This is not as unusual as some think it is. What I personally find interesting is how many times the departed appear to other than their actual loved ones, but use someone else to get a message to family members. I had a hard time understanding that until I read if they appeared to the grieving it would be very difficult to get past your grief and and start to heal; as one medium put it, if you thought you could go to bed and they came to you in a dream, would you even want to get out of bed? Of course many would not. There is a definite difference between dreaming about the deceased and having them actually come to you in a dream and once you have experienced it you do know the difference. A book I just finished reading, it took me some time to finish because it affected me so emotionally reading it, but it is so well written on the subject I recommend it to anyone who has lost a loved-one... “Love Beyond Life.”
When my father died he appeared to my daughter (she was a teen ager and close to her grandfather), he called her by his pet name for her and just say bye bye sissy and was gone.
She never told anyone for years, until her father died and she expected him to also say good by and was disappointed when he didn't....I just told her they were 2 different people and did things differently...
When my daughters oldest girl was about 3 she woke up in the middle of the night screaming about blood all over grandma...(her great grandmother was in the hospital and she never calls me grandma to this day, I am called Greta). I got a call from my father in law the next day that my mother in law got out of bed to use the bathroom and didn't take her iv with her...she pulled it out and lucky for her a nurse was just coming in check on her, dad said there was blood all over the room...if anyone has seen an IV pulled out, its just like opening a vein if part of the iv port stays in the arm.....
This world is full of mysteries we don't understand...