Ghosts of the Gold Coast: A Memoir of Ancestry, Aliens, and the Number 7

The Lifepath 7 walks through delusion, epiphany, leaps of faith, father wounds, and ultimately learns that faith in one's self and God are one in the same.

This is a personal story I’ve held close for some time. It’s not part of a product or project, but it is part of me. I don’t know exactly where it belongs yet — but for now, I offer it here as a kind of soul breadcrumb.

It’s a story that spirals through the search for the father — biological, divine, galactic — and traces the evolution of sight: from trauma vision to psychic seeing. It remembers the body as a stargate, and invites us to consider that motherhood, miscarriage, and mediumship may all be part of one vast conversation.

Most of all, it’s about remembering who we are — not just as earthlings, but as starseeds. For anyone who’s ever remembered something they weren’t taught, or felt watched over by a sky that knows their name… this story is for you.

Ghosts of the Gold Coast

I see her father in a shed in the backyard, tinkering at a workbench when a short grey alien appears at his side. He registers the presence, and, being at peace with it, returns to his work.

            I relate this to the woman on the other side of Zoom.

She affirms, ‘My father died last year. He was always in the shed. And always looking through his telescope. I’m looking at a photo of him next to the screen right now.’

            ‘Interesting that you booked a reading for today. Today would have been my father’s birthday,’ I tell her. And the next day would be Fathers’ Day.

            I shuffle cards and Sky Father falls out of the deck.

            Clearly, the fathers want to speak.

The first time I remembered who I am, I was two-and-a-half-years-old. It was New Year’s Eve on the Gold Coast and the year my real father would die. But I did not know him then. All I knew was my mum, my little brother and I both in the pram, and the ocean at Surfer’s Paradise. A light whistled up into the night. But instead of fireworks I saw spitfires swoop low and drop bombs onto the sand. The scene looked like this: planes swooping low, a mechanical droning, waves of sand, bodies running, scrambling away from the water, sand-choked screams.

In my head I was shouting, Run! Look out! Why aren’t you running! But all that came out of my toddler mouth was sobs and screams. Mum shushed me: It’s okay, Kelly. It can’t hurt you. Look, how pretty. Finally she turned the pram away and towards the mall. The scene swung away in time.

For the first seven years of my life, I felt as if I were floating, that I was not actually using my legs. It was difficult to see and hear through the pixelated texture of the timespace between myself and others. Sometimes I saw grainy shapes in the air, and I couldn’t discern dreams from waking life. This wasn’t really my life at all. Then, at seven-years-old, my mum and brother and I were walking through Runaway Bay shops, a Target, when she began shaking.

            ‘Kelly,’ she said carefully. ‘See that man over there? That’s your dad.’

            I hid behind a display of videotapes and watched as my mother, still shaking, walked over to him: a man she told me is a quarter Chinese, a morning person, a real estate agent, and lived at the Treasure Island Caravan Park where I was conceived. He regarded her. Then me. I ducked. When I looked again, a woman pushing a pram had joined the man apparently my father, and mum was walking back.

          Mum showed me the scrawled numbers on a tatty piece of paper. I shook too. All of the sudden the world was the world, my body was my body, and I had chosen to be in it.

‘Don’t expect him to call,’ Mum warned weeks later, as she noticed that I was still staring at the phone. ‘I wanted my dad to be a knight in shining armour too. He’s not. He never came.’

That same year my favourite substitute teacher, a man I had a huge crush on, Mr. V., died. He had dreadlocks and rode a skateboard to school. My usual teacher, Mrs. Hartigan, burst into tears during my parent-teacher interview.

She said, ‘Kelly is the first student who ever asked if she could do anything for me.’

‘Well I’m never doing that again,’ Mum said as we walked out of the interview.

Around this time, Mum pulled all the palings off the fence at our apartment complex. She stole bricks from a neighbouring construction site and built a huge bonfire. Mrs. Hartigan’s daughter was dating our neighbour, and one day she came to collect her and saw me standing barefoot in the driveway, in front of the flames. I waved excitedly.

Mum threw her old journals into the fire, the soaring embers looking like fairies. She told me that she used to pray to the moon and imagine that her dad was looking at it too.

