Ghosts

Well, this topic is sure to stir some controversy...please understand that I bring it up not as a dividing point, but, instead as a starting point of conversation. Come on, for those of you that know me know I'm a uniter, not a...divideror. (Right George?) If you are the type of person who refuses to believe that ghosts exist than I would first say to you…good. I say “good” because I think that it’s not the answer that is wrong here, but rather the question. How often have we hindered ourselves in any self discovery when we continue to ask the wrong questions? So, what is the “right” question? "Do you think there is any basis for paranormal science?" might be a better, more specific question to ask. After all, "what is a ghost?" When dealing with anything that is as unexplored, subjective or devoid of hard facts as the paranormal sciences are, than there must be room for all discussion as opposed to condemnation.

Many years ago when Dawn and I lived in the townhouse, we had an unusual Sunday morning. Dawn slept in that day as we had a late night the night before. Round about 9 a.m. Dawn woke up to the warmth of the sun, saw the clock, but was still in that occasional dosing mode, so she laid back down, eyes closed, when the room grew colder. With the air-conditioning vent right above our bed she, as usual, became uncomfortably brisk and smiled reassuringly as I pulled the blanket up and over her, warming her once again. She dosed off and when she woke to the smell of the 2nd pot of coffee about an hour later she came downstairs and thanked me for covering her. I told her that I had gotten up with Taylor, who was just 2 years old at the time, at about 7:30 a.m. I went downstairs with him and the diaper bag. I had never come back up.

Shortly after that experience we would notice Taylor laughing and smiling…and staring. At nothing. Playing with him on the floor he would look past me or Dawn and smile at the stairs behind us. Or seemingly at the wall. We joked that it was Brian. Brian was Dawn’s ex-husband who tragically died at the age of 33 to sepsis only months before.

Fast forward 10 years to Dawn at work at Maricopa County Hospital in the NeoNatal intensive care unit. One of Dawn’s fellow RN’s, whose name I will not reveal, has claimed for years to be a sensitive. A sensitive is someone who feels a certain capacity for sensing what others cannot. Whether it be the presence of someone unseen or passed on from this life or as simply as reading the emotional aura of those around them…they are often admired but more often ridiculed. Called crazy. Nuts. I suppose I’d act a little nuts, too, if I could actually do those things. In any case, one morning she came to Dawn to inform her that she had been using her Ouija board the night before as she obviously has embraced this so called “ability” and tries to intentionally communicate with the beyond. Whatever. Dawn took it in stride, as usual, but then the RN said this. “Yeah, I spoke to Brian and I asked him to tell me something so that you would know that it was really him. So he spelled out ‘Taylor saw me’”. To Dawn’s knowledge she had never told that story at work.

As far back as I can remember I was always fascinated by the supernatural. Whether it was ghosts, myths and legends or anything on the outskirts of weird…I was into it. Although a relatively normal kid, I do know that some people, especially my family, thought that the stuff I was reading was odd. They are not without responsibility here because it was those special days, Christmas’s and birthday’s, that I received these volumes as gifts. What does Michael like? Anything weird that he can read was fair game. Fortunately, I never labeled this indulgence as too far off the deep-end (except for several of my college years when my whole life was sort of going off the deep end and New Age bookstores in New Hope, PA were my fix) but nonetheless it always had me asking the question “why” about everything. My devout Catholic upbringing many times would crash down around me when hard questions were met with aversion, diversion and convenience. Why do many of the stories of miracles and supernatural events apply to the Bible but not to modern civilization? How come things like ghosts, mediums and psychics were so spurned from religious thinking? And no picking on just the Christians here as ALL the major religions have been just as defensive on same issues.

I was perplexed that the conventional thinking told me that ghosts didn’t exist, psychics were blasphemous and fake and by just thinking a devious thought I had sinned. As a child I remember those ideas drilled hard into my head and I believed them, for fear my soul be damned. But science continued to swarm around my head (despite my grades in some particular areas) as it offered real answers to complicated questions. And so as not to appear a complete nave, I do realize that a whole society of cheats exists within the palm-reading psychic world but I have also encountered a select few who show way to high of an efficiency rate to be ignored. But, as I matured, I (and many friends and family members of same faith) was able to better distinguish what aspects of my faith were rationally acceptable and what was not.

