When a security guard discovers a lost toddler in a parking lot, the surveillance footage reveals something that challenges everything we think we know about reality—and launches an investigation that will haunt everyone involved
The Discovery
The afternoon shift at Westfield Shopping Center had been routine until 4:47 PM on that Tuesday in late October. I’d been working mall security for eight years, and I thought I’d seen everything—shoplifters, medical emergencies, lost children, parking lot fender-benders, and the occasional mental health crisis that required delicate handling and police backup.
But I’d never seen anything like what happened that day.
My name is Marcus Chen, and I’ve always prided myself on being observant, methodical, and unflappable under pressure. At thirty-four, I’d worked my way up from part-time security guard to head of mall security, responsible for a team of twelve officers covering a complex that housed over 200 stores and served approximately 50,000 visitors daily.
The October sun was setting earlier now, casting long shadows across the parking lot as the after-school and early dinner crowds began to thin out. I was conducting my routine perimeter check, walking the outer edges of the lot where lighting was dimmer and parents sometimes forgot where they’d parked.
That’s when I heard it—a sound that immediately triggered every protective instinct I’d developed both as a security professional and as a father of two young children myself.
Crying. Not the frustrated wailing of a child denied a toy or candy, but the deep, heartbroken sobbing of someone who was truly lost and afraid.
I followed the sound to the far corner of the lot, near the employee parking area where a cluster of trees provided shade during the day but created pockets of shadow as evening approached. There, sitting cross-legged on the cold asphalt next to a black Honda Sedan, was a boy who couldn’t have been more than three years old.
He was barefoot, wearing only a pair of denim overalls and a white t-shirt that was too thin for the cooling October air. His dark hair was tousled, his face streaked with tears, and his small hands were scraped as if he’d been crawling or had fallen recently.
But what struck me most immediately was how alone he was. Completely, utterly alone in a way that made no sense.
Children don’t just appear in parking lots by themselves. Someone brings them—a parent, grandparent, caregiver, older sibling. Someone is always responsible for getting a three-year-old from point A to point B. And yet this child seemed to have materialized out of thin air.
I approached slowly, the way I’d learned to approach all children in distress—calmly, non-threateningly, making myself as small as possible despite my six-foot frame.
“Hey there, buddy,” I said, crouching down to his level about six feet away. “My name is Marcus. I work here at the mall. Can you tell me your name?”
The boy looked up at me with eyes that were startlingly alert and intelligent despite his tears. He had the kind of face that photographers love—large expressive eyes, delicate features, skin that seemed to glow with health despite his obvious distress.
“Eli,” he said in a voice that was surprisingly clear for someone his age. “My name is Eli.”
“That’s a great name, Eli. Can you tell me where your mom or dad is?”
Eli’s expression shifted in a way that made my stomach clench with worry. It wasn’t just sadness or confusion—it was a kind of resigned acceptance that no three-year-old should possess.
“My other dad brought me here,” he said simply. “But he had to go away.”
Other dad. The phrase set off alarm bells in my head. Was this a custody situation? Had someone who wasn’t supposed to have access to the child brought him here and abandoned him? Was this kidnapping?
“Where’s your regular dad, Eli? And your mom?”
“Mommy’s in heaven with the angels,” Eli said matter-of-factly. “Daddy’s at work. But my other dad comes to visit me sometimes.”
My throat tightened. A motherless child, a father who worked (presumably to support them both), and some mysterious “other dad” who brought three-year-olds to mall parking lots and left them there.
This was looking more and more like an emergency situation.
“Eli, where do you live? Do you know your address?”
He shook his head. “I live with Daddy and Mrs. Rodriguez. She takes care of me when Daddy’s at work.”
Mrs. Rodriguez. A babysitter or nanny. This was good—it gave us a lead to follow.
“What’s your daddy’s name, buddy?”
“David. David Eli Thompson. I’m named after him, but I’m little David.”
David Thompson. Finally, concrete information I could work with.
I activated my radio to call for backup and additional resources while keeping my voice calm and reassuring for Eli’s benefit.
“Base, this is Marcus. I have a lost child situation in sector seven of the main lot. Requesting immediate assistance and police notification. Child appears to have been abandoned.”
“Copy, Marcus. Backup en route. How long since you discovered the child?”
I checked my watch. “Approximately seven minutes. Child is safe and unharmed but appears to have been alone for an unknown period of time.”
