Holy Ghosts – A Spiritual Look at the Paranormal

BY HARV BISHOP

Imagine children’s toys turning themselves off and on at odd hours, strange noises in the attic and shadowy, ethereal figures in your home. Then imagine that the epicenter of all this apparently paranormal activity is your small child’s bedroom.

It sounds like the latest Hollywood ghost movie, but author and book editor Gary Jansen and his family lived it in their Long Island home.

What Jansen calls his “classic haunting” tale has another twist. He evolved from skepticism to fear to seeing important spiritual lessons in his experience.

Jansen has edited books by Deepak Chopra and Paulo Coelho. His own books include the new “The 15 Minute Prayer Solution” and “Holy Ghosts,” [#Commissions earned) which details his ghostly encounters and spiritual journey.

Every “classic haunting” story has its scary moments so we’ll start there.

Although Jansen was admittedly skeptical, the strange events he was experiencing in his home were persistent enough that he sought aid from Mary Ann Winkowski, a Chicago-based psychic who inspired the hit television series “The Ghost Whisperer.” When they spoke by phone, Winkowski described Janesen’s home and his son’s room in perfect detail though she had never been there.

Jansen recalls:  “Mary Ann says, ‘I have an eerie feeling you have two ghosts in your house. One is a woman that has been there a long time. I do not have a problem with that one.’ Which made me say, ‘Well, wait a minute, if you are saying there are two ghosts and you don’t have a problem with that one, then you have a problem with the other one?’ And then she says, ‘And he is right on top of you.’ As she was saying those words, as they were coming right out of her mouth, I felt an electric surge go through my body.”

That’s as far as we can go without spoiling your pleasure in reading the book.

In another paranormal encounter, Jansen fell asleep on a living room chair and was awakened at 3 a.m. by what sounded like loud church bells inside the house. As he looked for the source of the eerie sounds he saw a ghostly woman with auburn hair and a floral dress in the door to his son’s playroom. He then discovered his downstairs computer had come on and iTunes was playing the AC/DC song “Hells Bells,” which includes the sound of church bells.

“That was one of those moments where your hair stands on end. There were lyrics in it that really resonated with what was going on. I was having chills and almost like electrical surges that were going up and down my spine. I think the quote is “Dark sensations up and down your spine” from AC/DC.  I remember sitting there and saying, ‘Get the hell out of here, this is not happening.’”

Why didn’t he and his family get out? A high mortgage, he explains with a laugh, and reassuring stretches of normal reality between the weird paranormal outbursts.

“There were plenty of moments when we felt unsettled, frightened,” Jansen says. “There was one incident where I was just trying to get some sleep. Scary stuff was happening and I yelled out in the middle of the night and everything stops. I am mostly a skeptic. So was it the sound of my voice that sent out a sound wave that was able to settle down something? I don’t know. I spent a lot of time trying to make excuses or explain things rationally. But at a certain point, I jumped into the pond, drank the Kool-Aid and said, ‘I am just going try and take this path and see where it leads me.’

“Sometimes you have to let go and allow your emotions and other realities to spring up and partake of it all. I asked myself ‘If there is an intellectual world, why can’t there be a very, very deep spiritual world?’ It is kind of what we were taught, vaguely, as I was growing up as a Catholic.  But it was never explained to me wholeheartedly. So in some ways I felt like it was a journey into the unknown.

“I was scared and taken back by all of this so I started questioning my beliefs. In the end, I realized it was all kind of a miracle. I think that if I had approached it differently, and had seen these experiences not as something to be feared, but as something to be explored, something that is trying to reveal another meaning, then it would have been a different experience for me.

“A lot of us fear things we don’t understand. That is who we are as human beings. We want to protect ourselves and survive. So you hunker down to protect yourself. But I think what God tells us, in those challenging times, is, ‘If I created the whole Universe, I created everything that is in it, you don’t have to be afraid. I am going to provide for you, you are going to be okay, but you block that [comfort] if you are fearful all the time.’ That was a lesson to me to stop being fearful. It has not worked 100 percent. I am still afraid of things. But I think it has given me a clearer perspective about what opens up inside you when you really, firmly believe that God has got your back. All of sudden you become a channel for the Holy Spirit.”

A pivotal point in the story comes when Jansen realizes the role the power of thought played in attracting a ghost to his home. To be more specific would spoil a crucial plot twist. I asked Jansen his views on the power of thought.

“The ancients knew the power of words,” he says. “They knew the power of intention and they understood the power of a thought. Jesus said that the power of thought is as powerful as the action. If you are angry at your enemy, guess what? That is just as bad as trying to stab the guy. If you have wrath inside your heart, it is just as bad as attacking someone physically. It is a huge responsibility for people. It means you really have to really protect the way you think.

“I think as a society we have become lax about the power of words. It is very easy for us to become flippant, especially in our consumer-driven, everyone-has-a -say society. Everybody can say all the mean stuff that they want on the internet about people. How can they not think that is not having a psychic and spiritual effect on someone besides hurting someone’s feelings? You don’t think that somehow that is changing the world because people are spilling vitriol all the time?”

