Holy Ghosts

by Gary Jansen

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART I - Follow the Thread

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  PART II - Discernment of Spirits

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  PART III - Dearly Departed

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Copyright © 2010 by Gary Jansen

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  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Scripture texts in this work are taken from the New American Bible with Revised New Testament

  and Revised Psalms ©1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C., and

  are used by permission of the copyright owner. All rights reserved. No part of the New American

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jansen, Gary.

  Holy ghosts, or, How a (not so) good Catholic boy became a believer in things that go bump in

  the night / Gary Jansen.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-44337-8

  1. Jansen, Gary. 2. Haunted houses—New York (State)—Rockville Centre. 3. Catholic

  Church and spiritualism. I. Title. II. Title: How a (not so) good Catholic boy became

  a believer in things that go bump in the night.

  BF1472.U6J36 2010

  133.1’29747245—dc22 2010023072

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet

  addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any

  responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does

  not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party

  websites or their content.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.

  In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;

  however, the story, the experiences, and the words

  are the author’s alone.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  FOR MY MOM

  It is generally supposed that amongst other restrictions Catholics are not allowed to believe in ghosts more than they are allowed to read an English Bible. This may be the popular belief, but incidents constantly break in contrariwise. Catholics, both priest and laymen, report ghosts or what are called “psychical phenomena.” Many more notice them but say no more.

  —Shane Leslie’s Ghost Book

  For the thousandth time, there’s no such things as ghosts!

  —Freddie Jones, Scooby-Doo

  BEFORE WE BEGIN

  A few months before I became convinced that our Long Island house was being haunted by ghosts, I awoke suddenly in the middle of the night from a dream. For the first time in weeks, the night was quiet. I was in my bedroom. I was alone. My wife and our young son were sleeping at her mother’s for a couple of days while I worked on a book I was writing. Moments ago, I had been sound asleep and now I was wide awake. I remember thinking to myself that I wished I woke up this alert every day for work instead of groggy and tired. Though the dream was startling—and, it turns out, unmemorable—I didn’t feel afraid. On the contrary, I felt very much alive and aware of everything around me: the bed, the blanket, the air in the room, the temperature, the outline of the furniture, and the faint strips of streetlight streaming through a partially open blind. Everything in the room seemed to be breathing, and I felt a strange sort of union with everything around me.

  As I looked around the room and listened to the night, I became very conscious of my body and the way my clothes felt against my shoulders and legs. I could feel the hair on my head and was aware of certain parts of my back, which seemed to press down more heavily on my mattress than others. I began to think about my skin and how it covered my entire body, that I was a landscape of ridges and curves. I then became very attentive of what lay beneath my surface: my bones and my organs. I imagined my heart pumping blood through my veins and arteries. I could picture my lungs expanding and contracting. I could see my stomach moving and digesting the food I had eaten earlier in the evening. I saw my liver and my kidneys cleaning toxins from my body. All of this activity was going on right below the surface of my skin and I tried really hard to listen closely to all of it, and you know what I heard?

  Nothing.

  Silence.

  I couldn’t hear my heart beating. I couldn’t hear the acids in my stomach breaking down the food that was in there. I couldn’t even hear my own breathing. I wasn’t dead. This wasn’t an out-of-body experience, it was a total in-my-body experience. I realized for the first time in my life that our bodies are really quiet, unless we’re using our voices or experiencing a physical imbalance of some kind. Certainly, my stomach would growl from time to time or I would get a case of the hiccups on occasion, but those were exceptions. Most of the time, my body didn’t make a peep (or at least not that I could hear). At that moment I became very aware that below my skin, less than an inch below the surface of my outer body, there was a silent, unseen world that was regulating and influencing my life all the time. It was, in many ways, an invisible realm, a place brimming with activity and energy, one that existed by its own rules and to which I was fully connected. It was also a world I had very little control over. Sure, I could change how deeply I was breathing or eat a food that would accelerate my heart rate, but I could never get my lungs to act like my pancreas. I couldn’t get my brain to act like my esophagus. Each organ had its own function and generally lived in harmony with the others unless something was
out of whack.