As I waited for help to arrive, I continued talking to Eli, trying to gather more information while keeping him calm and comfortable.
“Eli, can you tell me more about your other dad? What does he look like?”
The boy’s face brightened for the first time since I’d found him. “He’s tall like you, but I can’t see his face very good. He wears dark clothes and he’s very quiet.”
“Is he a friend of your daddy’s?”
Eli shook his head emphatically. “Daddy doesn’t know about him. My other dad says it’s our secret.”
The phrase “our secret” sent ice through my veins. In my training and experience, adults who insisted on keeping secrets with children were almost always up to no good.
“Eli, did your other dad tell you not to tell anyone about him?”
“He says some people wouldn’t understand,” Eli replied, his small voice taking on a slightly sing-song quality, as if he were reciting something he’d memorized. “He says he’s helping take care of me because Mommy can’t anymore.”
This was sounding more and more like a predator grooming situation. Someone had clearly been spending time with this child, building trust, establishing a relationship that the child’s father didn’t know about.
But how had this person gained access to Eli? And why abandon him in a parking lot rather than… I didn’t want to finish that thought.
The Security Footage
Officer Janet Rodriguez (no relation to Eli’s babysitter) arrived first, followed closely by my colleague Tommy Martinez and two additional police officers. Officer Rodriguez was a veteran of the department’s child protection unit, someone I’d worked with before on similar cases, and I was relieved to see her familiar face.
“What do we have, Marcus?” she asked, approaching slowly and allowing Eli to see her uniform and badge without being intimidated.
I filled her in on what Eli had told me while Tommy began cordoning off the immediate area and the other officers started canvassing the parking lot for witnesses.
“No one’s come forward claiming to know him?” Officer Rodriguez asked.
“We haven’t had time to do a systematic search yet, but nobody’s approached us, and there haven’t been any reports of missing children today.”
Officer Rodriguez nodded and crouched down to introduce herself to Eli. She had a natural way with children, speaking to them as individuals rather than talking down to them, and Eli responded well to her calm, professional manner.
“Eli, I’m Officer Rodriguez. I’m here to help make sure you get back to your daddy safely. Can you tell me what happened today? How did you get to this parking lot?”
“My other dad brought me,” Eli said simply. “We walked here together.”
“Where did you walk from?”
Eli pointed vaguely in the direction of the residential area that bordered the mall property. “Over there. We walked through the trees.”
Officer Rodriguez and I exchanged glances. The wooded area Eli was indicating was part of a greenway that connected several residential neighborhoods to the mall complex. It would be possible for someone to walk through those woods with a child, but it would take at least twenty minutes, and the path wasn’t well-marked or maintained.
“Was it a long walk?” Officer Rodriguez asked.
“Not very long. My other dad carried me some of the way.”
“And where is your other dad now?”
Eli’s face fell again. “He had to go away. He said someone would find me and help me get home.”
The calculated nature of this abandonment was becoming clearer. Someone had deliberately brought this child to the mall and left him where he would be found quickly and safely. It wasn’t random—it was planned.
But why?
“Officer Rodriguez,” I said, “I’d like to review the security footage to see if we can get a visual on this other dad. Maybe identify him or get a license plate number.”
“Good thinking. Tommy, can you stay with Eli while Marcus and I check the cameras?”
Tommy Martinez had been working mall security for three years and had a gentle way with children that came from being a father of four. He immediately engaged Eli in conversation about his favorite cartoon characters while Officer Rodriguez and I headed to the security office.
The mall’s security system was comprehensive, with over sixty cameras covering the interior, entrances, and parking areas. The exterior cameras were positioned to capture faces, license plates, and general activity patterns with enough resolution to identify individuals in most lighting conditions.
I pulled up the camera that covered sector seven of the main lot and began scrolling backward from the time I’d discovered Eli. At 4:47, there he was, sitting alone and crying. I continued scrolling backward to see when he’d arrived.
4:45… 4:43… 4:40…
“There,” Officer Rodriguez said, pointing at the screen. “4:38. That’s when he appears in frame.”
We watched as a small figure entered the camera’s field of view from the wooded area, exactly as Eli had described. But as we studied the footage more closely, something became apparent that made both of us fall silent.
The boy appeared to be walking alongside someone, but we couldn’t see anyone else.
Eli’s posture, the way he turned his head as if listening to someone, the pauses in his movement as if waiting for a companion—all suggested he wasn’t alone. But there was no second figure visible on the footage.
