Ghost

[akbar_786]

<P>when a person commits suicide he/she sometimes remains o&shy;n earth to live the remainder of years without a body we often call them ghosts but they are nothing more than spirits waiting for their time to be over</P>

[star_munir]

An article on ghosts....
These are not my views nor I believe them to be complete truth but as I saw an article in which there are some detailed views on ghosts so I thought to post them under this topic.
____________________________________________________________

Smita Mishra

Ghosts….are they?


My earliest exposure to death was in my early childhood when we lived in an old bungalow adjacent to the city medical college. The only dividing line was a deep natural drain that remained dry except during monsoons.

Usually that part of the college building that faced us remained quiet and forlorn except on certain days when one could see a lot of activity around a small yellow cabin with dark windows. It was the post-mortem room, I learnt later. Sometimes we heard women crying outside the cabin and saw bodies wrapped in white shrouds being moved in and out.

We all saw flickering lights inside the cabin and heard whispers at night, but the thought that it belonged to some phantom or banshee never occurred to us.

I often think that a few years later, when I was in college, what I spotted was the ghost of my schoolmate. This girl was my classmate and incidentally sat next to me. I still remember the goodies that I brought for her after festivals, as she stayed in the school boarding house. We joined the same college and remained in touch till, all of a sudden, I learnt that she committed suicide. It came as a shock and I failed to understand the reasons for her taking such an extreme step.

I was getting used to her absence when one day I spotted her amidst a crowd of girls. She was wearing a brown dress and was looking down. When I realized what I had seen, I swirled back and she had vanished! I would have believed that I had seen a ghost had not another incident changed my perception.

We had an old maid working at our place since long. One day while coming down the stairs I thought I saw her wiping the floor. After a while my mom told me that she was on leave that day. It was amazing! I had seen a living person’s ghost! And then it dawned upon me that Ghosts are shadows lurking in the mind. We see that which we want to see or that which we are used to seeing.

My belief in the theory that nothing exists beyond what eyes can see was also because my parents were rationalists and they had taught me that rather than fearing the unknown it was always better to go forward and check it out.

But my father, however, believed in Vaastu and spoke of a house in Kathmandu where they stayed in initial years and my mother used to get sacred of strange noises, automatic shutting and closing of doors and a dog letting out a pitiful wail just outside the window, everyday of their 6 months stay.

He spoke of another house which had a strange smell emanating from one of its rooms. My mother fell ill, and when they left the house they learnt that a woman had died in the same room a few years ago. “The moment I left the house I felt as if a cloud moved away from my mind,” he had said.

At one point of time in my life I really wished to believe in apparition. It was after my parents died one after another within a short span of two years, at very unripe ages. I was the youngest child and an object of concern for them till their final moments. My longing for them was so intense that I was ready to see them in any form. I wished to touch them, hold them cry before them and cuddle them…here love had displaced all fears!

In this age of technology, while some things may escape the eyes, nothing really escapes the lens. No wonder Jackson’s shadow was caught roaming in Neverland! Was it really Jacko wandering in the corridors of the place where his heart longed to stay all through his life or just an illusion created by television lighting and some person’s shadow who was moving about?

We all at some point of our lives have heard of the experiment where a dying man was kept in a glass cabin and when he did die, the glass broke to release, what is believed to be his soul. It could have been anything, heat, gas or energy. But honestly I have no idea where this experiment took place and I seriously doubt its veracity.

But is there an other-worldly life? Are we surrounded by unseen spectres and goblins? Will all of us become ghosts? Spooky literature(that’s what I love calling it) has its own theories about ghosts.

Actually all of us can’t qualify for “ghost-ship”. It takes quite a lot to become a ghost. If you think you can take revenge on your classmates, neighbours, colleagues and boss by becoming a blood thirsty vampire or a scary wraith- wake up! It is popular belief that dying and crossing over to the next dimension won’t make you a ghost. It happens only when you come back and make your presence felt. Ghosts have highly energetic souls and it is because of this they are able to breach one dimension to enter into another.

Ghosts are wandering souls with a message to convey. Unfinished business, pure love, revenge and abrupt violent end to life are the reasons that keep them tied to their previous lives.

In fact to prevent this all religions have their own safeguards. In Hinduism after the Shraddha rituals, relatives are believed to send the soul to the path of salvation. Washing hands with milk after all the rituals are over symbolises washing the hands off the deceased.

Ancient Greek mythology refers to Lithe, the river of forgetfulness, drinking from which helps the dead forget all about their past lives.

Islam has no concept of spirits coming out of graves and roaming about, however prayers are offered and lamps are lighted for the peace of the departed soul.

The veracity of the mediums that talk to ghosts cannot be doubted unless we have concrete evidence to prove their falsehood. After all there is no denying the fact that some senses in some individuals are extra sharp. Just as some of us can smell odours or hear sounds that go unnoticed by others, in the same way there are some who can tune their frequencies to the band of the otherworldly. I have heard of my grand-aunt speaking of a child ghost (brahma-raksha) who told her about the cause of his death and of an aunt who died but came back to tell her husband the place where she had hoarded the family jewellery!

Religious and spiritual literature says that ghosts belong to various creeds and genres.

Apparitions appear solid, visible or slightly invisible. Most of the time, they appear as they did when they were living. They can be both friendly and unfriendly. They are thought to have unfinished business in this world and attain peace once the job is done.

Common Ghosts like to stay in proximity of the earth and can acquire any form and colour. When they want to frighten people, they can take an amorphous form. Extreme variation of their shape is limited as their spiritual energy is quite low.

Poltergeist probably are the most famous type of ghosts. All they do is to scare people by making all sorts of noises and sometimes they push people and cause small fires.

Demons are powerful ghosts that prefer living in solitary places. They are fond of possessing people. They are arrogant, lethargic and lusty. Their presence is marked by a very foul smell.

Serpent (Kaala naag) is green in colour. They possess black energy which they use to harm mankind. Due to their tremendous spiritual practice, they have the spiritual energy to gain control over an individual's seven chakras. Chakras have something to do with Kundaliniyoga, which I fail to understand.

Female Goblins (Hadal) have a strong odour around them like that of a rotten egg. Generally, they affect the person without possessing him, i.e. they do not enter the body of an individual.

Jaakhin is a superior variety of female ghost. They are experts in the knowledge of mantras. They tie up subtle bodies with the help of mantras or they take control them by using mantras and force them to do various jobs. The Female goblins (Hadals) work under Jaakhins. They give Jaakhins information about the dead person.

Witch (Chetkin) :A foul smell is associated with the presence of Witches. People possessed by Witches (Chetkins) laugh continuously. They are skilled in assuming various forms. They enter a person's body and cause accidents. They are capable of taking complete control of a house and can then devastate the entire family living there.

Spirits (Pischaacha) are very lazy and therefore the likelihood of them causing distress to people is low. Mostly they possess a person to use his body just to get a habitat. They assume the form of the person they enter into.

With such a diaspora of Ghosts around us, isn’t it a wonder that we don’t bump into them time and again? I don’t know if the earth is big enough to hold trillions and zillions of souls, but I know that it is the mind that notices them and it is the mind that doesn’t.

I am a disbeliever and also an atheist to some extent. For me nothing exists beyond what eyes can see…but honestly as Matthew Arnold has said:

“We light half-believers of our casual creeds… Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will'd……”

[kmaherali]

Islam has no concept of spirits coming out of graves and roaming about, however prayers are offered and lamps are lighted for the peace of the departed soul.

Interesting artcile, thanks for sharing. Islam acknowledges the presence of Jinns - non-material beings living in astral planes. More on that at:

Doctrines --> Difference between Jinn and Angel

http://www.ismaili.net/html/modules.php ... jinn+angel

[kmaherali]

There is a related multimedia linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/us/23bisbee.html

August 22, 2010
A Hotel Where Some Guests Have Been Dead for Years
By MARC LACEY

BISBEE, Ariz. — Many hotel guests would complain if they were awoken by bumps in the night or if they found their things had mysteriously disappeared from their dressers. But not visitors to the Copper Queen Hotel, a rustic old place that is considered Arizona’s longest continuously operated hotel.

The Copper Queen is haunted, or at least that is what the owners claim and what numerous guests have affirmed over the years with stories about mysterious voices, odd sounds and smells, and even levitating objects. For many, a quiet, uneventful night at the Copper Queen, which dates to 1902, is a dire disappointment.

