Hans Holzer - Real Hauntings: True American Ghost Stories

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1995 by Hans Holzer

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Introduction

What Exactly Is a Ghost?

G reat American Ghost Stories dealt with the famous of the pasthistorical hauntings that I was able to verify and report on. However, there are hundreds of thousands of hauntings all over America involving neither the famous nor great moments in history. These ghostly encounters are experienced by people in all walks of life, and they are just as meaningful as a haunting in the White House.

Those who have read Great American Ghost Stories and Hans Holzers Haunted America will find these additional accounts equally absorbing and thought provoking. It can happen to anyone: Ghosts are, after all, people who had unfinished business on their minds when they passed on.

In Real Hauntings: Americas True Ghost Stories, I have selected cases from many areas of America that seem to be particularly interesting, and also convincing so that those who need persuading will see that life does go on beyond the veil.

When you look through the following pages you need to forget a popular notion about ghoststhat ghosts are dangerous, frightening, and evil. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ghosts are also not figments of the imagination or the product of motion-picture writers. Ghostly experiences are neither supernatural nor unnatural; instead they fit into the general pattern of the universe we live in, even though the majority of conventional scientists have not yet understood exactly what ghosts are. 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 when death occurs, and these exceptional situations create what we popularly call ghosts and haunted houses.

Ever since the dawn of humankind, people have believed in ghosts. The fear of the unknownthe certainty that there is something somewhere out there, bigger than life, beyond its pale, and more powerful than anything walking the earthhas persisted throughout the ages. These fears had their origins in primitive peoples thinking. To them, there were good and evil forces at work in nature, both ruled over by supernatural beings, and to some degree capable of being influenced by the attitudes and prayers of humans. The fear of death was, of course, one of the strongest human emotions. It still is.

Then what are ghostsif indeed there are such things? To the materialist and the professional skepticthat is to say, people who do not wish to be disturbed in their belief that death is the end of life as we know itthe notion of ghosts is unacceptable. No matter how much evidence is presented for the reality of the phenomena, they will argue against it and ascribe it to any of several natural causes. Either delusion or hallucination must be the explanation, or perhaps a mirage, if not outright trickery on the part of parties unknown. Entire professional groups who deal in the manufacture 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 a popular one. However, authentic reports of psychic phenomena along ghostly lines keep coming into reputable report centers such as the various societies for psychic research, or to people, like me, who are parapsychologists.

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

What exactly is a ghost? In terms of psychic research, as I have defined it 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. Ghosts, then, in the overwhelming majority, do not realize that they have died. Those who do know they are dead are confused as to where they are and why they do not feel quite as they used to feel. When death occurs unexpectedly or unacceptably, or when a person has become very attached to a place he or she has lived in for a very long time, sudden, unexpected death may come as a shock. Unwilling to part with the physical world, such human personalities then 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 also reliable reports of the apparitions of the dead having indeed traveled and appeared to several people in various locations. Those, 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 or another place 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 understand fully 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 or she may be too strongly attached to feelings of guilt or revenge to let go. Eventually, though, a combination of informative remarks by the parapsychologist and suggestions to call upon the deceased persons family will pry the ghost loose and send him or her out into the free spirit world.

Ghosts have never harmed anyone except through fear found within the witness. The harm results from the witnesss own doing because of his or her ignorance as to what ghosts represent. In the few cases where ghosts have attacked people of flesh and blood, such as the ghostly abbot of Trondheim, it is simply a matter of mistaken identity, where extreme violence at the time of death has left a strong residue of memory in the individual ghosts. 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 examines all alternate hypotheses one by one. 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 they might, people cant explain away ghosts, nor will ghosts simply disappear. They continue to appear frequently all over the world to young and old, rich and poor, in old houses and new, in airports and streets, and wherever tragedy strikes. For ghosts are indeed nothing more or nothing less than a human being trapped by special circumstances in this world while already being in the next; or, to put it another way, ghosts are human beings whose spirits are unable to leave the earthly surroundings because of unfinished business or emotional entanglements.