“Equipment malfunction?” I suggested, though I knew our cameras were top-of-the-line and had been serviced recently.
“Let’s check the other angles,” Officer Rodriguez said.
We pulled up footage from two additional cameras that covered overlapping areas of the parking lot. The same thing appeared on all three feeds—Eli walking as if accompanied, but no companion visible on any camera.
Then I noticed something else.
“Look at this,” I said, pointing to the screen. “Look at the shadows.”
In the late afternoon sun, Eli’s shadow was clearly visible, a small dark shape moving across the asphalt. But there was something else—another shadow, larger and adult-sized, that seemed to be holding hands with Eli’s shadow.
A shadow with no person to cast it.
We stared at the screen in silence for several minutes, replaying the footage multiple times. The shadow was consistent across all camera angles, appearing whenever Eli’s shadow was visible, disappearing when he moved into areas without direct sunlight.
“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” I asked Officer Rodriguez.
She shook her head slowly. “In fifteen years of police work, I’ve seen a lot of unusual things. But this… this is something else entirely.”
We saved the footage to multiple drives and called for a technical specialist to examine the equipment for any possible malfunctions or tampering. But even as we went through these motions, both of us knew we were witnessing something that defied conventional explanation.
The Investigation Deepens
Within two hours, we had located David Thompson, Eli’s father, who worked as an IT specialist at a downtown office complex. The call we made to him was one of the most difficult conversations I’d ever had to facilitate.
“Mr. Thompson, this is Officer Rodriguez with the metro police department. I’m calling about your son Eli. He’s safe and unharmed, but we found him alone in a shopping mall parking lot this afternoon.”
The silence on the other end of the phone stretched for what felt like an eternity.
“That’s impossible,” David Thompson finally said, his voice tight with confusion and fear. “Eli is with Mrs. Rodriguez, his babysitter. She picks him up from daycare at 3:00 every day. I spoke to her at 2:45 this afternoon to confirm.”
“Sir, we’re going to need you to come to the mall security office as soon as possible. Can you also contact Mrs. Rodriguez and ask her to meet us here?”
“Is Eli hurt? What happened? How did he get to the mall?”
“Your son is physically unharmed, Mr. Thompson. But we have some questions about what happened today, and we’re going to need your help to understand the situation.”
David Thompson arrived at the mall within twenty minutes, followed shortly by Elena Rodriguez, a woman in her sixties who had been caring for children professionally for over thirty years. Both were visibly shaken and completely baffled by the situation.
Elena’s account was straightforward and verifiable. She had picked Eli up from Little Sprouts Daycare at 3:00 PM, just as she did every weekday. They had returned to David’s house, where Eli had eaten a snack and played with his toys while Elena prepared dinner.
At approximately 4:00 PM, Elena had put Eli down for his usual afternoon nap in his bedroom. She checked on him every fifteen minutes, just as she always did. At 4:15, he was sleeping peacefully in his bed. At 4:30, when she went to wake him up for dinner, he was gone.
The bedroom window was still latched from the inside. The front and back doors were both locked and had been within Elena’s sight the entire time. There was no way Eli could have left the house without her knowledge.
Elena had immediately searched the house and yard, then called the police and David when she couldn’t find Eli. She was preparing to expand the search to the neighborhood when our call came in.
The timeline was impossible. Elena had discovered Eli missing from his locked house at 4:30 PM. Our security footage showed him arriving at the mall—a fifteen-minute drive from David’s house—at 4:38 PM.
Even if Eli had somehow left the house without Elena noticing, there was no way for a three-year-old to travel that distance in eight minutes. And that was assuming he had left immediately after Elena’s 4:15 check-in, which still wouldn’t account for the travel time.
“Mr. Thompson,” Officer Rodriguez said gently, “Eli has mentioned someone he calls his ‘other dad.’ Do you have any idea who he might be referring to?”
David’s face went pale. “Other dad? No, there’s no other father figure in Eli’s life. It’s just been him and me since my wife died eighteen months ago. Elena helps with childcare, but otherwise…”
He trailed off, studying his son with new eyes. Eli had been sitting quietly in a corner of the security office, drawing with crayons that Tommy had found for him, seemingly untroubled by the adult confusion swirling around him.
“Eli,” David said softly, “can you tell Daddy about your other dad?”
