Ghosts – Myth and Reality

For years death has been looked upon as either the last stop or the transition to some sort of afterlife. More often than not, the latter holds true. Those of us who have worked as healers over the last thirty years, however, have found one thing to be abundantly clear: the truth is not always so well defined. Sometimes those who have died become trapped and need to be healed. I know that sounds completely counterintuitive, how can something without a body be healed?

I’m not talking about broken bones here. Some of our most fundamental misunderstandings of what comes after life (not to be confused with the afterlife) come from the very limited concept of health and healing in Western society- that it is only a physical phenomenon. This is not so. It is also mental, emotional, and spiritual.

The living do not have a monopoly on mental, emotional, and spiritual wounds from which they must heal. Healing serves many purposes for a soul no longer attached to material reality through a body-

• The transition to the other side

• Examining the life that they have left behind

• Begin planning for the next lifetime

We call these trapped souls “ghosts”.

Those of us who work as healers often receive calls to perform ghost clearings. During these experiences, many unfortunate thought patterns on the subject of ghosts have come to our attention. Ghosts have gotten a particularly bad reputation over the course of the last century or so. Between Hollywood and television, ghosts have been portrayed as ill-tempered, spiteful, vindictive, and generally “not very nice”. For roughly two decades now we have seen more enlightened and open-minded showrunners and directors calling the shots, and they have given us as an audience more positive instances in popular media, but the prevailing picture remains a negative one. To help heal this unfortunate imbalance, I would like to address a few of the more pervasive negative myths about ghosts: 

MYTH: Ghosts are carrying a grudge, and are trying to be scary and vengeful. 

TRUTH: Ghosts, for the most part, are disoriented and do not know why they are trapped. They manifest confusion in their behavior because they do not understand how to pass out of this reality to the other side. The trapped soul will see time going by but not truly comprehend the changes. Like being stuck behind a glass wall, they will watch the world move forward without the power to interact with that world and all the changes it brings. 

MYTH: Ghosts will harm you. 

TRUTH: Ghosts want to get your attention, not harm you. They are trying to give you clues that they exist in the hopes that you might notice them and help them escape their limbo state. Often, they will attempt to reveal or replay the events that trapped them. The ghost generally has no interest in harming you. In our experience, a very few isolated spirits have harmful intent, but the percentage is negligible.

MYTH: Ghosts are evil. 

TRUTH: There are things that carry a great deal of negative or darker energy in this world – many embodied (particularly during recent election years) and others not embodied. These are not ghosts but energy patterns. You do not exorcize ghosts, you release them. Remember energy can neither be created nor destroyed. If a great deal of negative energy repeatedly patterns in a specific location, you may pick up on that negativity. Similar energies will be drawn together, sometimes enhancing each other. If a person has a great deal of personal negativity, they may draw upon similar negative energies in a geographic location. This attraction may manifest in physical patterns such as the movement of objects, but these are not ghosts. An exorcism releases energy patterns. A ghost clearing releases actual trapped souls.

MYTH: Only those that believe in ghosts will see them. 

TRUTH: Being able to detect the presence of ghosts is like tuning to the right radio station by finding the correct frequency. Some people are more sensitive than others at picking up these frequencies. Children, because of their general willingness to be open, traverse through many different frequencies, and are much more likely to pick them up. Mildly sensitive people who do not believe in spirits will often ignore their repeated attempts to make contact, treating unexplained incidents as a figment of the imagination or another equally “rational” explanation. In a class taught by myself and similar practitioners, we asked if anyone had lived in a haunted house. When a 13-year-old girl raised her hand, her mother looked startled. Their previous house had been haunted and all the things the daughter pointed out were things the mother remembered, but simply rationalized away. In retrospect, the mother agreed that they had lived in a haunted house. She realized she had seen all the evidence of the ghost but at the time simply did not want to believe that ghosts exist.

MYTH: Ghosts have been dead for a long time, they are not the newly dead.

TRUTH: Ghosts experience the passing of time very differently from the living, so naturally they will express this. I have had to do ghost healings that involve souls that died in an altered enough state, oftentimes overdoses, to the point that they don’t even know they’re dead. This can leave them stuck in their high or trapped within the trip that killed them. And until they are not only brought into awareness of their own death, but crossed over to the other side, they are stuck and cannot continue on their soul’s journey. The disorientation brought on from lack of awareness may give the impression that a ghost doesn’t understand our modern world, and thus they are from another point in time such as the distant past.

MYTH: Sprinkle some holy water or burn a little sage and all will be well.

TRUTH: You may detach a ghost from a place that it is “haunting” and send it out into the world, but you have not crossed it over without communications and understandings of why the ghost is trapped. And oftentimes in dealing with a ghost there is almost a childlike mentality or compromised state that they are traveling in. So before you send them out wandering -disconnecting them from all that they know and recognize- ask yourself, if this were a small child would you throw them out on the street to fend for themselves or would you help them to get “home”?

Many fallacies and myths exist about the nature of ghosts, some that we have covered here. Do not believe all the stereotypes. If a ghost is drawn to communicate with you it may be because you shared the lifetime within which that spirit became trapped. You passed on and reincarnated, but they did not. Whatever the case, remember that ghosts are merely souls that are trapped on this side. They need our love, support, and healing so that they can look to the other side and travel towards the light.