“I was really young. I was, it was in Georgia. My Mom and my Dad were married at the time. My mom was at work, my Dad and my brothers were in the house sleeping. I could sleep so I – like taking a nap, it was midday I went out into our backyard and started swinging on the swings. I was facing away from the house. I was facing, like this hill that our backyard faced. And I was just swinging, running around, doing kids’ stuff and I suddenly heard my Mom’s voice calling my name – or what sounded like my Mom’s voice. It was a female voice. I turned around, and just as I turn around smoke starts coming out of the kitchen. Um, so I go running in there – the kitchen window, sorry the kitchen window. So I go running into the house and the – the kitchen’s on fire! And my Dad and my brothers were also so they had no idea. So I ran in there and I woke up my dad and my dad went and extinguished the fire and actually burned his hand in the process. And um, my Mom wasn’t home. So the voice that I heard, it was unexplained. It was a female voice that called my name and draw my attention to the fire as it began. So early on, and if it had been any later it might not have been able to be extinguished. And my family was inside asleep so who knows, you know, how bad it could have been.”

The informant is a 26-year-old cinematographer who grew up as a military brat moving every couple of years, before coming to Los Angeles, California for college and to work in the motion picture industry. He is the oldest of three boys and was recently married.

When asked what he thought it was the informant said, “I think it was an angel. I mean it was an angel or, or something along that line.” What had caused the fire initially was that there was a pizza box on the stove and his little brother had accidentally turned the stove on while climbing up on the counter to get something out of the cabinet. He said “There was no female that I knew that was there” and his Mom “didn’t even know about the fire until she came home.” He said “it was definitely a guardian angel or something.” He told me, “I didn’t know what [the voice] was until later on because I never, I wasn’t Christian or anything until my teens and then when I was saved then I realized, ‘Oh, I wonder if that’s what it was.’ To him what was significant was that his family was saved from great harm due to him hearing this voice. The informant says he usually tells this story whenever he is talking about miracles or God’s goodness, he called it a “praise report”.

I can see why one might be confused as to what to label this strange voice as. It didn’t move anything around like one might expect a ghost to do and he didn’t see the translucent form of a woman like we hear in many stories about ghosts. But most significantly what it did was good – it likely saved his family’s life. Stories about ghosts saving someone’s life are not characteristic. It is clearly a situation where the informant was trying to categorize something outside of scientific explanation or normal experience. As he says, when he heard an explanation that made sense of an experience, he integrated that explanation into his narrative. It happened to be that that explanation was of guardian angels in Christianity. Perhaps had he moved to Ireland and learned about friendly fairies (sí) he may have integrated this explanation into his memory. The key here is how closely the idea of guardian angels explained his unexplainable experience. In that he said it was “definitely” an angel says how well the concept makes sense in his mind.