Authors Provide Tools For Third Millennium

The third millennium most likely will bring catastrophic floods, volcanic eruptions, violent earthquakes and horrific windstorms. But don’t sink into a depression.

It’s happened before, and the Earth’s still here. What’s important, says Coeur d’Alene author Shirley Jonas, is to learn from history.

“We’re not going to die out as long as we understand what’s coming and what we have to do,” she says.

Shirley’s newest book, “Now is the Hour,” is a collaborative effort with Elisabeth “Lisa” Dietz, a descendant of the Chippewa tribe.

Lisa supplies the Native American prophecies and philosophies that suggest the world is reaching its climax. Shirley provides the common sense tools to preparing for the aftermath.

Lisa knows Native American prophecies from a variety of tribes - Hopi, Mayan, Menominee, Lakota. She says the prophets visit in her dreams and warn her that the Earth has taken its limit of abuse from humans.

From her dreams, Lisa predicts an increase in worldwide famine and birth defects, plagues and geographic devastation, including a major earthquake next month in California.

Lisa’s dream-world communication with prophets is something Shirley understands.

Shirley, 73, has devoted most of her life to paranormal research and investigations.

“I don’t care if people think I’m nuts,” she says, smiling with almost maternal understanding. “I’m not. They’re nuts for not believing.”

Understanding extrasensory perception and the supernatural became her avid interest after she sensed her father’s plane crash 40 years ago. He survived, but the experience changed the direction of her life.

“The moment my dad’s plane hit the ground in Lansing (Michigan) I sat bolt upright in Detroit,” she says. “I wanted to understand why that happened.”

She studied with parapsychology experts at Duke University, Michigan State University and around the world, and tracked individual paranormal experiences for 35 years.

During that time, she says she encountered everything from ghosts to out-of-body experiences.

Her research deepened her beliefs that people underuse their senses and that life is connected across several dimensions.

When she and her husband retired in Skagway, Alaska, seven years ago, Shirley was delighted by the ghost stories that circulated in the area. A friend urged her to fill a book with them.

Shirley had written short stories for her own amusement, and newsletters for the ESP organization she’d founded in Michigan. Researching and writing ghost stories appealed to her.

So she set off with her two sisters to track the tales by hiking the 48-mile Alaska/Canada Chilkoot Trail.

“I had to make sure these people existed once and weren’t `six-beer’ stories,” she says.

Research took three years, but she collected much more than the nine stories she included in “Ghosts of the Klondike.”

She found Mary, the grieving bride-to-be who haunts the Golden North Hotel in Skagway.

Mary died in 1898 in her wedding dress from tuberculosis (or a broken heart) after her gold-miner fiance was killed in an accident on his way to meet her.

Shirley found John Ostrander, a young man ghost who apparently still lived in the house he’d inhabited in 1898 although a new house sat on the site.

After the book hit stores, Shirley returned widowed to Michigan and met Lisa. Lisa’s knowledge of the Native American prophecies and spirit world added a new dimension to Shirley’s consciousness.

Together, the two women decided they had to share what they know with the world. After “Now is the Hour” was released last fall, Shirley moved to Coeur d’Alene to live with her sister.

The book is not alarming. It’s an interesting blend of the spiritual and the practical. Lisa reminds readers that the Earth has suffered disasters before, and shares her advice for survival.

Shirley provides lists of ingredients for every emergency kit imaginable, instructions on how to build emergency shelters and the names of a dozen survival-type books.

“People need to know about the prophecies to prepare themselves,” she says. “The Earth is going to change in the next few years, and we’re going to have to change with it.”

Shirley will sign copies of her book at The Book and Game Co. in the Silver Lake Mall noon to 2 p.m. Saturday. Mike Oehler, the Bonners Ferry man who wrote “The Hippy Survival Guide to Y2K,” will sign his books at the same time.

Cynthia Taggart can be reached at (208) 765-7128 or by e-mail at cynthiat@spokesman.com.