The boy looked up from his drawing with a bright smile. “He visits me sometimes when I’m sleeping. He says he knew Mommy and that she asked him to help take care of me.”
The drawing Eli had been working on showed two stick figures—one small, one large—holding hands. The larger figure was entirely black, like a shadow, while the smaller figure was colorful and detailed.
“That’s me and my other dad,” Eli explained proudly. “We go for walks together.”
David Thompson sank into a chair, overwhelmed by the implications of what his son was saying. “Eli, when do you go for walks with your other dad?”
“Sometimes when I’m asleep. We go to different places. Today we came here.” Eli gestured around the security office. “He said someone nice would find me and help me get home.”
Elena crossed herself and began murmuring prayers in Spanish. David looked like he was about to be sick.
Officer Rodriguez maintained her professional composure, but I could see the wheels turning in her mind as she tried to process information that defied logical explanation.
The Experts Weigh In
Over the next several days, the case attracted attention from specialists in multiple fields. The security footage was analyzed by video forensics experts who confirmed that there was no evidence of tampering or technical malfunction. The shadow visible in the footage was real and couldn’t be explained by any known photographic or digital phenomenon.
Child psychologists interviewed Eli extensively, looking for signs of trauma, coaching, or false memory implantation. Dr. Sarah Martinez, who specialized in pediatric psychology and had worked with children in high-profile custody and abuse cases, spent three hours with Eli across multiple sessions.
Her report was both reassuring and bewildering.
“Eli shows no signs of physical or sexual abuse,” Dr. Martinez explained to the assembled team of investigators, social workers, and family members. “His descriptions of his ‘other dad’ are consistent across multiple interviews and don’t match typical patterns of coached testimony or false memory.”
“More significantly,” she continued, “Eli’s emotional responses to discussing his ‘other dad’ are entirely positive. He shows no fear, anxiety, or distress when talking about these experiences. If he had been victimized by an adult, we would expect to see some psychological indicators, even if he couldn’t articulate what had happened to him.”
“So what’s your professional opinion, Doctor?” Officer Rodriguez asked. “Is Eli telling the truth as he understands it?”
Dr. Martinez paused for a long moment before responding. “In my professional opinion, Eli believes completely in what he’s telling us. Whether what he believes corresponds to objective reality… that’s a question I’m not qualified to answer.”
Meanwhile, investigators had canvassed the neighborhood around David’s house and the mall, looking for anyone who might have seen Eli or his mysterious companion. Despite showing his photograph to dozens of people and reviewing additional security footage from businesses along potential routes, no one reported seeing the boy during the timeframe in question.
The woods between the residential area and the mall were searched by K-9 units looking for scent trails. The dogs were able to follow Eli’s scent from the mall parking lot to a point about halfway through the wooded area, where the trail simply disappeared.
“It’s like he materialized out of thin air,” the K-9 handler told Officer Rodriguez. “The dogs lose the scent completely at that spot in the woods. No other scents, no indication of where he came from or how he got there.”
The Family’s Struggle
For David Thompson, the incident marked the beginning of a profound crisis of understanding about his son, his family, and the nature of reality itself.
“I keep thinking there has to be a rational explanation,” he told me during one of our conversations several weeks later. “Someone must have taken Eli from the house, someone who knew Elena’s routine and had been watching us. But how do you explain the locked doors? The timing? The security footage?”
David had installed additional locks, security cameras, and motion sensors throughout his house. He’d changed Elena’s schedule and even considered moving to a different neighborhood. But the measures felt inadequate when facing a threat that apparently didn’t obey physical laws.
Eli, meanwhile, seemed largely unaffected by the adult turmoil surrounding him. He continued to mention his “other dad” occasionally, always in positive terms, always with the casual acceptance that children bring to things adults find impossible.
“My other dad says not to worry,” Eli told his father one evening. “He says he’ll keep me safe until I’m big enough to take care of myself.”
David had started sleeping in Eli’s room, but the boy continued to have what he called “dream walks” with his otherworldly companion. David would wake up to find Eli standing at the window, apparently having conversations with someone invisible.
“Did he take you anywhere tonight, buddy?” David would ask.
“We went to see the ocean,” Eli might reply. Or “We visited the place where the big dinosaur bones are.” Always places that Eli had no frame of reference for, described in detail that suggested genuine experience rather than imagination.
