What is a ghost?

As I am the operator and editor of this webpage, it is probably and quite rightly assumed that I DO believe in ghosts. However, having said that, what IS a ghost? Why do they appear? Why do they seem to haunt certain objects or areas? Are hauntings different to what I like to call Haunted Helpers or the spirits of loved ones come to say goodbye?

These words today will attempt to answer some of these questions from my own point of view. The one main constant I have found with ghosts is that they seem to appear where great trauma or a high state of emotion has been reached and then perhaps permanently imprinted on the surrounding area. The Physicist Sir Oliver Lodge proposed in 1908 that hauntings were a “ghostly representation of some long past tragedy” this I would agree with, but have found it can also be associated with great happiness. Generally hauntings and ghosts appear where a suicide, sudden accident, murder, trauma, violence or torture has occurred. Hence, perhaps this is the reason why lunatic asylums, prisons and hospitals can have some serious ghost activity within them.

Have you ever returned to the house of your childhood, or the church you were married in, had your children christened in? Do you have a favourite sentimental spot or a place where a deep, dark memory resides? When you return to that place you experience those emotions again, generally for myself in a wave of memories as you recall whatever the event was that is so significant to you.

I was born very close to the beach and lived all of my childhood on the beach, in and around water. I find it difficult to move away from the beach, my physical self doesn't like it. My husband is an American Mountain Man, he feels the same thing about the Rocky Mountains ; they are ‘home' for him. When I take my own children to the beach now, the smell of the seaweed, the sight of the water and the whole experience instantly transports me back to my childhood. When I return to my old school, there is again a combination of memories - some good, some horrible . These feelings I believe are imprinted upon their surroundings. My mother is a great lover of perfume; I can smell her glorious scent even before I see her . If I visit my nanna's house I know if my mother has been there. I can sense this simply by the essence she had left behind. Ghosts are I believe the essence or the imprinted memory of a period in time. Why that persons memory or scent is left behind can be attributed to a number of factors.

Firstly I believe with the heightened emotional state that person(s) was in at the time of their death, is a vibrational frequency that is different to the vibrational frequency of the physical plane . The vibration of our physical selves is very dense, the emotions that emenate from us are at a different vibrational level again, just as air is different in weight and frequency to rocks or sand. Our Universe is full of living things, each surrounded by its own energy field, some call this the “aura” Every plant, animal, gemstone and human has a distinctive vibrational frequency and different frequencies of energy reflect varying rates of vibration. I f you get a scare or get some very exciting news, your heart palpitates, adrenalin rushes through your system, your body perspires and you “buzz” Your energy and vibrational frequency increases. This I believe can be left behind, attached to things or places, the same way a smell stays behind after a physical person has left.

If you have ever encountered someone who has had some significant news, either good or bad in their life, you can ‘feel' it about them. Some of the information you receive does come from body language, you can see if a person is happy, sad, depressed or scared by body language but I think this body language is only secondary to whatever first ‘impressions' you had about this person, the body language confirms what you have already ‘felt'. Hence this is also the reason when someone insists they are ok, but you sense they are not…..your intuition does not gel with what someone is telling you.

When you die, you cease to exist on this plane but if you died traumatically, the circumstances of your death can still be ‘felt' the impression of that incident is left behind and this is essentially what your basic ghost is, the experience you have with the memory of a significant part of their life.

The ghosts associated with repeat hauntings is a lot like watching Television, the TV can make you cry, laugh or feel great fear but you are not in any real way interacting with the TV you are reacting to whatever it is you are feeling, you certainly feel involved but essentially I believe someone who sees a ghost of this nature is involved in much the same way as a TV experience, viewing something that happened during that ghosts life in history, while they may feel involved and even sometimes the ghost may seem to be aware of their presence, confused even but essentially the same event is repeated or experienced.

Professor Henry Habberley Price of Oxford University probably explained it best when he put forth his “psychic ether” theory. He believed an image born of mental activity (emotion) lives on in another plane or in mulitiple planes even after its creator had died or left. Price said that the ghost was “something intermediate between mind and matter” that exists in a dimension or dimensions unknown to us. It is this ether, not our physical environment that records psychic impressions and plays them back to psychically sensitive people.

Personally I believe that our physical surroundings can and do retain the memories of events. Plants, wood, stone, rocks crystals are great conductors and storers of energy. The practice of psychometry is where a psychic or sensitive person uses a much loved object to read the vibrations of the person who once wore it. Psychic researcher, Eleanor Sidgwick, theorized that objects absorb psychic impressions and then broadcast them back to people who enter the vicinity. Clarity of the resulting apparition or memory depends on the emotional force of the original psychic imprint and the psychic sensitivity of the percipient..

