Ever seen a ghost? Me neither. But unlike NDEs and PLRs, most of us have at least met someone who's had one of these experiences. This makes sense; an NDE or PLR is one's own personal afterlife experience, but when we encounter ghosts, we are observing someone else's afterlife experience, and there's always going to be more of them than us.

Many people, it seems, encounter these mysterious forms at some point in their lives. Ghosts and apparitions have been reported in all eras and cultures; they seem to be an integral element of the human experience. In fact, even though my circle of friends is small, at least half a dozen of them claim to have seen ghosts at one time or another. My own sister insists that our grandfather's spirit appeared at the foot of her bed the night he died, even though his deathbed was 500 miles away. Awaking the next morning, she'd thought it had just been a dream until she was told he'd passed away in the middle of the night.

Many families have stories like this. According to a survey conducted by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Council, 42% of all Americans, and a staggering 67% of widows, believe they've heard, felt, or seen ghosts of the dead. According to Rosemary Ellen Guiley, author of numerous books on ghosts and apparitions, the vast majority of ghosts haunt a single location, going through the same motions again and again, virtually oblivious to the presence of the living.⁽⁶⁾ Most of the time, ghosts seem tied to particular physical locations or physical objects, always showing up in or around the same buildings, roads, or vehicles again and again. While ADCs are usually only seen once (or in very rare cases a handful of times), and always by a close friend, relative, or associate, ghosts are often witnessed year after year (sometimes century after century), by people who never had the slightest thing to do with the deceased in life.

"A house in Cheltenham, England... was the site of a haunting by a female apparition on and off for more than 90 years. The majority of the sightings occurred between 1882 and 1889, but the phantom was viewed independently by at least 17 persons.... : a tall woman, dressed in black, holding a handkerchief over part of her face.... The ghost often passed down the stairs; she almost always paused in the living room before moving down the hall to the door to the garden, where she disappeared. On at least one occasion, one of the Despard daughters saw her in the garden. The phantom appeared to be solid ... but she never acknowledged anyone's attempt to communicate with her."⁽⁷⁾

Sometimes just a ghostly face will be seen, in a window, a mirror, or floating in mid-air, but most ghosts come complete with a fully-clothed body. Each time they appear, these specters look the same, wearing the same period clothing and hairstyles, often standing in the exact same spot or traveling along the same route. In buildings whose floor plans were changed at some point in their past, ghosts are sometimes observed moving along those previous floor-plans, traveling through doorways or along staircases that no longer exist. It is generally thought that ghosts haunt locations that held some emotional significance to them in life, such as their homes, places of business, or the place they died. And while this theory is supported by the fact that so many ghosts seem to be seen re-enacting emotionally traumatic scenes, in the majority of the cases, there is no way to be sure who the ghost really was in life.

In addition to visual appearances, ghosts sometimes provide evidence of their presence by opening doors and windows or turning lights on and off. Peculiar smells and cold spots are also often reported, as well as strange sounds, voices, and footsteps. Despite the sounds that sometimes accompany hauntings, however, when these ghosts visibly appear they are usually completely silent, and almost never verbalize any intelligible speech.

Haunting ghosts often seem to be unconsciously sleep-walking, acting out memories from their past. They seem permanently frozen in time, oblivious to the present-day, just doing the same thing again and again down through the ages. Noticing this, the famous parapsychologist F.W.H. Myers⁽⁸⁾ suggested that they are not actually sentient beings at all, but just the unconscious dreams of the dead; others have suggested they are meaningless psychic recordings running on automatic, possessing no more independent awareness than a videotape of a man on TV. Pointing out that many ghosts seem to be enacting particularly unpleasant scenes, some theorists have suggested that emotionally traumatic events can somehow record themselves upon a physical location. However, emotionally traumatic memories are not the only thing ghosts are seen acting out over and over; many of these 'tapeloop' ghosts seem to re-enact common, drab, humdrum actions, and others even re-enact quite happy memories. Several people, for example, have reported seeing one phantom playing the piano at the Captain's Museum in Brownsville, Nebraska, and another has been repeatedly seen riding a certain roller-coaster at the King's Island amusement park in Cincinnati.

Talking With Ghosts

The vast majority of ghosts make no attempt to communicate with others, acting as if they are entirely unaware of the presence of the living. And when communication is received from ghosts, it is almost always entirely 'subjective' in nature, using gestures, signals, images, and symbols -- classic right-brain formatting of information. There is a very long history of the non-verbal nature of these entities; even the souls of the dead in Homer's Iliad are portrayed as being unable to speak properly. Haunting ghosts virtually never use left-brain communication techniques such as codes or spoken or written language, or any sort of linear message format.

While the average person usually can't communicate with ghosts at all, some psychics maintain they can. In fact, psychics tend to divide haunting ghosts into two groups -- those they can communicate with, and those they can't. Those they can't, psychics often claim, are not real beings at all, but merely non-sentient memory-recordings. But to the average person, these two categories of ghosts seem indistinguishable -- both appear at the same place every time they are seen, always wearing the same thing and doing the same thing, both seeming equally caught up in their emotional memories, attitudes, and behaviors from the past. It seems unlikely that two entirely separate kinds of phenomena could look and behave so much the same. The Binary Soul Doctrine, of course, would suggest that both categories are living sentient beings, but the noncommunicative ones are functioning more exclusively through the right-brain unconscious half of their minds, which would cause them to have less objective awareness and be less able to interact with others. Such ghosts would be quite like a comatose patient -- still alive, but imprisoned inside their own unconscious.