In the wake of a father, I worshipped my teachers. All through primary school I put my hand up for volunteer work and extra-curriculars. In my lunchbreaks I went to leadership meetings, planted trees, and served in the tuckshop. One time I punched a girl for pushing my friend into the bushes and another time I stepped on the glasses of a boy who told everyone that we had sex: after both charges, the teachers backed me up. Kelly would never do that on purpose. Kelly is a good person.

I kept seeing things. One day I was playing in the shallows at the Broadwater when I saw a stream of smoke coming up from behind the Spit. This wasn’t unusual as the Bermuda Triangle: Alien Encounter ride at SeaWorld featured a smoking volcano that animated the coastline. But this stream was further north, wispier, and at the pinnacle something looked like a rocket blazing into the blue.

I pointed: ‘A rocket!’

It was conspicuous enough: there was not a cloud in the sky. People about looked eagerly; they saw nothing.

‘Right there! There!’

I must have gone on for minutes before it faded into the distance above.

Sometimes Mum would get drunk and let things slip.

‘Your grandmother called me schizophrenic. She doesn’t know the meaning of the word. Thinks that being mad makes me schizo. Of course I’m mad. She was my mother! I had no one to protect me.’

I had heard stories of Mum’s hellish childhood. Sometimes Mum sat on the bathroom floor with broken glass and said she’ll do us a favour and kill herself. So when she also said, ‘Your grandmother says he’s not your dad.’ I listened with a soft ear. ‘She always accused me of sleeping around. But what would she know? I was only ever with your dad. He couldn’t be anyone else.’

When I was sick home from school, we watched Maury Povich and Jerry Springer. You are not the father. She wrote and illustrated stories about fairies and taught me how to see and feel auras. Twice we saw white orbs within arm’s reach: were these ghosts? Guardian angels? I began talking to a fatherly voice in my head, whom for ease of reference I called God. This was another world: its aftertaste on my tongue. But increasingly I investigated what was in front of me, folded between each word.

I matured into an academic atheist, an avid reader of psychology, astronomy, and the classics. Recurring nightmares of being burned at the stake in a medieval city square haunted my entry to high school. Fear of change, renewal, sexuality, womanhood, alienation: I analysed these dreams painstakingly. I journaled, made the unconscious conscious. Defined the world of magic as an apparition of brain chemistry. I excelled in the arts and humanities, continued to overload myself with extra-curriculars, and took a part-time job. Boys started calling me Joan of Arc.

The more Mum drank, the less she left the apartment. I avoided going home to face the full-volume Kenny Rogers, which I could hear from the end of our street, getting louder and louder each step to our front door, turning into slurred accusations.

‘You’re not better than us’ was a go-to line. She didn’t want me to work. She herself hadn’t worked much since before I was born, when she was an artist for sets and props at MovieWorld.

‘It doesn’t matter if you get good grades or what you do; it only matters that you’re a good person, Kelly.’ She said this like an allegation, a threat, the insinuation being that I was definitely not a good person.

Meanwhile, my boss, (Tom, we'll call him) a man 51 years older than me, became nicer and nicer. He noticed how hard I worked, cooked me dinner when I worked a late shift, and drove me home. He photoshopped my face onto the body of Liza Minelli performing Mein Herr and hung it at the back of the shop like a pinup. His daughter and his wife (Edith, we'll call her) told him to take it down.

Then his wife died.

When I was 17 and in the middle of a shift, Tom cornered me out the back and pinned me against the wall. Stuck his tongue in my mouth and thrusted against me. As quickly as it happened, he let go, and the other staff, including his daughter, walked by without noticing. I was scared and disgusted. I kind of liked it.

He began texting me, telling me that he loved me. Whenever I was fewer than five minutes early to work, he’d cry and yell: ‘Are you cheating on me with boys at school? How could you leave me waiting? How could you lead me on?’ He threatened to kill himself repeatedly.

I had no idea what was going on. But I knew it had something to do with definitely not being a good person. I kept the relationship a secret. Cried myself to sleep every night.

Mum was intuitive, or “not stupid”, as she called it.

‘Give me your phone,’ she demanded one night. Already drunk, she was my enemy before I gave her a chance. ‘That man is a pedophile. He’s in love with you!’

