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Spotlight On: What Are Ghosts?

Ghosts have always played a part in the world’s gestalt—cultures from all over the world have stories of spirits appearing throughout their mythologies, histories, and belief systems. From man’s earliest cave drawings, spiritlike entities have been illustrated giving messages or appearing from the sky. Why do ghosts appear at their own tragic accident scenes for an eternity to give warnings from beyond the grave? Why, when people least expect it, do spirits materialize and pass by unaware of their surroundings as though conducting everyday business … and then fade into a wall? Are they all here to finish off unfinished business? Or are we seeing something else?

What are ghosts? What if we’ve been trying to apply a single word—ghost—to time travelers, doppelgängers, people popping in and out of parallel universes, and even remote viewers? What if people die and just move on to another universe where they have the opportunity to touch our lives every once in a while? Brilliant minds such as Carl Jung and Thomas Edison believed that if we could just find the right way to think, dream, or build an amazing communication device we’d be able to touch the Other Side with ease. Jung kept a chair in his study for the spirit of his dead wife to sit in when she visited, had a weakness for séances, and claimed to have seen UFOs. He also believed in a dream tapestry where we all go at night and meet in our sleep—threads of our own dreams interwoven with others—group dreaming. Edison’s parents were Spiritualists and conducted séances in his boyhood home; he believed he could build a machine to contact the dead.

These men were the thinkers of their day—they allowed themselves to think out of the box and accept what they’d perhaps seen to influence the projects they chose to develop. They, like us, were seeking the truth and scientific verification. It wasn’t such a big deal back in the day for scientists to believe in life after death, or at least it wasn’t the taboo it is now. So, knowing what we know today and looking at things with an open, scientific mind, can “earthbound spirits” be explained away with science? And what if we are some other parallel universe’s ghosts? What then?

“The theories of parallel universes, alternate dimensions, the multiverse, and the holographic-universe model all point to the possibility that somewhere, out there, copies of you exist and that somehow you get an occasional glimpse of them—perhaps even in a doppelgänger experience,” says Marie D. Jones, author of PSIence: How New Discoveries in Quantum Physics and New Science May Explain the Existence of Paranormal Phenomena. “You cannot in one reality be two places at once, but on another level of reality, your mirror image may reside, doing exactly the same thing at the same time you are doing it in your reality. The multiverse theory opens the possibility for an infinite number of yous to exist out there, each with its own conscious awareness of the reality it exists in, yet also possibly able, at times, to breach the barriers between realities and show up as your eerie double, or even as a déjà vu event.

“Maybe time travel is possible, then, if we believe in these theories, because although we are met with numerous paradoxes and limitations in our own reality for going back to the past or forward into the future,” Jones continues, “those paradoxes may not exist in the multiverse, or in another dimension, where the laws of physics may look to us like magic.”

One instance that illustrates Jones’s theories beautifully is that told by Debbie Senate, paranormal investigator and medium—who for a few moments had an experience that allowed her to see through the window in time … literally.

“We [she and her husband, author Richard Senate] had been investigating a place for almost a month. The husband had said there had been a moon shining through a window that woke him up. He’d walk over to shut the window—there was no window there. Richard was downstairs, and I was upstairs with two other people. And there it was—the window! I put my head through it—everything looked very two-dimensional; I was nauseous and moving around like I was in quicksand. It really took effort to move. Outside it was like I could see back in time; there was a sawmill—where there really wasn’t a mill—and girls jumping rope. The girl looked up at me, and her mouth opened and she said, Oh! Like she’d seen a ghost—like I was her ghost! She was frightened. But I didn’t hear her; there was no sound on the other side of the window. The two people who were with me had a hold of me from each arm—they saw me going through the wall. I was getting really sick, and it was all I could do to nudge them—and they pulled me back in! Just as they did, the window disappeared, which led me to ask, what if I’d still had my head through it when it disappeared? I wonder now if that little girl grew up thinking she’d seen a ghost?

“Richard did some research and found that there had been a window in that spot, and it had been built over in the ’40s,” says Debbie of the affirmation of the time-traveling experience. “He also found a sawmill right where the one I’d seen had been—it had burned down in 1939!”