by Hans Holzer
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 not seem to fill any useful purpose in the realm of computers and computerized humans.
Laboring under these difficult conditions, Dr. Rhine developed a new scientific approach to the phenomena of the sixth sense some thirty years ago when he brought together and formalized many diffused research approaches in his laboratory at Duke University. But pure materialism dies hard—in fact, dies not at all. Even while Rhine was offering proof for the “psi factor” in human personality—fancy talk for the sixth sense—he was attacked by exponents of the physical sciences as being a dreamer or worse. Nevertheless, Rhine continued his work and others came to his aid, and new organizations came into being to investigate and, if possible, explain the workings of extrasensory perception.
To define the extra sense is simple enough. When knowledge of events or facts is gained without recourse to the normal five senses—sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste—or when this knowledge is obtained with apparent disregard to the limitations of time and space, we speak of extrasensory perception.
It is essential, of course, that the person experiencing the sixth-sense phenomena has had no access to knowledge, either conscious or unconscious, of the facts or events, and that her impressions are subsequently corroborated by witnesses or otherwise proved correct by the usual methods of exact science.
It is also desirable, at least from an experimental point of view, that a person having an extrasensory dealing with events in the so-called future should make this impression known at once to impartial witnesses so that it can be verified later when the event does transpire. This, of course, is rarely possible because of the very nature of this sixth sense: it cannot be turned on at will, but functions best during emergencies, when a genuine need for it exists. When ordinary communications fail, something within men and women reaches out and removes the barriers of time and space to allow for communication beyond the five senses.
There is no doubt in my mind that extrasensory phenomena are governed by emotional impulses and therefore present problems far different from those of the physical sciences. Despite the successful experiments with cards and dice conducted for years at the Duke University parapsychology laboratory, an ESP experience is not capable of exact duplication at will.
Parapsychology, that is, the science investigating the phenomena of this kind, has frequently been attacked on these grounds. And yet normal psychology, which also deals with human emotions, does not require an exact duplication of phenomena under laboratory conditions. Of course, psychology and psychiatry themselves were under attack in the past, and have found a comfortable niche of respectability only recently. It is human nature to attack all that is new and revolutionary, because man tends to hold onto his old gods. Fifty years from now, parapsychology will no doubt be one of the older sciences, and hence accepted.
It is just as scientific to collect data from “spontaneous phenomena,” that is, in the field, as it is to produce them in a laboratory. In fact, some of the natural sciences could not exist if it were not for in situ observation. Try and reconstruct an earthquake in the lab, or a collision of galaxies, or the birth of a new island in the ocean.
The crux, of course, is the presence of competent observers and the frequency with which similar, but unrelated, events occur. For example, if a hundred cases involving a poltergeist, or noisy ghost, are reported in widely scattered areas, involving witnesses who could not possibly know of each other, could have communicated with each other, or have had access to the same information about the event, it is proper scientific procedure to accept these reports as genuine and to draw certain conclusions from them.
Extrasensory perception research does not rely entirely on spontaneous cases in the field, but without them it would be meaningless. The laboratory experiments are an important adjunct, particularly when we deal with the less complicated elements of ESP, such as telepathy, intuition beyond chance, and psychic concentration—but they cannot replace the tremendous impact of genuine precognition (the ability to foresee events before they occur) and other one-time events in human experience.
The nature of ESP is spontaneous and unexpected. You don’t know when you will have an experience, you can’t make it happen, and you can’t foretell when and how it will happen. Conditions beyond your knowledge make the experience possible, and you have no cont
rol over it. The sole exception is the art of proper thinking—the training toward a wider use of your own ESP powers—which we will discuss later.
The ESP experience can take the form of a hunch, an uncanny feeling, or an intuitive impression. Or it can be stronger and more definite, such as a flash, an image or auditory signal, a warning voice, or a vision, depending on who you are and your inborn talents as a receiver.
The first impulse with all but the trained and knowledgeable is to suppress the “message” or to explain it away, sometimes taking grotesque paths in order to avoid admitting the possibility of having had an extrasensory experience. Frequently, such negative attitudes toward what is a natural part of human personality can lead to tragedy, or, at the very least, to annoyance; for the ESP impulse is never in vain. It may be a warning of disaster or only an advance notice to look out for good opportunities ahead, but it always has significance, even though you may miss the meaning or choose to ignore the content. I call this substance of the ESP message cognizance, since it represents instant knowledge without logical factors or components indicating time and effort spent in obtaining it.
The strange thing about ESP is that it is really far more than an extra, sixth sense, equal in status to the other five. It is actually a supersense that operates through the other five to get its messages across.
Thus a sixth-sense experience many come through the sense of sight as a vision, a flash, or an impression; the sense of hearing as a voice or a sound effect duplicating an event to be; the sense of smell as strange scents indicating climates other than the present one or smells associated with certain people or places; the sense of touch—a hand on the shoulder, the furtive kiss, or fingering by unseen hands; and the sense of taste—stimulation of the palate not caused by actual food or drink.
Of these, the senses of smell and taste are rarely used for ESP communication, while by far the majority of cases involve either sight or sound or both. This must be so because these two senses have the prime function of informing the conscious mind of the world around us.
What has struck me, after investigating extrasensory phenomena for some twenty-odd years, is the thought that we are not really dealing with an additional dimension as such, an additional sense like touch or smell, but a sense that is nonphysical—the psychic, which, in order to make itself known, must manifest itself through the physical senses. Rather than an extra sense, we really have here an extension of the normal five senses into an area where logical thinking is absent and other laws govern. We can compare it to the part of the spectrum that is invisible to the naked eye. We make full use of infrared and ultraviolet and nobody doubts the existence of these “colors,” which are merely extensions of ordinary red and violet.