I denied everything and threw my phone at the wall, smashing it, before she could prove herself right.

‘You’re crazy!’ I yelled.

She slapped my face.

I leaned closer. ‘Go on. Do it again,’ I said. She did. ‘Does that make you feel big and strong now that you’ve hit your daughter?’

‘Pack your bags!’ she called out as I had begun packing anyway.

On the street in the night, with nowhere to go, it seemed, I went to work.

My boss answered the knock on the garage. He took me into the house at the back. The outdoor security lights through the blinds striped his bed like a jail cell. I said no. He entered me anyway. The pain and the unrelenting tightness saved me from more. I did not save myself.

I began dreaming of apocalypse: every night tidal waves decimated the Gold Coast, and every night I found some new way to stay alive: clinging to palm trees, climbing to higher ground, holding my breath for minutes until I could latch onto a skyscraper. Waking up was like coming up for air. All day I was riddled with anxiety, sick and breathless. I finished school this way, went through my undergraduate studies this way. Going to classes, then straight home to my secret abuser-boyfriend, studying, nightmaring, repeat. The magic had dried up in my life; I didn’t remember who I had been. I became 21 and he became 72.

Then one night before bed we were arguing in the dark. Mid-sentence he stopped and said, ‘What the hell is that?’

He climbed out of bed and walked to the window.

From the other side of the room, I scoffed, uninterested.

‘What the hell is that?’ he repeated, slightly panicked. ‘There’s a light in the sky.’            ‘A helicopter,’ I stated.

‘No. Way up. Not like a helicopter. Look. Look!’

I ambled over. I saw the block of shops, the orange streetlights on the quiet road. No sound.

         ‘That’s a streetlight,’ I said.            

‘Up! Up!’

I followed his finger, and there, right up in the sky, a few streets away, was a big orange ball of light. It seemed to hover backwards and forwards like an elegant helicopter, but it made no sound, and it didn’t have an obvious body. Then two more lights brightened into existence beside it. Had they come from within the first ball of light? The three lights danced around each other, up and down, around and around, much too agile. I dared not blink. Then the first light shot up—faster than lightning—into space. A second after, the other two lights followed. Zip. Gone.

We stood still together.

After a while, he climbed back into bed, muttering, ‘I knew we weren’t alone.’

He fell asleep.

I lay eyes-wide to the dark, thinking of a nothingness that contained everything.

This was the beginning of my rapture. I poured myself into UFO documentaries and online forums, sat outside stargazing, and generally avoided him. I had my first loud dream: a saucer as long as the house hovered a metre above the grass and beamed white lights and a deafening hum into the windows. I ran up and down the house to escape, but somehow the saucer was on both sides of the house at once. Two nights in a row I had this dream, and then the migraines started: streams of white triangles across my sight before partial blindness, debilitating pain in my head, and a numb left arm. I was back in my body. Being recalled to life, it seemed.

            One night my 70-year-old boyfriend’s 50-year-old daughter knocked on the door unexpectedly. Our secret was out.

She sat on the couch and cried.

‘I deserved better. I deserved honesty,’ she told me.

Here, dear reader, is my attempt at honesty.

I tried to explain. ‘You said that if your dad was with me then you’d never speak to him again.’

            When he left the room she told me the truth: that he had molested her as a child. At that moment it all made sense.

            When he walked back in the room, all she said was, ‘I told her.’

            ‘Oh,’ he answered.

My telescope and search for extra-terrestrial life hit dead-ends, and so instead, from my new room in a Brisbane sharehouse, I wrote fiction and poetry about the ends of the universe. I took a DNA test to discover my ancestry—never hopeful enough that I’d find my father, but intrigued enough that the ethnicity profile never matched what Mum told me.

            ‘And you’re Chinese, right?’ was the first thing Mum asked me when I told her that I took the test.

            I registered her nervousness.

            ‘Well, it’s not exact,’ I said. ‘The science is still developing.’ I tried to spare her. But we both felt history unravelling.