Jansen is both a devout Catholic and a long-time student of the world’s spiritual traditions. From Buddhism to Christianity, all traditions speak of the paranormal and ghosts. Too many contemporary religious traditions discount the paranormal experiences of their followers, says Jansen. And unexplained occurrences are part of almost everyone’s lives.

“People are having these 21st century experiences that somehow relate to what happened to the Saints in the past. And not only to the Christian Saints, but the Hindu saints and the Buddhist saints. They were able to communicate with people who have died, exhibit telepathy and even levitation. These experiences are universal, so let’s talk about them.”

When the book was published Jansen found himself rejected for interviews by Catholic media television and radio.

“People actually said ‘I like you, but you cannot ever be on this show again,’” Jansen recalls, “or ‘You are just not Catholic enough.’ The paranormal is a topic that makes people uneasy. My own clan did not want anything to do with me and that hurt.”

Jansen and family have been ghost free since their haunting ended.

“Why is it that people can have these paranormal experiences and they never happen again? Why do they all of a sudden stop? Is that because your consciousness shifts because you have had the experience? It is like being on a roller coaster. You get on the roller coaster the first time and it scares the heck out of you. Then you go on it the second time and it takes some of the thrill away. So, those questions and the nature of our thoughts influencing reality and consciousness. Those are the kind of bigger questions that I have been focusing on. I hope to write a book about it in the near future.”

“I think in retrospect,” Jansen reflects, “my family and I were given a gift and a miracle. To be reminded, or at least acknowledge, that in fact the world is bigger than you think it is.”

This article originally appeared in the September 2016 issue of Science of Mind magazine.

Books mentioned in the Post:

[#Commissions earned]

Read below for an excerpt from Holy Ghosts: 

From Holy Ghosts: Or, How a Not-So Good Catholic Boy Became a Believer in Things that Go Bump in the Night by Gary Jansen

A few months before I became convinced that our Long Island house was being haunted by ghosts, I awoke suddenly in the middle of the night from a dream. For the first ime in weeks, the night was quiet. I was in my bedroom. I was alone. My wife and our young son were sleeping at her mother’s for a couple of days while I worked on a book I was writing. Moments ago, I had been sound asleep and now I was wide awake. I remember thinking to myself that I wished I woke up this alert every day for work instead of groggy and tired. Though the dream was startling—and, it turns out, unmemorable—I didn’t feel afraid. On the contrary, I felt very much alive and aware of everything around me: the bed, the blanket, the air in the room, the temperature, the outline of the furniture, and the faint strips of streetlight streaming through a partially open blind. Everything in the room seemed to be breathing, and I felt a strange sort of union with everything around me.

As I looked around the room and listened to the night, I became very conscious of my body and the way my clothes felt against my shoulders and legs. I could feel the hair on my head and was aware of certain parts of my back, which seemed to press down more heavily on my mattress than others. I began to think about my skin and how it covered my entire body, that I was a landscape of ridges and curves. I then became very attentive of what lay beneath my surface: my bones and my organs. I imagined my heart pumping blood through my veins and arteries. I could picture my lungs expanding

and contracting. I could see my stomach moving and digesting the food I had eaten earlier in the evening. I saw my liver and my kidneys cleaning toxins from my body. All of this activity was going on right below the surface of my skin and I tried really hard to listen closely to all of it, and you know what I heard?

Nothing.

Silence.

I couldn’t hear my heart beating. I couldn’t hear the acids in my stomach breaking down the food that was in there. I couldn’t even hear my own breathing. I wasn’t dead. This wasn’t an out-of-body experience; it was a total in-my-body experience. I realized for the first time in my life that our bodies are really quiet, unless we’re using our voices or experiencing a physical imbalance of some kind. Certainly, my stomach would growl from time to time or I would get a case of the hiccups on occasion, but those were exceptions. Most of the time, my body didn’t make a peep (or at least not that I could hear). At that moment I became very aware that below my skin, less than an inch below the surface of my outer body, there was a silent, unseen world that was regulating and influencing my life all the time. It was, in many ways, an invisible realm, a place brimming with activity and energy, one that existed by its own rules and to which I was fully connected. It was also a world I had very little control over. Sure, I could change how deeply I was breathing or eat a food that would accelerate my heart rate, but I could never get my lungs to act like my pancreas. I couldn’t get my brain to act like my esophagus. Each organ had its own function and generally lived in harmony with the others unless something was out of whack.

As I lay there thinking about these things, I asked myself: couldn’t it be possible that there exists a world of spirits, an invisible world of ghosts, angels, and demons, one that is less than an inch away from our physical existence—a world that is mostly quiet (unless it’s out of balance), acts by its own rules, and is just as influential and important in our daily lives as our own bodies are?

At the time, strange occurrences had been happening in my house, a classic haunting, if you will—odd noises, strange electrical anomalies, chills, objects moving of their own accord—and I didn’t know how to answer my own question. When it came to an invisible world of spirits, all I could say was that I believed in God, and I had a difficult enough time believing in him, let alone a supernatural world populated by veil-like apparitions, Hallmark card cherubs, and little red men with pointy goatees and pitchforks. And even if a world like that did exist, what did it matter in my life?

I learned in time that it matters a lot.