DEFINITON: In mythology and folklore, a vengeful ghost or vengeful spirit is said to be the spirit of a dead person who returns from the afterlife to seek revenge for a cruel, unnatural or unjust death. In certain cultures where funeral and burial or cremation ceremonies are important, such vengeful spirits may also be considered as unhappy ghosts of individuals who have not been given a proper funeral.
Abe Lincoln's spirit reported seen in the White House... Ben Franklin's spirit appears near his home in Philadelphia. Blah blah blah blah. You've heard these or stories like them, but have you wondered about them beyond the surface of the reporting? I'm talking about longevity here. To me, it appears that reports of apparitions involve someone who has died at least a good while ago, whether it be a famous person or someone associated with us such as family or friend. Among all of the stories concerning visitation by spirits in our physical realm, I don't recall hearing much about the Abe or Ben or famous/infamous alike actually haunting someone. They are considered residual hauntings with no intelligence seemingly behind them. Most alleged interactive hauntings seem to be by majority, of the more recently deceased. Why is that?
Questions have to be posed as to the nature of intelligent hauntings themselves. A few questions would be:
1) do all deceased have a choice/opportunity to haunt the living?
2) do the deceased have a time limit as to how long they can choose to remain haunting the living?
3) are spirits restricted to physical boundaries they cannot transgress?
4) do the circumstances of a death play a factor in any of the above (peaceful death vs sudden or crime victims)?
5) do the beliefs of the living influence the efficacy of a spirit presence, malevolent or not?
6) concerning religious & spiritual beliefs, are there cosmic rules concerning spirits that cannot be violated?
7) could "hell" be considered a non-physical torment experienced by unrepentant, killers' spirits here on earth?
8) are ghosts "attached" to physical objects (willingly or unwillingly)?
There are stories about murderers claiming to be haunted by the ghost of their victims. As with most stories, there are always two sides to be told. It might be easy to attribute a tortured conscience as the source of such alleged hauntings, but sometimes you have to take into account, based on the killer's personality, where those few instances entertain doubt enough to not preclude the possibility of a haunting.
Is it all just in one's mind? The predominance of ghost claims involve someone dying a premature death due to circumstances such as sickness, accident, crime, etc. First, let's focus on the crime circumstance, as it seems to involve the living interacting with the paranormal in what could only be described as unexplained, curious and coincidental.
Murderers have confessed to their crimes after claiming constant harassment from such things as hearing the voice of their victims, seeing their apparitions frozen in place staring at them, reoccurring nightmares of their victim's appearing to them, etc. (#6). While this could easily be attributed to what might be called a guilty conscience, sometimes the circumstances inject doubt into a specific situation that make you wonder. I'm not convinced that every serial killer has a tortured conscience concerning their victims. An example would be someone like Al Capone, who claimed that the ghost of one of his ordered "hits" wouldn't leave him alone (#1). Prison guards reported hearing Capone screaming in his cell for someone to leave him alone, only to find him by himself in the cell. Capone claimed this ghost not only harassed him while imprisoned, but it following him everywhere when he was later released from prison. Capone even hired a medium to help try rid him of the ghost. What's important to note here is that Capone's character was not one in which he would have felt regret for his offenses. If not his conscience causing this haunting, what then? On the other hand, there is convicted murderer Daniel French, quoted as saying of his victim, "I seen Ms. Howe's ghost, and I apologized!" That, ladies and gentlemen, is what I call a guilty conscience.
The question of a time limit (#2) might be moot taking famous serial killer Ted Bundy into account. Well after being executed in 1989, multiple prison guards had reported seeing his apparition sitting in the electric chair that he was executed in. Some, so rattled by what they believed they saw, refused to be alone in the chamber. This would imply no time limit on how long a spirit remains, but also being trapped there. A proposed hypothesis explaining this situation would be that this was the killer's hell he would have to endure (#7) ... never released from their own fear of execution and not unlike the fear they caused their victims!
