9
What Are Ghosts?
“Poltergeists have disturbed humans throughout history. An
Ancient Egyptian scribe recorded a violent attack in which
the beds of the household shook and stones showered out
of the air.”
—Alasdair Wickham, British writer and paranormal expert.
Alasdair Wickham,
The Dead Roam the Earth: True Stories of the
Paranormal from Around the World
. New York: Penguin, 2012, p. 93.
“Poltergeist reports are based entirely on eyewitness testi-
mony. The case for their reality as anything other than teen-
age pranks is exceeding poor.”
—Terence Hines, professor of neurology at Pace University, New York City.
Terence Hines,
Pseudoscience and the Paranormal
.
Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2003, p. 98.
For there to be a belief in ghosts, there must first be a be-
lief that in every person a spirit exists in which all the non-
physical characteristics of the person reside: the demeanor,
sense of humor, intelligence, emotions of love and hate, and
so on. When death arrives, and the physical body ceases
to function, the spirit of the person—the ghost—leaves the
body and continues to exist. “The solid, dense energy of our
physical body begins to deteriorate,” says paranormal expert
James Van Praagh. “The light, transparent energy body that
is an exact replica of the physical body emerges and moves
into the spirit worlds.”
5
Popular culture has often portrayed ghosts as appearing as
though they are draped in white bedsheets. Such notions are
