AFTERWORD FROM AFTER LIFE
In the scheme of things, most people don’t distinguish between what we, versed in studying the paranormal, call ghosts and hauntings. You see a figure standing in front of you, or hear voices coming out of nowhere, or even sense a presence or feel like something is off in a space you’ve just entered. You say the place is “haunted” and might even say that there are “spirits” present.
But over the 140 years since the scholarly and scientific study of all things psychic phenomena related was officially started with the founding of the Society for Psychical Research, we’ve naturally learned a thing or three about many things considered “ghostly” and “haunted.”
First of all, there is a difference between a spirit of someone who has died—what we typically call an apparition (less cultural baggage than the term ghost, though they can be used interchangeably)—and a place or object that is haunted.
If we are truly talking about an apparition, ghost or spirit, we’re talking about someone’s consciousness surviving the death of their brain and body and having the capability to still be aware of and interactive with our physical world, and us. Consciousness is paramount here for the understanding of what that a ghost is, and interactivity and at least apparent self-awareness supports the entity being conscious.
When using the term haunting—often used with a qualifier and stated as residual haunting by some of the paranormal reality show folks—we’re not using the term to refer to a conscious entity. The concept is that the environment, the land, the house, or object store information of activity and emotions that happen in and around them.
Living humans—and we think animals of course—have the capability to pick up snippets of this recorded information from the environment. The information gets interpreted by our perceptual processes and added to our normal perceptions, kind of like adding a background on a Zoom call. Whether this is a form of ESP or some biophysical thing happening between our brains and something in the environment has not yet been determined.
People experience this information residue in many situations without ever saying the place is haunted. One example being when we go house or apartment hunting. We walk into a place and get a vibe, a sense of good or bad emotion and “energy”—nothing to do with the décor or smell. That emotional imprint comes from the people who lived there, or even still live there. If it’s “bad vibes,” we leave and continue our hunt for a new place to live.
The information can be translated in our heads to emotions (the most common) or visuals or sounds or voices, even smells and physical sensations. Objects can also hold such emotions and other information for us to perceive. For what is a house? It’s a big object we enter instead of touch or hold in our hands.
One last important point about the “recording” that hauntings hold: the Living leave the imprints, not the Dead. Yes, many places we call haunted are old and no longer have people living there, with the people who used to live there perhaps being long dead. And yes, places where a murder was committed, or a suicide happened can be haunted by the emotion—and even other kinds of perceptions—related to the murder or suicide.
However, just because someone died there does not mean the death or manner of death was responsible for any information residue.
Consider a movie like Frankenstein, released in 1931 (I’m a sucker for the old Universal monster movies). When the movie was filmed, everyone in it was fully alive. However, since then the majority (if not all) of the people on screen have died. Yet I can watch that movie whenever I want on DVD or streaming. I am watching a recording of people who are dead, yet who made that recording when they were alive.
It’s the same with a haunting. The information we pick up was imprinted into the environment by living people, though for some it’s from living people in the process of dying (but not dead yet). There are hauntings on record of people even seeing ghostly figures which turn out to be images of themselves!
One last point before I move on to discussing the main phenomenon of this novel, apparitions.
The word “haunt” refers typically to places. It is not uncommon to hear a character in an old detective mystery movie say something like “we need to check the killer’s old haunts.” Living people haunt their regular hangouts (you’re even haunting your own home and place of work or business). Regular customers of bars and restaurants are technically haunting the place, while alive. Norm and Cliff haunted the bar on the TV sitcom Cheers. In other words, anyone who spends a lot of time in a place is technically in their “old haunt.”
So yes, apparitions—ghosts—can haunt a place, but we don’t call that a haunting per se, mainly because that seems to be a choice. Apparitions can and do move from place to place on occasion, but at least in the US and other western countries, they hang around in places where they had a real emotional connection when alive.