Elena had initially wanted to quit, terrified by events she couldn’t comprehend or control. But her affection for Eli and her commitment to the family won out, and she stayed, incorporating prayers and protective rituals from her childhood into her daily routine with the boy.
“I’ve seen things in my life,” she told David. “Things that the church says we shouldn’t speak of. But never anything like this. This boy, he has a guardian that’s not from this world.”
The Ongoing Mystery
Six months after the parking lot incident, Eli’s case remained officially open but inactive. The police had exhausted all conventional investigative avenues. Child protective services had found no evidence of abuse or neglect. The family had been referred to appropriate support services and continued to be monitored, but there was no legal basis for removing Eli from his father’s care.
I maintained regular contact with the family, partly because of professional interest and partly because I’d developed a genuine concern for their wellbeing. The incident had changed me as well, forcing me to confront the possibility that there were aspects of reality that my training and experience hadn’t prepared me for.
Eli continued to thrive developmentally and socially. He started preschool and made friends easily. His teachers reported that he was bright, creative, and well-adjusted, with no behavioral problems or signs of trauma.
But the “dream walks” continued, and they were becoming more frequent and more elaborate.
“My other dad showed me where Mommy is,” Eli told David one morning over breakfast. “She’s in a beautiful place with lots of flowers and sunshine. She says she’s proud of how big I’m getting.”
David had learned to respond to these statements calmly, not wanting to dismiss his son’s experiences but also not wanting to encourage what might be unhealthy fantasies.
“That sounds like a wonderful place, buddy.”
“She says my other dad is someone who loved her very much, but he had to go away before I was born. Now he’s helping take care of me because he promised her he would.”
This was new information, and it hit David like a physical blow. His wife Sarah had never mentioned anyone who fit that description. But then again, there were things about Sarah’s life before they met that she had never discussed in detail.
That evening, David pulled out Sarah’s old photo albums and journals, looking for any clues about who this mysterious figure might be. Deep in a box of mementos from her college years, he found photographs of Sarah with a young man he didn’t recognize—someone tall and dark-haired who appeared in multiple photos across several months.
On the back of one photo, Sarah had written “Michael and me, spring semester senior year. If only…”
David had never heard Sarah mention anyone named Michael. He called Sarah’s sister Rebecca, who had been close to her throughout college.
“Michael?” Rebecca’s voice was quiet when David asked about him. “Sarah never told you about Michael?”
“No. Who was he?”
“Her first love. They were together for almost two years in college. Sarah was convinced they were going to get married after graduation.”
“What happened to him?”
Rebecca was quiet for a long moment. “He was killed in a car accident about three months before graduation. Sarah was devastated. She didn’t date anyone seriously for years after that.”
David felt a chill that had nothing to do with the evening temperature. “Rebecca, did Sarah ever say anything about Michael after he died? Dreams, or feelings like he was still around?”
“You know, she did mention having vivid dreams about him for months after the accident. She said it felt like he was trying to tell her something, but she could never remember what it was when she woke up.”
After hanging up, David sat in his living room staring at the photograph of Sarah and Michael, trying to process the implications of what he’d learned. Could Eli’s “other dad” be the spirit of someone who had loved Sarah before David had even met her? Someone who had promised to watch over any children she might have?
It sounded impossible. But then again, everything about this situation was impossible.
The Revelation
The breakthrough came during a family visit to Sarah’s grave on the second anniversary of her death. David had made these visits a monthly ritual, bringing Eli to place flowers on his mother’s headstone and share stories about their life together.
This particular visit was different from the beginning. Eli seemed excited rather than solemn, chattering about how his “other dad” had told him they were going to see Mommy today.
“Not just her grave,” Eli explained as they walked through the cemetery. “Her real self.”
David felt the familiar chill that had become associated with Eli’s otherworldly experiences, but he continued with their usual routine, letting Eli place the fresh flowers and helping him arrange the small toys and drawings he’d brought.
As they knelt beside the grave, Eli suddenly became very still and focused, as if he were listening to something David couldn’t hear.
“Daddy,” Eli said softly, “my other dad wants to talk to you.”
“What do you mean, buddy?”
“He says you need to not be scared anymore. He says Mommy asked him to take care of both of us, and he’s keeping his promise.”
David felt a presence then, something he couldn’t see or hear but somehow sensed—warm, protective, and somehow familiar despite being completely unknown.
“He says his name is Michael, and he loved Mommy before you did. But he’s glad she found you and was happy. He says he’s not trying to take me away from you. He just wants to help.”