If God was always around, for example, why would I need to confess my sins to a fellow man, albeit a priest, in order for God to forgive me if I were truly sorry for what I had done? Do you know how many times I lied to a priest when I said I was sorry for not honoring my mother and father after I got in trouble...but I was actually still pissed that I was grounded. Are you kidding? I wasn’t sorry for what I had done. I knew that God knew I was a liar, too, but I had to play the stupid game of going in the dark booth under the cloud of secrecy and telling some guy my “sins” (as horrible as they were at 10 years old). I mean, really, how silly was that? I was told later it was groundwork for future faith-based practice but the fact remained that even in 5th grade I knew the difference between feeling remorse in my heart and having to purposely be embarrassed in front of another about some petty "sin". I didn’t need a priest or worse yet, 10 Hail Mary’s or God forbid, a Rosary, to say “I’m sorry”. It was like mental shin splints. It did nothing for my spirituality nor did it cleanse my heart. It only hurt my brain and gave me a headache.

So where is this going? Well, after catching up on all of our “Ghosthunter’s” episodes on SciFi, I began to think about the topic of ghosts and religion after many years of “non-thinking”. (Many of you raising young children know what I’m talking about here. You go through these phases of life and when you are raising young one’s it’s like a perpetual numbing of your brain. The days are filled with routines, heavy sighing and non-gourmet meals. There is just so much intellectual thought that will seep in during “Jack’s Big Music Show” or “Wonderpets”, you know? Couple that with hours of Spongebob and you’re ready to declare a glass of wine at $4.99 a bottle a great escape.) In my Catholic school, ghosts were not real…and not to be talked about. I remember asking one of the nuns about them once and I was about scolded for 10 minutes about abandoning God, hellfire and all the brimstone that came with it. Granted, it was Sister Eustace (who we also called Sister "Useless"... knowing full well that using that label practically guaranteed our nonstop ticket to hell, but she definitely had a screw loose.) No, no, absolutely NO talk about ghosts...but, for some reason demons, guardian angels and virgin births were still on the table. I just didn't get it. I wondered, even then, why could it not even be TALKED about? Didn’t they realize that all kids want what they can not have? Grownups, too, for that matter. I wanted knowledge and they wouldn’t let me have it. So eventually, I searched for it on my own.

If you’ve never watched Ghosthunter’s, it’s basically about a group of amateur paranormal researchers out of Rhode Island called TAPS. The Atlantic Paranormal Society is lead by Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson, two Roto-Rooter plumbers by day and ghosthunters by night” who go around to various supposedly “haunted” locations and investigate them as scientifically as possible. Though they are believers in things “paranormal” their main objective is to “debunk” as many of the claims as they can through logic, science and analytical thinking. Whatever “evidence” they can catch electronically (video, audio or other electronic meters) that cannot be explained away is pronounced “potentially” paranormal. (The semantics are quite specific that the definition is “potential” for all you hardcore skeptics who are screaming right about now).

Rudimentary science tells us that energy never dies. Most scientific minds relate to that. If energy never dies and our very bodies are made up of energy than it stands to reason that we continue on after death..in different form. A primitive concept, perhaps, but a decent starting point for debate. It gives credence, actually, to the plausibility of an afterlife. The devout already know there is an afterlife and they are praying they make it to the good place rather than the bad one. So why couldn’t science and faith mix here? Why can’t the possibility exist that the energy of Uncle Ned, who just passed away, realigned itself in another form (as energy doesn’t die) and that energy is perhaps his “soul”, heavenly bound? It still exists. We have so many different levels of consciousness as evidenced by sleep and dream analysis that there’s no reason to say that Uncle Ned’s energy doesn’t exist on some other level. There’s no reason to say that it’s impossible for certain people to actually see or hear or “read” those energy’s just as I had a penchant for being a southpaw. The problem always is that this side can’t prove the paranormal exists and that side can’t prove that it doesn’t.

