In all of my research into the paranormal I have found many different myths and legends that have stood the test of time. These are stories that are as true today just as they were then. One story that stands out and seems to be in every culture, in one form or another is about the entity that has been called "Death.”

The Grim Reaper, The Angel of Death and of course Death are the names that western religion and folklore use to identify the entity that is said to come to us all at the time of our death. The Grim Reaper is said to be a tall skeleton dressed in a black hooded cloak carrying a scythe in its hands. This image of a tall cloaked specter that comes for us all has made its way into all forms of the arts, entertainment and literature.

The western culture Death is said to come to us on the hour of our passing to take our soul away from our body for judgment. This would be like the ferry man (Charon or Phlegyas) on the river Styx where he would take the soul of the newly deceased across the river. There was a tradition of placing coins over the eyes of the dead for the payment to the ferry man. There are some that say Death is there to cut the earthly bonds that the soul has to the world at the time of passing, which would let the soul pass from this realm to the next without the body. In the Bible, Death is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Hades follows after him.

There are many different culture inclusive entities that go by many different names and all have one thing in common - "death". Let’s just touch on a couple of these entities because there are way too many to try and list all of them here.

The first will be one that covers several different cultures and is a key figure in Buddhist religion. Yama is considered in the myth to be the first mortal to die and to find the way to the celestial abodes. He was the first and being the first made him the ruler of the departed. Yama is said to be the judge of the dead who presides over the Buddhist Hells. Yama became an integral part of Chinese and Japanese mythology even though each culture developed a different myth for him and different functions than the original Hindu. Yama is in every region where Buddhism is practiced and can be traced back to a Hindu deity. Hindu scriptures says that Yama rides a black buffalo and carries a rope lasso to carry the soul of the dead back to his abode.

In Japanese modern art and fiction there is a new death god that is called "Shinigami.” The Shinigami or Shinigamis are closer to the Western traditional Grim Reaper than the Yama. The next one is from Aztec mythology, the Mictlantecuhtli who was a god of the dead and the King of Mictlan, a part of the underworld. He was one of the principle gods of the Aztecs and was the most prominent of the several gods and goddesses of death and the underworld. The worship of this death god sometimes involved rituals like cannibalism in and around the temple of Mictlantecuhtli.

He was described as a bloody skeleton or a person wearing a skull with many teeth. His headdress is shown decorated with owl feathers and paper banners and he also had a necklace of human eyeballs. Many of the Aztec gods and goddesses were depicted in this fashion because in the world of the Aztecs, skeletal imagery was a symbol of fertility, health and abundance. This makes the symbolic connection between life and death. You can see from the Aztecs culture that they have, as many cultures have, incorporated a god of death into their mythology or religion.

With death and birth a major part of human life these deities most of the time were major parts of the religion. Some cultures had one deity for life and then the adversary death, or many different gods or entities that have roles in the process of death and dying. The Egyptians had several different gods that had roles in the journey to the afterlife. Anubis was the guardian of the dead and he greeted the souls in the underworld and protected them on their journey. Anubis is portrayed as a jackal-headed man, or a jackal wearing ribbons and holding a symbol or protection.

There is also Osiris the god of life, death and fertility. He was the redeemer and a merciful judge of the dead in the afterlife. He was also the one that granted all life from the underworld. I could list different death deities and entities to include Archangel Michael or Gabriel as angels of death but I think that we can move away from the who’s- who of death now.

I would like to tell you a story now that may make some uneasy but it is a true story. My mother had a very aggressive form of multiple myeloma (bone cancer) and was in and out of the hospital for several months for treatments. When she went to the hospital they put her on the cancer floor. Most people who were on this floor were terminal and were there instead of hospice. There was more death on this one floor than anywhere else in the hospital. The nurses on this floor were a special breed, kind and strong with hearts of gold and feet of clay. I had a deep respect for these nurses for they were there day after day with a smile and a kind word even though you just knew that they wanted to cry.

My mother would always ask me to fix the nurses a cake or cookies to show them how much she appreciated their kindness, and I would do as my mother wished. I would talk to the nurses at the station when my mother would be getting a treatment or a bath. When I first started to do this it was just to get to know them and to pass the time. Soon I had made a friend or two among them and they would always look forward to the cakes and cookies I would make.

I can remember coming in one late afternoon and there was an ominous feeling as soon as I got off the elevator on the floor. I could not shake the feeling as long as I was on the floor. I had this sad feeling like loneliness and fear combined but not like it at all. The feeling was very hard to describe but was only on the cancer floor because I went to the cafeteria and did not feel it until I returned to the floor.

The nurses that came into my mother’s room did not appear to notice the feeling that I was feeling. I went out to the nurse’s station and noticed that they did seem to be affected just like me until a patient would come up and they would start smiling again. So when no one was around I asked one of the nurses that seemed to be picking up on the same thing that I was, what the feeling was that I was feeling. She looked at me with a sad almost heartbroken look and said that, "Death is walking the floor tonight.”

The next day when I arrived the feeling was gone and I learned that one of the people on the floor did die during the night. I started to pay very close attention to my feelings and every time that I had that same feeling some one else on the floor would die. This happened five or six times over the next several weeks. It was not every day that some one would die on this floor but a week without a death was almost unheard of. So was the feeling that I was having about an entity called "Death" or was it just the energy that the soul would give off before passing.

After my mothers passing I had filed away the months that I spent at the hospital with the bad memories of my mother. When I was a park ranger in Alabama I was working a suicide attempt and had the same feeling and it brought back all the memories of my mother’s death. The person did not succeed in the attempt to kill himself but the feeling was still there. With this incident I revisited my mother’s death because of the return of the feeling that I had felt many years ago. I had to look again at what I had linked the feeling to so I could see if it still held true. The feeling was the same but no one died… but someone was trying to die. I had many sleepless nights looking inside my heart and soul for some help with this problem.

One day I was called on a poacher call and as soon as I exited from my truck I had the feeling again. It stopped me dead in my tracks because I have had this feeling and people have died. I had to continue to do my job, by no means was I a coward and I knew if my time was up there was not much I could do about it. In the process of the investigation I was shot at and then adrenalin took over and the feeling I had linked to death was gone.

When I was debriefed by my direct supervisor I asked him if he had ever heard of a feeling of doom before something bad happened. He said that he knew that we were able to feel more than we realized and the poachers wanted me dead. Maybe I felt their intentions.

So, was what I was feeling their intentions to kill me and the only thing I could equate it to was the feeling I had early in my life? I looked into the entity of "Death" in my spare time and read how most cultures had some type of god or entity that controlled death. I formed an opinion that I still hold true today from my experience with death and deadly situations. There is an Angel of Death or a Grim Reaper that has the job of being there at the end of a life. It may be there to help with the crossing to the next reality, I am not sure yet, that will be a question that I will have answered when my time comes. They have a presence that can be felt if you pay attention to the energies around you.

With all the choices in our lives the time of our death has some variables also. Have you ever seen a bad wreck and knew if you had left just a few seconds earlier that you would have been killed in the wreck? That was one of those variables and choices that make life or death a matter of what you do or don’t do. So along with our guardian angel sometimes the Grim Reaper is there in case we decide to take the next exit to the next reality.

But as I said in the title of this article don’t fear the Reaper for no matter who you are, great or small, some day you will pass away from this world and you will meet the Reaper.