Ghosts - By Hans Holzer Page 0,13

who has died traumatically, and usually tragically, but is unaware of his or her death. A few ghosts may realize that they are dead but may be confused as to where they are, or why they do not feel quite the way they used to feel. When death occurs unexpectedly or unacceptably, or when a person has lived in a place for a very long time, acquiring certain routine habits and becoming very attached to the premises, sudden, unexpected death may come as a shock. Unwilling to part with the physical world, such human personalities continue to stay on in the very spot where their tragedy or their emotional attachment had existed prior to physical death.

Ghosts do not travel; they do not follow people home; nor do they appear at more than one place. Nevertheless, there are reliable reports of apparitions of the dead having indeed traveled and appeared to several people in various locations. These, however, are not ghosts in the sense that I understand the term. They are free spirits, or discarnate entities, who are inhabiting what Dr. Joseph B. Rhine of Duke University has called the “world of the mind.” They may be attracted for emotional reasons to one place or another at a given moment in order to communicate with someone on the earth plane. But a true ghost is unable to make such moves freely. Ghosts by their very nature are not unlike psychotics in the flesh; they are quite unable to fully understand their own predicament. They are kept in place, both in time and space, by their emotional ties to the spot. Nothing can pry them loose from it so long as they are reliving over and over again in their minds the events leading to their unhappy deaths.

Sometimes this is difficult for the ghost, as he may be too strongly attached to feelings of guilt or revenge to “let go.” But eventually a combination of informative remarks by the parapsychologist and suggestions to call upon the deceased person’s family will pry him loose and send him out into the free world of the spirit.

Ghosts have never harmed anyone except through fear found within the witness, of his own doing and because of his own ignorance as to what ghosts represent. The few cases where ghosts have attacked people of flesh and blood, such as the ghostly abbot of Trondheim, are simply a matter of mistaken identity, where extreme violence at the time of death has left a strong residue of memory in the individual ghost. By and large, it is entirely safe to be a ghost hunter or to become a witness to phenomena of this kind.

In his chapter on ghosts, in Man, Myth, and Magic, Douglas Hill presents alternate hypotheses one by one and examines them. Having done so, he states, “None of these explanations is wholly satisfactory, for none seems applicable to the whole range of ghost lore.” Try as man might, ghosts can’t be explained away, nor will they disappear. They continue to appear frequently all over the world, to young and old, rich and poor, in old houses and in new houses, on airports and in streets, and wherever tragedy strikes man. For ghosts are indeed nothing more or nothing less than a human being trapped by special circumstances in this world while already being of the next. Or, to put it another way, a human being whose spirit is unable to leave the earthy surroundings because of unfinished business or emotional entanglements.

It is important not to be influenced by popular renditions of ghostly phenomena. This holds true with most movies, with the lone exception of the recent picture Ghost, which was quite accurate. Television, where distortions and outright inventions abound, is especially troublesome. The so-called “reality” shows such as “Sightings” and some of its imitators like to present as much visual evidence of ghosts as they can—all within a span of seven minutes, the obligatory length for a story in such programs.

To capture the attention of an eager audience, these shows present “authorities” as allegedly renowned parapsychologists who chase after supposed ghosts with all sorts of technical equipment, from Geiger counters to oscilloscopes to plain flashlights. No professional investigator who has had academic training uses any of this stuff, but the programs don’t really care.

Another difficult aspect of the quest for ghosts is that not everything that appears to fit the category does indeed belong in it.

Phenomena, encounters, and experiences are either visual, auditory, or olfactory—they are