Angel Babies: And Other Amazing True Stories of Guardian Angels. Theresa Cheung

the escalator and then I rolled my pushchair onto it with my daughter strapped in. A teenage boy with his iPod playing got on behind me and although I was aware that he was two or three steps behind and wearing a white hood, my main focus was on keeping my pushchair upright.

      When we got to the bottom my sister got off and I began to roll the pushchair off behind her, but I felt a little dizzy and lost my balance. I fell over and my body weight pushed the pushchair away from me at speed and hurled it over to one side. I ended up on all fours with a very painful pair of knees.

      I got up and for a moment or two froze with fear. I could hear my heart beating but not my baby crying. I ran to my pushchair, which had skidded several feet from the bottom of the escalator, and it was empty. I turned around and standing at the bottom of the escalator was the boy in the white hoodie, holding my little girl in his arms. She was fine and smiling. Still shaking, I took her and covered her with kisses. I can’t have looked away for more than a few moments, but when I looked up again to thank him and ask him how he had got her out of the pushchair so fast, he had gone.

      I asked my sister, who by now had rushed to my side, if she knew where the boy had gone and she said she hadn’t seen a boy. She said I had got my baby out of the pushchair, but I know that it hadn’t been me but the boy. I ran ahead and looked for him, but there was no trace of him.

      This remarkable story sent to me by Amelia also features a pushchair.

      Hit Really Hard

      This happened to me last month and I had to write and tell you about it. I’m a psychologist and have never believed in angels or any of that stuff. I thought it was all wish fulfilment or imagination, but everything has turned upside down for me now and I’m willing to believe the impossible can happen.

      I was staying with my husband’s family in Austria and decided to take my young son for a walk in his pushchair. I walked for a while along a main road and then decided to cross over. There were no cars coming so I started to walk across. As I did so, though, I heard a car coming extremely fast from the right. I had no chance of getting away. With a presence of mind I didn’t think I had, I pushed the pushchair away from me so that at least my son would be saved and then I ran after it. I must have pushed too hard, though, as the pushchair bounced off the curb and started to roll back into the road. At the same time I slipped and fell, banging my head. We were both going to die.

      Then a woman ran out from the pavement and stepped in front of the car. The driver obviously saw her, because he tried to swerve but didn’t quite make it and the woman was hit hard and thrown into the air. The driver then lost control and skidded into a brick wall, crushing the car and very probably himself. This all happened really quickly while I was still trying to get up.

      As soon as I was up, my first instinct was to run to my baby and pull the pushchair out of the road. There was blood trickling down my face from where I had fallen and I must have been hysterical.

      By then a police car had pulled up by the crash scene, followed by several others. Later I would learn that they had been chasing the driver of the car, as he was a dangerous car thief. They started to pull him out of the car and his body was limp and bloody. This made me think of the woman who had stepped out into the road. The force with which the car had hit her must have caused terrible injuries. I looked round, but I couldn’t see her anywhere. I asked the policemen to look but they couldn’t find her either. The only other person who had seen her was the driver of the car, but he died two days later in hospital, leaving me as the only witness.

      People say the bang on my head must have caused hallucinations, but I know what I saw and I believe that woman was an angel. I wasn’t imagining it, whatever people say, and I know she saved my life and the life of my son.

      Miraculous baby-rescue stories may force even the most sceptical of people to at least consider the possibility that something or someone not of this world is watching over a child. But as sensational as stories like this are, they are also fairly rare. Far more common but less well known are stories where babies are not in life or death situations yet still have guardian angels watching over them.

      What Were They Looking At?

      While I have been researching and writing this book, countless parents have told me they believe that babies have the ability to see angels or the spirits of departed loved ones. They believe this because they have seen a baby, either their own or someone else’s, stare at a particular spot in a room, typically the ceiling, and appear captivated by it, occasionally smiling or cooing as if they are communicating with someone invisible. Sometimes the baby will even lift their arms towards the invisible presence as if wanting to be picked up. Adults can’t see anything themselves and cannot explain it.

      There is plenty of documented evidence to suggest that babies do often behave in this manner and over the years I’ve received hundreds of stories from parents who have witnessed their babies clearly seeing something special. In my opinion there are just too many stories out there, like this adorable one sent to me via e-mail by Whitney, to discount the fact that something special is going on.

      Looking Up

      Last night at about 11 o’clock when I was feeding my twin baby boys I needed to burp them, so I put them down in their cot to get a blanket to put over my shoulders. The moment I put them both down, they started to squirm and fuss. I started to feel tense, because I couldn’t find any blankets and I’d hardly had any sleep the last few weeks.

      Then suddenly they both stopped fussing at the same time and there was complete silence. This was very odd, as they’d been suffering from colic for a week or so and either one or both would be squirming for attention at any given moment. I looked down and saw them both staring at the right-hand corner of the room. I looked where they were looking and there was nothing there apart from dust, and there was no way they could see that with their newborn eyes. Rays of moonlight were creeping in from the window, but they were not looking at any pockets of light.

      What were they looking at that made them both settle down at exactly the same time? Even stranger was that I felt as if something was saying to me that they didn’t need to be burped and they would sleep better now.

      It’s six in the morning now and I am up by myself and have been able to shower and wash and blow dry my hair after sleeping for a good six hours. I haven’t been able to do this since the twins were born.

      My daughter, who’s five now, also had a habit of looking intently at a corner of the room when she was a newborn. It wasn’t the same corner as the one the twins were looking at, as we were living in a different place then, but it was still a corner. So if babies do see angels, I think they like to hang out in corners.

      Whitney’s experience is fairly typical of the amazing stories about babies seeing angels that I’ve gathered over the years. I never tire of reading these stories, not just because it lifts my spirits each time I picture in my mind the wonder and delight new parents experience when they witness their babies behaving in this way, but also because they bring back memories of the many times late in the evening when I was feeding my own babies and they would suddenly pull away, even when they were ravenous, and focus on something invisible to me. Sometimes they would stare intently, but other times they would smile as if they were being entertained. How I longed to join in with them and see what they were seeing.

      On other occasions my son would be in the middle of playing with his toys and stop to stare at nothing in particular. He would then start to babble and coo into thin air. At the time I did wonder if tricks of the light were a factor or if there was some other perfectly rational explanation, but ever since I’ve found out that this ‘stop and stare at something invisible’ phenomenon, as I like to call it, is far more common than I thought. I’m now convinced that babies have an innate ability to ‘see’ at a spiritual level. Here’s Nadine’s story:

      Taking an Angel Home

      I had heard stories of babies seeing angels and spirits but had never really given them much thought. I can’t say if I believed in them or not. I believe in them now and want to tell you about my eight-month-old cousin called Grace. Last week I was getting her ready to leave the house and she was sitting up on the bed and fussing