“Oh, oh!” a non-ghostly woman exclaimed in surprise when she rounded a corner on the fourth floor one recent evening. When she realized she had encountered another non-ghost, she seemed disappointed. “Have you seen anything?” she asked.

The front desk clerk’s voice grew low as he told how he heard a female voice one evening while riding the elevator between the third and fourth floors, even though he was the only physical being inside. And he swore up and down that he once saw a room key floating in the air.

At his side were the ghost journals, accounts left by guests over the years of their encounters with the hotel’s resident spirits. So compelling are some of these tales that they have been compiled into a book that came out this month. Adding credence to the hotel’s claim of three resident ghosts, at least for those who believe in the paranormal, was the hotel’s appearance in an episode of the “Ghost Hunters” show on the Syfy Channel.

One Copper Queen guest, Tina LaVon, wrote about how she had tried to take a photo in the hotel but the camera said it had no memory card. The scary part is, she insists it did have a memory card.

Others wrote of hearing whispers, of the remote control for the television not working or of a cellphone battery mysteriously losing power. A child wrote of losing her stuffed animal only to have it mysteriously reappear later.

Nine-year-old Devan heard breathing over his shoulder when he was reading the ghost book. Other guests said coins disappeared from the desk in their room, which legend has it is the handiwork of Billy, a young ghost, who died long ago in the nearby San Pedro River and supposedly now has the run of the Copper Queen.

“Southern Arizona’s Most Haunted,” a book on Bisbee and other reputedly haunted locales in the southern part of the state, recounts how Billy has been seen jumping on the leather couch in the lobby.

“The Copper Queen Hotel is haunted by over 16 spiritual entities,” said the book’s author, Renée Gardner, who has been named by the local Chamber of Commerce as the official ambassador to the ghosts and spirits of Bisbee. She conducts walking tours of ghostly spots around this old copper mining town, as well as a special driving tour in a secondhand hearse.

All the spirits supposedly roaming around the Copper Queen, and some guests perhaps pretending to be spirits themselves, mean a lot of potential for mischief.

A guest named Roxana wrote of a ghostly incident that occurred when she showered.

“My husband and daughter left our room and I got in the shower,” she said. “When I was in the shower I heard the bathroom door shake. When my husband and daughter returned I said, ‘Very funny.’ They swore they hadn’t returned to scare me.”

Another guest, Natasha, wrote about something that may or may not have happened as she and her stepfather were dining one night. He had locked the door to their room, No. 401. She had seen him. But when they got back, their door was wide open.

There have been rooms that got phone calls with no one at the other end of the line, a photograph on the wall that moved, a shaving kit that fell to the bathroom floor and mysterious taps on guests’ shoulders by invisible beings.

“My husband and I are believers but skeptics at the same time,” wrote a woman who heard strange sounds in Room 316 at 2 a.m.

On Thursday nights, ghost experts lead guests through the creaky old building in search of mischievous Billy, a former prostitute named Julia Lowell (who is said to have taken her life in the hotel and now pays particular attention to male guests) and a mysterious bearded man in a top hat and black cape who smells of cigar smoke.

Not all guests have ghostly encounters. On a recent night, the old elevator did make some groaning noises, but they seemed more mechanical than supernatural. From the hallway on the fourth floor, one could hear sounds from guest rooms, although they seemed to be CNN. Nothing appeared to have moved in Room 404 from late one night to the next morning.

Yes, for some guests, the Copper Queen is not the least bit scary, offering little more than a good meal, a lively bar scene and an uninterrupted night of slumber.

“Absolutely nothing happened to us of a ghostly sort,” a guest named Crystal wrote in the journal. “The only sounds we heard were from the noisy people upstairs.”

[kmaherali]

November 12, 2010
For Catholics, Interest in Exorcism Is Revived
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

The rite of exorcism, rendered gory by Hollywood and ridiculed by many modern believers, has largely fallen out of favor in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States.

There are only a handful of priests in the country trained as exorcists, but they say they are overwhelmed with requests from people who fear they are possessed by the Devil.

Now, American bishops are holding a conference on Friday and Saturday to prepare more priests and bishops to respond to the demand. The purpose is not necessarily to revive the practice, the organizers say, but to help Catholic clergy members learn how to distinguish who really needs an exorcism from who really needs a psychiatrist, or perhaps some pastoral care.

“Not everyone who thinks they need an exorcism actually does need one,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Ill., who organized the conference. “It’s only used in those cases where the Devil is involved in an extraordinary sort of way in terms of actually being in possession of the person.

“But it’s rare, it’s extraordinary, so the use of exorcism is also rare and extraordinary,” he said. “But we have to be prepared.”

The closed-door conference is being held in Baltimore before the annual fall meeting of the nation’s bishops. Some Catholic commentators said they were puzzled why the bishops would bother with exorcisms in a year when they are facing a full plate of crises — from parish and school closings, to polls showing the loss of one of every three white baptized members, to the sexual abuse scandal flaring up again.

But to R. Scott Appleby, a professor of American Catholic history at the University of Notre Dame, the bishops’ timing makes perfect sense.

“What they’re trying to do in restoring exorcisms,” said Dr. Appleby, a longtime observer of the bishops, “is to strengthen and enhance what seems to be lost in the church, which is the sense that the church is not like any other institution. It is supernatural, and the key players in that are the hierarchy and the priests who can be given the faculties of exorcism.

“It’s a strategy for saying: ‘We are not the Federal Reserve, and we are not the World Council of Churches. We deal with angels and demons.’ ”

Pope Benedict XVI has emphasized a return to traditional rituals and practices, and some observers said the bishops’ interest in exorcism was consistent with the direction set by the pope.

Exorcism is as old as Christianity itself. The New Testament has accounts of Jesus casting out demons, and it is cited in the Catholic Church’s catechism. But it is now far more popular in Europe, Africa and Latin America than in the United States.

Most exorcisms are not as dramatic as the bloody scenes in films. The ritual is based on a prayer in which the priest invokes the name of Jesus. The priest also uses holy water and a cross, and can alter the prayer depending on the reaction he gets from the possessed person, said Matt Baglio, a journalist in Rome who wrote the book “The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist” (Doubleday, 2009).

“The prayer comes from the power of Jesus’ name and the church. It doesn’t come from the power of the exorcist. The priest doesn’t have the magic power,” said Mr. Baglio, whose book has been made into a movie to be released in January, starring Anthony Hopkins.

There is plenty of cynicism among American Catholics — even among priests — about exorcism. Mr. Baglio noted that there are hucksters who prey on vulnerable believers, causing them physical or spiritual harm. As a result, he thought it was helpful that the church is making an effort to train more priests to perform the rite legitimately.

With so few priests who perform exorcisms, and the stigma around it, exorcists are not eager to be identified. Efforts to interview them on Friday were unsuccessful.

Bishop Paprocki said he was surprised at the turnout for the conference: 66 priests and 56 bishops. The goal is for each diocese to have someone who can at least screen requests for exorcisms.

Some of the classic signs of possession by a demon, Bishop Paprocki said, include speaking in a language the person has never learned; extraordinary shows of strength; a sudden aversion to spiritual things like holy water or the name of God; and severe sleeplessness, lack of appetite and cutting, scratching and biting the skin.

A person who claims to be possessed must be evaluated by doctors to rule out a mental or physical illness, according to Vatican guidelines issued in 1999, which superseded the previous guidelines, issued in 1614.

The Rev. Richard Vega, president of the National Federation of Priests’ Councils, an organization for American priests, said that when he first heard about the conference on exorcism, “My immediate reaction was to say, why?”

He said that he had not heard of any requests for exorcisms and that the topic had not come up in the notes of meetings from councils of priests in various dioceses.

The conference on exorcism comes at a time, he said, when the church is bringing back traditional practices. The Vatican has authorized the revival of the Latin Mass, and now a revised English translation of the liturgy, said to be closer to a direct translation from the Latin, is to be put in use in American parishes next year.

“People are talking about, are we taking two steps back?” Father Vega said. “My first reaction when I heard about the exorcism conference was, this is another of those trappings we’ve pulled out of the past.”

But he said that there could eventually be a rising demand for exorcism because of the influx of Hispanic and African Catholics to the United States. People from those cultures, he said, are more attuned to the experience of the supernatural.