Before I finished my PhD on the subject of the Gold Coast, homelessness, missing fathers, and aliens, I started dating a lecturer, someone who had taught me, and someone I had taught for. We disclosed the relationship, but I fell pregnant faster than anticipated, and people started accusing us of everything. That I was raped was one of the many rumours, and this enraged me: what did they know? And if I had been, how dare they say so on my behalf? I was an angry, righteous, depressed, self-alienated person, but I was again to be shown that the other world wasn’t done with me.  

            Three months into my pregnancy, I had a ‘vision’—is the only way I can describe it. I was sitting in a theatre for a lecture on Freud and neuroscience, and the screen at the back of the stage displayed a gif of brain scans flicking so quickly that the brain seemed to be blooming over and over. I was hypnotised.

            Suddenly I was on a bed with a newborn lying face-down on my stomach. Its head snapped up, looking into my eyes. In a deep voice, mouth closed, it telepathically said, “I am an old soul. Don’t let me die.”

            I didn’t understand.

            ‘I am an old soul. Older than even you. Old as the universe. Don’t let me die.’

            And then I was back in the theatre. Looking around. Everything unchanged, except me.  

Like many pregnant women, my dreams became intense, vivid. The ghost of an old woman—the landlord’s mother—kept telling me to get out and threatened to burn the house down. Many times the house actually flooded. Meanwhile, my mother had reconnected with an old boyfriend, and they had become physically abusive to each other. The night I dreamt that I stabbed him and cut off his penis was the same night he woke up, suddenly stood up from his armchair, and dropped dead. I stupidly, selfishly, told my mother, and she saw me as his murderer.

After the funeral, Mum began screaming and writhing, saying that she was on fire. We later learned that he had been cremated against his wishes at that exact time.

The vision of the newborn repeated in dreams, and I had others of a hyperactive toddler trying to jump over the balcony. I had a sense that these dreams were warning me, preparing me for what was to come. Indeed, I gave birth to a neurodivergent boy with no sense of mortality.

One day he tried to jump out the window of a raised Queenslander, and I, exhausted and terrified, snapped, ‘If you jump out the window you will fall down and you will die!’

            Nicholas, then three, answered, ‘And I’ll fly up to my home in the sky?’

            He would come out with many curious throw-away lines, often referring to “when he was big”: “I had a special watch when I was big”; “I was nice when I was big”; “I had a gun in the army when I was big”; “My house was bigger when I was big.”

I began to believe two things: there is a soul, which exists before and after the body; and that the soul has lived other lives, in other times and places. I then set out to discover if this remembering can be learned, and could I learn it? Again, the other world found me first.

When I fell pregnant for the second time, I determined to prove to myself the existence of spirits who became babies. I pulled tarot cards that predicted exactly when I would conceive, down to the day. When the tarot cards became bloody, and showed painful endings, I was confused. In a guided meditation, my child told me, “I have died”. Too attached to accept the truth, I wondered if they were simply telling me about past lives. But when I spotted blood at three-months pregnant—the same point at which I had had the vision of Nicholas—I pulled that same bloody tarot card: the end.

            Because of COVID restrictions, and a sleeping toddler at home, I spent the night alone in an isolated hospital waiting room like a scene aboard the Starship Enterprise. From 9pm to 5am I sat sadly on the floor, reckoning with what I already knew. I sketched out a face on the back of notepaper in my handbag. When I recognised the face as the spirit from my meditation, I burst out bawling. Yet, quickly, I felt drowned in intense love. As if I were being swaddled by angels. I was overcome with love and gratitude: how had my lowest moment of profound sadness also been the most transcendently loving feeling of my life?

I conceived again quickly, and our second son was finally born one year to-the-day after that night on the hospital floor: the day before Father’s Day. When it came time to name him, all I could hear in my head was the name ‘Alan’: a dated choice for a child born in 2021. So Nicholas named his brother Luke. The light-bringer. I asked for a sign that I’d made the right choice, thinking that I might be given a sign in the coming days. But immediately I opened my book back to where I had been reading before I went into labour days earlier. The very last line that I had been reading was a prayer to “let my life be full of light.” So his name became Luke Geoffrey Charles. I didn’t yet know that these were my real father’s names.

As I was juggling babies, but in need of mental stimulation, an intuitive friend had insisted that I start a website as a freelance editor. For some reason I immediately obeyed and had a website up within a week. This is how Mum’s father found me.

