Ghosts - By Hans Holzer Page 0,14

manufactured through sight, sound, or smell. In addition, there are poltergeist phenomena, which are nothing more than products of the phase of a haunting when the entity is capable of producing physical effects, such as the movement of objects.

Even an experienced investigator can’t always tell to which class of phenomena an event belongs—only after further investigation over an extended period of time is an explanation forthcoming.

All three types of the phenomena (except for poltergeists) can be caused by the following:

1. A bona fide ghost—that is, a person who has passed out of the physical body but remains in the etheric body (aura, soul) at or near the place of the passing due to emotional ties or trauma. Such entities are people in trouble, who are seeking to understand their predicament and are usually not aware of their own passing.

The proof that the ghost is “real” lies in the behavior of the phenomena. If different witnesses have seen or heard different things, or at different times of the day, then we are dealing with a ghost.

In the mind of the casual observer, of course, ghosts and spirits are the same thing. Not so to the trained para-psychologist: ghosts are similar to psychotic human beings, incapable of reasoning for themselves or taking much action. Spirits, on the other hand, are the surviving personalities of all of us who pass through the door of death in a relatively normal fashion. A spirit is capable of continuing a full existence in the next dimension, and can think, reason, feel, and act, while his unfortunate colleague, the ghost, can do none of these things. All he can do is repeat the final moments of his passing, the unfinished business, as it were, over and over again until it becomes an obsession. In this benighted state, ghosts are incapable of much action and therefore are almost always harmless. In the handful of cases where ghosts seem to have caused people suffering, a relationship existed between the person and the ghost. Someone slept in a bed in which someone else had been murdered and was mistaken by the murderer for the same individual, or the murderer returned to the scene of his crime and was attacked by the person he had killed. But by and large, ghosts do not attack people, and there is no danger in observing them or having contact with them, if one is able to.

The majority of ghostly manifestations draw upon energy from the living in order to penetrate our three-dimensional world. Other manifestations are subjective, especially when the receiver is psychic. In this case, the psychic person hears or sees the departed individual in his mind’s eye only, while others cannot so observe the ghost.

Where an objective manifestation takes place, and everyone present is capable of hearing or seeing it, energy drawn from the living is used by the entity to cause certain phenomena, such as an apparition, a voice phenomenon, or perhaps the movement of objects, the sound of footsteps, or doors opening by themselves, and other signs of a presence. When the manifestations become physical in nature and are capable of being observed by several individuals or recorded by machines, they are called poltergeist phenomena, or noisy phenomena. Not every ghostly manifestation leads to that stage, but many do. Frequently, the presence in the household of young children or of mentally handicapped older people lends itself to physical manifestations of this kind, since the unused or untapped sexual energies are free to be used for that purpose.

Ghosts—that is, individuals unaware of their own passing or incapable of accepting the transition because of unfinished business—will make themselves known to living people at infrequent intervals. There is no sure way of knowing when or why some individuals make a postmortem appearance and others do not. It seems to depend on the intensity of feeling, the residue of unresolved problems, that they have within their system at the time of death. Consequently, not everyone dying a violent death becomes a ghost; far from it. If this were so, our battlefields and such horror-laden places as concentration camps or prisons would indeed be swarming with ghosts, but they are not. It depends on the individual attitude of the person at the time of death, whether he or she accepts the passing and proceeds to the next stage of existence, or whether he or she is incapable of realizing that a change is taking place and consequently clings to the familiar physical environment, the earth