Ghosts and spirits are real and seen by people around the world.

Ghosts

Ghosts and spirits are around us all the time. We are just not aware of them. Some years ago, a realtor had an open house at an unoccupied Victorian Mansion built in 1861 and now located in the historic district of our town. Before the time of the open house, there had been rumors of paranormal activity within the home. I was just getting started in paranormal investigation, so my son and I decided to do an impromptu investigation. I took along a digital camera and voice recorder to capture some evidence. While we were there, we could take ourselves on a self-guided tour. We explored all the rooms, from the attic to the home’s basement. I did manage to capture an EVP in one of the upstairs bedrooms.

… don’t go …

A while later, we made our way to the long hallway on the main floor. The hallway ran from the enclosed front foyer to the kitchen area at the rear of the house. I stopped to take a photo of the hallway and front foyer. Seconds before I took the photo below, I looked directly at the door and saw only the panes of glass with the darkness of the foyer beyond; nothing out of the ordinary. However, when examining the photo later, there appears to be an apparition behind the foyer door. The ghost seems to be a female, possibly in Victorian-era dress, patiently waiting for someone to admit her to the house. This apparition could have been a residual or intelligent manifestation based on the photograph without further evidence.

The above photo was in ambient light with no flash. A few minutes after I took the photo, my son and I peered through the windows and saw nothing but darkness in the small enclosed foyer.

After this investigation, I began developing a scientific theory for why we could not see the apparition with our eyes, but the camera captured it perfectly. The digital camera sees a slightly broader light spectrum than the human eye. It also merely converts the light energy into electrical energy, and then digital data is stored in memory to be displayed as an image later. The human visualization of what we see is a more complicated two-step process. We see with our eyes, but we perceive or comprehend what we see with the visual cortex of our brain. In the Illusion of Reality post, we learned that the sole purpose of the conscious mind is to identify incoming information with the five senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. It is continuously perceiving and sorting what is happening around us and deciding what is significant to us and what is not. For most people, their conscious mind may have decided that seeing ghosts and spirits is insignificant. Therefore, our eyes still see them, but we do not perceive them visually.

Why is it that some people can see and hear ghosts while the majority of us cannot? It is all about our psychic senses. Our psychic senses are a natural extension of our five ordinary senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. The following is a brief description of the seven psychic senses:

Clairvoyance (Sight) is the ability to see anything not physically present in objective space, such as objects, animals, or people. The image may occur in the mind’s eye, or you may see the bodily form as if the spirit is physically present.
Clairaudience (Hearing) is the ability to hear the voices or thoughts of spirits.
Clairalience (Smell) is the ability to smell a spirit. For example, a medium may smell the tobacco smoke of a person who smoked during life.
Clairsentience (Touch) is the ability to feel sensations a spirit instills.
Clairgustance (Taste) is the ability to receive taste impressions from a spirit.
Clairsentience (Empathy) is the ability to feel a person’s condition or ailments before death.
Claircognizance (Knowing) is the ability to know something without receiving it through normal senses. It is a feeling of just knowing. For example, you may know who is on the phone before you answer it or know personal things about a person you just met. You may have a good or bad feeling about a place or a person.

Where our ordinary five senses are part of our conscious mind, our psychic senses are part of our subconscious mind. To some degree, everyone has psychic senses. There is also relatively strong evidence that we all may be born with them since many young children seem to perceive and communicate with spirits or what many people think of as imaginary friends. Evidence suggests that these imaginary friends may be full-body apparitions in human form. In most cases, these children perceive and communicate with deceased loved ones. It is only natural that deceased grandparents would want to interact with their new grandchildren. Usually, at around age five, this ability diminishes in most children for several reasons. Many children are discouraged from talking about such things by family members, telling them that it is only in their imagination; the imagination is part of the subconscious. Even without discouragement, as a child’s brain continues to develop, it appears that the ability to see and hear ghosts naturally disappears anywhere between the ages of five and eleven years old. However, in some instances, children keep their ability to communicate with spirits. They can continue expanding their abilities with proper mentoring as they grow into adults.

The inability of the majority of people to see ghosts and spirits may be a natural defense mechanism. Throughout history, most adults have had enough to deal with in their daily life in the physical world without dealing with all the activity in the spirit realm, too. Psychic mediums have the advantage that they can turn off their psychic sense when they don’t want a connection with the spirit realm. But what do ordinary people experience when they encounter ghosts and spirits? One way a person can encounter a ghost is by walking through the unseen ghost or having the ghost walk through them. The effect of this encounter is an unexpected, profound chill and tingling with goosebumps lasting less than a second. We can not see these ghosts; they evidently cannot see us. Many transient spirits are roaming around, so this type of encounter can happen anywhere.

The next type of encounter usually happens in a location experiencing intense paranormal activity. Ghosts and spirits in this location may appear as semitransparent full-bodied or partial-bodied apparitions, shadow figures, or light or dark smoky mists. Depending on the spirit’s intent, they may or may not interact with the living. If this is an intelligent haunting, people may also sense cold spots in the area of the manifestation. If there are no cold spots, and the activity repeats at a specific time of the day, month, or year, this may indicate a residual haunting.

The next type of encounter is seeing a full-bodied apparition that appears to be a living person. This spirit wants to be seen and interact with the living. Ghosts have some control over whether or not they wish to be observed by the living. If a ghost wants to appear, they can appear to anyone. Ghosts can manifest themselves to such a degree that they appear as ordinary living beings. As mentioned in Disembodied Ghost Voices, when a person passes, they retain their personality and all the memories of their entire life. They remember everything in minute detail about their physical body, its appearance over time, and all the clothes they wore during their lifetime. When an entity begins to manifest, it uses the heat energy from the air in the room, zero-point energy, and its memory to create a realistic and animated holographic manifestation of itself as it wants to appear to observers. These entities sometimes communicate messages to the living and then vanish.

The above information describes some of the general benign paranormal activity that one may encounter in a haunted location. However, keep in mind that not all paranormal activity is harmless. The behavior of ghosts and spirits in a haunted place will reflect the personality of their soul. Their behavior can range anywhere from benevolent to dangerously malicious. If a person was evil when they died, their spirit tends to continue their evil ways in the afterlife. They may even align themselves with other evil entities that have never walked this earth as human beings. They do this to cause chaos, mental and physical harm to the living, and to feed on the generated negative energy. When preparing to visit a haunted location, it is wise to know the history of the location and the area around it. Be cautious and protect yourself in unfamiliar locations.

On a lighter note, if a person was kind, mischievous, or a jokester when they were alive, they tend to be the same in the afterlife. They may do any number of things to attract your attention, such as moving objects or touching you. Ghosts have much to say, and most will communicate with us. If a psychic medium is unavailable, high-tech ghost-hunting equipment can help communicate with ghosts and spirits.

Revised 11-5-2023