What that means is that when someone dies and sticks around after death, they seem to stay with their home or appear in a place they had an association with when alive. In most cases, that’s a positive association and, other than their former home, could be a bar, restaurant, hotel, or other place they might have spent a lot of time. Whether they died there or not is irrelevant. It’s about the association from life, so if they died in that bar or restaurant, they might hang out there after death, or might head home.
I do want to mention a few more tidbits here before moving on to discuss the case I had that inspired the main ghostly interactions in the story you have just read (or maybe are about to read).
An apparition is our personality (or spirit, soul, consciousness, mind or whatever you want to call it) surviving the death of the body, and capable of interaction with the living (and presumably other apparitions). It is pure consciousness. Apparitions are seen, heard, felt or smelled (thankfully, not tasted!) by people through the process of ESP, ExtraSensory Perception. Not a “sixth sense,” but rather something extra, a perceptual process that does not involve the physical senses. It seems our own ESP allow us to perceive them in different ways. And yes, we all have some degree of ESP unless we’re totally blocking it, usually related to fear and/or belief.
The model of an apparition is that it is consciousness without form. As the apparition has no form, and no sensory organs or normal ability to communicate, he or she essentially connects to the minds of living people. The apparition essentially broadcasts sensory information (what he or she looks, sounds, feels and smells like) to the minds of us living folk. Our minds process the signals and add them to what our normal senses are picking up. Some people do better with visual input, some with auditory or other kinds of information. Some can process combinations. It’s an individual thing.
But because they have no physical form, they are not seen with the eye or heard with the ears, as such. It’s why in a crowded room with lots of living people and a ghost some see the ghost, some hear him, some feel his presence, some smell his cologne, and some get different combinations of those perceptions. And of course, lots of people in the room may get nothing at all. This is also why ghosts generally can’t be photographed—they don’t reflect or give off light to affect our eyes or cameras.
If a ghost could appear in a picture, it would be because the apparition consciously affected the film or digital media, not because they simply appear in a bright flash (which is absolutely not the case). In other words, the apparition affects the picture media with his or her mind. By definition, this is psychokinesis (PK), or mind over matter. PK is also how an apparition could move an object or even create a recording of a voice inside a voice recorder (what’s called electronic voice phenomena, or EVP).
When one sees or otherwise perceives a “ghost,” we in parapsychology have to figure out if what’s perceived represents an actual conscious entity or is a haunting. The distinction is related to interaction, since recordings typically do not react or interact to us or show any indication of self-awareness.
One way I can get this point across is to bring up the old ghost stories.
Let's say we have that old haunted Scottish castle, where the Lord of the manor (who died some 300 years ago under tragic circumstances, of course) appears on the parapet every night at midnight (playing his bagpipes, naturally). You see him coming towards you—needless to say, you’re starring as the intrepid investigator here. He reaches your position, then walks right through you. And night after night he goes through the same motions (playing the same tune). That's either a haunting—a replay from the past—or a very boring ghost (perhaps he has OCD).
Should he stop one night, however, and ask if you have any favorite songs you'd like to hear (on the bagpipes!)… well, you've got yourself a real "live" ghostie.
One important additional bit of information about apparitions is that there are numerous reports of apparitions of still-living people. Often those people are having an out of body experience at the same time as they’re being perceived as apparitions, or they’re having dreams about visiting the persons who see them as apparitions. Sometimes the apparition is generated by a person in some sort of immediate danger or crisis. It’s as though the apparition is projected to get help for them.
It is clear that the vast majority of encounters with apparitions happen at or within a couple of days of the moment of death of the person represented by that apparition. After that, they’re gone to whatever the next stage of existence is (called the afterlife or the other side by most people). Some few seem to stick around longer, and there are a number of personal reasons why this might be, a range of reasons that reflect the individual person.
After being around this field for over forty years, coupled with my own investigations, those of my colleagues, and the reports in our century-plus literature, I am of the opinion and belief that a personal desire or other reason to stay is not enough. Otherwise, I think we’d have a lot more such cases to investigate. It’s likely that there are some connections to the physical environment at or after the moment of death, such as to the Earth’s magnetic field.
