mum always expected me to ring her – never the other way round. She wouldn’t admit it, though. I’m quite sure that her first words when I see her again will be: ‘I was just about to call you.’

Perhaps I’m wrong. The first time I heard the voice of someone who’d died, I certainly wasn’t expecting it. My Gran, Dad’s mother, came straight to the point, just as she did when she was alive. ‘You look after them kids!’ she told me. This was some 25 years ago when my children were four and six.

She spoke so clearly and suddenly that I was instantly awake. ‘I will, Gran,’ I said. ‘I do.’

Her voice softened. ‘Well, just you mind you do,’ she said, and she was gone. I can still hear the words ringing now.

Gran had eight children and numerous foster children, well into her sixties, and all her later life until her death aged 98 she ‘toured’ around the family. She met every one of her great-grandchildren. It was absolutely typical that her only instruction for me would be for their welfare.

On one other occasion, I’ve been woken by a familiar voice, with a message that was entirely characteristic. My favourite of Dad’s brothers was Dennis – he was a talker, like me, and a dog-lover, and a chess player, and we always got on.

He didn’t have children, and after his wife Doreen died in 2010 Den was bereft. We saw a lot of him, as he made a brave attempt to move on with life and have a few adventures – he particularly enjoyed visiting cathedrals. Unlike Dad, he was a religious man who found a lot of comfort in prayer, and he had no doubt at all that he and Doreen would be reunited.

We talked so much in those last years that I really did expect to hear from him again. For a couple of months, I’d go to bed wondering if this would be the night. When nothing happened, I felt a little hurt, quite irrationally. But I forgot about it, until more than a year later when, one night, I woke knowing he was there.

I couldn’t see him, and I don’t think he said anything at first. Although it makes me sound like a Victorian medium, I ‘felt his presence’.

Precisely what I said, I can’t remember. It was something like: ‘Where have you been all this time?’

‘You know where I am,’ he said, sounding surprised to be asked. ‘I’m with Doreen.’

It’s easy to be sceptical, of course. Many people will say that I’m simply prone to vivid dreams when I’m grieving, and that my subconscious finds ways to comfort me. There’s no way to prove or disprove that.

Dr Rupert Sheldrake, who has studied after-death communications or between humans and their pets, says: ‘For materialists, ADCs are nothing but tricks of the memory or hallucinations.

‘But for those who believe in the possibility of survival of bodily death, they may be what they seem to be, communications from the departed.’ The phenomenon has been widely reported for centuries. Often, it occurs shortly after a death, before friends and relatives have heard the news.

The British tend to be uncomfortable talking about death, and more so about the supernatural. If we experience something inexplicable, we might not talk about it. But when I was writing my biography of the actor Kenneth Williams, his close friend and neighbour Paul Richardson told me how he woke on the night Ken died, and saw him at the foot of his bed.

‘I thought I actually saw him in my bedroom, in the early hours of the morning,’ he told me. ‘But all I could see was his face, grinning. This is absolutely true. I said, ‘Go away, go away,’ and I didn’t think anything else of it.’

The star had suffered a fatal heart attack in his sleep.

The first attempt to collect stories like these was made by three 19th century psychologists, Edmund Gurney, Frank Podmore and Frederic Myers. Their 1886 study Phantasms Of The Living, documented more than 700 cases. Another study published in 1923 found thousands. Other European cultures are more open to the idea than we are.

In 2012, Professor Erlendur Haraldsson at the University of Iceland estimated that 3 per cent of Icelandic people had experienced ADCs. About one in seven of these occurred within 24 hours of death.

The strangest cases I know involve my sons, James and David, and my wife’s redoubtable great-aunt, Miss Gwendolyn Williams.

We saw a lot of Auntie Gwen, who was head of the Queen’s Nurses in Wales during the early days of the NHS, before we had children. She died from a stroke about three years before James, our elder boy, was born – a great pity, because she would have loved to see Nicky become a mum.

One day when James was about seven, Nicky heard him in his bedroom, talking as though he was chatting to someone. She stuck her head round the door, and asked who he was speaking to. ‘Auntie Gwen,’ he said, as though it was perfectly natural.

That was bizarre. Neither of us could remember telling James about her, and we didn’t have her picture on the wall. But what happened 20 years later was much, much stranger.

Our younger son, David, is severely autistic, and has lived in care since he was 13. His speech has always been very limited, but a couple of years ago he became intensely distressed and stopped talking altogether. We discovered he was being neglected and emotionally abused by staff at the facility and, after a long battle, moved him to a new placement.

With great dedication and patience, the staff at his current home have helped David to feel safe and, with the help of an outstanding speech and language therapist, coaxed him to start talking again.

About four months after David arrived at the new home, his key worker asked us: ‘Who is Auntie Gwen? David keeps saying, ‘Seeing Auntie Gwen tomorrow’.’

I cannot think of any plausible explanation for that, except the obvious one: Gwen was keeping an eye on David when he needed her most. We can’t ask him how he knows about her – his capacity for language is far too limited.

For the same reason, we didn’t attempt to tell David that his grandparents had died. They used to visit him regularly, bringing him the flapjacks and Disney videos he loves, but that stopped with the first Covid lockdown.

He’s used to people vanishing from his life. But the week after my Mum died, one of his support workers remarked that David had been saying: ‘Nanny and Grandpa, silver car.’

Their car was silver. It’s tempting to think that they came to visit him. And with the logic of autism, David might assume that they must have come the way they always did… by car.

A few weeks later, David came to our home for a morning. It was the Friday before Mum’s funeral and, since my Dad hadn’t had a service, many of his family were going to be there too. We didn’t talk about this in front of David, of course. But as he collected his things to go, he broke from his routine.

He usually says: ‘Goodbye Mummy and Daddy.’ This time, he fixed me with a stern look and said: ‘Goodbye Nanny and Grandpa.’