Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  Doctor Karlis Osis published his findings concerning many deathbed experiences, wherein the dying recognize dead relatives in the room who have seemingly come to help them across the threshold into the next world. A lady in South Carolina, Mrs. M. C., reported one particularly interesting case to me. She herself has a fair degree of mediumship, which is a factor in the present case. “I stood behind my mother as she lay dying at the age of some seventy years. She had suffered a cerebral stroke, and was unable to speak. Her attendants claimed they had had no communication with her for over a week. As I let my mind go into her, she spoke clearly and flawlessly, ‘If only you could see how beautiful and perfect it all is,’ she said, then called out to her dead father, saying ‘Papa, Papa.’ I then spoke directly to her and asked her, did she see Papa? She answered as if she had come home, so to speak. ‘Yes, I see Papa.’ She passed over onto the other side shortly, in a matter of days. It was as if her father had indeed come after her, as if we saw him, and she spoke to me clearly, with paralyzed mouth and throat muscles.”

  Sometimes the dead want the living to know how wonderful their newfound world is. Whether this is out of a need to make up for ignorance in one’s earth life, where such knowledge is either outside one’s ken or ignored, or whether this is in order to acquaint the surviving relative with what lies ahead, cases involving such excursions into the next world tend to confirm the near-death experiences of those who have gone into it on their own, propelled by accidents or unusual states of consciousness. One of the most remarkable reports of this kind came to me through the kindness of two sisters living in England. Mrs. Doreen B., a senior nursing administrator, had witnessed death on numerous occasions. Here is her report.

  “In May 1968 my dear mother died. I had nursed her at home, during which time we had become extremely close. My mother was a quiet, shy woman who always wished to remain in the background. Her last weeks were ones of agony; she had terminal cancer with growths in many parts of her body. Towards the end of her life I had to heavily sedate her to alleviate the pain, and after saying good-bye to my daughter on the morning of the seventh of May, she lapsed into semiconsciousness and finally died in a coma, approximately 2:15 A.M. on the eighth of May 1968. A few nights after her death I was gently awakened. I opened my eyes and saw Mother.

  “Before I relate what happened, I should like to say that I dream vividly every night, and this fact made me more aware that I was not dreaming. I had not taken any drinks or drugs, although of course my mind and emotions revolved around my mother. After Mother woke me, I arose from my bed; my hand instinctively reached out for my dressing gown, but I do not remember putting it on. Mother said that she would take me to where she was. I reacted by saying that I would get the car out, but she said that I would not need it. We traveled quickly, I do not know how, but I was aware that we were in the Durking Leatherhead area and entering another dimension.

  “The first thing I saw was a large archway. I knew I had seen it before, although it means nothing to me now. Inside the entrance a beautiful sight met my eyes. There was glorious parkland, with shrubbery and flowers of many colors. We traveled across the parkland and came to a low-built white building. It seemed to have the appearance of a convalescent home. There was a veranda, but no windows or doors as we know them. Inside everything was white, and Mother showed me a bed that she said was hers. I was aware of other people, but they were only shadowy white figures. Mother was very worried about some of them and told me that they did not know that they were dead. However, I was aware that one of a group of three was a man.

  “Mother had always been very frugal in dress, possibly due to her hardships in earlier years. Therefore her wardrobe was small but neat, and she spent very little on clothing if she could alter and mend. Because of this I was surprised when she said she wished that she had more clothes. In life Mother was the kindest of women, never saying or thinking ill of anyone. Therefore I found it hard to understand her resentment of a woman in a long, flowing robe who appeared on a bridge in the grounds. The bridge looked beautiful, but Mother never took me near it. I now had to return, but to my question, ‘Are you happy?’ I was extremely distressed to know that she did not want to leave her family. Before Mother left me she said a gentle ‘Good-bye dear.’ It was said with a quiet finality, and I knew that I would never see her again.

  “It was only afterward when I related it to my sister that I realized that Mother had been much more youthful than when she died and that her back, which in life had been rounded, was straight. Also I realized that we had not spoken through our lips but as if by thought, except when she said, ‘Good-bye, dear.’ It is now three-and-a-half years since this happening, and I have had no further experience. I now realize that I must have seen Mother during her transition period, when she was still earthbound, possibly from the effects of the drugs I administered under medical supervision, and when her tie to her family, particularly her grandchild, was still very strong.”

  Don McI., a professional astrologer living in Rich-land, Washington, has no particular interest in psychic phenomena, is in his early seventies, and worked most of his life as a security patrolman. His last employment was at an atomic plant in Washington state. After retirement, he took up astrology full-time. Nevertheless, he had a remarkable experience that convinced him of the reality of afterlife existence.