Thus it is with extrasensory perception, and yet we are at once at war with the physical sciences, which want us to accept only that which is readily accessible to the five senses, preferably in laboratories. Until radio waves were discovered, such an idea was held to be fantastic under modern science, and yet today we use radio to contact distant heavenly bodies.
It all adds up to this: Our normal human perception, even with instruments extending it a little, is far from complete. To assert that there is no more around us than the little we can measure is preposterous. It is also dangerous, for in teaching this doctrine to our children, we prevent them from allowing their potential psychic abilities to develop unhampered. In a field where thought is a force to be reckoned with, false thinking can be destructive.
Sometimes a well-meaning but otherwise unfamiliar reporter will ask me, “How does science feel about ESP?” That is a little like asking how mathematics teachers feel about Albert Einstein. ESP is part of science. Some scientists in other fields may have doubts about its validity or its potentials, just as scientists in one area frequently doubt scientists in other areas. For example, some chemists doubt what some medical science say about the efficiency of certain drugs, or some underwater explorers differ with the opinions expressed by space explorers, and the beliefs of some medical doctors differ greatly from what other medical doctors believe. A definition of science is in order. Contrary to what some people think, science is not knowledge or even comparable to the idea of knowledge; science is merely the process of gathering knowledge by reliable and recognized means. These means, however, may change as time goes on, and the means considered reliable in the past may fail the test in the future, while, conversely, new methods not used in the past may come into prominence and be found useful. To consider the edifice of science an immovable object, a wall against which one may safely lean with confidence in the knowledge that nearly everything worth knowing is already known, is a most unrealistic concept. Just as a living thing changes from day to day, so does science and that which makes up scientific evidence.
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There are, however, forces within science representing the conservative or establishment point of view. These forces are vested in certain powerful individuals who are not so much unconvinced of the reality of controversial phenomena and the advisability of including these phenomena in the scientific process as they are unwilling to change their established concept of science. They are, in short, unwilling to learn new and startling facts, many of which conflict with that which they have learned in the past, that which forms the very basis and foundation of their scientific beliefs. Science derives from scire, meaning “to know.” Scientia, the Latin noun upon which our English term “science” is based, is best translated as “the ability to know,” or perhaps, “understanding.” Knowledge as an absolute is another matter. I doubt very much that absolute knowledge is possible even within the confines of human comprehension. What we are dealing with in science is a method of reaching toward it, not attaining it. In the end, the veil of secrecy will hide the ultimate truth from us, very likely because we are incapable of grasping it due to insufficient spiritual awareness. This insufficiency expresses itself, among other ways, through a determined reliance upon terminology and frames of reference derived from materialistic concepts that have little bearing upon the higher strata of information. Every form of research requires its own set of tools and its own criteria. Applying the purely materialistic empiric concepts of evidence to nonmaterialistic areas is not likely to yield satisfactory results. An entirely different set of criteria must be established first before we can hope to grasp the significance of those nonmaterial concepts and forces around us that have been with us since the beginning of time. These are both within us and without us. They form the innermost layer of human consciousness as well as the outer reaches of the existing universe.
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By and large, the average scientist who is not directly concerned with the field of ESP and parapsychology does not venture into it, either pro or con. He is usually too much concerned with his own field and with the insufficiencies found in his own bailiwick. Occasionally, people in areas that are peripheral to ESP and parapsychology will venture into it, partly because they are attracted by it and sense a growing importance in the study of those areas that have so long been neglected by most scientists, and partly because they feel that in attacking the findings of parapsychology they are in some psychologically understandable way validating their own failures. When Professor Joseph B. Rhine first started measuring what he called the “psi” factor in man, critics were quick to point out the hazards of a system relying so heavily on contrived, artificial conditions and statistics. Whatever Professor Rhine was able to prove in the way of significant data has since been largely obscured by criticism, some of it valid and some of it not, and of course by the far greater importance of observing spontaneous phenomena in the field when and if they occur. In the beginning, however, Professor Rhine represented a milestone in scientific thinking. It was the first time that the area, formerly left solely to the occultist, had been explored by a trained scientist in the modern sense of the term. Even then, no one took the field of parapsychology very seriously; Rhine and his closest associate, Dr. Ho
rnell Hart, were considered part of the Department of Sociology, as there had not as yet been a distinct Department of Parapsychology or a degree in that new science. Even today there is no doctorate in it, and those working in the field usually must have other credits as well. But the picture is changing. A few years ago, Dr. Jules Eisenbud of the University of Colorado at Denver startled the world with his disclosures of the peculiar talents of a certain Ted Serios, a Chicago bellhop gifted with psychic photography talents. This man could project images into a camera or television tube, some of which were from the so-called future. Others were from distant places Mr. Serios had never been to. The experiments were undertaken under the most rigid test conditions. They were repeated, which was something the old-line scientists in parapsychology stressed over and over again. Despite the abundant amount of evidence, produced in the glaring limelight of public attention and under strictest scientific test conditions, some of Dr. Eisenbud’s colleagues at the University of Colorado turned away from him whenever he asked them to witness the experiments he was then conducting. So great was the prejudice against anything Eisenbud and his associates might find that might oppose existing concepts that men of science couldn’t bear to find out for themselves. They were afraid they would have to unlearn a great deal. Today, even orthodox scientists are willing to listen more than they used to. There is a greater willingness to evaluate the evidence fairly, and without prejudice, on the part of those who represent the bulk of the scientific establishment. Still, this is a far cry from establishing an actual institute of parapsychology, independent of any existing facilities—something I have been advocating for many years.