We also cannot eliminate that there may be something spiritual or even Divine, that a greater power has something in “mind” for us, individually, when we die. Science cannot research such things as God or gods, due to them being “unknowable” in nature. I don’t personally believe this is the case or not the case. But it is something to consider.
One other important piece here that is completely ignored by “ghost hunters,” it seems (except those who do have the curiosity and motivation to learn from the field that has been studying the paranormal since the 1800s): Ghosts have ESP, too.
Without some form on non-sensory Perception, apparitions could not perceive (“see” or “hear”) us or the physical world in general, since they do not have physical sensory organs to gather information. They don’t physically make sound, otherwise everyone present could hear them and recordings could easily be made of those sounds or voices. No voice box, no physical voice.
Apparitions perceive the world and communicate using non-sensory—or extrasensory—means.
As mentioned earlier, since they have no physical form per se, anyone “seeing” an apparition is perceiving some kind of self-image of that apparition. Since, with rare exception, we in Western culture think of ourselves as wearing clothing, and ghosts are people too, naturally that psychic image people pick up on has the apparition wearing clothes. And often, the ghost looks much healthier, younger and even fitter than the people they were at their time of death. Close your eyes and get a picture of yourself in your mind and you’ll get what I mean.
In communication with apparitions over time, people who have communicated with them, whether “normal” people or psychics or mediums, have learned that they don’t have a real sense of the passage of time. After all, they have no body-clock, no real need to eat, and apparently no need to sleep (I say “apparently” because the ghosts in the wonderful CBS and BBC TV shows Ghosts do apparently sleep at night, but that’s pop culture for you).
In some very few cases, the apparitions have learned to move things or otherwise affect the physical world. As they have no bodies with which to do this, we can say they’re interacting with the physical via mind over matter—psychokinesis, or PK. As a pop culture example, I point you to the 1990 film Ghost with Patrick Swayze, Whoopi Goldberg, and Demi Moore, in which Swayze’s character has to learn from another ghost how to move something.
On to the apparition case at hand…
First, for a complete write-up of this case, please see my chapter “Interactive Apparitions” in Leslie Kean’s 2017 book Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife, available in multiple formats.
The intriguing call came into the office of the Graduate Parapsychology Program at John F. Kennedy University in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I was on faculty. This was not long after I received enormous national publicity in the fall of 1984 as a “Real-Life Ghostbuster.” (NOTE: The Graduate Parapsychology Program ended in the late 1980s, and, as of 2021, JFK University has been folded into National University. I continue to teach Parapsychology online through the Rhine Education Center, www.rhineedu.org, and Atlantic University, www.atlanticuniv.edu)
The call came from a woman named Pat in Livermore, a city east of Oakland, California, less than an hour drive from where JFK University was. Pat was an attorney who lived in Livermore with her son and her husband. Her mother lived nearby. The call was prompted by her learning that her son had been having conversations with the ghost of the previous owner. She also learned that these almost-daily conversations had been going on for well over a year, since shortly after they moved in.
Pat's attitude was refreshing, as was her story. They had purchased the 70-plus year-old home in an estate sale a couple of years after the death by natural causes of the owner. The woman who was that previous owner had lived in the house since her birth in 1917 until her death in 1980. Since moving in the house, Pat, as well as her husband and her mother had seen the apparition of a woman appearing and disappearing in the house, but until her son mentioned his daily communications with the ghost, the others had not even admitted they’d seen her too. In other words, they’d all seen the ghost, but kept the sightings to themselves. Pat grew up in a family environment that acknowledged psychic experience and was not afraid of the ghost.
One day, Pat’s 12-year-old son Chris began talking about the origins of some of the antique furniture and some of the porcelain dolls they had also purchased in the estate sale. Pat asked if he had found some kind of paperwork about the items. Chris simply replied that "Lois told me." Lois was the name of the late owner. Chris also let her know that the ghost, Lois, had told him that the other family members had seen her but were not talking about the experiences.