So we are left with either you believe in paranormal events or you don’t. The question to really ask than is not “Do you believe in ghosts” because than we have to spend an eternity defining the term “ghosts”. Culturally we have made ghosts out to be something frightening. As always, throughout the history of mankind, it is the unknown that evokes the most fear. The best scary movie doesn’t need gore or monstrous makeup effects…it just needs the unexplained. A scary thought is far worse than a demonic mask any day of the week. So are guardian angels than ghosts? When the event of a song or a smell or finding a coin or knick-knack that reminds you of a deceased loved one occurs, is that not a paranormal experience? Did “they” make that song play, did "they" manipulate that smell? If you see "them" in a dream was that your own subconscious mind or did "they" somehow manipulate your consciousness in order to arrange a visit? We all believe in things differently which is why this becomes a controversial subject because belief is a very powerful matter. But belief is an assumed truth or the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true. The relationship between belief and knowledge is subtle. That's why we uphold the idea that we "do better when we know better".

No matter what your beliefs are, the truth is, strange things do happen. Only under intense scientific parameters does the possibility of “evidence” of the paranormal even have a snowballs chance in hell of being believed. Take a look at the following:



This picture above, taken in a cemetery, has the frightening appearance of a figure standing...dark, see-through and ominous in full view of the lens. Is this a “ghost-photo”? Well, the answer is no…it is an example of long exposure photography. The photographer (a self-described skeptic who set out to debunk ghost photos) set up a tripod, stood in front of the camera for 3 seconds during a long-exposure shot and then ran out of the view of the lens leaving a mysterious shadowy figure. Spooky, but explainable. Another example is here:



The ghostly orbs, a phenomena often cited by parapsychologists as evidence of spirit activity, were recreated using dust and snowflakes giving the illusion of a supernatural event. Neat, huh? Well, these photos were intent on trickery as that was their purpose.

Now…look here:




This photo was taken recently in Manila with a cell phone camera and is making the rounds on the internet. The young girls were not playing with professional photography methods. There are no long or double exposure possibilities here. Neither of the three girls (two in the photo, one taking the picture) claim to know who the person to the right is in the picture. They have never seen this person before and he/she wasn’t there when the photo was taken. You can see that the two girls were the focal point of the picture, otherwise it would likely be a pan to the left to fit them all. Could it be doctored. I suppose it's possible since anything is fair game on the internet.


Other examples:



A rather harmless photo of the photographers grandmother at a family BBQ. The man standing behind her, however, is her grandfather who had died 5 years earlier. There were no other older men at the party. The film in the camera wasn't even made until years after he passed. There are no logical reasons that explain why this photo would include his image behind his wife.

And finally one of the more famous ghost photos on record was taken in 1919.



The photo is a group portrait of Goddard's squadron, which had served in World War I aboard the HMS Daedalus. An extra ghostly face appears in the photo. In back of the airman positioned on the top row, fourth from the left, can clearly be seen the face of another man. It is said to be the face of Freddy Jackson, an air mechanic who had been accidentally killed by an airplane propeller two days earlier. His funeral had taken place on the day this photograph was snapped. Members of the squadron easily recognized the face as Jackson's. It has been suggested that Jackson, unaware of his death, decided to show up for the group photo.

So does the matter simply come down to intent and belief? Are these pictures proof of paranormal activity? Not much, really. Like any science before it, parapsychology has a long way to go to be considered in the realm of "real science". The people who are genuinely intent on being taken seriously by not creating a hoax and have a very real and unexplainable event should be given the same consideration of validity as those so willing to expose deceit.

People can speculate as to how and why strange things occur. It can be over-simplified as to not frighten children (or an uneducated class of society, perhaps) or it could be just the opposite. To instill fear and control. Einstein once said that “The problem is never ‘is that the wrong question’ but rather no questions at all.” That is why it is not, in my opinion, wrong to question authority, validity or even faith. If those things cannot stand up to scrutiny using unbiased truth or even devil's advocate questioning than they weren’t very durable to begin with. I see no reason why science and faith cannot be partners as long as each side is willing to learn and advance and grow with each other. Unchanging attitudes are left in the dust as the human race continues to advance its knowledge due to the work of scientific, psychological and technical minds. Minds supposedly created by God himself. Organized religion has to be willing to embrace those advancements if it wants to survive.

As for ghosts…either you believe or you don’t. Or you approach it from a different angle. But anyone with faith should understand what it means to have it. In the end we may have to just agree to disagree. I believe that paranormal science is worth studying and that its possibility is legit and I don’t need proof to believe it. But having it sure would be nice. I guess I’ll just keep hunting.