Bishop Paprocki noted that according to Catholic belief, the Devil is a real and constant force who can intervene in people’s lives — though few of them will require an exorcism to handle it.

“The ordinary work of the Devil is temptation,” he said, “and the ordinary response is a good spiritual life, observing the sacraments and praying. The Devil doesn’t normally possess someone who is leading a good spiritual life.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/13/us/13 ... es&emc=a23

[change786]

Although I am very afraid of ghosts and witches and so on, I would like to see a ghost from far away. Is that possible?
ya ali madad.
in order to see one of them. first of all you need to be excepionaly storng in faith very strong. sedond of all you will need and spirit guide to guide in seeing one or getting in contact. this spirit guide is to protect you as well. be carefull they might get interested in you and posses and inflecy you such harms which no doctor in the world could cure.

[change786]

There is an order in the world. God has created everything and has given them rights and restrictions. Human beings are suppose to interact with humans only. I had seen a documentary of indonesian priest who would invoke them and film them . finally he got to an stage where he was posesed himself. he was crying in pain . when i saw the video . once they were invoked by the priest they became visible phyical form and could not tolerate light . they were ugly in the video such an ugliness that i had never seen before.

[shiraz.virani]

There is an order in the world. God has created everything and has given them rights and restrictions. Human beings are suppose to interact with humans only. I had seen a documentary of indonesian priest who would invoke them and film them . finally he got to an stage where he was posesed himself. he was crying in pain . when i saw the video . once they were invoked by the priest they became visible phyical form and could not tolerate light . they were ugly in the video such an ugliness that i had never seen before.

hehehe, Are you saying you actually saw the ghost on TV ? And did somebody then wake you up from your sleep ?

Brother there is no freaking way that you could document a ghost, jinn, angel or even spirits either on cam or even in real life !

[change786]

hehehe, Are you saying you actually saw the ghost on TV ? And did somebody then wake you up from your sleep ?

Brother there is no freaking way that you could document a ghost, jinn, angel or even spirits either on cam or even in real life !

this board is not intended for immature posts. you can reply and contradict any post while also respecting. As far as it goes. Most of these things can take physical appearances, If you dont have knowledge of something dont act like an ignorant . Be open minded no one is a know it all. We should not act like know it alls. Everyone has a limit of undrestanding . if you cant grasp the idea of these things taking physical appearances then please stop your immature posts. thank you.

[shiraz.virani]

this board is not intended for immature posts.

Excatly !! So are you clear on this now ??

you can reply and contradict any post while also respecting. As far as it goes. Most of these things can take physical appearances, If you dont have knowledge of something dont act like an ignorant . Be open minded no one is a know it all.

God did mentioned in quran that those who die in the way of god or defending his faith are not dead but they find sustenance with their lord[allah]....But recording a jinn/ghost/spirit is out of context bcoz once you leave this worldly life you are no longer part of it !

We should not act like know it alls. Everyone has a limit of undrestanding . if you cant grasp the idea of these things taking physical appearances then please stop your immature posts. thank you.

If you cant come up with proof's then please stop asking ridiculous question...oh yeh ...THANK YOU

[agakhani]

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If you cant come up with proof's then please stop asking ridiculous question...oh yeh ...THANK YOU

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If you dont have knowledge of something dont act like an ignorant

Change786 & Shiraz,

There are two groups regarding Ghosts existence; one group believe that yes, ghost does exist one group believe that nope, ghost does not exist.
Now whom to believe and whom not to believe is totally individuals own decision. I heard and read many stories who had encounter with ghost, I also show some picture of ghost in book (but I am not pretty sure that the picture were real or not)
I do not have any ghost encounter experience yet but one my relative had ghost encounter experience and he told us that he show a friendly ghost at night, he told him to leave and ghost left without any action b
Now question arise here does ghost has body like human being?
If yes how he can float in the open sky? when human being can not.
Some say they smell good smell like incense at night without burning incense or loban where does this smell come? some say they feel Ruhani's presence when smell like this come. I personally smelled incense, scents many times but have not seen any ruhani yet.
In my opinion yes 'GHOST ARE THERE" some are very friendly, some are mean, some are helpful some are not

[shiraz.virani]

Change786 & Shiraz,

There are two groups regarding Ghosts existence; one group believe that yes, ghost does exist one group believe that nope, ghost does not exist.
Now whom to believe and whom not to believe is totally individuals own decision. I heard and read many stories who had encounter with ghost, I also show some picture of ghost in book (but I am not pretty sure that the picture were real or not)
I do not have any ghost encounter experience yet but one my relative had ghost encounter experience and he told us that he show a friendly ghost at night, he told him to leave and ghost left without any action b
Now question arise here does ghost has body like human being?
If yes how he can float in the open sky? when human being can not.
Some say they smell good smell like incense at night without burning incense or loban where does this smell come? some say they feel Ruhani's presence when smell like this come. I personally smelled incense, scents many times but have not seen any ruhani yet.
In my opinion yes 'GHOST ARE THERE" some are very friendly, some are mean, some are helpful some are not

Brother Agakhani, I personally believe that there are spirits and jinns existing along with us....but there is no way you can communicate or videograph them.....I seriously cannot comment on ghosts....just like i cannot describe how the aliens look like

Yes it is upto ones belief whether to believe it or not, and iam completely ok with CHANGE786 's view....what i dont like it when you actually see something on TV and believe that ok ghosts do exist !

Unless and until you yourself saw the ghost , video taped it thats a different story

Ghost is nothing but a superstition ! This concept is borrowed from the time of pre-islamic ignorance ! Before our rasool[saw] people in arabia used to believe and worship jinns . Yes there is good and bad jinn appearing as humans and wild animals in relation.

When imam ali[as] and rasool[saw] destroyed all the idols in kaaba, there were idols of so many jinn gods whom people of arabia used to worship

I can go on and on but i would prefer to stick with my opinion that yes jinn and spirits do exist but its impossible to videotape them

[agakhani]

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 Although I am very afraid of ghosts and witches and so on, I would like to see a ghost from far away. Is that possible? 

Change786,
Yes It is possible but it is dangerous.

First I was avoiding to post my answer of your above question for many days because it is inappropriate topics in this religious web site as per my thinking but now this topic becoming interesting and more popular so I decide to put my comments and answers.

In my opinion the safest way to see spirits is below, which I read in many spirit/ghost books and also it is mentioned by Abu Ali in his many waezes.

1,If you really want to see the ghosts/jinns/spirits/demons via safest way then start practicing on meditation/baitul khyal bandgi hardly and one of days you will be able to achieve the power to fly with your ether body also known as astral body, that time you may have ability to see ghosts/spirits and jinns after this achievement you can travel with your astral body and visit the colonies of ghosts/spirits/demons which is not far from this earth even you can travel any country of your choice.
This is very hard practice not all practicer will be able to reach this far but it is nothing wrong to try you may not get success in astral traveling but you will definitely get benefits from bandgi and it very good for your soul.

There are some books available on'ASTRAL TRAVELING' and 'OUT OF BODY EXPERIENCE' if yo need the names of these books please let me know.

Above is the easiest way to see ghost/good spirits in my opinion but now I will tell you some few other ways to see ghost or spirits but....it may dangerous or harmful to you and your lives so please read carefully below paragraph first.

LET ME CLEAR IT HERE THAT I WILL STRONGLY RECOMMEND CHANGE 786 AND ISMAILI.NET READERS NOT TO TRY OR PRACTICE THESE DIRTY AND DANGEROUS PRACTICES, PLEASE STAY AWAY FROM THIS PRACTICES, AFTERALL IT IS HARMFUL TO EVERYBODY AND IT IS NOT GOOD FOR ISMAILIS, YOU MAY LOOSE YOUR LIVES.

1 By unii or Oujia Board:-
There are some groups they invite ghost using ujii or oujia Board practice but in this practice you can not see the ghost but ghost answer your question in only yes or no via mediator.

2, Go in any cemetery/graveyard at night specially after midnight and you may be able to see some good and bad spirits there in their gaseous bodies. but you need to become very brave, and need to have very strong strength in your self, any thing can happen at any time without your knowledge in graveyard, I heard and read many time that many peoples had lost their lives for doing this.

