Ghosts - By Hans Holzer Page 0,16

their value. Spirits are people like you and I who have passed on to the next world without too much difficulty or too many problems; they are not bound to anything left behind in the physical world. They do, however, have ties and emotional interests in the family or friends they left behind, and they might need to let people in this world know that they are all right “over there,” or they may have some business in the living world that needs to be taken care of in an orderly fashion. Ghosts, too, may have unfinished business, but are generally unable to convey their requests clearly.

Spirits, people who have died and are living in their duplicate “inner body,” the etheric body or aura, are different from physical living people in respect to certain limitations and the time element, but spirits are simply people who have passed on to the next world with their memories and interests intact.

The only thing these four categories of phenomena have indeed in common is their density: they seem three-dimensional and quite solid most of the time (though not always), but try to touch one, and your hand will go right through.

Only materializations are truly three-dimensional and physical, and they do occur when there is enough energy present to “clothe” the etheric body with an albumin substance called ectoplasm or teleplasm, drawn from the glands of the medium and/or assistants (known as sitters) during a séance, and sometimes even spontaneously site where something very powerfully traumatic has occurred in the past.

Such materializations look and even feel like physical bodies, but touching them may dissolve them or hurt the principal medium, as does bright light. In any event, the ectoplasm must be returned whence it came to avoid shock and illness.

The temptation to reproduce that rarest of all psychic phenomena, the full materialization, is of course always present, but also easy to spot. When I unmasked a group of such fakers as part of an investigation into one of the Spiritualist camps in Pennsylvania, I presented the evidence on television in a program I helped produce and appeared in with Mike Wallace, who remarked, “You mean these are only ghostly actors?” to which I replied spontaneously, “No, just ghastly actors, because I caught them in the act.”

Séances, which are nothing fancier than a group of people getting together for a “sitting” in the hope that a departed spirit might be able to communicate through her or his principal medium or one of the sitters, have fallen out of favor these days. But if someone asks you to a séance promising you that someone on the other side of life will be contacted, or “called”—beware. The folks on the other side are the ones who decide that they want contact with us, not the other way around.

Ouija Boards, crystal balls, and tarot cards are all useful in helping a psychic focus his or her natural gift, but they have no powers of their own. Using a board can bring trouble if those using it are potential deep-trance mediums, because an unscrupulous person on the other side might want to come in and take over the players, which would result in possession.

Communication with ghosts or spirits does sometimes occur, however, when one of the persons operating the board is psychic enough to supply the energy for a communication to take place. But the majority of what comes through a Ouija board is just stuff from the sitter’s own unconscious mind, and often it is just gibberish.

A word about the dreams of ghosts or departed loved ones. We are either awake or asleep. In my view, however, if we are asleep we are “adream,” for we dream all the time even if we don’t always remember it or are not aware of it.

Some psychic experiences involving ghosts and spirits occur during sleep in the form of quasi-dreams. These are not really bona fide dreams. It is just that in the sleep-dream state, when our conscious mind is at rest, the communicator finds it easier to “get through” to us than when we are fully awake and our conscious mind and rational attitude make it harder for the communicator’s emanations to penetrate our consciousness.

Many who have had such dream visitations think that they “just dreamt” the whole thing, and the medical establishment encourages this by and large, classifying such events as quasi-fantasies or nightmares, as the case may be. But in reality, they are nothing of the kind. These dreams