Stephen Rowland: Don't laugh off the ghost 'stories'
Unexplained whispers. Glimpses of a translucent figure that slowly disappears into nothingness. Footsteps heard coming down the stairs when nobody is there. Little orbs of light that travel quickly through a room. Objects that sometimes move a few inches by themselves.
By now you have undoubtedly guessed what I am talking about — paranormal phenomena, the stuff that haunted houses and ghost stories are all about.
When I was younger, I would have laughed all that stuff off as a product of overactive imaginations, or perhaps the person was a little bit “touched” (pun unintended). As I grew older, I came to the realization that many of these experiences came from very credible, straight thinking people who had no reason to lie but plenty of motivation not to — there was often a stigma associated with the people who told those stories. Perhaps they were a little mentally “off.”
That stigma is evaporating with the popularity of paranormal research teams with their shows and haunted house investigations on TV. Is some of that faked in the lucrative pursuit of popular TV programming? Undoubtedly so, but not all of it.
My wife Susan and I went on a “Haunted House tour” on our vacation in Pensacola, Florida. It was basically a bus tour with our guide telling the stories of those homes and the experiences people have had in them. Often it was very old homes built in the late 1800s with a sad tale of murders that had occurred in them. New homeowners, often completely unaware of the home’s history, would experience such hair-raising phenomena as just described. They usually sold those homes very quickly to someone else equally unaware.
As a devout Christian, I have noticed that many Christians have a hard time integrating those type of experiences into their theology. If they are not angels or demons (I believe in both), what are they? I’ve found a personal interpretation that works for me, and it involves the departed spirits of deceased individuals.
In my personal Christian belief system, the souls of genuine Christians go immediately at death to be with Jesus, or as the Apostle Paul put it, “… to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.” What about all the souls of non-Christians? I grew up in a church that taught that the souls of the unsaved immediately went to hell upon physical death to suffer everlasting punishment. When I studied the subject myself, that sounds a lot more like the “Second Death” spoke of in Revelations after the great White Throne Judgement. At that event, scripture speaks of “Death and Hell” being thrown into the “Lake of Fire which is the Second Death.”
The Old Testament Hebrew word is “Sheol,” while the New Testament Greek word is “Hades” for the intermediate realm of departed spirits, which was often thought to be some type of subterranean holding area. What I propose is another “dimension” — a “spirit realm” that coexists right alongside our physical realm. It might be the “chains of darkness” realm that scripture talks about — a shadowy dark dimension inhabited by immaterial souls with very little interaction between that dimension and our physical realm.
It would already be a “hell” of terrible frustration to be trapped in that dimension. You retain your intelligence and memory of being a human being, but cannot interact with the physical world you see around you like humans do every day. You exist with just a small amount of “spirit energy” in that cold shadowy realm longing to communicate and interact with the people you once knew, but can only muster a weak whisper, a hazy translucent image, a sound of footsteps, a certain odor, a tiny orb of light, the occasional movement of an object a few inches, etc. That’s the limit of your energy while hoping that someone might notice. That’s the dimension you are consigned to until the great Judgement Day when God sends you to your final destination.
My intuition is that demons and “fallen angels” inhabit that same dark spirit dimension with a key difference being that they can exert much more energy interacting with our physical dimension — in a malevolent way. When people get scratched, burned, shoved, or “possessed” or terrified in their homes by flying objects, that is usually the cause in my opinion. In our Christian Motorcyclists Association, we had some members buy a used home and start experiencing that type of menacing phenomena. An appointment was made with a pastor to come out to their home for a prayer/deliverance house-cleansing session.
The plea went out via email for all our surrounding chapters to pray in support of this pastor when he was there at this house. After that session, all activity ceased, and they were able to enjoy their home. I have heard several other similar first hand accounts.
You can laugh off all the “ghost stories” you hear as being subjective emotional experiences of unstable individuals or outright fabrications, but if you ever purchase a used home and start experiencing this type of unfortunate phenomena, you might want to exercise some prudent wisdom in the effort to bypass your skepticism and consult with a minister of the gospel who actually does have experience. Sometimes chagrin is good for the soul.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Herald: Stephen Rowland: Don't laugh off the ghost 'stories'