  As I lay there thinking about these things, I asked myself: couldn’t it be possible that there exists a world of spirits, an invisible world of ghosts, angels, and demons, one that is less than an inch away from our physical existence—a world that is mostly quiet (unless it’s out of balance), acts by its own rules, and is just as influential and important in our daily lives as our own bodies are?

  At the time, strange occurrences had been happening in my house, a classic haunting, if you will—odd noises, strange electrical anomalies, chills, objects moving of their own accord—and I didn’t know how to answer my own question. When it came to an invisible world of spirits, all I could say was that I believed in God, and I had a difficult enough time believing in him, let alone a supernatural world populated by veil-like apparitions, Hallmark card cherubs, and little red men with pointy goatees and pitchforks. And even if a world like that did exist, what did it matter in my life?

  I learned in time that it matters a lot.

  THIS IS A BOOK about how I became a believer in ghosts, angels, demons, and the strange and unexplainable things that go bump in the night. As I am a devoted, albeit greatly flawed, Catholic and an editor and writer of religion and spirituality, this belief might not seem like much of a stretch. After all, almost all religions, including Catholicism, in one way or another begin with a supernatural event—“In the beginning God created the universe”—and their sacred scriptures from the Torah to the New Testament to the Koran to the Upanishads abound with stories of beings from an invisible world—some good, some bad—who either assist or wreak havoc on unsuspecting humans. Whether you are talking about the angels or devils—such as Michael, Satan, or the demonic shedim that surface in Christianity and Judaism, or the djinn, invisible and dangerous creatures made of smokeless fire in Islam, or the rakshasa, wandering night spirits in Hinduism, or the preta, the lost and hungry ghosts of Buddhism—religion has always talked of an invisible, and influential, world in the midst of our physical existence here on earth. For millennia, the unseen world was a very real world indeed.

  But in modern times, where much of tradition has been pushed to the curb by technology, many of these beliefs have fallen by the wayside, considered by many, even within organized religion, as a useless vestige from an unenlightened and unscientific age. In turn, angels, demons, ghosts, and spirits have been relegated to the world of fairy tales, of metaphor, myth, legend, and superstition (and have made excellent fodder for novels, movies, and TV shows). Maybe this is a good thing. Certainly, a belief in witches and devils led to the death of thousands of individuals during the many European inquisitions the Catholic Church organized between the late twelfth century and the early nineteenth century. And to a lesser but still dramatic degree, right here in our backyard, Protestant Puritans executed twenty of their own—nineteen by hanging, one crushed to death by heavy stones—during the Salem witch trials of 1692-1693. In addition, though it’s not a new concept, the political and superstitious act of “demonizing” one culture or society in order to carry out acts of slavery, terrorism, and mass murder, in many ways, defined the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, unfortunately, continues to do so in our new millennium. It’s no wonder that religion and a belief in what can’t be seen or proven by empirical science continue to bear the blame for many of the world’s problems (though when people ask me how could I be a Catholic with all the atrocities the Vatican has committed over its two-thousand-year existence, I like to remind them that it was three big atheists—Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and not the Pope—who executed sixty million people in the duration of a generation). Who needs a ghost story when reality is frightening enough?

  Up until recently, I never gave much thought to the spirit world. Like most people, the idea of a ghost or a demon was ancillary to my daily life. So were heaven and hell and what comes to pass after we die. I can’t legitimately say I was a skeptic about these things—I had a number of unexplained incidents take place around me growing up—it’s just that unless I was watching a scary movie or reading a Stephen King novel or attending a funeral, the thought of an invisible spirit (other than God) and a world populated by human-like beings with wings never really crossed my mind. And when it did, it never lasted long and I soon found myself focusing on more earthly pursuits, like paying my bills or checking the scores to see if the Yankees won. While heaven, hell, angels, and demons were basic tenets of my Catholic faith, they were never basic tenets of my life. Moreover, having grown up in and around the Catholic Church, I rarely ever heard a priest talk about spirits and such things, and these topics were never discussed during my twelve years attending parochial school. Sure, during church on Sundays a priest would occasionally whip out a fire-and-brimstone speech to scare us that the devil was a real person and not to be taken lightly, but most people just thought the man was having a bad day or was in need of some fiber. For me, and for most people in the pews, being a good Catholic (which I failed at more often than not) meant essentially doing the right thing. It was about maneuvering in a world that was seen, not in a world that wasn’t.

