Hollywood actor James Cagney, most famous for his iconic gangster roles, had a strange experience while driving to San Francisco with his wife in 1964. The fact that Cagney had no interest or belief in the paranormal makes his experience seem even stranger.
It was very late at night and Cagney was driving about 85 miles per hour. Suddenly, he heard a voice in his ear saying, “Take it easy, kid!” Initially, Cagney thought it was his wife, Billy, who was imitating him. But when he turned to look at her, she said, “Did you hear it too?”
At first, Cagney dismissed the voice as nothing and simply ignored its warning. He put his foot on the gas. But then, to his surprise, he heard the voice again, this time in a stronger tone: “Take it easy, kid!”
Totally stunned, Cagney turned to his wife and said that he recognized the voice as his father’s. Even Billy herself agreed with him on this.
Then, a hundred meters ahead of them, they saw a damaged trailer dumped on the other side of the road. Apparently he had been adrift from a car moments before. Fortunately, Cagney spotted it in time and swerved quickly. He said that if they had been driving 85 miles per hour, they would have crashed into the trailer.
Cagney’s father had been an Irish bartender and had been dead for several years. Although Cagney had always been an inveterate skeptic, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the strange disembodied voice he had heard in the car was definitely his father’s voice speaking to him from beyond the grave.