While we were experiencing all the phenomena it certainly did feel that ghosts or other supernatural beings, as conventionally understood, were inhabiting our house. I don't have any other explanation for the apparitions some people saw, or the noises we heard or what made a glass jump up from the arm of my chair, in front of me and Christine, and hover, mid-air, then come down, finally resting at my feet. I have no other explanation for the varied phenomena Karin experienced, or for the suffocating dreams or voices of giggling children or floating balls of light and small, shadowy shapes that seemed to like being in our living room. It all sounds so unbelieveable.....even to me......even as I type this. Did that really happen to us? Yes, it did. But I wish it could have been explored more. Let me explain.
When there is frightening phenomena happening, it is normal to want it to stop and normal to try to put in into an understandable box. You see an apparition and go along with the accepted dogma that it must be a dead person trying to communicate. But what if we are way off about how we view the paranormal? For instance, at the time our haunting took place, there was no internet access. There were no ghost shows on T.V. The topic was not freely discussed and it was frowned upon by most people I knew. This made it harder to come to the conclusion that we had an actual haunting occurring, and also made it easier, once that idea was accepted, to view it in the traditional manner and seek traditional help, i.e. a psychic investigator and a medium. But I have always felt, as I express in the last chapters of my book, that we missed something, that there was more to what was happening to us than was so easily categorized.
We now know that there are a few different types of hauntings: There are the residual types, which means that an action by a person seems to be recorded somehow and played back over and over, the apparition doing the same things, including walking through walls that were not there when the original action took place. Sounds reasonable, except I can't understand why this type of haunting is not causing more of a fuss. I mean, recorded. On what? Some universal DVR? When I hear this mentioned on TV I want to scream out, Isn't this the most fascinating thing ever??
There are other hauntings where the phenomena seem to be interacting with living people. There is ESP and psychokinesis and clairvoyance, all of which I will get into at another time. Parapsychologists are discovering new bits and pieces of the paranormal puzzle all the time. I hear more now of EVP's, which are electronic voice phenomena, or the recording of voices when no one has spoken into the recorder. Electromagnetic activity seems to both rise in the presence of ghosts, and, at the same time, the existence of a high electromagnetic field seems to cause various uncomfortable feelings often mistakenly attributed to hauntings.
There are just so many questions, not just about our haunting, but all of them. Perhaps they really are caused by disembodied souls trying to communicate. But what if psychic phenomena is a window into another dimension that has nothing to do with death? There are just so many possibilities.
I guess what I am trying to say is that I feel to describe what happened to us in that house as merely a 'haunting' doesn't go far enough. I think if we had taken the time to dissect it more, the way Karin wishes it had been, perhaps some very interesting insights into the paranormal could have been uncovered.
What I do know, even though I am still a skeptic and still question, question, question....is that there were elements of our haunting, most specifically the suffocating dreams, the balls of light, and the apparitions we all saw, that made me understand there is something that exists after this life ends. I don't think everything that happened to us points in that direction, but these experiences, for me
help me to believe in an afterlife. What that afterlife is exactly.....well.....who knows?
There are other hauntings where the phenomena seem to be interacting with living people. There is ESP and psychokinesis and clairvoyance, all of which I will get into at another time. Parapsychologists are discovering new bits and pieces of the paranormal puzzle all the time. I hear more now of EVP's, which are electronic voice phenomena, or the recording of voices when no one has spoken into the recorder. Electromagnetic activity seems to both rise in the presence of ghosts, and, at the same time, the existence of a high electromagnetic field seems to cause various uncomfortable feelings often mistakenly attributed to hauntings.
There are just so many questions, not just about our haunting, but all of them. Perhaps they really are caused by disembodied souls trying to communicate. But what if psychic phenomena is a window into another dimension that has nothing to do with death? There are just so many possibilities.
I guess what I am trying to say is that I feel to describe what happened to us in that house as merely a 'haunting' doesn't go far enough. I think if we had taken the time to dissect it more, the way Karin wishes it had been, perhaps some very interesting insights into the paranormal could have been uncovered.
What I do know, even though I am still a skeptic and still question, question, question....is that there were elements of our haunting, most specifically the suffocating dreams, the balls of light, and the apparitions we all saw, that made me understand there is something that exists after this life ends. I don't think everything that happened to us points in that direction, but these experiences, for me
help me to believe in an afterlife. What that afterlife is exactly.....well.....who knows?