Haunted Australia has a great collection of Haunted things or items that would seem to have absorbed the energy of their previous owners. A strange case of psychometery was documented in 1971 in Spain when Maria Gomez Pereira was startled by what appeared to be a face in cement floor of her kitchen, as the days passed the images became more detailed and news spread quickly of the mysterious face. Alarmed by the face, the Pereiras decided to destroy to it, six days after it appeared. Maria's son Miguel took a sledgehammer to the floor and relaid his mother another kitchen floor. Eerily, within a week another face began to appear in the same place as the old one, this face appeared to take the shape of a middle aged man and was much more detailed. First the eyes appeared, then the nose, lips and chin. As a result of this hundreds of people lined up outside of the house each day. Maria's house quickly earned the title of “the house of the faces” the police had to be called to control the crowds. This time they decided to preserve the image and it was carefully cut from the floor, mounted behind glass and hung beside the Perieras fireplace. Before the floor was repaired this time, investigators excavated the spot this time and found human bones, nine feet underground. The people concluded that the images appearing were of the people who were buried, some locals were unconvinced though as most of the neighbourhood was built over burial grounds.

This to me would seem to be an example of energy imprint, perhaps the people buried underneath Maria's house died in traumatic circumstances. It would appear so as Two weeks after the final floor was laid another image appeared, the third and it was female, this was closely followed by the fourth face again 2 weeks later, this face was surrouned by many other faces, anywhere between 9 – 18. The faces began to fade away over the years but in the 1980s more began to appear. The police, priests, parapsychologists and other researchers have painstakingly investigated the Pereiras house but not been able to explain the enigma of the ‘house of the faces'.

Another attributing factor to the Pereiras house and other buildings and lands that are haunted may be earths ley lines and energy. Eastern philosophy and its teachings fully understand the Chi of the earth, the energy that crosses, intersects and gathers at different energy centres. Stonehenge is a good example of something been built along the energy grids of the earth. If your house, building or town happends to be located over the top of one of these ley lines, I believe the capacity for the energy imprints such as hauntings and ghost activity to be much greater.

Some ghosts interact with you, and differ to the recorded emotion hauntings. My favourite ghost stories are the ones I refer to as “haunted helpers” apparitions who interact with the physical world to help someone. This is a different type of ghost, they do seem to have some sort of understanding of the physical and are more than a memory, they interact and essentially are a being of a different vibrational frequency.

The Overlander Hotel publican tells of one such incident of a ghost who woke him and he felt then appeared to pull and direct him downstairs, when he got downstairs he discovered an ashtray had been emptied into a trash can which had set it alight, luckily he was able to distinguish the fire before any real damage was done.These are the ghost stories I love, a non physical being interacted with a physical being to divert a dangerous situation, presumaeably for himself as well. If the ghost is that attached to the hotel, he would experience in some form protection probably of the place he is attached too.

Another not uncommon story is of combat buddies being warned by their dead friends, sometimes the living soldiers did not realize their friend had died. Only finding out later and realizing that their mate had before passing over taken the time to divert them from the same fate, leading them away from dangerous situations. Why would a ghost do this? This is different to a haunting or recorded memory of a past event or trauma, this is interaction. A ghost is interacting on this plane to change circumstances.

There are a lot of stories like this that appear to be attributed to restless spirits, ghosts who would have justice done before they can literally rest in peace, this I can understand. If I knew I had been betrayed and other people were perhaps in danger, I can imagine that I too would seek to have the guilty person brought to Justice. Fishers Ghost is probably the most famous example of this story, a man he believed to be his friend, essentially stole from him and then murdered him. Fisher appeared at the same spot many times pointing to where he was buried, eventually his murdered body was dug up at the spot he had been pointing too and the murderer bought to justice. You can imagine what Fisher felt just before being murdered, shock, indignation and horror of realizing that someone he thought was friend was going to murder him to cover up the fact that he had stolen from him. Somehow that combination of emotions of betrayal, shock, disappointment and rage, which peaked right before death manifested itself into the same appartition which ultimately brought Fisher Justice. It attached itself to the land, how did an apparition appear from these emotions? Was fisher controlling this somehow?

