J. Allan Danelek - The Case for Ghosts: An Objective Look at the Paranormal

About the Author

A native of Minnesota but a resident of Colorado since 1969, Jeffs life has been a journey that has taken him down many different paths. Besides writing, his hobbies include reading, art, politics and political history, world and military history, religion and spirituality, numismatics (coin collecting), paleontology, astronomy (and science in general), and Fortean subjects such as Bigfoot, UFOs, and things that go bump in the night. His personal philosophy is that life is about learning and growing, both intellectually and spiritually, and that is the perspective from which he approaches each project he undertakes. Currently Jeff resides in Lakewood, CO, with his wife, Carol, and their two sons.

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

The Case for Ghosts: An Objective Look at the Paranormal 2006 by J. Allan Danelek.

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First e-book edition 2010

E-book ISBN: 9780738725543

Book design by Steffani Sawyer

Cover design by Gavin Dayton Duffy

Editing by Jane Hilken

Interior photographs property of author

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Contents

part one / Laying the Groundwork

chapter one /

chapter two /

chapter three /

chapter four /

chapter f ive /

chapter six /

part two / Ghost Hunting 101

c hapter seven /

part three / Examining the Dark Side of Ghosts

chapter eight /

chapter nine /

chapter ten /

chapter eleven /

part four / Communicating with the Spirit Realm

chapter twelve /

chapter thirteen /

I would like to thank Mr. Bryan Bonner at the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Society for his encouragement and assistance in going through this material and pointing out its many potential problems, possible pitfalls, and occasional bouts of just plain nonsense. Such oversights have since been corrected or otherwise taken into account, thus making this a better book than it would have been otherwise. If ghosts are ever to be proven to be a fact, it will be through the tireless efforts of dedicated and clever skeptics like himself, who have made it their lifes passion to keep both believers and debunkers alike on their collective toes.

I also would like to thank my editor and all the staff at Llewellyn Publishing for their encouragement and ongoing enthusiasm for my work. It is impossible to speak to the human condition without the proper stage, and Llewellyn and the handful of publishers out there courageous enough to let people like myself take that stage are a true godsend.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didnt thank my wife Carol for her constant encouragement and loving support in all my writing projects, for I doubt if I could achieve much of anything without her. It just goes to prove the old adage that if one were to scratch a writer worth his or her salt, one will invariably find a supportive life partner and soul mate lying just beneath the surface. Thanks to all.

J. Allan Danelek

October, 2005

Marleys Ghost: You dont believe in me.

Scrooge: I dont.

Marleys Ghost: What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?

Scrooge: I dont know.

Marleys Ghost: Why do you doubt your senses?

Scrooge: Because a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. Theres more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

Do you believe in ghosts? According to a Harris poll conducted in January, 2003, over half of the adult population of the United States, including nearly sixty-five percent of adults under the age of twenty-seven, do. Clearly, the belief that the human soul not only survives death but is capable of manifesting itself to the still-living not only has held steady for decades, but even seems to be on the upswing.

But why should this be? Why should otherwise level-headed men and women come to imagine there exists something that is neither visible to the naked eye nor discernible to our other senses, yet is as real and solid as any material object? Is the belief in ghosts nothing more than culturally influenced superstition that serves only to reflect our fears about our own mortality, or could there be something more to it?

No doubt ghosts do reflect some of our concerns about what happens to us after we die. After all, if there are ghosts, then it demonstrates that the human personality does survive death, giving all of us the hope of immortality. As such, even while they frequently terrify us, it seems we need ghosts, if only for our own personal sense of cosmic significance.

But if the belief in ghosts were nothing more than a byproduct of mankinds fear of death and its ongoing quest for immortality, it would be easy to dismiss the entire subject as so much superstitious nonsense and move on, but even in our supposedly scientific age the subject continues to hold sway over us. It seems we simply cannot shake the notion that the belief in ghosts has more to say to us than that we live on after death.

Ghosts appear to be something we believe not so much on a rational, empirical level, but on an intuitive or even emotional level. Like the belief in God, they are something we feel to be true even though few of us have ever had a genuine paranormal experience. They speak to us of the mysteries of the universe and reinforce our inherent beliefs that there is much more to the cosmos than what tiny bit we can see from our limited vantage point. Thats why we believe in them; they provide us a glimpse into as well as the promise of eternity.

But is there room for ghosts in our supposedly materialistic, rationalistic world? Can the paranormal fit into this great mystery we call life, or must we jettison science and the realm of empirical knowledge in order to consider the idea?

Perhaps not. The universe is increasingly demonstrating itself to be a far more complex, mysterious, and wonderful place than we ever imagined. Whereas once we assumed we had a good understanding of what constituted reality, as we move into the twenty-first century, the boundaries of what was once considered empirical truth are being challenged all the time. Quantum physics, for one, continues to demonstrate on an almost daily basis that we are still in our infancy in terms of understanding the very nature of time and matter itself, making it easier than ever before to find room for the paranormal, the mysterious, and the apparently impossible to coexist alongside the proven, the testable, and the empirical.