Introduction to Paranormal 102

These articles serve as a primer to supposed esoteric happenings and how they appear, and are not meant to be my own personal views on the subject.

I present the evidence I’ve seen, as I’ve seen it, and much of the content of these articles is about the way things are perceived by the public, and are anthropological observations.

– Emily

GHOSTS 102

Written by Emily Tabone. © July 2019

What is a ghost?
Compression artefacts and other blemishes
Ghosts of ancient history
Ghosts of The Renaissance
Spiritualism
Current folklore
Ghosts in the Philippines
Ghosts in Thailand
Aokigahara
The witching hour
Afterlife implications
Bibliography

I. WHAT IS A GHOST?

In folklore, a ghost (sometimes known as an apparition, haunt, phantom, poltergeist, shade, spectre, spirit, spook, or wraith) is the soul or spirit of a dead person or animal that can appear to the living.¹

All ghosts are spirits, but not all spirits are ghosts. The collective “spirits” also includes angels, elemental spirits (nymphs), souls, and anything else that exists as just its base self, without a body attached.

This is the definition for “ghost” that I will be using throughout this essay.

In the field of paranormal research, a “ghost” is a broad term used for any of these happenings. To clarify, a spirit is only a ghost when it is a dead person or animal, and when it appears in the three dimensional space (i.e. when it appears to the living). The one exception to this rule is that any time something manifests in such a way, it is considered a ghost.

APPARITION, noun. A ghost, or ghost-like image, of a person.

Oxford Dictionary (web version)

When a paranormal researcher collates data about apparitions, they are divided into four classes. These classes are usually used for electronic voice phenomena, but can be translated into other mediums.

Class A: Class A phenomena is a full bodied, very visible apparition; one where you would not dispute the validity of what your senses are showing you. In the movie Ghost (1990), the way the psychic (Oprah Winfrey’s character) can hear Sam’s voice clearly is an example of a class A phenomena in film.

Class B: A class B encounter is similar to class A, but much more indirect. This class includes hearing vocal sounds (such as laughter or coughing), quick sightings in your peripheral vision. If you think (rather than know) that you’ve seen a ghost, it’s probably class B phenomena.

Class C: The best way to describe class C encounters is lingering evidence, or “residue”. You likely won’t experience a class C encounter first-hand, as this class of phenomena is usually comprised of media files (audio, video, photographs) that need to be run through a filter to get any meaningful data.

Class C phenomena also include strange, seemingly mundane events, such as the borrowers. “The borrowers” is a word that was coined by my (skeptic) grandfather, and popularised by him and my auntie (his sister in law) before I ever got to use the term. The Borrowers (1997) is a fantasy film about little people (four inches tall or so) who live in the walls, sort of like cartoon mice. They “borrow” things from the homeowners just to survive.

The borrowers in the sense of the film don’t exist, but I use the term to describe the type of phenomena where your car keys (or some other mundane item) go missing, or turn up in an irregular place.

In my home, the borrowers take food. To date, we’ve had a carton of eggs, and two 1kg bags of flour disappear, all on separate occasions. It’s always something we’ve just brought home in the shopping, that we definitely had on the way home, to seemingly disappear from the bag from the time we put it down on the counter, to the time we go to take it out of the bag. I also have conveniently found a can of my favourite soft drink in my handbag on several occasions, where I had definitely not bought any for over a week.

Class D: Class D encounters and evidence are all types of unrecognisable fragments of images (visual, or on media). This class is most often used for media containing fragments of voice, or artifacting on a video, that may be evidence but isn’t clear enough to say for sure.

Remember that ghosts don’t exist in the third dimension, so when you see them it’s basically a holographic transmission. Sometimes the connection is poor, and this phrase literally explains some instances of class D media evidence, but also (figuratively) explains class D encounters.

II. COMPRESSION ARTIFACTS & OTHER BLEMISHES

Ghosts and spirits have been known to appear in all forms of media. Sometimes, they seem to want to be known and do it knowingly, other times it appears that we’ve, quite literally, “caught” a ghost on camera.