  “On November 15, 1971, at about 6:30 A.M., I was beginning to awaken when I clearly saw the face of my cousin beside and near the foot of my bed. He said, ‘Don, I have died.’ Then his face disappeared, but the voice was definitely his own distinctive voice. As far as I knew at that time, he was alive and well. The thought of telling my wife made me feel uncomfortable, so I did not tell her of the incident. At 11:00 A.M., about four-and-a-half hours after my psychic experience, the mail arrived. In it was a letter from my cousin’s widow, informing us that he had a heart failure and was pronounced dead upon arrival at the hospital. She stated that his death occurred at 9:30 P.M., November 8, 1971, at Ventura, California. My home, where my psychic experience took place, is at least a thousand miles from Ventura, California. The incident is the only psychic experience I’ve ever had.”

  William W. lives and works in Washington, D.C. Because of some remarkable psychic incidents in his life, he began to wonder about the survival of human personality. One evening he had a dream in which he saw himself walking up a flight of stairs where he was met by a woman whom he immediately recognized as his elderly great-aunt. She had died in 1936. “However she was dressed in a long gray dress of about the turn-of-the-century style, her hair was black, and she looked vibrantly young. I asked her in the dream where the others were, and she referred me to a large room at the top of the stairs. The surroundings were not familiar. I entered the room and was amazed to see about fifteen people in various types of dress, both male and female and all looking like mature adults, some about the age of thirty. I was able to recognize nearly all of these people although most I had seen when they were quite old. All appeared jovial and happy. I awakened from the dream with the feeling that somebody had been trying to tell me something.”

  There are repeated reports indicating that the dead revert to their best years, which lie around the age of thirty in most cases, because they are able to project a thought-form of themselves as they wish. On the other hand, where apparitions of the dead are intended to prove survival of an individual, they usually appear as they looked prior to death, frequently wearing the clothes they wore at the time of their passing.

  Not all temporary separations of the body and etheric self include a visit to the next world. Sometimes the liberated self merely hangs around to observe what is being done with the body. Mrs. Elaine L. of Washington state reported an experience that happened to her at the age of sixteen. “I had suffered several days from an infected back tooth, and since my face was badly swollen, our dentist refused to remove the tooth until the swelling subsided. When it did, and shortly after the novocaine was administrated, I f
ound myself floating close to an open window. I saw my body in the dental chair and the dentist working feverishly. Our landlady, Mrs. E., who had brought me to the dentist, stood close by, shaking me and looking quite flabbergasted and unbelieving. My feeling at the time was of complete peace and freedom. There was no pain, no anxiety, not even an interest in what was happening close to that chair.

  “Soon I was back to the pain and remember as I left the office that I felt a little resentful. The dentist phoned frequently during the next few days for assurance that I was alright.”

  According to one report, a Trappist monk who had suffered a cardiac arrest for a period of ten minutes remembered a visit to a world far different from that which his religion had taught him. Brother G. spoke of seeing fluffy white clouds and experiencing a sense of great joy. As a result of his amazing experience, the monk now helps people on the terminal list of a local hospital face death more adequately. He can tell them that there nothing to fear.

  A New Jersey physician, Dr. Joseph G., admitted publicly that he had “died” after a severe attack of pneumonia in 1934 and could actually see himself lying on the deathbed. At the time, worrying how his mother would feel if he died, he heard a voice tell him that it was entirely up to him whether wanted to stay on the physical plane or go across. Because of his own experience, Dr. G. later paid serious attention to the accounts of several patients who had similar experiences.

  The number of cases involving near-death experiences—reports from people who were clinically dead for varying lengths of time and who then recovered and remembered what they experienced while unconscious—is considerable. If we assume that universal law covers all contingencies, there should be no exceptions to it. Why then are some people allowed to glimpse what lies ahead for them in the next dimension without actually entering that dimension at the time of the experience? After investigating large numbers of such cases, I can only surmise that there are two reasons. First of all, there must be a degree of self-determination involved, allowing the subject to go forward to the next dimension or return to the body. As a matter of fact, in many cases, though not in all, the person is being given that choice and elects to return to earth. Secondly, by the dissemination of these witnesses’ reports among those in the physical world, knowledge is put at our disposal, or rather at the disposal of those who wish to listen. It is a little like a congressional leak—short of an official announcement, but much more than a mere rumor. In the final analysis, those who are ready to understand the nature of life will derive benefits from this information, and those who are not ready, will not.

  CHAPTER TWO

  What Every Would-be Ghost Hunter Should Know

  EVER SINCE I WROTE my first book, entitled Ghost Hunter, in 1965, that epithet has stuck to me like glue even when it was clearly not politic, such as when I started to teach parapsychology at the New York Institute of Technology and received a professorship. As more and more of my true ghost stories appeared in my books, a new vogue—amateur ghost hunting—sprang up. Some of these ghost hunters were genuinely interested in research, but many were strictly looking for a thrill or just curious. Foolish assumptions accompany every fad, as well as some dangers. Often a lack of understanding of the aspects of ghost hunting, of what the phenomena mean, is harmless; on the more serious side, this lack of knowledge can cause problems at times, especially when the possibility exists of making contact with a negative person for whom death has changed very little.