After Chris's revelation, Pat spoke with her husband and mother, and they all admitted to one another that they, too, had seen the ghost on several occasions. But it was Chris that Lois apparently felt most comfortable around and appeared to every day.
Pat was curious about having a ghost in the house with a growing pre-teen. In fact, by the time of her call, she had already taken her son in to see a local psychological counselor to make sure he was "okay" and that it was not damaging to have him continue conversing with the ghost. With the family’s permission, I had lunch with the therapist, who, he admitted, was a bit of an agnostic when it came to ghosts. However, he was convinced that Chris was well adjusted and not prone to making things up—consciously or otherwise.
I agreed to come check things out myself, and I was quite excited to do so. Pat stated that Chris was able to get verifiable information from Lois. This was a rarity when it comes to apparition cases.
Pat did pass along a concern of Lois's about my visit, however, that Chris had passed on from Lois. Apparently, Lois watched television quite a bit with Chris and had seen a commercial for Ghostbusters. She was worried we'd bring along "blasters" to get rid of her. I assured Pat that this was not the case.
Driving with me from the University to Livermore were Joanna Rix and one of the Transpersonal Counseling students, Kip Leyser. As we drove to Pat's place, we talked about a number of things. A few, in particular, came back to "haunt" us in a way. The car I was driving was giving me problems, and I expressed ideas for a new car. Joanna was seriously contemplating quitting her job that week. Kip, we learned, had been a professional dancer for ten years before coming back to school at JFK University.
We arrived and were greeted by Pat, her mother, and Chris. Pat's husband was out of town at the time. As we were invited in, I got the impression Chris was giving us the visual once over to make sure we had no ghost traps. We started a tape recorder and walked around the house, discussing the sightings of the ghost they had all had.
Pat and her mother had seen the ghost on brief occasions. She always appeared as an elderly woman. Chris had been seeing her almost every day for more than a year. He told us she didn't always appear as an old woman to him. She often looked like a teenager, a six-year-old, a woman in her thirties, and sometimes middle aged.
"Did her clothing change often?" I asked.
"All the time," he replied. In fact, Pat and her mother also admitted to seeing Lois wearing different clothing. This was important to me, as was the appearance of Lois at different ages.
I asked Chris how that was possible. He told us Lois believed she did not have a "form.” She believed she was some kind of "ball of energy" that was able to communicate by "projecting her thoughts" to others. These thoughts included visual and verbal information that she would "project into the minds of others" so they would "see" and "hear" her as if she was really there. Remember, this was coming from a twelve-year-old.
This meant that Lois was aware that she was literally "telling" Chris's mind what to "see" and "hear" about her. They were not really seeing or hearing Lois. They were perceiving her, and both Lois and Chris were aware of this.
"Why was Lois appearing in different forms and clothing?" I asked.
"Because that's how she felt that day," he replied. In other words, as indicated earlier in this Afterword, it was Lois's own sense of self, her perceptions about the way she viewed herself that day—at a particular age in particular clothing—that shaped her "projection" of herself.
We finished touring the house, hearing about some of Lois's furniture and her doll collection, about the city of Livermore, and about Lois herself when she was alive. For a twelve-year-old, Chris was an articulate purveyor of anecdote. In fact, I had little trouble believing someone else was feeding him the information.
Was Lois there with us? Apparently, she was by Chris's side the whole time (or so he said).
As we ended the house tour, we asked whether we could ask Lois some questions. We sat down in the living room, facing Chris who was seated next to an empty chair he identified as Lois's favorite spot to sit. According to the boy, she was sitting there with us all.
So, the three of us pitched questions at an empty chair as a young boy looked and listened to "someone" sitting there, repeating or translating "her" answers. There was a surreal feel to the situation, like we were in some weird situation comedy. While Joanna and Kip asked questions more related to Lois herself, I pretty much kept to questions related to her current incarnation as an apparition.