3, There are also some other practices there, few names are 'AGHORI SADHNA'' BHUT-PRET SADHANA"'PISHACH SADHNA' e.t.c. many Aghoris, Sadhus, Avdhuts are still teaching this practices in India and Nepal you can also find some books for this practices in many languages including English too. ( this practices are not good for Ismailis because in this practice there are many HINDU MANTRAS like "Hanuman Chalisa", "Gayatri mantra" e.t.c. which we Ismailis can not recite also in this practice you need to pray different Hindu gods which is against" TOHID')

4, Close all the doors sit in one lonely room by your self alone take a glass with full water pour some lemon juice in it, burn incense and invite "GOOD SPIRITS ONLY' after few days practices you will be able see some strange thing happen in your room, after some more days you will hear some noise, after few days more you will able to see some spirits, please remember this, you can not communicate with ghost because spirit can not speak. BUT THE BAD PART OF THIS PRACTICE IS......
some time bad spirits also appear which may give you trouble in this case just tell them to leave, open all doors, go outside the room, go in the company of others and they will leave.



BEST PRACTICE IS THIS; STAY AWAY FROM ALL THESE DIRTY PRACTICES.

[kmaherali]

1,If you really want to see the ghosts/jinns/spirits/demons via safest way then start practicing on meditation/baitul khyal bandgi hardly and one of days you will be able to achieve the power to fly with your ether body also known as astral body, that time you may have ability to see ghosts/spirits and jinns after this achievement you can travel with your astral body and visit the colonies of ghosts/spirits/demons which is not far from this earth even you can travel any country of your choice.
This is very hard practice not all practicer will be able to reach this far but it is nothing wrong to try you may not get success in astral traveling but you will definitely get benefits from bandgi and it very good for your soul.

Through Ibadat one can acquire all kinds of powers, but one has to be careful not to abuse those powers for lower purposes. If one indulges in higher powers such as astral traveling it is too easy to get trapped by them and hence cause hindrance for subsequent progress in Ibadat.

However Ibadat does protect individuals from the evil spirits.

[shiraz.virani]

This is ridiculous !!!!

Aga khani bhai and Meherali bhai whats going on ???

I just wanna know how do you define IBADAT ??? Is it associated with allah's worship ?? If yes then there is no way you gonna see or feel ghosts on black power !!!

The worship that you do in order to reach at that point[MARIFAT] is allahs worship, now if you worship SATAN then yeh you'll have control or even communicate with jinns/ghosts and all tht crap just like arabs did before rasool[saw] became prophet .

I respect your views but what you are doing is comparing ibadat with black power or magic [ghosts/jinns etc etc]

Ibadat is for reaching allah and not for controlling jinns or ghosts......because there are angels already appointed for that purpose !!

[kmaherali]

This is ridiculous !!!!

Aga khani bhai and Meherali bhai whats going on ???

I just wanna know how do you define IBADAT ??? Is it associated with allah's worship ?? If yes then there is no way you gonna see or feel ghosts on black power !!!

The worship that you do in order to reach at that point[MARIFAT] is allahs worship, now if you worship SATAN then yeh you'll have control or even communicate with jinns/ghosts and all tht crap just like arabs did before rasool[saw] became prophet .

I respect your views but what you are doing is comparing ibadat with black power or magic [ghosts/jinns etc etc]

Ibadat is for reaching allah and not for controlling jinns or ghosts......because there are angels already appointed for that purpose !!

You have totally misunderstood what I said. Through Ibadat one elevates his soul and in this manner he can contact the Jinns and angels at his will if he chooses to. An elevated person however will however never toy with such powers and will only use it if it for beneficial reasons.

During the Prophet's journey to Ta'if he recited the Koran at night in the desert and a party ot the jinn came, listened, and believed. Later their chiefs came to the Prophet and made a bay'ah, or an allegiance, with him on the spot which is today the "Mosque of the Jinn" in Mecca.

How was the Prophet able to contact the Jinns if not through Ibadat.

[agakhani]

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 I respect your views but what you are doing is comparing ibadat with black power or magic [ghosts/jinns etc etc] 

Shiraz,
It is not necessary to involve Allah or god in meditation if you do not want to take benefits (salvation for your soul) from your meditation there are many peoples doing Sadhnas to achieve some kind bad powers, they intentionally doing this they know that the power they will receive will be used in wrong way to harm some one or kill some one.

You can find many Hindus and bad peoples every where they do not involve God in their yoga/sadhna practice but they involve 'BHAIRAV', 'KALI' AND 'RUDRA' devil forces in their Sadhana and they still can achieve some powers through meditation we can call this 'BLACK MAGIC"

Any normal human being practices Ibadat or meditation/Yoga ( not the physical yogas or which you can call as 'USA YOGAS' which pop up every corner in USA every week in every cities.) regularly then he/she may achieve many good and bad powers through this practices NO MATTER YOU THINK ABOUT YOUR SOUL'S SALVATION OR NOT, NO MATTER YOU INVOLVE ALLAH OR DEVIL IN YOUR MEDITATION PRACTICE OR NOT, you will always receive some kind powers it may good power it may bad power now it depends on individuals own decision, use it or not to use it, use in good manner or use it in bad manner
There are many Aghoris/Rishis/Sadhus and Monks in Himalaya, Nepal and Tibet they receive this kind devil powers through sadhana and jaap/mantra and you know? some use it in bad ways we can call it as black magic.
Now let talk little bit about some good powers,there are many rishis in Himalaya they are believed to be 300 years old, how they can live that long? because of yogas, Some Rishis can travel one place to another place (ASTRAL TRAVEL) without plane or any ride how they can do it? with the power of meditation,Some Sufis ,Sages have power to know what is in your mind, some has ability to see and know what will happen tomorrow? how they know these? answer is simple meditation.
These kind powers always comes automatically during your Ibadat/Meditation/Sadhana/yoga whatever name you call, now it is up to the practicer how to use it, I agree with KMaherali's below paragraph:-

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 Through Ibadat one can acquire all kinds of powers, but one has to be careful not to abuse those powers for lower purposes. If one indulges in higher powers such as astral traveling it is too easy to get trapped by them and hence cause hindrance for subsequent progress in Ibadat[/quote]

That is absolutely right that if some one misuse the power then he/she has to suffer in many ways.
BUT REMEMBER THIS MEDITATION IS VERY HARD PRACTICE, NOT ALL PRACTICER WILL ABLE TO RECEIVE BENEFITS OR POWER BUT ONLY FEWS.

[kmaherali]

Modern Witch Hunts

Not the metaphorical kind


By Josie Glausiusz


March 25, 2015

While shopping for a witch’s hat for the Jewish costume-festival of Purim, a verse from the Biblical book of Exodus popped into my head. The King James Version translates Exodus 22:17 as “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” or as the Basic English Bible says, “Any woman using unnatural powers or secret arts is to be put to death.”

Three hundred years of European witch-hunts ended in 1750 after 100,000 trials and 50,000 executions. (Three-quarters of the accused were women, except in Iceland, where 90 percent of “witches” were men.) The Salem witch trials lasted just two years in the 1690s; 200 people were accused and 20 were executed.

As I left the toy store with my pointy-tipped purchase, I felt a sense of relief that the verse is no longer interpreted literally. But, as I later discovered, Exodus 22:17 is still cited as a “proof-text” in relation to the maltreatment of child “witches” in Africa, according to a recent paper by Paul Cookey, a doctoral student at the Theological College of Northern Nigeria in the city of Jos.

Accusations of witchcraft and sorcery are still leveled at thousands of people every year, mainly older women and children in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Last October, seven people accused of witchcraft were burned alive in the Tanzanian village of Murufiti. In 2013 in Papua New Guinea, a 20-year-old mother was accused of sorcery, tortured, and set on fire on a pile of tires in front of a crowd of hundreds.

“In too many settings, being classified as a witch is tantamount to receiving a death sentence,” according to Philip Alston, a special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions in a 2009 report to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Another 2009 report, presented by Jill Schnoebelen to the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, details the scope of the problem. In Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, it is estimated that more than 60 percent of street children have been thrown out of their homes after allegations of witchcraft. In Tanzania, government statistics show that between 1998 and 2001, some 17,220 women—many of them elderly—were abused for practicing witchcraft, and 10 percent of them were killed. Similarly, elderly, destitute women in Nepal are often targeted with accusations of sorcery.

Children with disabilities or diseases—or those simply deemed rebellious—are frequent targets of exorcism ceremonies, which may be implemented by Pentecostalist pastors, parents, or relatives. Such children may be denied food or water, beaten, or burned. Accusations of “black magic” are often linked to the rise in diseases such as HIV/AIDS, or, in the latest twist, Ebola.

