Are Ghosts Real?

No better time of the year than now to put up a post about ghosts and whether or not they really exist.

The folks at U.S. Catholic are asking if Catholics believe in ghosts:

About 10 years ago, Marla Fisher and her husband, Everett, were leaving their Pasadena, Texas ranch-style home for a weekend getaway. As Everett backed out of the driveway, Marla remembered that she’d left her curling iron in the bathroom, and she went back to retrieve it.

The couple had been renting the house for about four years, and every once in a while Marla would reach over to turn on a lamp and nothing would happen. Then she’d tighten the bulb and the light would come on.

Anywhere there was an exposed lightbulb—a lamp, a ceiling fan—at some point the bulb would loosen just enough for the electricity to misfire. The Fishers lived in the flight path of a nearby airfield, so they attributed the loose bulbs to the slight shake the house underwent each time a jet approached.

Once in a while they’d joke, “We must have ghosts.”

On the day Marla went back into the house for her curling iron, she walked through the door to the master bedroom and saw what she thought was a shadow going into the bathroom.

“There’s someone in the house,” she thought. But she and Everett had just left the house moments before.

To be sure, Marla checked the back door. It was locked. And then she realized the light was coming into the house from the back door, meaning the shadow she saw couldn’t have been a shadow. The light was coming from the opposite direction. The hair on the back of her neck stood straight up.

Marla, who calls herself a “cradle Catholic,” is involved in her parish. Before this experience, she hadn’t really thought much about ghosts, or what the church teaches about them.

“I felt that this was a spirit, but does that mean this was someone’s soul?” she asks. “Why would someone’s soul be here in my house? Are the souls of those in purgatory living among us? What do ghosts mean in the spiritual sense?”

Do you believe?

There's much, much more and it's all intriguing.  

Do you believe?  Leave a ghost story in the comments.