            I was scrolling through a threadless mess of DNA results, wondering if I could find some spiritual lineage, when an email from an apparent great-aunt popped into my editor’s inbox. My grandfather had been stalking me online; he’s a lovely, chatty man; would I be interested in a phone call? Mum was periodically mad at me, and every year or so we’d go months without speaking. Eager to know anything, and lonely, I accepted.

‘Hello, dear, how are you?’

His gruff voice soothed my inner child. He could be bitter with regret, but he also made me laugh. Here was Mum’s knight in white shining armour, who failed his duty to her, but found me. Kevin and I shared similar life philosophies and we both worked at universities—me as a teacher of media and communication in Brisbane and he as a purchasing officer for a school of biology in New Zealand. Kevin Francis Palmer. Kelly Anne Palmer. Even our names were similar. And of course we both yearned for my mother, the missing link between us that we were both too righteous to fix. He told me that he used to stare at the moon and imagine that my mother was looking at it too.

I had had the sense that he was wanting to tell me something. Perhaps he was dying, was the most obvious case. And he was. But before that revelation, he came out with something else:

‘I might as well tell you. You’ll think I’m weird or a nutter, but all I can do is tell you my story and you can make up your own mind. I’m a clairvoyant medium. I talk to spirits on the other side and help them move on.’

He explained, ‘When I was 50, I was buying a house in Wellington. It was ridiculously cheap—houses were cheap 20 years ago but not this cheap. I outright asked the real estate agent why people kept retracting their offers, and he told me. He told me that the house was haunted. I said what a load of rubbish. And I bought it for the best deal ever.

‘Well, Kelly, let me tell you. I moved in, and that house was haunted. I could see the spirits moving around the house. Outlines of people walking about. It freaked me out. They never did anything, but boy it gave me the creeps. I didn’t want to go to the Catholic Church, as they’d abused me in the orphanage, but I went and the priest was useless anyway.

‘So I went to the Spiritual Church. They said to me, ‘Clear out for the weekend and leave us the keys. We’ll take care of it.’ I had a feeling the whole time away that there was nothing they could do. I knew what they were going to say when they called me on Monday. '“Sorry, Kev. We cleared some out, but others just aren’t moving. Can you stay gone longer and we’ll keep trying?”

‘I said, “Well, you can try, but I didn’t think they were going anywhere. I can’t stay gone forever.”

‘I moved back in, and that was it. I started going to the Spiritual Church to learn more about opening my third eye, healing people, and how to help spirits move on. I got quite good at it. I would go to other people’s houses, find the spirits, and talk them into moving into the light. Say, “You can’t be here. You have to move on. My guides are going to help you over. Follow them.” And they’d go.

‘Sometimes I thought I was making it all up, that I was just crazy. But sometimes other people would see the same thing. Like this one time I went to a woman’s house who was adamant that a man was standing by her bed. I wasn’t sure if she were making it up, so I pretended to need the bathroom, and peeked into the main bedroom. It was empty. But then on the way back I saw the spirit of a man standing by a sofa in the sleepout. I came back and told her, “There’s no man by your bed.”

‘She was livid. “Yes there is!” she said.

‘I told her, “No. But there is one in the sleepout.”

‘She said, “That’s where I sleep. The sofa folds out. I’ve rented the main bedroom to someone else.”

‘I told her, “Not to worry then. We had a chat and he’s moved on.”

She came and checked the sleepout and said, “You’re right, he’s gone.”’

I listened intently to my grandfather’s story. I told him that I didn’t think he was crazy.

‘You’re like me, aren’t you? I knew straight away,’ he said to me.

I didn’t think so. But I wanted to be.

We also talked about numerology: he was a lifepath 6, here to open his third eye and heal vision, and I’m a lifepath 7, here to open my crown chakra, have faith in myself and God, and heal the father wound. He said that he thought aliens and religion were rubbish. Like me, Kevin was an avid genealogist, though he was much more skilled in research than I, a PhD holder. He had books of family trees and records as well as his own DNA results to share. And now I had some sense to the DNA matches I’d harvested: by Kevin’s DNA and a book of last names I could now tell, mostly, which DNA matches were my mother’s, and which were my father’s.

