Gary 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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Holy Ghosts: Or How a (Not-So) Good Catholic Boy Became a Believer in Things That Go Bump in the Night: summary, description and annotation
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In this extraordinary true story, the haunting of a Long Island household forces a respected writer and editor to reevaluate the mysteries of life and death as he struggles with the frightening truths of his childhood home and his towns past. Growing up in Rockville Centre, Long Island, Gary Jansen never believed in ghosts. His mother - a devoutly Catholic woman with a keen sense for the uncanny - claimed that their family house was haunted. But Jansen never found anything inexplicable in how their doorbell would sometimes ring of its own accord; or in the mysterious sounds of footsteps or breaking glass that occasionally would fill their home; or even in his mothers sometimes unnervingly accurate visions of future events and tragedies. Though he once experienced a supernatural encounter in a Prague church as a young man, Jansen grew up into a rationalist, as well as a noted writer and editor. In 2001, Jansen moved back into the very same house where he had once grown up, to raise a family with his wife. One day in 2007 he encountered a weird physical sensation in his toddler sons bedroom - like an electric hand rubbing the length of my back. I stopped and couldnt move, not because I was stuck but for the simple reason that the feeling was so strange. What the hell is that? Then the pressure seemed to break apart and for a brief moment I felt like I had a million little bugs crawling all over my back and neck. This became the first step in uncovering a frightening, full-blown haunting in his home-a phenomenon which lasted a full year and eventually included unveiling the identities of the spirits who occupied his house; reliving a tragic murder in his hometown; encountering mind-boggling coincidences between local history and episodes in his household; and finally, with the help of Mary Ann Winkowski, the real-life inspiration for TVs The Ghost Whisperer, ridding his house of these uninvited visitors. The events of that year, in which Jansens family was terrified by ghosts in their own home, would forever change how he viewed the mysteries of life and death. Holy Ghosts is not only a gripping true-life ghost story but a wry and touching memoir, as well as a meditation on the relationship between religion and the paranormal, which are often considered at odds with each other, but which the author shows are intimately linked.
Gary Jansen: author's other books
Who wrote Holy Ghosts: Or How a (Not-So) Good Catholic Boy Became a Believer in Things That Go Bump in the Night? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
David A. Adler
Patty Jansen
Jansen
David A. Adler
David A. Adler
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Table of Contents
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.
Shane Leslies Ghost Book
For the thousandth time, theres no such things as ghosts!
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?
At the time, strange occurrences had been happening in my house, a classic haunting, if you willodd noises, strange electrical anomalies, chills, objects moving of their own accordand I didnt know how to answer my own question. When it came to an invisible world of spirits, all I could say was that I believed in God, and I had a difficult enough time believing in him, let alone a supernatural world populated by veil-like apparitions, Hallmark card cherubs, and little red men with pointy goatees and pitchforks. And even if a world like that did exist, what did it matter in my life?
I learned in time that it matters a lot.
THIS IS A BOOK about how I became a believer in ghosts, angels, demons, and the strange and unexplainable things that go bump in the night. As I am a devoted, albeit greatly flawed, Catholic and an editor and writer of religion and spirituality, this belief might not seem like much of a stretch. After all, almost all religions, including Catholicism, in one way or another begin with a supernatural eventIn the beginning God created the universeand their sacred scriptures from the Torah to the New Testament to the Koran to the Upanishads abound with stories of beings from an invisible worldsome good, some badwho either assist or wreak havoc on unsuspecting humans. Whether you are talking about the angels or devilssuch as Michael, Satan, or the demonic shedim that surface in Christianity and Judaism, or the djinn, invisible and dangerous creatures made of smokeless fire in Islam, or the rakshasa, wandering night spirits in Hinduism, or the preta, the lost and hungry ghosts of Buddhismreligion has always talked of an invisible, and influential, world in the midst of our physical existence here on earth. For millennia, the unseen world was a very real world indeed.
But in modern times, where much of tradition has been pushed to the curb by technology, many of these beliefs have fallen by the wayside, considered by many, even within organized religion, as a useless vestige from an unenlightened and unscientific age. In turn, angels, demons, ghosts, and spirits have been relegated to the world of fairy tales, of metaphor, myth, legend, and superstition (and have made excellent fodder for novels, movies, and TV shows). Maybe this is a good thing. Certainly, a belief in witches and devils led to the death of thousands of individuals during the many European inquisitions the Catholic Church organized between the late twelfth century and the early nineteenth century. And to a lesser but still dramatic degree, right here in our backyard, Protestant Puritans executed twenty of their ownnineteen by hanging, one crushed to death by heavy stonesduring the Salem witch trials of 1692-1693. In addition, though its not a new concept, the political and superstitious act of demonizing one culture or society in order to carry out acts of slavery, terrorism, and mass murder, in many ways, defined the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, unfortunately, continues to do so in our new millennium. Its no wonder that religion and a belief in what cant be seen or proven by empirical science continue to bear the blame for many of the worlds problems (though when people ask me how could I be a Catholic with all the atrocities the Vatican has committed over its two-thousand-year existence, I like to remind them that it was three big atheistsHitler, Stalin, and Mao, and not the Popewho executed sixty million people in the duration of a generation). Who needs a ghost story when reality is frightening enough?
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