Just as witchcraft allegations in Europe and North America coincided with lowered crop yields, so too do witchcraft allegations in Africa overlap with extreme weather events, according to economist Edward Miguel. As cited by Schnoebelen, he found that in western Tanzania “there are twice as many witch murders in years of extreme rainfall [resulting in drought or floods] as in other years.” Civil war and political repression, climate change and natural cataclysms such as floods and famine can all create stress that intensifies witchcraft allegations.

A community that believes itself to “be under the threat of physical or cultural extinction,” Schnoebelen writes, tends “to rely more heavily on supernatural explanations.”

Next Week: What is to be done?

https://theamericanscholar.org/witch-hu ... urce=email

[kmaherali]

The world's 9 most haunted places

Paranormal destinations that are guaranteed to spook even the most skeptical of travelers ...

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/travel/tripide ... gfp#page=1

[kmaherali]

Losing My Husband&#8213;&#8203;and Finding Him Again Through a Medium&#8203;

The medium delivered the message that eased her unrelenting grief. Then the doubt set in. Lisa Chase went searching for the truth and found life and death merging and converging in ways unforeseen.

http://www.elle.com/life-love/news/a309 ... -a-medium/

Up until a year ago, I'd never visited a psychic, never had my palms or tarot cards read. I wasn't exactly a skeptic, but you have to trust the people who practice such things, you have to buy into their cosmologies, and I didn't, quite.

But for a few years, in my thirties, I called an astrologer around my birthday. I had a hippie aunt who, when I was 16, gave me a present of an astrological chart. It was fun; it seemed to confirm who I am—a pragmatic Capricorn—and the ancientness of the art, the systematicness of it, the universality, appealed to me.

The last time I talked to the astrologer, I was told two significant things. One delighted me. The other I put deep in the vault of my subconscious. That's how we in this Anthropocene era interface with the paranormal and the metaphysical. If we get a prophecy we like, we keep it at our fingertips, bring it out at dinner parties, tweet it to our followers: "@amazingpsychic told me I'd meet my soul mate next month. #cosmic #blessed." If we get bad news, we can decide that it was delivered by a charlatan and disregard it. Because our navel-gazing, technology-is-God culture doesn't fundamentally believe in anything bigger than ourselves (What could be bigger?), we don't have any rules of the road to evaluate what we hear and who is delivering our para-, meta-messages. We're each on our own recognizance.

It was a little over a decade ago. I was 39 years old, 10 weeks pregnant with my son—though after a previous miscarriage, I wasn't telling anyone about this pregnancy. The astrologer read my chart and said, "You're having a baby now or very soon." Wow, she is good, I thought. We talked about how Aquarius was in my marriage house, and so it was no surprise that my partner was an Aquarius. She told me that he was "a difficult path." Was I sure I needed to go down it? I assured her I did, because for all the difficulties, there were many more amazing moments in my life with him. Okay, the astrologer conceded; maybe he was my "destiny." Then she told me that something "wild" was going to happen around the time I was 50. "It's almost like someone around you is murdered."

That's the one I sent deep into my Gringotts vault, to be ignored and nearly forgotten. I had my son Davey, eventually married the Aquarius—a brilliant, dazzling, disheveled, funny, work-addicted, self-involved, loyal man named Peter Kaplan—and built a chaotic and emotionally rich life with him, our son, and Peter's three kids from his first marriage.

Peter was the most vivid person I've ever known. While he claimed to be an expert on everything, he actually did seem to know everything about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Kennedys, Bob Dylan, The Wizard of Oz, good grammar, David Letterman, the Great American Songbook, the golden age of Broadway, Othmar Ammann and his design for the George Washington Bridge, the New York Yankees, Spencer Tracy, Hollywood from 1920 to 1960, Ralph Lauren, and the media. He was a controlling person who thought he was always right. He hated when I wore polka dots and when I drank red wine because he said it made me a little mean (the wine, not the dots). But he was also monumentally generous, with his presents, his love, and his time. He was an editor, and a mentor to many, many people, and as a consequence, he'd get overextended, often falling into trouble with them, and us. His friend Paul had an expression for the Kaplan méthode. Peter would be poised on the brink of disaster and at the very last moment pull out a victory, a redemption, a "Kaplan finish." He was the leader of our big, bawdy, intellectually stimulated, culturally literate family, the kind I'd longed for growing up. We were lucky. We were happy.

Ten years after that phone call with the astrologer, Peter was in a bed at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where he'd been for three months. He was surrounded by doctors, Paul, his son Charlie, and me, being told that his stem-cell transplant had failed in spectacular fashion (Peter did everything in spectacular fashion) and that he'd be dead in a week to 10 days. This was as horrible as you can or can't imagine, but there was torture involved, too, because only a week before, he was coming home; we were frantically readying the house for his arrival. He was doing great! "There are patients here who'd kill to walk in your shoes," one nurse had told him. As the transplant worked and his marrow began to grow, however, his lymphoma came roaring back a third time, and he, and we, made a hairpin turn back to despair. No Kaplan finish this time. It did feel like he was being murdered.

"They tell me I only have a week," Peter told his older brother in an almost quizzical tone when James arrived a few minutes later. Peter looked at the two of us, and for the first time, I really understood the marriage of ideas in the word tragicomedy when he said, "Feel free to use any of this as material."

I have experienced grief in all its parts—the—the "acute grief" of the early months after Peter died on November 29, 2013; and then later the "integrated" or "abiding grief," as the DSM neatly terms them (this was the period in which people liked to chirp at me that I was doing amazingly well); followed by "complicated grief" (okay, I wasn't doing so well; I was actually stuck in a black whirlpool). I felt stupid and slow, simultaneously suspended in aspic and pushed along in a swift, strong stream that I couldn't quite keep my head above. It was as if someone had taken a can opener to my edges and rolled back my skin, exposing my insides to air and microbes and every other invasive thing. It was the most painful experience of my life, and yet in the rawness of it, there was something beautiful, too. I was wide open, untethered, in ways I'd never been before. My eyeballs and skin hurt when I walked outside; it was like the feeling you get when you're just succumbing to a flu—vulnerable and odd, and on the verge.

My dreams were invaded regularly by Peter in the first months after his death, with an insistence that woke me at four in the morning almost daily. Frankly, that's how he was in life. If he called me and I didn't pick up the phone, he'd call again. And again. And again. And again. He didn't really care what I was doing that might be keeping me from calling him back; when he wanted to talk, he wanted to talk. Davey, then nine, was dreaming of him, too. One morning, he said, "Last night Daddy and I had fun."

"What'd you do in the dream?"

"We went to Game 7 of the Yankees–Red Sox World Series," Davey said.

"Who won, Boo-boo?"

"The Yankees."

"What was the score?"

"Eight hundred and three to zero."

It was Peter's sense of humor…and his idea of heaven. There's a pretty obscure film clip of him at 23, having talked himself and his younger brother, Rob, into the Yankees locker room after they won Game 6 of the 1977 World Series. Peter stands there, pretending to take notes, but he's really just gazing prettily into the camera—he was a beautiful boy—pleased for the world to see that he's in the red-hot center. In these days, Davey was sure he was communicating with his father. On New Year's Eve, as we walked down our silent suburban block, coming home from a friend's, he said, "This is the gateway to next year, Mommy. Next year at this time, we'll still be sad, but maybe we won't have the crazy thoughts in our heads."

Then he said, "Daddy is with us now. He says he wants you to hold his hand."

I was holding Davey's hand in my right, with my keys in my left—an old habit from living in the city: When walking home late at night, have your keys out. Again, Davey asked me to do it, and so I put the keys in my coat pocket and held out my left hand in the cold air.

