Ghosts - By Hans Holzer Page 0,18

the problem itself. For religion today has drifted so far from spirituality that it no longer represents the link to the deity that it originally stood for, when the world was young and smaller.

When people kill one another because their alleged paths to the deity differ, they may need a signpost indicating where to turn to regain what has been patently lost. I think this signpost is the evidence for humankind’s survival of physical death, as shown in these pages, the eternal link between those who have gone on into the next phase of life and those who have been left behind, at least temporarily.

Belief is uncritical acceptance of something you cannot prove one way or another. But the evidence for ghosts and hauntings is so overwhelming, so large and so well documented, that arguing over the existence of the evidence would be a foolish thing indeed.

It is not a matter for speculation and in need of further proofs: those who look for evidence of the afterlife can easily find it, not only in these pages but also in many other works and in the records of groups investigating psychic phenomena through scientific research.

Once we realize how the “system” works, and that we pass on to another stage of existence, our perspective on life is bound to change. I consider it part of my work and mission to contribute knowledge to this end, to clarify the confusion, the doubts, the negativity so common in people today, and to replace these unfortunate attitudes with a wider expectation of an ongoing existence where everything one does in one lifetime counts toward the next phase, and toward the return to another lifetime in the physical world.

Those who fear the proof of the continued existence beyond the dissolution of the physical, outer body and would rather not know about it are short-changing themselves, for surely they will eventually discover the truth about the situation first-hand anyway.

And while there may be various explanations for what people experience in haunted houses, no explanation will ever be sufficient to negate the experiences themselves. If you are one of the many who enter a haunted house and have a genuine experience in it, be assured that you are a perfectly normal human being, who uses a natural gift that is neither harmful nor dangerous and may in the long run be informative and even useful.

CHAPTER THREE

Ghosts and the World of the Living

I HASTEN TO STATE that those who are in the next dimension, the world of the spirit, are indeed “alive”—in some ways more so than we who inhabit the three-dimensional, physical world with its limitations and problems.

This book is about ghosts in relation to us, however, for it is the living in this world who come in contact with the dead. Since ghosts don’t necessarily seek us out, ghosts just are because of the circumstances of their deaths.

For us to be able to see or hear a ghost requires a gift known as psychic ability or ESP—extrasensory perception. Professor Joseph Banks Rhine of Duke University thinks of ESP as an extra sense. Some have referred to it as “the sixth sense,” although I rather think the gift of ESP is merely an extension of the ordinary senses beyond their usual limitations.

If you don’t have ESP, you’re not likely to encounter a ghost or connect with the spirit of a loved one. Take heart, however: ESP is very common, in varying degrees, and about half of all people are capable of it. It is, in my view, a normal gift that has in many instances been neglected or suppressed for various reasons, chiefly ignorance or fear.

Psychic ability is being recognized and used today worldwide in many practical applications. Scientific research, business, and criminal investigations have utilized this medium to extend the range of ordinary research.

The problems of acknowledging this extra faculty are many. Prior to the nineteenth century, anything bordering on the occult was considered religious heresy and had to be suppressed or at least kept quiet. In the nineteenth century, with social and economic revolution came an overbearing insistence on things material, and science was made a new god. This god of tangible evidence leaped into our present century invigorated by new technological discoveries and improvements. Central to all this is the belief that only what is available to the ordinary five senses is real, and that everything else is not merely questionable but outright fantasy. Fantasy itself is not long for this world, as it does