In the science of photography and film making, there are a lot of blemishes that can reduce quality, or even spoil an image. I’ll outline some of the common blemishes mistaken for ghosts below.

Orbs are common phenomena, with a hot period during the early days of the digital camera. Because of the way light bounces off dust, it’s quite easy to capture orbs (sometimes even hundreds in one image) if you take photos inside old, dusty houses with the flash on (think: grandma’s attic). The science of reflection, refraction, and more specifically camera focus the magnification properties of light, really come into play when capturing orbs.

Another phenomena, which appears dissimilar to orbs but is actually quite similar, scientifically, is rods. These long rods, usually white, in general the same colours and textures as orbs, appear as the result of the flash or other harsh background light reflecting off a hair or other fibres. Sometimes these fibres can be microscopic (have you ever analysed the pilling on clothes?).

We think our environment is clean, but it is actually quite filthy. There are millions of small particles, other than oxygen and nitrogen that comprise “air”, dispersed in your environment, and these things sometimes reflect light. The smallest particle can reflect the biggest light back at the camera.

One phenomena that is quite easy to debunk (even orbs are more likely to be a ghost than this) is lens flare. This comes back as damage to the quality of the image, usually either a dark circle “burn” (like a reverse vignette image filter), or white streaks that look like sun rays.

Less than 1% of images that contain any sort of “ghostly” residue turn out to be actual ghosts.

III. GHOSTS OF ANCIENT HISTORY

In ancient cultures such as Mesopotamia, ancient Greece, and ancient Egypt, ghosts were said to be created at the time of death to allow the loving person to continue on. The deceased would have some sort of journey into the afterlife, and take up some sort of otherworldly vocation.

There are a heap of references to ghosts in the Bible; two of such books that include references to ghosts are Deuteronomy, and I Samuel, in which King Saul has a witch summon the ghost of Samuel².

The Egyptian Book of the Dead is a compiled reference of the constantly changing beliefs, and some of the stories, of the ancient Egyptian people.

Ghosts in ancient Greece were described in Homer’s works The Odyssey and The Iliad. The ancient Greek beliefs were described by these works. The ghosts are described as wavering, gibbering, whining vapours.

In the first century, the writer Plutarch described the haunting of the Charonaea baths. The ghost of a deceased man had been groaning so loudly that the townspeople boarded up the baths. There was a general fear of ghosts in ancient Rome, where the idea that someone could create a curse to force a ghost to haunt you being the norm.

By the 5th century, ghosts were seen as meddling and mean spirited, so the ancient Greeks held annual festivals to keep them at bay. These festivals were often fun atmospheres, where the high spirits and loud partying were seen as warding against ghosts.

Such ceremonies weren’t restricted to festivals, however. Sporting events were held, because the atmosphere is the same as a festival. Two such events were the Panathenaea, a series of games in devotion to the goddess Athena. Another was the Olympic Games which were held in honour of Zeus. Neither unlike today’s Olympic Games, aside from the fact that all the participants were men, and they all participated naked aside from their protective gear.

In the 5^th century Aeschylus play Oresteia, the ghost of Clytemnestra is one of the first ghosts to appear in fiction.

Ancient Greek lawyer Plimy the Younger describes the haunting of stoic Athenodorus, who intentionally set up his office in a room where an apparition was known to appear, and waited out the ghost. Late one night, Athenodorus was disturbed by a ghost bound in chains, whom he followed outside. The ghost indicated to a spot on the ground, and Athenodorus eventually excavated, supposedly revealing the skeleton of the deceased.

In the Gospel of Luke, Luke says that Jesus is forced to convince his disciples that he is not a ghost, showing us that ghosts were in popular culture even during the time of Jesus.

The 9^th century Arabian Nights explicitly references ghosts and haunted houses⁴.

In the middle ages, ghosts were much more corporeal than ever before. Reports include accounts of knights being challenged to duels by phantom knights, and priests having to physically restrain ghosts to retrieve confessions, allowing the ghost to continue onto the afterlife.

IV. GHOSTS OF THE RENAISSANCE

The Renaissance served as a time of Christian superstition, but it was also a time of occult revival.