You may be wondering what this has to do with the para- and the meta-, and I'm getting to it right about now. Because at this point, the coincidences began to occur. You may be able to explain some of them away, but not all, I'll wager. It started on Christmas Eve, when we flew to Seattle to see Peter's brother Rob. The car in front of us on the way to the airport was the same color, make, and model as Peter's, and the license plate was nearly identical to his—off by one number. The flight attendants were pouring out Aquarius water. A few weeks later, Peter's daughter Caroline got her first big break as an actor on a new TV show called Proof, about a group of people trying to determine definitively whether there's life after death. Around this time, Davey, his friend, and I were waiting in the high school hallway for baseball tryouts. Davey and the other boy were talking about what year their dads graduated from college. He asked me about Peter as he was bending down to pick up a couple of pennies he'd spotted on the floor. "Well, Dad was supposed to graduate in 1976, but he actually graduated in '77," I said. The dates on the pennies were 1976 and 1977. On the evening of February 10, 2014, which would have been Peter's sixtieth birthday, I went out to dinner with the kids and two good friends. Because I was with everyone I wanted to talk to, I left my cell phone in my bag. Three weeks later I discovered a text, sent from my phone number to my phone number, dated February 10, 8:18 P.M.: "Lisa I cannot believe I'm funny I sent you the message love you see I."

A month later, Peter's first wife, Audrey, was in a market. On the TV above the cash register, the clip of young Peter in the 1977 Yankees locker room was playing. She said it was like he was staring right at her.

(Around minute 3, look for the handsome young guy with the glasses and the pen who manages to be in almost every shot&#8203;.)&#8203;

In the first three to four months after he'd died, I couldn't escape the feeling that Peter was calling, calling, calling, until I picked up. I had two friends who'd faced unspeakably horrible deaths: One lost her fiancé in the war in Afghanistan. The other lost a child. Both had called a medium named Lisa Kay, and I'd known of their remarkable conversations. So on a Saturday morning in March 2014, I dialed her number and left a message: "Hi, my name is Lisa Chase. I'm a friend of X and Y, and I know you've worked with them. My husband died, and I'd like to make an appointment to talk to you."

I hung up and then walked next door to my neighbor's to borrow some sugar; when I got back, there was a missed call from a Manhattan number on my phone. I called it, and Lisa Kay answered. "I don't usually work on Saturdays," she said, "but I felt compelled to call you back now." I also knew, from others who've called her, that she usually makes a phone appointment for a couple of weeks out and then asks you to send her a check.

But on the line with me now, Lisa all of a sudden sounded a little peeved and said, "I don't like to do it this way."

"What do you mean, 'I don't do it this way'?" I was confused.

"He's here," she said. "He wants to talk now." Then, as if she were talking to someone else: "I like to get paid first." Then, addressing me, "Can you even do this now? Are you free?" Terrified and exhilarated, I said yes. This is how it began:

Lisa Kay: Who's David? Who's David? He has grown. He says, "He has grown." Testing, trial control. He's talking about goldfish. And marzipan. He doesn't like it.

Lisa Chase: I have no idea what that means….

LK: Acknowledging James. He's acknowledging someone named James. Are you writing this down? You should write this all down. Even if it doesn't make sense now, it will later.

James, of course, was Peter's brother. I was running around my house, looking for scraps of paper to write on. I found a bill from a local stationery store, forms sent home from Davey's school, a confirmation for a flight to Atlanta. I was frantically scribbling on the backs of all of them, grateful I knew how to take shorthand notes from my years as a reporter, because she was talking so fast, her melodic voice—she once thought about pursuing a career as a singer—stopping and starting, darting from subject to subject.

LK: He's talking about a ball. He says, 'Find the signed ball in the bag and give it to David.'

While Peter was in the hospital, a good friend, knowing he loved the Yankees and particularly Joe Torre, their longtime manager, got Torre to sign a baseball—a talisman. But the day I brought it in, Peter shook his head. "I can't," he said. "Put it away." I didn't know why it upset him, but I put the ball in his closet, in a canvas bag that I'd packed with his clothes and toiletries to bring to the hospital.

LK: He's showing me blood. Did he die of a blood clot? Something about blood. I'm seeing the word 'genetic.' She said it in an almost staccato fashion: Ge-net-ic.

LC: He died of a blood cancer. And his doctors told us it was probably related to the lymphoma his father died from.

LK: The reason—David will not get it. That's what he's telling me. Good for you, Peter! I like this guy. [In a different voice]: 'You can call me Pete!'

He says, 'Go ahead. You can have the red wine.'

I began to laugh. For the first time, I felt some relief from the cruelty of the way he died. This call had begun to do for me what the best antianxiety medicine and therapy had not been able to, which was pull me out of the whirlpool and see the beginning of a way out of my sadness.

Lisa would be talking to me directly, then talking to…Peter? And sometimes it was if she were Peter, talking to us both. Channeling would probably be the best verb. Sometimes she said things that made no sense to me. Maybe a third of what she said could apply to anyone who'd lost a spouse; things like, "I want you to marry again," and "It's okay that you cried in front of me." But there were many more specific things she said that she couldn't have known or Googled, as several people have suggested to me.

Anyway, try Googling the name of a person you know nothing about. It takes a lot more than five minutes to navigate to the page with the right information and absorb it all—the names and details and events.

LK: He says he controlled too much. He says, 'Take the good with the bad. I had my faults.' He's learning to be better at not criticizing.

Then she said something that shocked me.

LK: 'I'm a lucky guoy. I got the better end of the deal.'

What was amazing about this was the way Lisa pronounced it: "guoy," not "guy." It was precisely the way Peter said it, with an exaggerated Brooklyn accent. He'd use that expression when we were making up after a fight: I'm a lucky guoy…to have you. At this point I began speaking directly to him; I couldn't help myself.


LC: Peter, you weren't lucky
! You died!

LK: I hear a dog barking. There's a dog with him. Did you have a dog?

LC: Yes, we did. Gracie was our dog. She died of Lyme disease. Peter felt super guilty about it—

LK: [In a grouchy tone] 'It was our dog, but it was MY dog.'

Was he social? Because people are calling out to him over there. Someone's yelling 'Pete! Peter!' I gotta calm him down.

He says, 'I was lucky to have someone so pretty and young.'

LC: I was lucky to have someone so handsome.

LK: 'That's true.'

Even in the afterlife, I was competing with others for his time. But I was weirdly comforted by the joking and grouchiness and grandiosity. It felt like my husband.



More From ELLE


Lisa's cell phone started to die, so she gave me her home number, and I called her back. We'd been on the phone for about 45 minutes.

LK: Who met you?

LC: What?

LK: I'm asking Peter; who met you? Mom. He says mom. But he was clearly met by his father. He was starting his transition that last week.

'Did you touch my face? I wasn't in my body when you did.'

Until that last week, I hadn't been able to touch Peter's skin with my fingers or lips for three months; I wore rubber gloves and kissed him from behind a mask. A stem-cell transplant takes a patient down to zero immunity; a kiss from a wife with even a nascent cold sore can be deadly. But once we knew he was not going to survive, I took off the mask and gloves, climbed into the bed with him—he was in a morphine sleep by this time—and I did touch his face. After he died, I kissed his face and tried to close his eyes.

LK: He says, 'You did what you knew was right. I am well here.'

LC: Do you swear, Peter?

LK: 'No. But you do.'

A joke! It's true; I swear like a sailor. He hardly ever did.

LK: Who's Boo-boo?

At this I shrieked loudly enough that Davey ran into the room to make sure I was okay. Then I told Lisa that Boo-boo was Peter's baby name for Davey.

LK: He was a seal-the-deal kind of guy. He says, 'XOXO.'

LC: He didn't do that! I did that. I do that.

LK: He said, 'That's one for you.'

We'd been on the phone for a little over an hour. I thanked her and took down her address to mail a check for her $350 fee. I asked her if people ever called for another reading, and she said yes, but that she didn't encourage it. She didn't want people to become dependent; they had to move through their grief and maybe learn to recognize the signs themselves. We were hanging up when she said suddenly, "Who's Paul? Who's Paul? 'Give a hug to Paul.'"

Wherever Peter was—and let's say for the sake of argument that he was—the dog was barking, and his sense of humor was intact, as was his self-regard, and I was still trying to get his attention. The picture of life, or death, or whatever state it might be that Lisa was depicting, felt incredibly familiar. It was funny. It was almost earthy, not profound, not woo-woo. I could not shake the notion that after we hung up, he was off to a gathering with his friends Eric and Sarah, and Lem and Clay, his dad and mom. Abraham Lincoln? George and Ira Gershwin? Ava Gardner? Peter loved history, and he loved meeting famous people, and it occurred to me that the ranks of the dead could make up the best cocktail party ever. In the immediate aftermath of the call, I was filled with euphoria and flooded with an intense wave of love for him.

