“What Hollywood and television portray is very inaccurate and cannot be relied upon as truthful,” say Lewis and Sharon Gerew of the Philadelphia Ghost Hunters Alliance in their article, Co-Existence. “They show these spirits of the dead as being evil in nature, filled with malice and harmful intent. I assure you that this is not the case.”
Creepy, rotting, vengeful ghosts may make exciting movies, but they have very little basis in actual experience.
Scratching, slapping and biting
Ghost and haunting phenomena are harmless. As much as they may unnerve and mystify us, there is really nothing to fear. Haunting phenomena seem to be recordings of past events on a particular environment. This is why haunted houses can “play back” the recordings of footsteps on a stairway, for example, or even the voices of an argument that took place many years previous. Apparitions can sometimes be seen performing the same task over and over again.
True ghosts or spirit apparitions may be earthly manifestations of those who have passed on. They are sometimes able to interact with the living and relay messages. (See “Ghosts: What Are They?”.)
In neither case does the phenomena pose any real threat. Voices captured through electronic voice phenomena (EVP) techniques can at times be rude or even downright abusive, but again there is no real threat of harm.
So then how do we explain those rare cases in which a person is apparently scratched, slapped or even bitten by some unseen entity? Such instances have been documented in the famous Bell Witch case, the Esther Cox case in Amherst, Nova Scotia, and the terrifying “The Entity” case on which the film was based.
These cases, and others in which people are “attacked” and objects are thrown around, are considered by most researchers today as poltergeist activity. Although poltergeist means “noisy spirit,” current parapsychology theory suggests that they are not spirits or ghosts at all. Poltergeist activity is psychokinetic activity caused by a living person. Usually that person is a teenager undergoing hormonal changes or someone under extreme emotional or psychological stress.
So what we generally consider the scariest aspects of ghosts – objects moving by themselves, TVs turning on, pounding on walls and very rarely a person being injured – are most likely caused by the unconscious working of a living human mind. We can't blame ghosts.
For those of us researching ghost and haunting phenomena, we must resist our fearful instincts in the face of the unknown. Fear can only inhibit our examination and understanding of one of the most intriguing aspects of the human experience.