The answers we all got were specific and to the point. More and more information came out about Lois, giving us the picture that she was a local social butterfly, often hosting parties at her home throughout her life. Most of her relatives had died, but we were informed on one who was still alive.
For me, Lois related—through Chris's excellent translation—more description of her form and ability to communicate on a telepathic level with Chris. She declined to appear to us. She still didn't quite trust us, she said, and admitted she wasn't even sure she really could. She related that others seeing her might also have to do with their current attachment to the house and how psychic they were.
Most of what Chris told us Lois said about her form as an apparition was more than a bit familiar from my readings in parapsychological literature—not from books for the general public. This was not something I expected from a twelve-year-old boy who, according to his mother, had never read anything on ghosts.
One of the more enlightening questions I asked was why Lois was still hanging around her old house, why she had not passed on. The answer was that she had done much socializing, had many parties in her life, and had not been an avid churchgoer. A believer in heaven and hell, she thought too much partying and not enough church might see her to hell, so she figured why not stick around rather than take the chance of ending up there? Besides, she told us, she liked the new family and felt very happy with them, especially Chris.
From this, one cannot conclude that there is a heaven or hell, only that Lois believed there was. However, we could infer that her belief and her desire to remain somehow enabled her to stay as an apparition in her home. As mentioned above, it is unlikely it’s only a desire on the part of all who die that’s enough to allow everyone to be here as a ghost, as there were also most likely some environmental factors and some person-specific factors that allowed Lois to stay. Otherwise, we would have many more apparition cases than we do.
I finally asked if Lois had any questions for us. Lois decided to show off. Chris looked to the empty chair and then asked us each a question.
"Loyd, she wants to know if you've decided on a color for that car you want.
"Joanna, have you really thought about the kind of job you want after you quit the one you have?
"Kip, how long were you a professional dancer?"
I think our jaws probably hit the floor at the same time. We each, in hollow voices, answered the questions. Then, after telling Pat and the others that the questions related to our in-transit conversation, I asked how Lois knew to even ask the questions.
Chris looked over to the chair, then back at us a bit sheepishly. "You're probably not going to like this, but Lois wanted to make sure you weren't bringing blasters to get rid of her, so she hitched a ride with you here and eavesdropped."
We all got a big—though nervous—laugh out of that. Kip was especially shaken, since the only place Lois could have “sat” was next to him in the back seat. We got up to leave, promising continued contact and follow-up.
We did go through the tapes to listen for any indication that we somehow told them about our previous conversation. We concluded that either Chris—or Lois-read our minds, or that my car was bugged, or that Lois really caught a ride with us. To this day, I'm sorry it didn't occur to me to ask how Lois got to JFKU to get into my car in the first place… did she hitchhike there? Take a bus? Fly?
Sometime afterwards, Lois's only living relative was tracked down. I spoke with the elderly gentleman, who was able to verify the tales of Lois's youth as true, as well as information and stories about the family and Lois's house that Chris came up with.
In case you’re wondering, Pat did thoroughly check to see if Chris had somehow found diaries or other papers Lois might have left behind. None could be found.
Chris continued to see Lois on a daily basis for a while, but then lost interest as he grew and discovered—and was discovered by—real girls, though he apparently asked Lois for advice on many occasions. I continued to follow up with Pat through the early 2000s, and Lois was still in the house, still seen on occasion by members of the family, and still apparently happy to be staying in her lifetime home.
This case is my favorite on many levels. First, the verified information was enough under the circumstances to convince me that normal sources of information could be ruled out. Lois was there or perhaps Chris was some kind of super-psychic who was able to pick up the information from the house itself through clairvoyance or retrocognition. That there were other witnesses to Lois puts heavier emphasis on the former possibility rather than the latter.
