Jansen - Holy ghosts: or, how a (not so) good catholic boy became a believer in things that go bump in the night

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JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN
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Copyright 2010 by Gary Jansen

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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 housesNew 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
133.129747245dc22 2010023072

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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
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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.

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 mothers 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 startlingand, it turns out, unmemorableI didnt 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 couldnt hear my heart beating. I couldnt hear the acids in my stomach breaking down the food that was in there. I couldnt even hear my own breathing. I wasnt dead. This wasnt 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 were 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 didnt 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 couldnt 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: couldnt 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 existencea world that is mostly quiet (unless its out of balance), acts by its own rules, and is just as influential and important in our daily lives as our own bodies are?