  All of this changed for me over the course of a single year, between 2007 and 2008, when unexplainable things began happening to me and my family on a regular basis in our home. I was thirty-seven at the time and my wife and I would soon welcome our second child into the world. Like many people my age, I was preoccupied with my job and responsibilities at home, like spending time with my loved ones and mowing the lawn. Also during this time, after years of struggling with my faith, I had made prayer a daily exercise in my life. The result was transformative—a sense of calm and focus I had never experienced before—and in many ways it was one of the most fruitful times for me spiritually. Each day was filled with the expectation of growing closer to God and in turn growing closer to the people in my life.

  What I wasn’t expecting was the discovery that our house was haunted. Nor was I expecting to be drawn into an unseen world where ghosts weren’t just the stuff of campfire stories, but dynamic, real things that could influence the world around me. Over the course of a year, my beliefs would be challenged and I would be forced to revisit events that took place during my childhood, leading me to once again reevaluate my faith. Moreover, I would encounter mind-boggling parallels between local history and events in my own family, and I would find myself engaging in a strange ritual to rid my home of ghosts. These bizarre events would forever change the way I looked at life, death, and what ensues after we say good-bye to this world. The experience was also a wake-up call to pay attention to the things I took for granted every day: loved ones, my thoughts, and, sometimes, the stupid words that came out of my mouth.

  This book is a true story about my journey into the supernatural. Except where specifically noted to protect someone’s privacy, everything is recounted as it actually happened. It is my hope in telling this story that it will help you to experience the world—the seen and the unseen—in a totally different way.

  There is an invisible world out there and it is a very real world indeed.

  PART I

  Follow the Thread

  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

  —Hamlet

  The supernatural is real.

  —Evelyn Waugh

  Late one night in the fall of 1996, I was walking through the narrow, fog-covered, cobblestoned streets of Prague in the Czech Republic. I was sort of homeless at the time, having recently been evicted from a friend’s apartment after a silly comment I made escalated into a full-blown argument and a case of hard feelings. Trying to save as much money as possible before I hopped a train the next day to Krakow, Poland, I had opted not to spend the night in one of the city’s many run-down hostels, where the walls were thin, the clientele high and obnoxious, and where you could catch gonorrhea just by looking at a doorknob. Instead, I had chosen a more hygienic alternative. I decided to walk the bridges and avenues of the city alone at night and
if I needed to nap I would do so in a doorway or on the steps of a church or in the waiting room of the train station.

  Though Prague was not as active as New York City, people were out in the streets at all hours of the night. Old Town, the most beautiful part of the city for me, with its mixture of medieval, gothic, and baroque architecture, was alive with musicians, artists, and lost souls in search of someone to talk to. I could have used someone to talk to as well, but unfortunately, I didn’t speak Czech. I was just another linguistically challenged American stray dog rambling through a former Communist country with an oversize backpack and a Eurail pass (which was worthless in any former Eastern Bloc countries at the time). Yet as I walked through the city, feeling a bit like a character in an Albert Camus novel, I was surprised to meet a few people who did speak decent English. I passed the time listening to their stories of haunted saints and lost lovers with wooden teeth, and their dreams of visiting America or moving to Japan to open an import-goods shop.

  One man, who smelled of wine and tobacco, pulled me aside, pointed to the sky, and told me that the atmosphere in Prague was different than in any other place in world, that if the clouds are just right, the color red turns black in the moonlight. He held up a red silk glove in front of me and told me to look carefully. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it still looked red to me and that maybe, just maybe, he was color-blind. Instead, I told my newfound friend of my self-imposed exile, of my pursuit of God, that I had been stalking the Old Man for years and had tracked him down to this very place. He is evasive, I told him. But keep your eyes open, he could be anywhere. He just smiled at me and laughed. “You won’t find God here.”