In August 1971, two young girls played on a second story hotel landing in Lincoln, Nebraska. Eleven-year-old Cheryl became bored with their game and suggested they try something else. She looked over at the hotel dumbwaiter, a service lift rigged to transport laundry, and suggested they ride it down to the basement. Chrissy hopped in first and scooted to the back. As Cheryl ducked her head inside, Chrissy pressed the button, causing the dumbwaiter to slam down on Cheryl’s neck, pinning her against the frame.
As Chrissy screamed, Cheryl lost consciousness but recalls, “I was encompassed with white light, hen I hit a dimension where I was in total darkness. I passed through into a place where I saw the ancestors of my family, and I could hear their voices. I felt love for those people; I didn’t want to come home, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there. ” Chrissy managed to press the stop button, releasing Cheryl who slumped to the floor. Her mother rushed her to the hospital where they bandaged a five-inch gash caused by the incident. The doctor told her she was lucky to be alive.
Cheryl remembers, “I was thinking, You have no clue where l’ve been. ‘ How do you tell anybody that at 11 years old? Cheryl Fletcher sent me an email at the end of August with the subject line “My Extraordinary Life. ” I’d never heard of her before, but she found me through a mutual acquaintance, Johnny Houser, a subject of an earlier Character File. In her first line she said she was contacting me because she had a real story to tell. Intrigued, we began a month long email correspondence that resulted in a four hour video interview.
As a self-described medium, psychic, and clairvoyant, Cheryl doesn’t just have one story; she has many. According to “The Science of Near-Death Experiences” ritten by Gideon Lichfield and published in a 2015 issue of The Atlantic, “Many NDErs report that their experience did not feel like a dream or a hallucination but was, as they often describe it, ‘more real than real life. ‘ They are profoundly changed afterward. ” For Cheryl, that change was the beginning of a new kind of sight. Later that same year she had a premonition of her older brother’s death.
She told me, “It was like if I turned over right now and switched on a movie reel, like the building of vision. It’s a feeling like being pulled or magnetized to something. You just have to go there. I started to see a dark box, a casket, and there was my brother Pat, in the casket. I wondered why it was happening, so I told my mom. She thought I just had a bad dream. ” On January 23, 1971 at 1:23 in the morning, the Police Department of Lincoln knocked her mother’s door. As the door opened, flashlights streamed into the dark house.
Cheryl clung to her mother and told her, “He’s dead, just like I said. ” The officers informed the family that Pat had committed suicide by hanging. For many years, Cheryl kept her experiences and visions mostly to herself. She wrote about er gift through poetry and tucked it away until she met Mark Fletcher, her husband of 23 years. Though they are now divorced, Cheryl says he is her best friend and biggest advocate. He noticed Cheryl’s ability after the news reported a missing couple in Hastings, Nebraska.
In a phone interview with Mark, he remembers her saying, “They’re in the water. Later, after the pond water had somewhat evaporated, they found them upside down in their jeep where they had veered off the road. While cutting his hair on their porch, Mark recalled Cheryl’s prediction of a wreck on the Interstate. The following day there was a semi pileup. On another occasion, the news reported a woman who went missing in an Omaha blizzard. After Mark called her in to see the footage, Cheryl drew a picture of where her body was including a fence line, an embankment, and trees. Later, the news reported the woman was found and showed the exact location Cheryl had drawn in the living room that day.
Convinced that Cheryl’s ability was authentic and that she had a gift she could be sharing, Mark encouraged her official involvement with another case. For days, the news had covered the matter of a missing fisherman. Sure his body would be found in the small sandpit lake where he was last seen fishing with his dog, the Sheriff called in divers from Burwell, Kearney, and Grand Island, Nebraska to help with the search. According to 10 11 news out of Lincoln, authorities were ready to give up after a week of looking.
Certain Cheryl could help, Mark drove her from Grand Island to Elba to see what she could do. Cheryl watched the search and rescue teams, divers, dogs, and law enforcement personnel case the area. More concerned about the family’s closure than official protocol, Cheryl walked underneath the yellow tape. Confronted by an officer, Mark explained to the deputy what Cheryl could do. The woman radioed back to the search team and asked if it would be okay for Cheryl to come down to the site. What did they have to lose? Cheryl was given an escort the rest of the way.
As she got closer to the water, Cheryl was able to see the circumstances behind the missing man’s disappearance, and she began to tell the officers about her vision. Cheryl saw the fisherman arriving with his wife and infant. He became drunk, and he and his wife had a fight. After storming off, he got in a canoe with his dog. His wife ook the baby and drove home. The fatal moment occurred when he threw his fishing pole in the water. In the exact moment that he reached outward, his dog decided to walk to the same area of the canoe he was sitting in, putting too much pressure on one end.
The boat flipped, striking the man in the head. Cheryl reported that the dog pulled the man’s sunglasses in his mouth and took them to shore. The police did find his glasses during the early days of the search, though that particular detail did not appear in the press. She informed them that the man was far from where the dive team was looking. She recalls, “I could see in the water where he was at, and they were 300 feet in the wrong way. His body was hung up underneath a bunch of trees. ” She told them if they pulled the trees up, he would rise on the south bank on Easter morning.
Cheryl told me, “Sunday morning I got a call after church from them. They found him exactly where I said after they eradicated the trees. ” The skeptic in me, had difficulty believing, so I turned to research. Is the ability to make predictions outside the realm of science? Julia Mossbridge, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University, says no. According Mossbridge, Patrizio Tressoldi of he Universita di Padova, Italy and Jessica Utts of the University of California, Irvine, predictions are a thing of science fact.
They conducted a meta-analysis of more than forty experiments published over the past 32 years examining prediction events. The scientists are quick to admit they do not know the science behind such activity, but there can be no doubt that some people can, in fact, make accurate predictions. Though modern science is unable to successfully explain it, Mossbridge believes that further research into quantum biology will eventually reveal an explanation for behavior now deemed “paranormal. According to Mark Fletcher, “Cheryl is one of the best people in the country when it comes to finding people.
There are a lot of quacks out there, but she’s the real deal. ” Mark says if he could afford it, he’d send her to help locate missing persons all over the country. Mark wasn’t always a believer, but he says, “It blew my mind when she knew things about that Hastings couple. When things come to fruition, you start to think, maybe there is something to this. ” Before our interview was over, I asked Cheryl one last question. “What advice would you give to people based on your experiences? She replied, “You need to learn to let go, and I’m talking to you. Here she leaned in closer to the computer screen. “Let them be who they are. Let them choose their own lives. Let them grow and be who they want to be, even if you don’t like it. You know what I’m talking about. ” As a nother of four, you bet I know. Explain it away however you want, but it was exactly what I needed to hear on that particular day, this particular year. There is more to life than what can be explained by science. Sometimes life is just feeling it, believing it. Sometimes it’s okay not to know the answer.