Those ghosts that can be communicated with often benefit from receiving new information. Sometimes psychics seem to get through to these ghosts, finally explaining to them that they are dead and free to leave. Many ghosts are said to have haunted the same locations for 200 or more years, apparently never realizing that they are dead or that time has moved on. This suggests, of course, that somehow they've lost the ability to make even the most elementary logical deductions. Ghosts can apparently have the most obvious clues staring them right in the face for centuries, watching their hands, legs, and bodies pass thru solid objects, without it ever crossing their mind that they might have died. For some reason, these haunting ghosts can't figure this out on their own, as if they'd lost their own logical and analytical intellect.

"The fact that many spirits do not know they are physically dead is difficult for most people to comprehend. However, there is a vast amount of evidence that such is the case."

- Hazel Denning⁽⁹⁾

How long would it take normal people to watch their hands pass through solid objects before it dawned on them that something odd was going on? It would take about half a second while we're awake. But while we are asleep and dreaming, we might see it as the most normal thing in the world, never making the logical leap to the obvious conclusion. During sleep, we are functioning through the unconscious, not the conscious, and so all sorts of strange and bizarre things can occur and we just take them all in our stride, never analyzing them logically. If in a dream, a milkman arrives at my door with two full grown cows for me to milk, I would probably just think, "Oh, what a bother!", and it wouldn't ever cross my mind that this would never happen in the real world.

The vast majority of ghost reports seem to describe beings suffering from a pronounced diminishment of reasoning ability, cognition, and objective awareness. What's lost always seems to be the capacities of the left-brain conscious mind, and what's retained always seems to be more of the nature of the right brain unconscious mind -- emotions and memories -- which usually seem to be magnified beyond normal levels. These conclusions are found again and again in the reports of many ghost researchers, such as Robert Coddington and Hazel Denning.

In the tradition of the famous "Ghost Hunter" Hans Holzer, Robert Coddington also uses a psychic in his attempts to help these ghostly souls escape from their mental prisons. Coddington's wife Marianne lets these lost souls temporarily use her body and conscious mind in order to make verbal communication with the ghost possible. Together, Coddington and his wife are often able to successfully contact the ghost's mind, gently explaining that it has died and is now free to move on.

The vast majority of the ghosts described in Coddington's book Earthbound don't seem to be evil in any way; they don't seem to have deserved to become ghosts, but they did anyway. Their ghostly existence seems virtually identical to many NDErs' descriptions of the Realm of Bewildered Spirits - they were trapped in time, re-living their memories of traumatic events in their lives. When they finally awoke to consciousness in the psychic's body, seeing thru Marianne's eyes, they were still under the impression it was the same time period in which they died, although in reality two, three, or four hundred years had since passed. They had been so totally caught up in their own memories and emotional distress that they had remained completely oblivious to the external world for centuries. All the time they were ghosts, they watched their hands going through solid objects, but somehow never put two and two together and figured out that they were dead. The picture Coddington's book paints of the personal, subjective experience of ghosts would seem to be completely in line with what the Binary Soul Doctrine would predict.

Coddington tells us that many ghosts lack the ability to reason logically, calling them "confused", "disoriented", and "unaware".⁽¹⁰⁾ Because they cannot think logically, he says, obsessions that exist at the time of death can "continue unchanged and unresolved for a hundred years".⁽¹¹⁾ Coddington believes that ghosts are sleepwalkers acting out their dreams and memories: "The unaware ghost seems to be immersed in its own repetitive nightmare of events, now past, oblivious to present reality."⁽¹²⁾ Ghosts are often obsessed with continuously reviewing their own emotions and memories, he maintains, much like a computer that has become locked into a repetitive, meaningless cycle; the consciousness of the ghost remains locked in time at the moment of its death, never progressing beyond that instant. He writes: "Their perceptual awareness [was] frozen in the moment of the physical demise, [and] need to be 'awakened'".⁽¹³⁾

Dr. Hazel Denning, another modern-day ghost researcher, reports much the same thing in her book True Hauntings, noting that many ghosts are essentially insane, often remaining in a completely disassociated state for centuries after they die.⁽¹⁴⁾ Both Coddington and Denning repeat the same refrain we've heard for centuries -- ghosts often don't realize they're dead at all. Sometimes, well-meaning people like Coddington and Denning can help, but even when a psychic communication channel has been made available, these haunting ghosts still often resist 'reprogramming' their memories, attitudes, perspectives, beliefs, and interpretations of their situation, as if their minds were locked computer discs that won't allow any new data to be written upon them. Like psychiatric patients with fixed delusions, sometimes no amount of new data or logical arguments can dissuade these ghosts from their mistaken beliefs about what actually happened to them and where they really are now. Sometimes, however, these altruistic ghost rescuers get lucky; like the unconscious mind of a hypnotized person, ghosts sometimes do accept this new input, especially when it doesn't conflict with their previous programming.

The haunting ghost, the reader will realize by now, closely fits the ancient Binary Soul Doctrine's expected profile of a disembodied unconscious mind that has lost its conscious half. It would be trapped in a fixed dream world formed out of its own memories and emotions, and would not have any objective awareness, analytical reason, or ability to communicate verbally. Ghost reports seem to be the other side of the coin from dark void reports. NDE and PLR subjects who find themselves in the dark void report being entirely liberated from their memories, emotions, and grief, but ghosts seem fully immersed in their memories, emotions, and grief. Each seems to be the missing half of the other. The Bible repeatedly uses a curious phrase in relation to the afterlife -- "treading the winepress", which would seem to be an apt metaphor for ghosts who eternally retread their own past memories over and over. Like winemakers pressing grapes, ghosts seem to be squeezing out every last drop of emotional content from their memories, churning through them again and again.

Afterdeath Communications