Don’t Look Now, But We Aren’t Alone - Ghosts, Spirits, and Paranormal Energy
By Greg Evans
I turned on the Genesis Tournament, a signature event in professional golf. Scheffler was in last place. That doesn’t make sense. That freaked me out. Turned it off. Turned on the Olympics. Watched the hockey for a while, until curling came on. The Italian girls are pretty. I don’t understand it. Turned it off. Turned on a Netflix movie. Too many ads. Turned it off. Went to Barnes and Noble and bought a book, The Letters of the Younger Pliny. Pliny, around 100 AD (around 67 years after Jesus was murdered by a coterie of Roman thugs) wrote a letter to a friend asking him whether or not he believed in ghosts. Now this is intriguing as I too have pondered such phenomena. Shakespeare wrote about ghosts. So did Ambrose Bierce, Ovid and Kafka, both metaphorically and literally. Does the soul exist as energy after the body dies? It is a question people have grappled with for at least 2,000 years, if not longer. Native American tribes, long before Columbus, believed in ghosts and spirits. I believe in them too.
To Licinius Sura,
Our leisure gives me the chance to learn and you to teach me; so I should very much like to know whether you think that ghosts exist,
and have a form of their own and some sort of supernatural power, or whether they lack substance and reality and take shape only from our fears. I personally am encouraged to believe in their existence largely from what I have heard of the experience of Curtius Rufus. ' While he was still obscure and unknown he was attached to the suite of the new governor of Africa. One afternoon he was walking up and down in the colonnade of his house when there appeared to him the figure of a woman, of superhuman size and beauty. To allay his fears she told him that she was the spirit of Africa, come to foretell his future: he would return to Rome and hold office, and then return with supreme authority to the same province, where he would die. Everything came true.
Pliny’s words are honest, thoughtful, curious, and modern. It is something you may have overheard standing at the bar at Hooters.
Shakespeare wrote about ghosts multiple times in his plays
In the The Winter’s Tale, he wrote,
I have heard (but not believ'd) the spirits of the dead may walk again: if such thing be, thy mother appeared to me last night; for ne'er was dream so like a waking.
In Hamlet he wrote,
But, soft: behold! lo where it comes again!
I'll cross it, though it blast me. - Stay, illusion!
If thou hast any sound, or use a voice.
Speak to me.
In Macbeth,
Why, what care I ? If thou canst nod, speak too, If charnel-houses, and our graves, must send
Those that we bury, back, our monuments
Shall be the maws of kites.
And in Henry IV,
Glendower. - I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur. - Why, so can I; or so can any man:
But will they come when you do call for them?
And in many other scenes throughout his work.
Ovid, in his masterpiece, Metamorphoses, book 15 he speaks of ghosts,
“The spirit wanders, going hence, thither, coming thence, hither and takes possession of any limbs it pleases".
I think it is foolish to assume that everything is just randomly here then it is gone. A fleeting life with no explanation as to the origin of thought and the beating heart and then lights out, that’s it? It just doesn’t make sense to be so unspectacular.
I know multiple credible people who have seen ghosts, who before seeing them, didn’t believe in them. Now they do. Both saw them at night in the hallway of their home. Both ghosts were floating. The hard thing about it is to refute it if you have seen one.