I began to tell people about the reading. "Wait, he's still learning not to criticize?" my friend Shonna said. "Don't you think it's weird to think of him still learning?" I called psychotherapists to try to get some kind of plausible explanation—something rooted in psychology rather than parapsychology—for why this call made me immediately feel so much better. Sameet M. Kumar, PhD, who counsels dying patients and then, afterward, their families (this is brilliant; why don't more therapists work with both the dying and their families?), and who wrote a wondrous little book called Grieving Mindfully, listened to me cast around for reasons that didn't involve spirits in an afterlife and then gently said, "Are you trying to get me to tell you that I don't believe in this? Because I do…. I've heard hundreds of these stories over the years." Another, a very respected psychiatrist, confided (though not for attribution) that he'd had his own experience talking to his father via a medium.

Peter and I had become friendly with a young physician's assistant on the lymphoma service at New York-Presbyterian. I wrote her and asked if she or anyone there had an opinion about life after death. I half expected to never hear from her again. But the next morning, this was in my inbox: "I love that you asked this question. At risk of possibly sounding 'out there' or 'psychedelic,' I absolutely believe in some form of afterlife and/or spirit activity. I think I believed in it before I started working here, but over the past 2 years, my awareness has only become heightened, as I deal with more and more life-to-death transitions. I asked some of my colleagues too and they all agreed—there is definitely something after death, but no one is sure exactly what. Some spirits of my patients are more 'active' than others, I've noticed. Not quite sure why that is either."

Then I read about a researcher named Julie Beischel, PhD, the co-founder and director of research for the Windbridge Institute for Applied Research in Human Potential in Tucson. Though she was trained in pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Arizona, Beischel has for the past 12 years collected data on mediums. "I've been studying the phenomenon—is it a real thing?—and also how mediums can work better with law enforcement" and, if she can raise the money for it, she's designed a study to measure its impact on the bereaved.

Her own loss and an encounter with a medium got her interested in trying to quantify the mental-health effects of mediumship, as it's called, versus traditional grief counseling and drugs. "Our real interest is in what you can do with this," she says. "And as you experienced, it's super helpful in grief. As long as you know the scientific method, you can apply it to anything. There are all these people, mostly women, saying they're experiencing this communication with the deceased. So I'm testing them."

Her goal? That the medical establishment might recognize mediums as bona fide therapy for the bereaved. It sounds extremely farfetched, but not so many years ago, no insurance company covered acupuncture. Now, the state of California requires that all insurers do.


Not surprisingly, Beischel is running a shoestring operation and is perpetually seeking funding for her studies, for which she goes to great lengths to prevent any suggestion of "cold reading." That's the name for how a reader begins a session with generalities, pays attention to the reactions of the client—words, body language, skin color, breathing patterns, dilation or contraction of the pupils of the eye—and then tailors observations around the information conveyed. The bereaved are particularly easy marks for cold readings; we're highly motivated to find meaning in what we hear, and to hear what we want to hear about our dearly departed.

To prevent such fraud, Beischel keeps the "sitter" (the term of art for the seeker of a reading) and the medium from having direct contact. Typically, that means Beischel herself gives the medium the name of the deceased, along with five questions about him or her—appearance, personality, hobbies, cause of death, and whether the "discarnate" (the term of art for the dead person) has any messages for the relative or friend left behind. That person is then given the answers—but also a set of decoy answers from a reading done for someone else. The sitter scores both readings for accuracy, and picks which one she thinks came from her loved one.

Beischel says that sitters pick the right reading about 70 percent of the time, but that mistakes during readings are just part of the process. The reason TV mediums—which is how most people experience this profession—"seem so accurate is that they're most likely heavily edited," she says. "The theory [behind the errors] is that there's static or noise in the system. Your medium might be picking up the deceased family members of, say, a passing truck driver. As a medium, you have to have this sort of right-brained ability to hear from the dead, but also have one foot grounded to be able to differentiate the noise from the signal."

Lisa Kay works only over the phone, she says, in part to keep the reading "more pure," to avoid the "distractions" of an in-person reading. But precisely because I'm a left brainer, because I've spent my professional life as a journalist, I became determined to meet her, to report her out, to use one of my profession's terms of art. I was convinced that if I observed her body language, looked her in the eye, that if I grilled her about her job and how it works, I'd know if what had happened between us was real. I wanted to demystify the mystery.

I called her and invited her to lunch. Somewhat reluctantly, she agreed.

We met in an Upper East Side Manhattan restaurant Lisa picked; I told her what kind of bag I'd be carrying and she spotted me first. She was not the New Agey lady I was expecting. She was attractive, well-coiffed, and beautifully turned out in pink cashmere, black pants, and flats. I'm guessing that she's a few years older than I, but her age remains a state secret.

"I knew you'd call again," she said as we sat down among all the ladies who lunch and ordered a salad Niçoise and a frittata. How did she know?

"Well, I'm a medium." She giggled.

I began to ask her about how it works, the mechanics of reading, of seeing spirits.

"First," she said, "I don't talk to dead people. I don't see dead people. I hate that." It drives her nuts. "Spirits are energy—energy can't be destroyed, just read the quantum physicists. Max Planck. They're just on a higher vibrational frequency, and I have to tune in to that."

What did she do to prepare? "I meditate. I quiet my mind. I connect to my heart, set an intention to read. I make sure I'm well hydrated. I leave my problems at the door, making myself completely available to be a receiver." What happens when the signs, or "hits," as she calls them, start to come? "Sometimes it's a little movie. Sometimes a picture. A symbol. Sometimes it's just one sign—a smell." Or a sharp, fleeting pain in her head if, say, the deceased had a brain tumor.

She says she gets some of her best hits in the shower: "Water conducts energy." And at Bloomingdale's! She's quite funny. "I'm joking, but truthfully, I will go to Bloomingdale's when it's empty and walk around, and I get some of the biggest hits that way."

She's self-taught. She did not study under another medium, but she's very well read, in her field and beyond it. Later, she'd send me quotes often, about the power of intuition, from Kahlil Gibran, Albert Einstein, Ram Dass, Helen Keller, Molière, William Blake.

"Somebody called them my 'powers' the other day," she said dismissively. "They're not 'powers.' It's an ability I've worked on."

So, when did she know she had it? I asked. I sensed that she was weighing something, trying to decide whether to trust me. I later learned that she'd been approached by media people before and had decided not to participate in whatever they were offering—magazine stories, TV projects.

Here's some of what I learned over the last year about Lisa Kay:

She and her sister were raised in Switzerland, Belgium, and the Upper East Side. Her parents were divorced. Her dad was a Marine who fought in World War II and ultimately became a senior vice president of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. Her mother remarried and had one more child, a boy named Patrick, whom Lisa adored.

It was hard to get her to focus on questions about her personal life. She frequently went off on tangents, and I wondered: Was she a little ADD? Was it possible she was hearing more than one conversation at once? Or, the reporter in me feared, was she trying to avoid my questions?

She came back to the States as a teenager and enrolled at Jacksonville University in Florida. "I took a criminal-justice course there and I was fascinated, so I transferred to John Jay [College of Criminal Justice in New York]." After graduation, she interned for a year in Manhattan's 30th Police Precinct as a youth aide officer. "One detective said to me, 'You're too sensitive. You want to change everything, and that's not gonna happen.'"

So she left and worked as a flight attendant and in a nursing home, took singing lessons, and ended up in high-end fashion retail, as a sales associate at Gucci, Calvin Klein, and Bottega Veneta. "I was lost over the years," she says. "My dad was a good man, but he'd say, 'You never finish anything.'" One day at Bottega Veneta, she was taking a phone order. "I said, 'Okay, Doctor, I'll send that off to you.' And he said, 'How did you know I was a doctor? I didn't say I was.' I said, 'Yes, you did, it's right here on my paper.' But it wasn't. So I tried to explain it away—'Well, it was just your cadence'—and he sort of laughed and said, 'My dear, you have a very special gift.'"

About five years later, on her fortieth birthday, the love of her life died. "Almost immediately, I started getting psychic information. On the set of the film Serendipity, I was working as an extra, and that's when I got my first mediumship impression. I met this woman at the craft-food services table, and she started to talk to me about her losses. And I started telling her about people who'd passed. This is back in 2001.

"Then I went to see a psychic, and he said, 'I'm sorry to tell you this, but they're clapping for you; they're throwing a party for you; they're saying you're doing great work.' It was exciting but upsetting. I said, 'Can you ask them to postpone the party?'"