Ernesto Bozzano was an Italian Psychical researcher who put forth a theory he named the “spiritistic theory” in which he proposed that apparitions are the telepathic messages from their lingering bodiless minds. Perhaps Fisher was able to sort these emotions and consciously direct them into an appartion of himself pointing to the spot of his betrayal. Sometimes a ghost is confused about where he is and can interact on a confused level, scaring involuntarily because of this. This appears to have happened on the Alkimos, A psychic made contact with the ghost of the Alkimos "Henry" and he told her he had his throat slit and did not realize he had died, he stayed attached to the ship and did try and interact with people to ask questions and explain and was confused by the strange sounds he was making due to his slit etheric throat. Those sounds to the people who heard them were very frightening! The ghost though meant no harm, he was just unaware of his circumstances and of what was happening. Sometimes like the ghost of the Alkimos the ghost is able to manipulate physical matter, people who slept aboard the ship heard the kitchen utensils being banged about and things that needed repairing on the ship would somehow be repaired, tools would be moved. The extreme of these cases is called a poltergeist but generally if no ill intent is meant, we on the physical may be witness to a ghost consciously or unconsciously manipulating our physical environment in some way
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Electricity seems to be manipulated the easiest, a lot of hauntings have tales of TV's turning on and off, Lights flicking etc…… contrary to popular belief there is strong evidence that the unconscious mind can move material objects, this is generally known as Psychokinesis or PK. In 1934, a professional gambler walked into the office of a psychical researcher named Dr J.B Rhine and professed to be able to influence the roll of the dice. “Show me” Rhine declared upon which the two crouched on the floor and the gambler proceeded to call the dice with remarkable success. A Russian housewife named Nina Kulagina discovered she could make matchsticks move around simply by staring at them, an American filmmaker and researcher Felicia Parise tried it with little success until one day she was told that her grandmother was dying, this “shock” seemed to affect her abilities in some way and she found after that she could move small objects simply by staring at them, this lends credence to the high emotional energy imprint that I believe is associated with ghosts and why the energy is attached to houses, places or things.

Surprisingly Carl Jung, Freud's best known student arrived at the same conclusion. Interestingly he had a female cousin who at puberty began to go into trances and speak in a foreign language. One day when she was in a trance the family dining room table split in two with a loud crack, there was also an explosion from the sideboard where it was discovered that a bread knife had shattered into pieces. Jung declared that his young cousins unconscious mind was to blame and he called these occurrences “exteriorization phenomena”. Probaly the most fascinating person with exceptional PK abilities was Madame Helena Blavatsky, she was an accomplished psychic, founder of the Theosophical Society and mystic who proved her abilites time and time again to disbelievers

Excepting the criteria of hauntings I call the energy imprint ghost, where a person finds themselves witness to the unfoldment of a scene imprinted upon a certain area or place. When a person dies, obviously they have no physical selves, all they have is some level of consciousness, that we don't fully understand and this differs amongst each haunting, some ghosts seem to realize they are dead and for some reason don't wish to move on, some poor souls don't realize they are dead and seem trapped reliving painful events, these spirits seem to be able to interact with their environment with differing levels of degree, presumeably tapping into the same energy that the gambler, Nina Kulagina and Felicia Parise were all able to control.

Ghosts in a strange kind of way to me, are a comfort. From their presence I draw my own conclusions that skeptics would disagree with that they are evidence of the soul going on, that you do meet your loved ones again and that your loved ones can and do still guide and watch over us.

A lot of people say to me, why doesn't my husband, brother, mother just appear before me and tell me what it's like over there and that they are ok. I heard a story once that I really resonated to unfortuently I can't remember where I read it, but it has always stuck with me. The story is of twins in a mother's womb, as it is time to be born one twin becomes apprehensive, what will it be like when we go to the other side? Will we even exist? Will I ever see you again? Who will we meet over there? The other twin tries to assure his sibling that if he goes first he will contact his brother and let him know all about the other side beforehand.
Obviously once the twin is born, trying to reach back inside the womb and explain what being born is like, what earth looks like and is all about, is very hard to convey, the environments are very different, one twin is still in water, the other twin is breathing air. The already born sibling tries to keep his promise and taps the mother's stomach and whispers through the stomach wall but it is very hard to convey the message he has promised to his brother. The brother still in the womb becomes even more anxious, convinced that the other side is nothing, why has his brother not contacted him? He told him he would reach him and explain what it was all like before he got to the other side what will happen to him? The poor little soul doesn't really understand until he too crosses over to the other side or is born……I think this is what it is like for ghosts and the living, the environments and energy levels are so different that ghosts interact with us as they can but as such we have no real understanding of death or what it's like ……on the other side. We too shall have to wait our turn to fully understand.

Lia Ramses 2005