Second, the information about how Lois was able to appear and communicate was far beyond what most people would be able to read about easily at the time, let alone the kind of information that a twelve-year-old would spout about ghosts.
Third, that the family called us in because they, too, were curious about apparitions was refreshing and enabled us to ask the kinds of questions I like to ask about the "how" and "why" of apparitions.
Finally, that the family was well-adjusted, seemingly without psychological issues about the ghost was very encouraging to someone like me who so often encounters people whose first impulse when they see a ghost is to turn and run.
Lois showed herself to be a person first, and a ghost second. She proved my adage that "Ghosts are people, too."
Cases like this exist all over the world, though unfortunately my colleagues and I rarely get to visit and dig deeper into them. Most people wouldn’t think to call for a parapsychologist (or other paranormal investigators) when they have a friendly ghost or even a positive-imprint type of haunting. It’s generally only when one is afraid, angry, annoyed or otherwise put out that one calls for “help” with psychic experiences or encounters–or for plumbing, for that matter.
One last thing: that “squirrelly” case Jennifer Daye investigates in this book is also based on one of my own experiences.
In the actual case I sat on the rough attic floor waiting for something to happen. It is one of the only cases I’ve ever done where I did so at night with the lights out, as that was the condition of the attic when the couple heard the “ghostly” footsteps from the floor below.
I actually heard scratching and light thumping sounds across the attic from me, sounds that were coming closer. At the same time, the male owner of the home yelled up to me “do you hear footsteps?” I turned on my flashlight and shocked the squirrel rolling a big nut across the floor. He (or she) scampered away through a hole I found. I then found a pile of nuts nearby.
It seems odd acoustics were to blame for the bouncing nut to be heard as footsteps. To test my hypothesis, I rolled a nut across the floor. “Footsteps!” yelled the owners. To further test, I grabbed a handful of the nuts and rolled them all across the floor at once. The couple responded with more yelling (and a little screaming), asking if I was “okay.”
I came down from the attic, at which point they looked at me suspiciously. I explained the acoustics and had to take them up one at a time (the other remaining below) to show them how it all worked, as well as to point out the squirrel’s entry point.
You may wonder why I did the test with a handful of nuts, especially since it was going to freak out the homeowners (and did, of course).
Sometimes you just have to do something to entertain yourself in these investigations.
—Loyd Auerbach, January 13, 2023
FOR MORE INFORMATION
If you’re at all interested in finding out more about psychic phenomena in general, psychic abilities, ghostly encounters, and research on all of this—the kinds of things that Jennifer and Nate encountered in this book, in the first in the series, NEAR DEATH, and in future investigations—check out these organizations as your starting points. They are credible, provide excellent information and learning opportunities, and are ones I am proud to be part of (or a member of, in the case of the SPR).
Rhine Research Center: www.rhine.org
The longest running lab and educational organization in the United States, this is the legacy of the Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory founded in the 1930s. The Rhine has a huge media library—videos of lectures by researchers, psychics, and others presented over the last few years. There are a few that are free, but you are encouraged to join, not only to gain access to the media library and get discounts on webcasts of new lectures and discounts on classes and other things, but mainly to help support the work of the Rhine.
The Rhine Education Center (www.rhineedu.org) offers online courses throughout the year (Loyd Auerbach is one of the main instructors and loves teaching through the Rhine).
The Society for Psychical Research: www.spr.ac.uk
The SPR is the oldest psychical research and parapsychology organization, founded in 1882. Lots of good info here for free, especially the Psi Encyclopedia (https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/)—an ever-growing resource on psychic abilities and research.
The Forever Family Foundation: www.foreverfamilyfoundation.org
Free to join, this non-profit supports the work of evidential mediums in the family grieving process and supports scientific research into experiences suggestive or supportive of the concept of Survival of Consciousness (and Loyd Auerbach is the current President)
Follow Loyd Auerbach on Twitter @profparanormal
Subscribe to his YouTube channels at:
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