Every fourth of July, we go there and have a huge party. One year, after several bourbon and cokes, I decided to head to bed. I was the last one to retire. I went into our room, and my husband, who had already crashed, was sleeping on my pillow. I tried to get it from him, but he grunted and wouldn't give it up. So I decided to go into the den, grab a pillow from the sofa, and use that. As I was walking into the den, I tripped on the lip b/t the den and the dining room. "It'd be nice to have a few lights on in here," I mumbled. All of sudden, every light in the room went on -- the corner floor lamp, the two lamps on either side of the sofa, and the lamp in front of the t.v. Since the house was built before electricity, there were no overhead lights; all lamps were controlled with separate switches. A bit shaken, to say the least, I grabbed a few pillows, and ran out of the room. As I passed from the den back into the living room, the lights went out.
The next morning, I relayed my story over breakfast. One of the older aunts just huffed, "Oh, that was Aunt Edith. She was always the one who went around after the parties making sure everyone was tucked safely into bed." Well, good old Aunt Edith totally freaked me out, and I am never the last one awake in that house.
You people need some freaking rest or something.
Guess I hesitate to describe this as a ghost story.
God seems--and certainly did in at least one Scriptural story--to set some rather clear limits on what can and cannot communicate from "beyond the grave" with us in this time/space dimension. Nevertheless, He Himself is want at times to cut clear across even His own little boxes. He certainly allowed David to with the shewbread etc.
The situation you described appears to me to be a clear message that God allowed from a beloved uncle to you. It also was a message to your whole family and perhaps to us hereon that THERE IS life beyond this one. . . .and that we needs be loving while we have the chance in this one.
I think the detail of his death was an added sort of "God thing" wherein He seems to love to toss in very telling or key details of a very literal nature just to clue us in how much attention HE IS paying to us and life here in general.
It could also have served as a point of comfort to the rest of your family as well as you--if God cared enough to communicate so personally and touchingly to you, perhaps He really did care for all of you, including the uncle--and had everything under control regardless of emotions and appearances--and would invite all of you and us to trust Him with all the details of all our lives.
I believe that most ghost stories that have the flavor of ghost stories are not very edifying or comforting. I believe that they involve demons pure and simple and/or demons masquerading as a dead loved one. Given that they have all the details of history at their observant disposal, it's not a great matter for them to pretend to be a deceased person rather convincingly.
One needs to ask what is the purpose as well as the source of the phenomenon. If it seems entirely "nice," is there some sort of seduction going on trying to strengthen a demonic grip on an individual, family, situation, place or habitation. If it seems primarily fear engendering, the source is rather obvious.
The Bible is full of "fear not!'s" and Jesus, the conqueror of the world, the flesh, the devil, hell and the grave has demonstrated with His Resurrection, we really have nothing to fear other than displeasing someone we love and would hate to displease because we Love Him.
We were visiting the Washington memorial back in 1964 on a family vacation. My mother, who was extremely overweight, was wearing a somewhat formal black dress, as many ladies wore in such dignified places back then. She had already been complaining about being out of breath that morning since we had already done so much walking. But as my sister and me kept begging her to walk up to the top with us, some young girl about 9 or so came out of the crowd, grabbed my mother's hand and begged her not to go inside. She then ran off into the crowd.
This scared my mother so much, that she sat down on a bench to gather her wits. Needless to say, she didn't leave that bench until we headed back to the hotel. Mother has always speculated that this was her guardian angel. It sure was a strange thing though.
Scary, huh?