During the Renaissance, ghosts were essentially seen as Dickensian (Athenodorian?), complete with sheets, rattling chains, and all.

There were a few reasons for a ghost to exist, according to these superstitions, and these reasons serve as the basis of today’s ghost folklore.

A ghost was considered to have been one or a combination of the following things⁵:

An omen of the future.
The deceased spirit of a human, who has not passed on due to unfinished business.
A deceased person allowed to continue on earth with “divine” permission.
A demon (or an angel) disguised as the deceased loved ones, to relatives who have succeeded them, to be tempted into damnation.

Renaissance scientists, such as physician Thomas Erastus, began publishing papers about the occult, and there were many backlash papers by clergymen to rebuke these types of claims.

There were two popular ballads (spoken word story of the era) by Francis James Child about ghosts; one is called Sweet William’s Ghost (circa 1740), which tells the story of a deceased young man returning to his fiancée with a dilemma: he must marry her, or risk eternal damnation. But of course, he cannot marry her due to being deceased. This type of story reflects a common superstition of the era, where deceased spouses would come back to haunt those who tried to move on.

Song writers such as Child sometimes collected these songs from older sources (folktales), and one such was Child’s The Unquiet Grave (circa 1868), about a young man who prevents his lover from moving on because he mourns her death so intensely.

There are folktales such as The Bird Grip collected by Andrew Lang in his The Pink Fairy Book (circa 1990), from Sweden. Another is Fair Brow from Italy, which was collected by Italo Calvino included in his Italian Folk Tales (1956), about a young man enlisting the help of friends to organise the funeral of the young man. The twist of the tale is that the young man turns out to be the deceased person with unfinished business (his funeral).

V. SPIRITUALISM

Spiritualism was a brief system founded in New York in the 1840s, based on the teachings of Franz Mesmer (this psychologist is the namesake of the word “mesmerised”⁶), and Emmanuel Swedenborg⁷.

These people were Christians who engaged in séances and attempted communication with spirits. They felt that New York was a special environment, safe from God, so it was ok to practice these kinds of activities.

Many spiritualist mediums were suspected of, and one of the early spiritualists did actually admit to faking the “rapping” noises (knocks), table tilting, and other phenomena that occurred in session⁸, but many researchers have had success using the same techniques as spiritualists.

VI. CURRENT FOLKLORE

In recent years, skepticism surrounding ghosts and other paranormal phenomena might seem to be at an all-time high, if the media is to be believed.

However, the mass media has been known to lie⁹. It is estimated that over 5 billion people own a mobile phone, and over half of those people own smart phones¹⁰. That’s a lot of people; enough to create thousands (maybe even millions) of independent media platforms. Hundreds of thousands of these are at your fingertips when you enter a search in Google. You get the picture.

Because of this, it’s much easier to make “converts”. Sometimes people convert themselves, with search terms like “real ghost stories”, usually searched out of pure curiosity. The evidence is so easy to find now.

And with ghosts interacting with humans every day, of course we are out there, taking about our experiences on the internet. Whereas in Francis James Child’s day, the people would gather around bards like Child to listen to songs inspired by true stories they’d heard whilst travelling, we now talk online about our crazy-but-true stories. You only have to look at Reddit to see how many people are talking about ghosts.

The way ghosts are presented in modern folklore is, often, similar to some of the (less outlandish) ghost stories of the past. Scientists say that our perception of the supernatural changes over time because of human psychology: society is dynamic; therefore what we fear is dynamic.

fig6

What remains are things like:

Psychics who speak to the dead, live on TV.
Haunted houses, complete with spiritualist-style rapping, phantom footsteps, apparitions of varying descriptions, etc. There hundreds of other signs that may occur, more than I can list in this essay.
Poltergeists, demons, and other entities can often be mistaken for ghosts of the dead. These entities are only colloquially called ghosts.
Paranormal researchers, who are cutting edge scientists, engineers, and writers who use their special talent to “research” ghosts and the afterlife.
Electronic Voice Phenomena the phenomena where a ghostly voice is caught on tape. Things commonly referred to by this term are audio recordings and other media, either accidentally, or deliberately used to “record” ghosts by paranormal researchers.

