Ghosts - By Hans Holzer Page 0,36

Dallas psychic in the case of two missing University of Texas girls, who were much later found murdered. At the time of the consultation, however, one week after the girls had disappeared, she predicted that the girls would be found within twenty-four hours, which they weren’t, and that three men were involved, which proved true.

But then the time element is often a risky thing with predictions. Time is one of the dimensions that is least capable of being read correctly by many psychics. This of course may be due to the fact that time is an arbitrary and perhaps even artificial element introduced by man to make life more livable; in the nonphysical world, it simply does not exist. Thus when a psychic looks into the world of the mind and then tries to interpret the conditions he or she is impressed with, the time element is often wrong. It is based mainly on the psychic’s own interpretation, not on a solid image, as is the case with facts, names, and places that he or she might describe.

One of the institutes of learning specializing in work with clairvoyants that cooperate with police authorities is the University of Utrecht, Netherlands, where Dr. W. H. C. Tenhaeff is the head of the Parapsychology Institute. Between 1950 and 1960 alone, the Institute studied over 40 psychics, including 26 men and 21 women, according to author-researcher Jack Harrison Pollack, who visited the Institute in 1960 and wrote a glowing report on its activities.

Pollack wrote a popular book about Croiset, who was the Institute’s star psychic and who started out as an ordinary grocer until he discovered his unusual gift and put it to professional use, especially after he met Dr. Tenhaeff in 1964.

But Croiset is only one of the people who was tested in the Dutch research center. Others are Warner Tholen, whose specialty is locating missing objects, and Pierre van Delzen, who can put his hands on a globe and predict conditions in that part of the world.

The University of Utrecht is, in this respect, far ahead of other places of learning. In the United States, Dr. Joseph B. Rhine has made a brilliant initial effort, but today Duke University’s parapsychology laboratory is doing little to advance research in ESP beyond repeat experiments and cautious, very cautious, theorizing on the nature of man. There is practically no field work being done outside the laboratory, and no American university is in the position, either financially or in terms of staff, to work with such brilliant psychics as does Dr. Tenhaeff in Holland.

For a country that has more per-capita crime than any other, one would expect that the police would welcome all the help they could get.

In the following pages you will read about true cases of hauntings, encounters with ghosts and apparitions of spirits, all of which have been fully documented and witnessed by responsible people. To experience these phenomena, you need not be a true “medium,” though the line between merely having ESP or being psychic with full mediumship, which involves clairvoyance (seeing things), clairaudience (hearing things), and/or clairsentience (smelling or feeling things), is rather vague at times. It is all a matter of degree, and some people partake of more than one “phase” or form of psychic ability. Regardless of which sensitivity applies to your situation, they are natural and need not be feared.

CHAPTER FOUR

What Exactly Is a Ghost?

FROM CLOSED-MINDED SKEPTICS to uninformed would-be believers, from Hollywood horror movies to Caspar the Ghost, there is a great deal of misinformation and foolish fantasy floating around as to what ghosts are and, of course, whether they do in fact exist.

I was one of the first people with a background not only in science, but also in investigative journalism to say to the general public, in books and in the media, Yes, ghosts are for real. Nobody laughed, because I followed through with evidence and with authentic photographic material taken under test conditions.

What exactly is a ghost? Something people dream up in their cups or on a sickbed? Something you read about in juvenile fiction? Far from it. Ghosts—apparitions of “dead” people or sounds associated with invisible human beings—are the surviving emotional memories of people who have not been able to make the transition from their physical state into the world of the spirit—or as Dr. Joseph Rhine of Duke University has called it, the world of the mind. Their state is one of emotional shock induced by sudden death or great suffering, and