Tears were streaming down David’s face now, and he didn’t know if they were tears of grief, relief, or simple overwhelm at the impossibility of what was happening.
“He says the walking dreams will get less as I get older, because I won’t need him as much. But he’ll always be watching, just like Mommy is.”
Eli reached out and took his father’s hand, his small fingers warm and reassuring.
“It’s okay, Daddy. You don’t have to be scared. We have lots of people taking care of us.”
The New Normal
In the months that followed, David gradually learned to accept the presence of Michael in their lives. The fear and anxiety that had consumed him since the parking lot incident slowly gave way to a cautious gratitude for whatever force was watching over his son.
The “dream walks” did indeed become less frequent as Eli got older, but they never stopped completely. They evolved into something more like bedtime stories, with Eli occasionally sharing adventures he’d had with his invisible companion—visits to historical places, conversations with animals, journeys to landscapes that existed only in imagination or memory.
David documented these experiences in a journal, partly for his own processing and partly because he sensed they might be important someday. Some of Eli’s descriptions were so detailed and accurate that David found himself researching locations and historical events, often discovering that Eli had somehow accessed information he couldn’t have known through conventional means.
Dr. Martinez continued to work with the family occasionally, helping David understand how to support Eli’s development while acknowledging experiences that fell outside normal parameters.
“There are documented cases throughout history of children who seem to have access to information or experiences that can’t be explained through conventional psychology,” she told David. “Whether you interpret these experiences as spiritual, psychological, or something else entirely, what matters is that Eli is healthy, happy, and developing normally in all other respects.”
Officer Rodriguez maintained professional interest in the case and became something of a friend to the family. She’d seen enough unusual things in her career to be open to possibilities that other people might dismiss.
“I’ve learned not to assume I understand everything about how the world works,” she told me during one of our periodic check-ins on the case. “That boy is protected by something, and frankly, that’s all I need to know.”
As for me, the experience changed my entire approach to security work and to life in general. I became more observant not just of obvious threats, but of subtle patterns and anomalies that might indicate something unusual was happening.
I also became an advocate for taking children’s reports seriously, even when they described experiences that adults found difficult to believe. Too often, I realized, we dismissed children’s accounts simply because they didn’t fit our understanding of what was possible.
Epilogue: Five Years Later
Eli is eight years old now, a bright and articulate third-grader who plays soccer, loves marine biology, and shows no lasting effects from his unusual early experiences. The “dream walks” stopped entirely when he turned six, just as Michael had apparently promised they would.
But Eli still mentions his “other dad” occasionally, usually in the context of feeling protected or guided during difficult moments.
“When I was nervous about the spelling bee, my other dad reminded me that Mommy was proud of me no matter what happened,” Eli told David recently. “And when Tommy Henderson was being mean to me at recess, I could feel my other dad there, making me feel braver.”
David has remarried—a wonderful woman named Lisa who was initially skeptical of Eli’s stories but came to accept them as part of the family’s unique history. She and Eli have developed a warm relationship, and she’s never felt threatened by his connection to his deceased mother or his mysterious guardian.
The security footage from that October afternoon remains one of the most compelling pieces of unexplained evidence I’ve ever encountered. It’s been analyzed by video experts, paranormal researchers, and debunkers, with no one able to provide a satisfactory conventional explanation for the shadow that appeared without a person to cast it.
I still work at the mall, though I was promoted to regional security director three years ago. But I make sure to visit the spot where I found Eli every few months, just to remind myself that the world is full of mysteries that can’t be solved through conventional investigation.
Sometimes, late in the afternoon when the shadows are long and the parking lot is quiet, I think I can sense something there—not threatening or frightening, but watchful and protective. A presence that suggests some promises transcend death, and some kinds of love find ways to manifest even when they shouldn’t be possible.
The case officially remains unsolved, classified as an unexplained missing child incident with a positive outcome. But for those of us who were there that day, who saw the footage and heard Eli’s simple, truthful accounts of his experiences, it represents something much more significant.
It’s proof that the world is stranger and more wonderful than most of us dare to believe, and that love—whether from parents, spirits, or forces we can’t understand—has powers that transcend our limited comprehension of reality.
Eli Thompson is a happy, healthy eight-year-old who happens to have been protected by something most people would consider impossible. And in a world that often seems dark and threatening, that strikes me as a pretty beautiful mystery to live with.