Most are familiar with the popular concept of a physical hell, where those damned for eternity are cast down (why in that direction I'm not sure), and suffer unbearable physical tortures and pain for misdeeds they committed while alive here on earth. Similar to Judeo-Christian beliefs and other various religions' beliefs about the hereafter, a place of punishment familiarly known as "hell" could have ties to a possible explanation concerning spirit time limits. A possible, terrifying hypothesis would be that hell is not a physical place at all, rather a condition of a continued consciousness after corporeal death. Having faced final judgement, standing before the Creator, and realizing the magnificence and beauty of entering by permission the realm of the Creator, could that punishment then be a condition where we suffer the pain of knowing we will never achieve being there? (#3) Our punishment would be the slow dissipation of our consciousness knowing we were fading into non-existence! (#2 & #7) Do Native legends tell of such a reward/punishment situation? Are some spirits simply left to their own devices to perpetuate evil? (#1) What happens to those who desire to move on?
Spiritual beliefs as those of the indigenous of North America, and not considered the same as religious beliefs, come with a set of rules. (#5) One most common rule is that the "unseen" as they are called, are subject to the physical rules of our realm that they have brought themselves into. Surely, some native stories were just that... stories told to fulfill a purpose such as keeping children from wandering into places they shouldn't or doing something that could incur a price to pay for their actions. But what about the others? Are ghosts just basically cultural ideas? Legends of the indigenous of North America tell of how the "Star People" have been here for a long time. What actually is meant by "Star People?" Are they talking about aliens or spirits? If so, wouldn't this be considered repeated hypothesis testing of a sort over hundreds of years, with theoretical proof being the applied reason and native medicines that have developed from those countless years of experiences? (#6) Nikolaas Tinbergen, the founder of behavioral ecology, famously stated that "ethology is the art of interviewing animals in their own language. This principle is simple but powerful." It proposes talking to animals in their own language. Native communication with the spirit world has been exactly that and thus nothing has been lost in the translation of stories moving forward through time. If we are to pursue all possible explanations for spirit contact, why have the indigenous experiences been for the most part disregarded?
One thing I find that actually works against making progress in paranormal research was the advent and growing popularity of so-called ghost detection devices, apps, etc. Without ever defining the properties of a ghost, they are regarded by too many as worthy of measurement of spirit activity. EMF detectors, audio recorders, infrared and ultraviolet cameras, kinect sensor type devices, et.al. all carry forward a created and false reality of actual spirit contact, and are grossly remiss in considering and respecting cultural aspects of their intended search targets. If we are to believe the popular ghost TV shows, this planet is overrun with more ghosts than living people! Overly enthusiastic paranormal investigators tend to label without reason, anomalies as evidence, based on their existing knowledge of rumors and legends associated with that location and with a total lack of repeated experimentation to actually attribute a possible cause to the anomalies. Making no real progress in paranormal research, they tend to forget that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
Beliefs can be comforting, especially religious ones. On the other hand, paranormal beliefs can lead one down a rabbit hole of increasing events that negatively impact one's life. Are the powers of suggestion contributing to an increased perception and misinterpretation of surrounding physical events such as banging noises, unexplained footsteps heard, dark shadows seen out of the corner of the eye?
Too often, the belief in God and the protection of one's faith is disregarded concerning the paranormal. Ghost hunters wearing a religious cross treat it more as an apotropaic device or talisman without the belief and meaning of the faith it actually represents. This might be one of the most disrespectful practices involving ghost investigation. By totally ignoring one's religious based faith and confidence of good over evil, does this enable increased demonic and manifestation experiences by an individual? (#6) Are they seeing and hearing, or not seeing and hearing, alleged paranormal events based simply on this premise? In my own personal experiences of involvement with the paranormal for over 40 years, I find this basically to be true. Fear is a powerful, mind-controlling thing. I once was frightened by a lot of things, but no more. With that elimination of fear came elimination of ghostly threats. A dark room, especially at night, was nothing more than a room that made it hard to see things... no negative or evil entities lurking around every corner and waiting to pounce!