Inevitably, I visited the Spiritual Church in Brisbane. I hadn’t understood that each Sunday service features a mediumship demonstration, so I was unprepared for everything that followed that day.

I took a seat in a post-war brick building. The inside was dated, looking a little like an op shop with its doilies, navy colours, and reddish woods. But the air was clean. It could have been dusty, with its high ceiling and all-round window ledges, little bookshelves, and scattered pews and chairs and plastic flowers. But there was something so bright and fresh about the space, as if the sheer intention to connect to something divine vacuumed the age away.

After a few songs and reflection, the reverend introduced a medium, a regular-looking person named Paul from up north, who just happened to be involved with the church and who had learned mediumship to become, like my grandfather, quite good. He seemed to be in his 50s or 60s, and had square glasses, kind eyes, a large smile, and a gentleness about him. He shared that when he started out, he separated himself from talented others who could discern the other world.

‘I can’t see anything,’ he had said. ‘But you show up. And you practise. And then you can see things.’

Slowly, he addressed the 12 people around me one-by-one. And one-by-one the people around me began laughing and sobbing. Barely a word was spoken by those on the floor while the medium delivered message after message from specific loved ones. I began to wonder if I had missed some memo. Then he looked at me.

‘You,’ he said gently. ‘Your father is behind you.’

I frowned. ‘Do you mean father figure? My dad isn’t dead,’ I told him, giving him an out. I’m not sure why I said this. As best as I knew, my father might have been a quarter-Chinese real estate agent with another family somewhere. But so far that seemed unlikely.

‘Noo…’ he said cautiously. ‘I mean your biological father. He is on the other side. And he has been for a long time. And he says that he’s going to be with you for a long time to come.’

He told me that I was studying, which I was—dabbling in comparative religion—and he said that this was the right track for me. He also said that my whole life, my marriage, my family, my career, and where I live, was all about to change.

I smiled and listened, grateful for this kind man’s sincere efforts and apparent conviction, but I detached from the message.

Each Sunday night the church also held a Zoom service, so I attended that as well, for comparison and curiosity. This service was much more populated: there were perhaps 30 or 40 people on the call, and they were warned that not everyone would be addressed by the medium.

The medium, a Scottish woman named Maureen, gave outstanding detail to the people she spoke to. She knew the names of people’s pets on the other side, could you tell where their parents worked, what towns they grew up in. Again, people laughed and cried. Interestingly, one of the last people to be read was also named Kelly, and it seemed that everyone chosen had some Scottish connection.

The reverend was wrapping up the call and saying goodnight when the medium Maureen interrupted.

‘I’m sorry, Spirit is really insisting. Is Kelly there?’

I shivered.

The reverend answered, ‘You already spoke to Kelly.’

‘No,’ Maureen said, her eyes closed. ‘There must be another Kelly.’

The reverend studied the screen in front of her, and obviously missing me, said, ‘No, there’s no other Kelly.’

‘Just a minute, please,’ Maureen said.

I turned myself off mute and said, ‘I’m another Kelly.’

‘Oh,’ the reverend chirped.

‘Kelly!’ Maureen said. ‘Kelly, there’s a woman here for you. She’s larger than life. A lot of fun. Wore a lot of fruity, fabulous outfits. You looked up to her.’

The only deceased woman I knew was Edith—my abusive, 70-year-old boyfriend’s wife, who was Scottish, and sometimes wore a pink feather boa over her pink polo shirt. She was extremely short—much shorter than me—but she was formidable.

‘Umm, I’m not sure,’ I said. Why would she want to speak to the ex-girlfriend of her widowed husband? Wouldn’t she hate me? I was definitely not a good person after all.

Maureen charged on. ‘She sends you butterflies, she’s telling me. And says that you’re worried about your kids. One of them is diagnosed with something, and you’re not sure if he’s going to be okay.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘My oldest was just diagnosed as autistic.’

The reverend reminds me not to offer details.

‘Yes,’ Maureen says. ‘But you don’t need to worry. He’s gifted. He’s a genius. You have a younger son—he’s also a gifted, but in a different way. Your oldest is very gifted and he’s going to be fine. He’s going to thrive at school; it’ll be great for him. And he’ll get into sports, something like football, soccer, and that’ll help him get his energy out, help him focus. You don’t need to be worried about him at all.’

