From Daily Mail UK

Author: Patricia Pearson

A new book, Opening Heaven’s Door, will make you re-think everything you thought about death. Here, in the third part of our spine-tingling series, survivors of shipwrecks, air crashes and terrorist attacks tell how they were mysteriously guided to safety.

As he lay sleeping in a muddy trench in France one night, William Bird woke to find someone shaking him. It was 1917. He’d just been through the Battle of Vimy Ridge, and he was exhausted. Irritably, he tried to pull away — but whoever it was continued to shake him with some urgency.

So Bird — a journalist in civilian life — wearily opened his eyes and, to his utter astonishment, recognised his brother, Steve, who’d been reported missing in action two years earlier.

‘Steve put his warm hand over my mouth as I started to shout my happiness,’ Bird recalled. ‘Then…