The link "Get the story" in this post is broken ( http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/artic... ).

In my family, we have no theology to cover ghosts other than as "demonic". However, my no-nonsense retired aeronautical engineer uncle (read that as "thinks in equations") was about to write a letter to his sister who was dying and fell asleep in his chair. He did not know she had already died.
He heard a voice call his name and it sounded like his sister. He awoke and thought it was his imagination. He started to doze off again. The voice called him again, only louder and announced itself as his sister. She said, "You were right. I'm going now."
And it was one of those things understood between them because he had pestered her for so many years to raise her children in the Lord by taking them to church. Instead, she neglected them and chased after the world herself. She lost her children to New Age, drugs, and some other things. Apparently, she wanted to signal him before she left.
But I know of another story, too. One of the academic scholars with whom I work was involved in the historic home of an author who used to hold seances. (Recipe for demonic activity.) He told me he saw her ghost on two occasions. Later he told the new landlord who happened to be Orthodox. The man was alarmed, called a priest and had the place exorcised. No one has seen the ghost since.
The first incident I think was a real passing spirit. The second, I think, was demonic. Demons are very good at impersonating the dead and possibly know all sorts of genuine information since they have been around for so long. The same scholar I mentioned also attended a seance in which one of the dead foretold that he would find a certain document, which he did. So, yes, I think demons are quite clever and we should not believe them just because they give us accurate information.

Josh,
Jimmy has stated that he cannot because of the number of comments keep track to answer questions from the comment boxes. It's best if you would just e-mail him.

Jimmy,
I'm new to your site so I'm not sure if you respond to these comments or not, but I'm giving it a go anyway. Wouldn't you think that the modern account of what a ghost is is quite clearly false? For example, on Halloween at work people were telling about their ghost stories. People mentioned some ideas of ghosts running along side their car, or old civil war ghosts who were looking for their lost wives, or children ghosts who got toys out of the closet and played with them when people weren't at home. I find these conceptions and stories to be something that must be false. In the first sense that it doesn't seem possible that a soul that has stood before the judgment seat of Christ, and who could fully witness to the glories of heaven and therefore possess an understanding about the sufferings of hell would have any desire to return to Earth to play with toys, or wait on a porch for his long dead wife to return home. Secondly, if such events were true, it would not be ghosts in the sense that it actually was innocent children ghosts playing with toys, or an innocent civil war solider ghost waiting for his wife to return, but rather a demon seeking to cause mischief which would lead persons to sin. But even so, with our understanding that the devil and demons seek to hide themselves to draw people away from the concept of the afterlife, wouldn't it seem that the existence of ghosts would undermine the devils attempt to show the world as being materialistic? Anyway, maybe I've got it wrong, but I still cling to the fact that it seems very hard for a soul to have seen God, the creator of all things, and still have the "desire" to come back to dwell on this earth. Or more simply, why would they not wish to dwell with the saints and perform greater works (as St. Paul would say) in heaven by their prayers, or do the same for others in Purgatory and accept the punishment that any soul who had stood before the judgment seat would rightly feel for the sins they had committed against God? And to take it a little step further, it does not seem likely that God would do the same, though I do not pretend to understand God, but it does seem more likely that He would rather have His Church be the ulimate authority on the afterlife and not allow beliefs in ghosts to dictate such matters. Keep up the good work and I'd love to hear your thoughts back!

great use of language,and intergration of the german background of usage.hope i get an A with the help of this site! thanks...and i gave credit btw :)

What I find surprising from these sorts of statistics is the amount of people who believe in ghosts and a heaven-type afterlife but who don't believe in God.
We can probably thank postmodern-new-age-mish-mash thinking for that. As well as people just not thinking things through properly.

"Familiar spirits" would be a valid explanation of a given situation. Whether it is a correct explanation is another matter.

"Souls experiencing purgatory might seem strage or disquieting to individuals in this life and might appear malevolent, but they would not be. I don't see any evidence, though, that genuinely malevolent souls--i.e., the souls of the damned--could manifest on earth. Thus any genuinely malevolent ghosts would more likely represent demonic activity as far as I can tell."
Hamlet's dilemma!

While I have never (thank God a million times) seen or experience the presence of an actual ghost (and I hope it never happens, as it's one of the very few things that I'm actually afraid of even if there's no reason for it) I know a few people, good friends of mine, that have lived in 'haunted houses'. One of them, a girl from my church group, even went to my diocese's exorcist, who told her that the spirits that lived in her house were indeed not demonic, but simply souls that needed prayers, and adviced her family to pray for them. Another person I know, said there was a ghost in one of the houses he lived in, but that the noises it made slowly stopped the more he prayed for him, until they ceased altogether.
Creepy... *shudder*

There is no reason not to believe in ghosts, but there are often a lot of reasons not to believe a ghost story.

The figures may represent Protestantism's traditional view that the Saints do not communicate with the living and therefore all such communication is demonic. Since it is demonic it does not qualify as a ghost. Hence ghosts don't exist to a large portion of conservatives. Though the haunted house numbers would seem to point in the opposite direction...
The other explanation is that Bible Thumping Conservatives are far fewer in number than the Left would like us to believe. I've notice more and more socially conservative commentary from individuals that are at best agnostic. There is also a strong tendancy for very devout Christians to take a very "Leftist" stance on many socio-economic issues.

This reminds me of a question I have been thinking about a lot lately: There is a radio interview with Fr. James. J. LeBar availible from the Catholic.com radio archives in which he discusses exorcism. In it he makes two claims (spread over a number of statements), the first being that the devil actually lives in hell, the second being that he sends damned souls (or perhaps they act autonomously) of the deceased to torment and/or possess people. He claims to have exorcised many such spirits. Both of these claims seem very, very, very theologically wrong, however upon research he is by no means the only exorcist to make such claims. What is going on? If this is true, how is it so? If it is not, what does this say of the authenticity of the field of exorcism as a whole?
Hmmmm

I seem to remember reading somewhere about the possibility of demons taking on the appearance of dead people in order to deceive the living. I think they were called "familiar spirits" or some such things. This would supposedly explain "spiritual encounters" that are not obvious hoaxes and that do not have a definitely divine source (e.g. the ghost of Frank Sinatra heard singing at night; the spectral form of Marlon Brando wandering about the foodcourts; et cetera).
Hey Jimmy, would such an explanation be theologically valid?

I somewhat recently asked the question as to the existence of ghosts of Colin Donovan on EWTN's Q&A forum.
I almost fell over in shock when he pretty much gave the same answer as Jimmy does here.
That totally changed my previous attitude towards the existence and manifestations of spirits.
Haven't seen any yet, though.
Although I did wake up one morning and out of the blue became startlingly aware that for sure my saintly mother was in Heaven. I guess I hadn't doubted that, but since it was a few years after her death, I immediately had to add quite a few "zero's" to my estimated Purgatory time.

Great... I couldn't sleep so I pulled up the laptop and checked out Jimmy's blog. I thought that reading a quick post or two will settle my mind down and let me sleep.
Um... This didn't help. 8^>