The belief is that all sound and light travels on a specific wavelength (in other words everything can be detected somehow), so perhaps the right frequency or medium could capture definitive proof of ghosts. It is a misnomer to refer to video communication (or, indeed, any type of media other than audio) as EVP; this is why we usually refer to this kind of activity as instrumental trans-communication).

VII. GHOSTS IN THE PHILIPPINES

Many Asian countries share intense superstition about ghosts and spirits, but they all have their own regional nuances. The people of the Philippines have their own superstitions surrounding paranormal phenomena, and a heap of creepy urban legends.

These stories and beliefs have lost a bit of traction with the younger generation, but there is still a greater degree of superstition among the general population there than there is in the general population of, for example, Australia.

In Filipino culture, ghosts tend to exist because of unfinished business. If there’s no unfinished business (or, when they complete their business), they can go into the light.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of urban legends featuring ghosts. The Headless Priest is a wartime story from a time when they beheaded many, many priests. The priest is said to haunted cemeteries, coming out at night to wander around carrying his own severed head.

The White Lady is outlined below, and the Phantom Hitchhiker is a similar story to the White Lady, where a hitchhiker leaves behind something relatively mundane (a photograph, his keys, etc), but the hitchhiker is nowhere to be found.

In some versions, when the driver takes the returned item like a wallet to the address, it’s discovered that the hitchhiker is actually the ghost of a person who passed away earlier that day, or that today is some significant anniversary of his death.

The Filipino Film industry has produced many other good horror films. Filipino cinema horror is quite disturbing and brutal compared to most of Hollywood’s horror films, due to the type of fear these Filipino stories are based on.

VIII. GHOSTS IN THAILAND

In modern culture, but especially Thailand, ghosts are said to “haunt” locations. These locations aren’t limited to houses, however. One such location is Sathorn Unique Tower.

Sathorn Unique Tower was the brainchild of Rangsam Torsuwan, and began construction in 1990 as a massive 600 apartment condominium tower in the heart of Bangkok, designed to capitalise on the growing population of Thailand.

“CONDO KING ARRESTED IN SUPREME COURT

ASSASSINATION CASE” read the 1993 headline.

Construction was halted in 1993, at 49 incomplete storeys, when the Torsuwan was arrested for the attempted assassination of the then Supreme Court President, Praman Chansue.

The accused was found guilty in 2008 after appearing before the judge 461 times (this number actually received human rights attention¹¹), and received 25 years in prison. He was acquitted 2010¹².

This glaring red mark on the building’s record combined with the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, drove investors away, and construction of the Sathorn Unique Tower was completely abandoned.

These days, the downtown Bangkok apartment building stands empty, and alone. The “Ghost Tower” has private security, but people still manage to make their way inside for “urban exploration” and ghost hunting¹³.

In 2014, a man was found hanged on the 49^th floor. This event was ruled a suicide, but that doesn’t stop the rumours of ghosts being seen there.

In fact, this ruling of a suicide completes most people’s logic about hauntings: sometimes, ghosts seem to influence people without the people even realising.

Another superstition regarding ghosts from around the world is haunted dolls and objects.

fig9

In Thailand, there is a growing culture of Luk Thep, (meaning “child angels”). Not unlike the western Reborn Doll culture aside from the religious aspects, these dolls are cared for like real children to urge the spirit inside to bring good luck to the “parent”.

The revival of Luk Thep doll culture was headed by doll maker, Mae Ning, who is also attached to the Thai religion Kuman Thong, which believes in haunted dolls and objects.

There is a widespread belief in many other countries that ghosts can be “appeased” with prayer, food, or gifts. In Thailand, this type of offering is done via a Lak Mueang, or City Pillar Shrine.

Many, but not all, cities have one. The bigger, more extravagant the shrine, the better the luck and protection generated.

Lak Mueang Shrines are designed to be a beautiful home for the spirits that live inside, almost like a palace for a king. According to legend, the Bangkok city pillar shrine (and possibly others) has the bodies of four human sacrifices buried beneath it.¹⁴

XI. AOKIGAHAHARA

We’ve spoken about how a ghost can haunt a specific, definable location, but we haven’t talked about ghosts that “haunt” an outside area.