Tearily, I thanked her.

And then she said that my whole life, my marriage, my family, my career, and where I live, was all about to change.

The next morning, I was standing in the garden, watching the butterflies, when my phone rang. Tom and Edith’s daughter. I hadn’t spoken to her since I left her dad, several years earlier. Hands shaking, I answered.

She said that she thought I should know that her dad had died last night.

I told her that I’m so sorry for what she’s had to go through.

She thanked me quietly and hung up.

There is no such thing as alone, I realise, as I’m left marvelling at how he could have died on the same night that his wife spoke to me through the veil. I stood there feeling watched, the hidden cameras about to be revealed.

The butterflies flew on.

It's after this that the first medium’s words start nagging at me. Your father is with you and he has been for a long time. What if my real dad wasn’t the man I saw when I was seven? What if my dad really were dead?

At the same time, the DNA website started sorting paternal and maternal matches. I combed through all the surnames on the paternal side, thinking that just one surname appearing twice would be a lead. Then I notice a likely-second cousin as well as a likely-third cousin both named Jeffreys. I’m unclear on the math, but figure this means that we have a common ancestor also named Jeffreys. I email them both through the website, hoping that someone might log in and take enough interest in my story to share some history. Within a day, the wife of the likely-second cousin answers: she doesn’t know anything about anyone, but here, have access to the family tree.

I clicked hurriedly through all the names, dizzy as each click sent out new shoots and times and places: the many fingers on many hands of the universe reaching out. I found great- and great-great- and great-great-great-grandfathers named Jeffreys, all Wesleyan-Methodist reverends. God, the crown, the father, my father, faith.

This is the highest I needed to go, so I begin my descent through the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, hoping for any kind of clue that one of these men could have been on the Gold Coast and known my mum in 1992. The family spans England, Canada, and Western Australia. So many children. So many sons. So many sons aged between 16 and 70 at the time I was conceived. No Gold Coast. 

Feeling overwhelmed, I sat back.

Your father is with you.

I remembered my own hypothesis and grew it: if spirits are real, and some people can communicate with them, could I communicate with spirits too?

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and said, “Please, Spirit, give me a hint. A name. Point me in the right direction.”

As clearly as a song stuck in my head, I heard, Alan.

Alan, Alan.

The same name that kept popping into my head when I was trying to name my second son.

Alan, Alan, Alan.

As if the name had never stopped ringing, but I wasn’t always listening. It rang out urgently then.

I clicked gingerly. I tapped there. Breath. Another tap. As if unwrapping something delicate.

Then the name appeared.

Alan Charles Jeffreys.

Born 1954, Perth, Western Australia.

Died 1996, Gold Coast, Queensland.

Died.

Nothing and everything.

I was conceived, likely, on the set of MovieWorld. My father and mother both built and decorated the sets. Setting the stage of my life on the Gold Coast.

            When I first run to my dad’s family—my family—at a playground on the beach, my cousin hugs me tight and says, ‘This is better than winning the lottery.’ Seven seven seven.

            A numerologist once shared that the number 7 looks like a streetlight: illumination from above, the crown chakra, the father, faith, delusion. Apparently my dad had been under the influence of heroin when he crashed his car into a streetlight and died from the head injury.

Then I’m lying in bed, pondering the tapestry of all things. I closed my eyes and ask, ‘What is my purpose? What am I meant to do?’

            In my mind’s eye, the sky opened up to reveal a vast space-scape of purple nebulae and spaceships.

            ‘You’re meant to help heal ancestral wounds. Help people meet their family in the sky with fresh minds and open hearts,’ the sky whispers back.

‘Clearly, the fathers want to speak.’

After a pause, the woman on Zoom offers, ‘How do I ever share what you've confirmed for me with anyone? How will anyone understand that my family has been interacting with UFOs and aliens for generations—that we have a whole family in the sky?’

‘People already believe in ghosts,’ is where I start. ‘Why not the sky?’

Where light and memory begin. A soul story told through sky, spirit, and sight.