When Ghosts Speak - Mary Ann Winkowski [22]
I looked around the pool area again, but I couldn’t see the ghost anywhere. I had a strong feeling that he’d had something to do with the woman’s flotation device coming off. After my class ended, I ran into the woman in the locker room and had the chance to ask her if she was okay. She was clearly still shaken, and admitted to me that she probably shouldn’t have been in the deep water at all, but she had just purchased a new type of flotation device and had felt confident that she’d be secure.
She showed me the float device—a foam belt clipped into place with plastic clasps, like those used in a baby’s high chair. She put the belt back on as she explained how it worked, and, judging by her difficulty in fastening the clasps, there was no way it could have come undone on its own.
She was clearly embarrassed by the whole affair, and I didn’t want to make the situation any more uncomfortable by asking her if she knew some dead twenty-year-old who had it in for her. Maybe if she had said something like You know, this kind of thing keeps happening ever since my stepson died, I would have felt more comfortable offering to help. But I just couldn’t bring myself to intrude.
While it seems clear that this ghost was intent on causing trouble and perhaps even putting this woman in real danger, he didn’t directly try to drown her. I didn’t see him try to pull her under or stand on her shoulders to push her down, even when she was thrashing around in the water. In fact, he seemed to vanish after undoing the belt. To me, this is reassuring evidence that although a ghost can conspire to put you in harm’s way—by tampering with your electricity or wiring, which could cause a fire; or by loosening a board on the stairs, which could cause a fall—earthbound spirits cannot on their own directly cause the death of a living person.
Ghosts Do Not Always Announce Their Presences with Scents, Sounds, or Slime
In the movie Ghostbusters, the ghosts announce themselves with blasts of ectoplasmic slime. In real life, I can’t say that I have ever identified the presence of an earthbound spirit by detecting slime or any other kind of sticky, oozing substance.
By the same token, I’ve never encountered ghosts who announced their presence by rattling chains and saying Boo. I have, however, seen some earthbound spirits deliver a resounding kick to a home’s furnace, resulting in a serious boom that could scare you right out of your bed!
Interestingly enough, in the European castles I’ve been invited to visit, the ghosts do moan—a sort of woe is me wailing—as they roam the same hallways and stairwells over and over again. These are ghosts who look as if they died in the fourteenth, fifteenth, or sixteenth century. When the castles are open to tourists, the furnishings and rooms have usually been kept as true as possible to their original state. It seems to me that the spirits who roam these rooms feel it’s their duty to continue patrolling the family estates. Although I’ve been invited to visit many castles, no owner has ever asked me to clear one of its spirits. To the owners, these “family ghosts” are invaluable tourist attractions. You wouldn’t believe how many people are willing to pay to spend the night in an authentic haunted castle.
I have also heard people talk about ghosts appearing as a dense and shifting fog. People have described these “density spirits” to me as a being on different energy vibrations, which can be sorted by colors corresponding to a spirit’s level of being. (For instance, I have heard people who claim to see black, dense shadows that are from hell but are moving around on the earthly plane.) I can’t say definitely whether these kinds of apparitions exist, but they’re not the types of ghosts that I can see. In fact, I’ve never seen a ghost who didn’t look human.
Some, but not most, earthbound spirits do have a definite scent associated with them. For instance, those who died in a fire usually smell of smoke. On a few occasions, homeowners who persistently smell a burning or smoky