One such location is Aokigahara, or the “Suicide Forest”, in Japan. Whilst some Japanese legends are not known around the world, Aokigahara has received such attention due to the sheer number of people who have died there, that there was recently a Hollywood movie released about it called The Forest (2016).

Japan has an incredibly high suicide rate. In 2016, suicide had reached an all-time low of 21,000 in the year, thanks to efforts to increase mental health awareness.

The Aokigahara forest lives in the shadow of Mt Fuji, and it is such a lush area due to eruptions leaving the soil extremely fertile. In 2010, the police recorded over 200 people having attempted suicide in the forest, and found 54 people who had succeeded.

It is difficult to find numbers, as the locals don’t like the suicide attribution, but every year, at least those numbers seem to be found, and in 2003, 103 people were found dead.

There haven’t been any formal studies done into why people attempt suicide at Aokigahara. There is evidence that people go there because it is symbolic, but reports from people who have returned tell us another story: that the forest itself has some sort of mystical atmosphere.

There is now a warning sign outside the forest due to the overwhelming number of suicides there.

There are many more examples of ghosts roaming an area; in Australia, there are countless reports of aborigine ghosts that seem to haunt more than one house in an area. These people were nomads, so when they haunt their “house”, it is actually a vast area. Any subdivided property is also likely to have reports of spirits seen in multiple buildings.

X. A MODERN GHOST STORY: THE WHITE LADY

There are many types of ghosts that are common to encounter; and there are common themes to most encounters with ghosts. I won’t be able to list them all, but I will set out some (more) examples.

The White Lady, also known as The Woman in White, is probably the most famous ghost in the world, second only to Casper. She is associated with a worldwide urban legend, which is always very similar to the following story:

Whilst driving late at night, you may see a young woman in a white dress on the side of the road, or perhaps in your way on the road. In some versions, it is the dead of winter, or she is soaking wet, which makes her scant garb even more striking. She usually appears helpless in some way, which prompts you to give her a lift. She gives you directions to her home, often close by to the location you found her.

There are two versions of this story from here on; I think the second one is more fun.

When you arrive at the young woman’s home, it is dilapidated, and clearly abandoned. When you look to her for answers, she is gone. She’s vanished from your passenger seat, into thin air.

When you arrive at the young woman’s home, you get out if the car to assist her to the door, and explain the situation to her husband/parents/etc that she claims is waiting for her. When the door is answered and you tell the opens that you gave their relative (the White Lady) a lift, the relative tells you that the white lady passed away on that same stretch of road many years ago.

Brazilian researcher Monteiro Lobato proposes that the White Lady comes from honour killings by their husbands. Another story from Brazil tells the tale of a young, white woman starved to death by her husband because he suspected her affair with a black slave.¹⁷

The White Lady is also seen at the Berliner Schloss (the German royal palace, still standing today) many times, including a hot period of 165 years between 1625 and 1790.

In Montmorency Falls, Canada, there is a White Lady said to be the spirit of a young Canadienne, whose tragic end was met when she threw herself into the rapids after her husband was killed in the Battle of Beauport (1759).

There are two worldly examples from a country close to my heart (Malta is my ancestral home). One is the White Lady of Verdala Castle, in the Buskett Gardens of Rabat, Malta. The other is the White Lady of Mdina. The Verdala ghost is purported to be the spirit of a young woman whose father arranged a marriage with a man she did not love, and she is said to have thrown herself off the castle walls on her wedding day.

The White Lady of Mdina is a legend based on the story of a young woman who was forced to marry a man other than her lover, and, in a fit of passion, the lover killed the woman. The White Lady of Mdina is said to appear around 8 PM (it might seem cliché, but the veil is thinner at night) to young boys and elderly men. She urges them to “find another” (a wife), or to join her shadow. She seems to prey particularly on these elderly men.

The Grudge (Ju-On) is a horror franchise about the White Lady, and there is a particularly good Pinoy film called White Lady (2006). There’s also a new 2019 film in The Conjuring franchise about the La Llorona encounters.