In a test of the hypothesis where a spirit is more or less imprisoned in the area of their bodily death (#3), I have explored out-of-the-box ideas in the search for evidence of after death communication. I had never heard reported anyone doing EVP work at the countless sites of roadside highway deaths... you know, the ones where flower and sign memorials are left for auto accident fatalities. Doing research on the accident victims, I would then go to such locations. I must have collected hundreds of hours of audio recordings and not once did anything approach what I would consider a spirit voice (#2). (NOTE: I no longer do this type of investigating along with cemeteries borne from the overcoming of my paranormal research zeal with the realization of insensitivity and lack of respect on my part to the deceased and their families).
I've even tested the hypothesis of where a ghost would choose to remain if it had a choice. (#2) Once such experiment was to do investigations at the site of a black man named "Abe," who was hung for a crime he did not commit in the early 1900s. It was a racially motivated arrest of an individual who ran a grocery store and defended himself from armed robbers. He was unjustly convicted of murder (later evidence revealed this fact), and taken to jail where he was later hung for it. I collected data over an extended period of time both from the location where the shootings occurred as well as where the jail and gallows were, with negative, inconclusive results. Abe didn't seem to be hanging around (excuse the unintended pun) wanting to chat with me or anyone else. (#3) I couldn't blame him after the way he had been treated!
Yet, there are unexplainable, believable encounters, without physical proof mind you, that lend credence to ghosts at least making an appearance. Whether it was in her mind or it actually happened, my wife claimed to have seen the ghostly image of her deceased brother-in-law staring at her for a moment out of his pickup truck. (#4 & #5). I am inclined to believe her. Curiously, the truck was not involved in his death (he was T-boned on his motorcycle at another location). This would be an example of a ghost appearing elsewhere, attached to a possession and not restricted to the location of death. (#3 & #8) Playing devil's advocate with this type of alleged encounter, such experiences can be explained by and attributed to the early stages of grief coping strategies. It is easier to reconcile the passing of a loved one if somehow you think that person still exists in some way rather than feel they are gone forever. The encounter experience itself may be something invented by our brain for that reason.
I have conducted a deeply personal attempt at obtaining empirical proof of spirit contact. Approximately one year ago, my beloved brother John passed from cancer. As his illness progressed and his health declined, we talked numerous times, about what awaits us on the other side. We went as far as to make a pact, that if it were possible, he would provide me proof of my long search for evidence of life after death. We agreed on a two-word phrase, known only to the two of us. This phrase was from something in our childhood and only he and I would know about, not even our spouses. I wrote down the phrase and buried it deep in my nightstand. The hope was for John to communicate this phrase not to me, but to someone other than me. The method would be of his choosing on how to communicate this phrase to someone, dreams being one such example. To date, John has been either unwilling, unable to, or not permitted by cosmic rules (#6) to communicate the phrase to anyone.
Whether a person feels the presence of the recent departed due to their own persecuted conscience, or from heartfelt love, the experience of some alleged ghost encounters helps remind us of our own mortality with the hope that there is something waiting for us after this life, that is, if we choose to move on and not hang around in a restricted environment for all eternity, as one would assume something like intended vengeance would necessitate.
So why did we ever start assuming that spirits are earthbound? It certainly seems contradictory to say spirits come and go into our physical realm at will. It's time to separate the perpetuated tales and folklore from the direction gathered data (or lack of it) seems to point to. If you take into account all of the explanations for alleged paranormal experiences, we are still left with those few that defy explanation. My opinions about the paranormal are my own and I do not ever wish to be misconstrued as conveying an arrogance of that opinion. As much as I believe I have learned, I acknowledge I have that much more to still learn. To quote Edith Hamilton, "Intellectual humility is essential for learning. Learn to recognize the limits of your knowledge. Be willing to say "I don't know." Be able to change your mind with evidence. And be very wary of overconfidence and certainty in your beliefs."
The search for answers continues, however the most obvious observation realized from my own personal paranormal research can be summed up in one of my favorite sayings... "Most people aren't scared of being alone in the dark — they're scared of NOT being alone in the dark."
- MoonJoey