Thank you for sharing your story, Liberty. As Hamlet tells Horatio, "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Or, indeed, in anyone's philosophy.

And so...when people ask me whether I believe in "the spirit world" or in life after death, as suggested by experiences such as yours (or, for that matter, millions of similar accounts throughout the ages) my only response is "MU."--a Zen response that means, roughly, "Not yes, not no." Many Buddhist traditions, perticularly in Tibet, speak of a continuum of consciousness that outlives and connects individual lives. And some extraordinarily sensitive people (such as yourself) may be able to experience this continuum of consciousness directly, to commune with departed souls. Again, I don't know. The prevalence, throughout the world, of ghost stories associated with locations (old, haunted houses, etc.) where someone has died a violent, unsettled death, also suggests something like this; not an objective reality per se, but rather an intersubjective reality--just as, in a later scene, Hamlet can see and hear his father's ghost, but his mother cannot.