The White Lady was featured in an episode of the TV show Supernatural (2005). In their first season, the Winchesters primarily dealt with paranormal phenomena and urban legends like this.

These worldwide appearances of the White Lady, and appearances of ghosts in general, seem to be in a lull. The skeptic explanation for the lull is that people are far less superstitious (read: gullible) now, so they don’t buy into that nonsense.

But the far better explanation seems to be twofold, and relies on the same premise as the skeptic explanation: society itself is more skeptical.

Whilst paranormal researchers encounter spirits daily because we’re looking, the layman does not know what to look for, and likely does not believe, and therefore never notices spirits, or the layman DOES notice the spirit, and does not report it because society generally does not believe in ghosts or hauntings.

The layman may report his findings to family and friends, who respond in awe, but the story is spread as an urban legend because most don’t believe in ghosts.

XI. THE WITCHING HOUR

The witching hour is a Christian superstition from the western world (primarily America and Europe), said to be either midnight, or 3 AM (i.e. 3 AM – 4AM). During this time, “witches” are said to roam, and magic is afoot.

According to researcher Kelly McClure, this superstition seems to be due to the absence of canonical (clergy) prayers. The fears are that good Christians are warding off evil just by existing and doing their daily Christian rituals – so what happens at night when the rituals cease?

Now, time zones contradict this theory of Christian rituals ever truly “ceasing” for any period of time, not to mention the fact that some monasteries have 24/7 prayer schedules. But these Christians HAVE correctly identified one thing: paranormal activity seems to increase at night time.

In real terms, the witching hour is the time when the veil is thinner, and we do indeed have more experiences at night. The air is environment is different; one doesn’t need psychic training to feel the strange vibe when it’s night time.

The phrase “witching hour” is used to reference any night time paranormal activity. If the specific hours of midnight, or 3 AM -4 AM are referenced, this is definitely witching hour phenomenon. It is also a time when real witches (or anyone doing introspective work) may choose to work, as meditations and vision work may be easier at this time.

While we say “the veil is thinner”, there is no literal veil. These are dimensional barriers, rather than a simple cloth, so, we don’t know for sure why there appears to be more paranormal activity at night. There are several factors involved, and several nuanced explanations, as follows:

There is a psychological aspect to night time; the still night air has a very humbling affect on some people, sometimes to the point of fear due to a perceived sense of over vulnerability.

You might think only people with severe mental illness suffer from a disconnect from reality, but studies show that this is not the case.

There have been multiple studies done on the memory loss in people who have experience traumatic events, particularly veterans. The results of a survey with 724 randomly selected participants (Brown University, Elliot, 1997¹³) were that you don’t have to have diagnosable PTSD or personality disorders to experience dissociative episodes and memory loss; you just need to experience severe stress.

The severity at which point one experiences these symptoms varies, but one can be sure that we are more likely to experience false memories, and basic hallucinations such as when you think you see something out of the corner of our eyes, as our stress and anxiety levels rise. Something as simple as a few days or weeks being overworked can lead to a whole host of problems such as this, not to mention many physical illnesses.

However, evidence shows that not all encounters with ghosts and spirits can be explained by episodes of mental illness, and the ease and likelihood of encountering ghosts or spirits does, indeed, increase at night.

There may not be a literal veil, but spirits find it easier to interact between dimensions at night. I like to reference studies, but we have actually had spirits convey that they definitely find this to be case, in messages (through ITC such as channelling, automatic writing, and ghost box sessions), and the effect is confirmed by the living who travel between worlds, such as astral travellers.

fig15 (1)

The previous paragraph is about cutting edge science, and considered pseudoscience by many due to the lack of formal studies on the field. The formal studies are few, but there are thousands of other papers from non-university researchers about paranormal investigation from the mid 19^th century onwards, which will be outlined in a further paper.

This is not to say that it isn’t common to encounter a ghost during the day: this phenomena is not the only active time, but rather a more active time.

XII. AFTERLIFE IMPLICATIONS

Whilst mainstream science does not acknowledge the existence of ghosts, there are an exponentially increasing number of independent researchers (and a large number of actual scientists) in the field. Starting in the early 1990s, psychics who claimed to have spoken with the dead became exceedingly popular.

