Moving Them On or Moving Them Out

Where Have the Ghosts Gone?

When I was growing up, ghost tales were limited to a handful of books and the occasional television episode or article in the local paper around Hallowe’en, featuring some well-known haunted location.

A national tabloid would sometimes report the exploits of the marvelous Hans Holzer and his investigations, but my access to this particular publication was limited and its profile lowbrow; this paper was not serious news. Hans Holzer’s scholarly inquiries and the experienced mediums he engaged were packaged along with love horoscopes, miracle cures, advice columns, scandalous celebrity reports, I-Married-Bigfoot stories, and ads in the back for mystery school courses that promised to certify you, via mail order, as a Class A Magician of the Hidden Arts.

Credible people did not read this garbage. And people who had their heads on straight did not believe in ghosts, so there was not a lot of information out there about the unrested dead.

Religion provided the only context for hauntings: you are either alive or dead. You are on earth, or in Heaven (or damnation.) If you are in between those two, you are lost, and if you are lost, then all you want is to be found. Prayers are required; or a medium will help you, if you are lucky and the haunted homeowner can find one floating around in your town’s fringier society.

If not lucky, then what is a ghost to do, if not make everybody as miserable as he or she is?   

Ghosts, I assumed, needed to be heard and rescued. For many years, even after ghosts started to be culturally exciting, I disdained anybody who reportedly chose to keep their resident apparition like a pet. By any means necessary, I thought, you should try to get spirits “crossed over.” They’d forgive you on arrival, once relieved of their torment and confusion.

I tried to help people troubled by ghosts with advice, and later energy work, to clear their spaces when their home environments were functioning like vibrational Velcro for sticky wraiths, so the ghosts would let go and move on. I talked to ghosts and heard them out, relayed what they needed to say, called on already dead loved ones to come and provide escort to the next destination where issues could be better resolved.

I reassured homeowners that, once the spirits were no longer trapped there, they could come visit anytime they wanted. And I do believe that, still.

But I no longer believe that there are only two working realities, with a sort of weird, ghost-populated ditch in between like a sepia-toned, Mathew Brady photo from a Civil War battlefield. Instead, I think there are multiple realities, and if some ghosts want to waft around in a layer of their choosing, between here and there, who am I to interfere in their situation?

These are not lost souls. These are some sort of identity fragments, remnants of the person they were in life, still able to flare into action when juiced up by available energy provided by the environment. They have their own reasons for sticking around.

They are working it out. We are always working it out, so we can fully inhabit our own souls.

Because of where I find myself, I have mostly steered clear of traditional ghost investigation groups with the electronics and the data collection. What a contrast from when I was a kid, to now; people love and believe in the spirit world so much that it has created an entire industry.

It’s taken the mystery and the joy out of it, and turned it into what it is most often referred to: ghost hunting. These are safaris into other realities, too often without respect for the unknown and the varied nonphysical energies that reside there.

I’ve found a reasonable strategy, in unwanted ghost situations, is to shift the energy in a location so that the reality inhabited by spirits no longer occupies the same space as the physical reality of the humans. The ghosts can go on doing their thing, for whatever reason they are doing it, but the living no longer intersect with it. (Sometimes a ghostly remnant really does need help, and wants out, and is ready to go with a little assistance. Then you do whatever you can, at their request.)

But the funny thing is, the more modern society has chased ghosts, the fewer real “old school” ghosts there seem to be, and this supports my theory of multiple realities. The ghosts seem to retreat; once challenged, pinned, or downright harassed, they flee. Somewhere.

And the ghost hunts and safaris have an unintended consequence; if you call them, they come. Or something comes, and it replaces the simple haunting that was once there. This is like standing at the dark opening of a cave in the deep woods in March, just as it warms up, with bologna stuffed in your pockets. Holler and see what comes.

We have no idea what is in the realities beyond our limited perception. We can’t see what is watching us, or to what we might be issuing an invitation.

Age and experience have not taken away one bit of my fascination with ghosts, or lessened my awe for the subject. If I’ve not solved the great mystery of why, and how, and what to do about hauntings, I’ve gained something more meaningful: enormous respect for what I don’t know. 

I have to ask myself, if a soul leaves this life still so consumed with the reality of it that a part of it sticks around until its earthly issues are resolved, why aren’t we living people similarly engaged with our current existence? Why are we poking into other realms when we haven’t figured out our own? Isn’t there enough here to occupy us, if we were more appreciative?

And would we go far toward improving our chances for a peaceful afterlife if we made the most of the one we already have?