  However, readers should keep in mind when looking at these pages the need to forget a popular notion about ghosts: that they are always dangerous, fearful, and hurt people. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nor are ghosts figments of the imagination, or the product of motion picture writers. Ghostly experiences are neither supernatural nor unnatural; they fit into the general pattern of the universe we live in, although the majority of conventional scientists don’t yet understand what exactly ghosts are. Some do, however—those who have studied parapsychology have come to understand that human life does continue beyond what we commonly call death. Once in a while, there are extraordinary circumstances surrounding a death, and these exceptional circumstances create what we popularly call ghosts and haunted houses.

  Ever since the dawn of humankind, people have believed in ghosts. The fear of the unknown, the certainty that there was something somewhere out there, bigger than life, beyond its pale, and more powerful than anything walking the earth, has persisted throughout the ages, and had its origins in primitive man’s thinking. To him, there were good and evil forces at work in nature, which were ruled over by supernatural beings, and were to some degree capable of being influenced by the attitudes and prayers of humans. Fear of death was, of course, one of the strongest human emotions. It still is. Although some belief in survival after physical death has existed from the beginning of time, no one has ever cherished the notion of leaving this earth.

  Then what are ghosts—if indeed there are such things? To the materialist and the professional skeptic—that is to say, people who do not wish their belief that death is the end of life as we know it to be disturbed—the notion of ghosts is unacceptable. No matter how much evidence is presented to support the reality of the phenomena, these people will argue against it and ascribe it to any of several “natural” causes. Delusion or hallucination must be the explanation, or perhaps a mirage, if not outright trickery. Entire professional groups that deal in the manufacturing of illusions have taken it upon themselves to label anything that defies their ability to reproduce it artificially through trickery or manipulation as false or nonexistent. Especially among photographers and magicians, the notion that ghosts exist has never been popular. But authentic reports of psychic phenomena along ghostly lines keep coming into reputable report centers such as societies for psychic research, or to parapsychologists like myself.

  Granted, a certain number of these reports may be inaccurate due to self-delusion or other errors of fact. Still an impressive number of cases remains that cannot be explained by any other means than that of extrasensory perception.

  According to psychic research, a ghost appears to be a surviving emotional memory of someone who has died traumatically, and usually tragically, but is unaware of his or her death. A few ghosts may realize that they are dead but may be confused as to where they are, or why they do not feel quite the way they used to feel. When death occurs unexpectedly or unacceptably, or when a person has lived in a place for a very long time, acquiring certain routine habits and becoming very attached to the premises, sudden, unexpected death may come as a shock. Unwilling to part with the physical world, such human personalities continue to stay on in the very spot where their tragedy or their emotional attachment had existed prior to physical death.

  Ghosts do not travel; they do not follow people home; nor do they appear at more than one place. Nevertheless, there are reliable reports of apparitions of the dead having indeed traveled and appeared to several people in various locations. These, however, are not ghosts in the sense that I understand the term. They are free spirits, or discarnate entities, who are inhabiting what Dr. Joseph B. Rhine of Duke University has called the “world of the mind.” They may be attracted for emotional reasons to one place or another at a given moment in order to communicate with someone on the earth plane. But a true ghost is unable to make such moves freely. Ghosts by their very nature are not unlike psychotics in the flesh; they are quite unable to fully understand their own predicament. They are kept in place, both in time and space, by their emotional ties to the spot. Nothing can pry them loose from it so long as they are reliving over and over again in their minds the events leading to their unhappy deaths.

  Sometimes this is difficult for the ghost, as he may be too strongly attached to feelings of guilt or revenge to “let go.” But eventually a combination of informative remarks by the parapsychologist and suggestions to call upon the deceased person’s family will pry him loose and send him out into the free world of the spirit. />
  Ghosts have never harmed anyone except through fear found within the witness, of his own doing and because of his own ignorance as to what ghosts represent. The few cases where ghosts have attacked people of flesh and blood, such as the ghostly abbot of Trondheim, are simply a matter of mistaken identity, where extreme violence at the time of death has left a strong residue of memory in the individual ghost. By and large, it is entirely safe to be a ghost hunter or to become a witness to phenomena of this kind.

  In his chapter on ghosts, in Man, Myth, and Magic, Douglas Hill presents alternate hypotheses one by one and examines them. Having done so, he states, “None of these explanations is wholly satisfactory, for none seems applicable to the whole range of ghost lore.” Try as man might, ghosts can’t be explained away, nor will they disappear. They continue to appear frequently all over the world, to young and old, rich and poor, in old houses and in new houses, on airports and in streets, and wherever tragedy strikes man. For ghosts are indeed nothing more or nothing less than a human being trapped by special circumstances in this world while already being of the next. Or, to put it another way, a human being whose spirit is unable to leave the earthy surroundings because of unfinished business or emotional entanglements.

  It is important not to be influenced by popular renditions of ghostly phenomena. This holds true with most movies, with the lone exception of the recent picture Ghost, which was quite accurate. Television, where distortions and outright inventions abound, is especially troublesome. The so-called “reality” shows such as “Sightings” and some of its imitators like to present as much visual evidence of ghosts as they can—all within a span of seven minutes, the obligatory length for a story in such programs.