These psychics have been collaborating with independent researchers ever since, to explain what they’ve seen and been told. The general consensus is that these afterlife/“other” worlds exist in the space between atoms. Our atoms exist in only a minute fraction of space, so there is plenty of room for other worlds.¹⁷

fig16

Essentially, what has been told to these researchers and psychics by people from these other worlds (usually the deceased, but not always), is that humans and animals are essentially ghosts driving a human body. How metal is that?!

Jokes aside, the reason these psychics can communicate with these other worlds is that they are tapping into the same kind of energy that the spirits use. They’re scaling back their bodies, and looking into the beyond, usually during meditation, but some people are constantly “open”, which can wreck havoc on their lives.

We know that there are no rules over there. Just like in your meditations when you can create your own world, so you can in the afterlife if you have no human brain to limit your consciousness (i.e. being dead, this is also the same principle used by witches and other ”magic” users).

Most accounts of death that spirits recall describe going into a big light. We’re not entirely sure what the light is (maybe we’ll never know; these are big questions we’re asking), but it seems that all spirits who become “stuck” as ghosts have access to this light; if they are asked in channelling or ITC sessions if there is a light, they almost invariably say yes.

There are a lot of mystical meanings regarding bright, white lights. Usually, it is the figurative “light of god” (as opposed to the “darkness” of Satan/hell) that people talk about in religious texts. However, the figurative is what defines this type of experience, so when we are on a journey through other worlds or our internal worlds, figurative “light” is almost always a literal light

White light is seen as protective against the forces of darkness, so it makes sense that when we leave our bodies and have more cognitive awareness over our surroundings, that we instinctively create this sort of light just to feel good. This explains why such an overwhelming “light” would exist.

There is not enough space in a single blog post to include all the nuances of the research into this and the evidence at hand, but one researcher who comes to mind is a lawyer from Sydney who became a medium spontaneously in the early 1990s. Victor Zammit speaks quite fluently about his experiences and research in his book A Lawyer Presents A Case For The Afterlife¹⁸, and his weekly Afterlife Report¹⁹, detailing a lot of these nuances I’d like to describe.

XII. BIBLIOGRAPHY:

What is a ghost? (Wikipedia, excerpt paragraph 1)
1 Samuel 28 (Contemporary English Version)
William Francis James Child (Wikipedia)
5 Creepy Things from The Thousand and One Nights (Britannica)
Ghosts and the Renaissance (Weber State University (Utah) HONORS PS1500 – Physics in the Plays of Tom Stoppard)
Psychology’s History of Being Mesmerized (Pyschcentral.com)
Swedenborg Foundation (Swedenborg.com)
In The Joints Of Their Toes by Edward White (The Paris Review)
Fox News controversies (Wikipedia)
Smartphone Ownership Is Growing Rapidly Around the World, but Not Always Equally (Pew Research Center)
Human rights group slams Thailand’s judicial system (Monsters and Critics
“Ghost Tower” haunts Bangkok 20 years after financial crisis (The Washington Times)
The abandoned Bangkok skyscraper that’s now a magnet for urban explorers (The Telegraph)
Memory disturbances and dissociative amnesia in survivors of childhood abuse (blogs at Brown University)
พิธีฝังคนทั้งเป็นในหลุมหลักเมือง (sarakadee.com)
Aokigahara (Wikipedia)
Urupês, Monteiro Lobato (Google Books)
Physics and the Afterlife (victorzammit.com)
A Lawyer Presents Evidence for the Afterlife, by Victor Zammit (victorzammit.com)
Afterlife Report by Victor Zammit (victorzammit.com)

This work has been produced by Emily Tabone, with the help and guidance of The Australian Paranormal Society. You are welcome to reference this work anywhere, but please source appropriately, and do so with express permission from the author or The Australian Paranormal Society.

Introduction to Paranormal 102 | Ghosts 102

INTRODUCTION TO PARANORMAL 102

GHOSTS 102

Written by Emily Tabone. © July 2019