For a while she read people for free, practicing. But she had to eat, pay the utility bills, and a few years after that first impression, she began to charge for hour-long readings. She spends a lot of her time on the phone with clients. She has a group of good friends, psychics and civilians both, but says of her work, "Sometimes it's lonely." She felt that some of her relationships changed when she first became a medium; not quite that she was being used, but…. I imagined her job was like being a doctor; people accosting you in restaurants, trying to get free advice: "Do you mind taking a quick look at my shoulder?"

In the beginning of our acquaintanceship, I was longing for the comfort I'd gotten in that first call and I'll admit that I was hoping she'd offer me messages from Peter when we talked. Occasionally she did: "He was with you in the attic that night…. He was at Davey's dentist appointment…. Did Pete get a new position? 'Dad's proud.'"

Still, I resisted asking for more, and I had only the one reading. The power of that call made me vulnerable, I knew. I worried I might start a habit that I couldn't quit. And the more I poked at it, the more I feared it wasn't true. As the psychiatrist I interviewed said, "You didn't protect it. You told too many people."

And maybe I'd asked her too many questions. "I tell my friends I had a yearlong interview with you," she said to me recently. We talked probably twice a month—with me interviewing her or sometimes just chatting—for 14 months.

But I was getting to know Lisa. One day it occurred to me that she was more or less in the same cycle of grief as I. Because 11 weeks before Peter died, her brother Patrick had died suddenly. "I'm human, too," she's said more than once. "Sometimes people say to me, 'Oh, you can just talk to Patrick anytime you want.' It doesn't work that way."


I decided to report out Patrick. I felt sneaky and deceitful. But it seemed to me that if there were any untruths in that story, it would cast doubt over everything. One day I gingerly asked Lisa, "What record company did he run?" Gotham Records, she said. Another time, "What was his last name again?" I asked her how old he was when he died: 41. Then I Googled him.

What emerged from the Internet—and this took a lot longer than five minutes—were images of a young man with wire-rimmed glasses, a gregarious smile, and close-cropped sandy hair, his strong arms wrapped affectionately around the other people in the pictures.

Patrick Arn was the founder and president of Gotham Records and Vital Music. I listened to a podcast interview with him about his innovations at his label; he was figuring out ways to place his artists' music in video games, movies, commercials—a creative business model in a time of iTunes and Spotify disruptions. He sounded smart, scrappy, principled, vibrant. He died, at the age of 41, on September 7, 2013, from a seizure in his sleep. I found his death notice in the New York Times, and read, "Beloved son…adored brother…an inestimable, crushing loss."

Everything Lisa had said about him and her family was true. But there was something about the last phrase, in the tiny agate type of the Times, that put an end to my questioning. Lisa lost her kid brother. She says she feels some guilt that she couldn't prevent it. What a terrible burden that must be.

"Peter brought us together," Lisa says, and she means it literally. But I think that it was our shared grief, that most terrestrial of emotions, that kept us connected.

Last April her number popped up on my cell while I was grocery shopping one Saturday morning. She said, "I'm calling you because I got a sign from Peter." It was the only time she'd done this in our yearlong acquaintance. "He keeps saying the word wife. Very emphatically. Does that make sense?"

I'd always referred to Peter as my husband. What I hadn't told her was that he and I were together 17 years but only married the last 11 months of his life. He'd resisted getting married a second time. He liked calling me his girlfriend. He thought it was sexier. But I always wondered, and worried, if part of him just wanted the out. We got married, in the end, out of hope, when we thought he was at last cancer free. Not that some of the old ambivalence wasn't in effect: He was 45 minutes late to the ceremony.

"He says, 'Wife. Wife. Wife.' He wants you to know you were his wife," Lisa said.

In our early days of grieving, my son said something that I've often thought about since. We were sitting at our kitchen table, and he was heartbreakingly sad. "I wish we lived in a magic world," he said, "where science wasn't the answer to everything."

He was thinking about miracles and medicine and death. But from this distance, I think it's a lovely theory of everything.

&#8203;This piece originally appeared in the October 2015 issue of ELLE.

[kmaherali]

My Philadelphia Ghost Story

IT has always bothered me that I’ve never seen a ghost. As a sociologist who studies fear, I’m well acquainted with the statistics: Forty-two percent of American adults believe in ghosts.














Last year, in search of my own ghost story, I went to what is reputed to be one of the most haunted places in America: Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. Nearly 60 paranormal investigation teams explore the site each year, seeking evidence of ghosts within.

Even if the lore was stripped away, the former prison would still be terrifying. Its 30-foot Gothic castle walls separate Philadelphia from an institution with a long history of pain and abuse, the first prison to use solitary confinement.

Built in 1829, Eastern State was occupied until 1971, after which it was scavenged and plundered by trespassers and nature alike. When the site was turned over to a nonprofit in the mid ’90s it was in a state of ruin: crumbling walls, roofs collapsed into cellblocks, rusted pipes strewn across floors and chipped paint that gave every surface a look of decay. Much of it remains the same today, though it now operates as a museum, capitalizing on its reputation with features like a haunted house and a “ghost bus.”

I thought it was best to travel with professionals and joined a team complete with photographers, a psychic, lots of equipment and experienced ghost hunters. They unpacked their cameras, tripods, audio recorders, even an electromagnetic field detector. We walked stealthily through the dark cellblocks, and as I passed each cell and looked in, I imagined brutal killers locked behind layers of stone and wardens treating inmates like animals. My palms were sweating and my heart rate had ticked up a notch. I was starting to feel afraid.

Our minds are so powerful that we can “think” our bodies into having real physiological reactions. You want to believe a drug will work, so it does. You want to see a ghost, so you’ll see a ghost. These psychosomatic experiences are the standard scientific explanation for paranormal phenomena, but it’s not all in our minds.

While our senses are keen, there are things happening around us that we are not completely aware of. For example: infrasound, sound waves of 20 hertz or less, mostly inaudible to the human ear. Our bodies can pick up these tiny vibrations through our skin and even our eyes. They register that something is not quite right, and have been shown to produce feelings of uneasiness, revulsion, fear and chills. This is the same process that alerts animals of a coming natural disaster. A large, empty building with lots of structural deficits — like, say, an abandoned prison — is a prime spot for infrasound.

We carried out the hunt in silence. I would have loved to get everyone in an fMRI right then and look at their brains.

Over the past 20 years, fMRI and EEG studies of Tibetan monks, Carmelite nuns, psychics and the hyper-religious have revealed the neurological manifestations of mystical experiences. Researchers have found that stimulation of the brain’s left anterior insula is linked to the feeling of a “sensed presence.” The neuroscientist Shahar Arzy and his colleagues found that repeated electrical stimulation of an area of the left temporo-parietal junction resulted in the subject’s perceiving a shadowy figure. And those who suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy have reported experiences comparable to supernatural encounters, including feelings of heightened spirituality, a “sensed presence,” and euphoria collectively known as Gastaut-Geschwind syndrome.



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This is not to say everyone who reports seeing a ghost is suffering from brain damage or a neurological condition, but it does suggest that changes in the way our brain is communicating can make us feel as if we’re engaging with the paranormal.

We stopped at a cell that the psychic reported to be especially active. The hunters set up a cassette tape recorder and microphone. We peered into the cell, dark except for a bright beam of moonlight coming in through the tiny window. I was staring harder than I ever had before.

The only sound came from the slow, hypnotic turning of the cassette tape. Time slowed to a crawl.

The passage of time is a subjective experience influenced by how important and how novel an experience is. New things, threatening things, arousing things all are going to feel as if they last longer. Our brains are working overtime to make sure we remember every little detail for future reference, gathering and processing all the signals and sensations in our bodies.

Standing in front of the prison cell I was overwhelmed by both the history of the prison and the anticipation of the hunt.

And that is when I felt it. A chill at the base of my neck quickly rippled throughout my body. My shoulders shuddered. I felt warm, relaxed and yet fully aware of everything around me. I was full of emotion and felt an incredible closeness to the four ghost hunters next to me, people I had met just hours before.

This was a sensation I had never experienced. For a few glorious moments I believed that a ghost, perhaps the long-ago occupant of this cell, was passing through me. I spent the rest of the evening in a trance, following the hunters through the cold, empty, eerie hallways.

I had my ghost story, finally.

Or did I? I knew that my powerful paranormal experience was most likely a result of my heightened, sensitized emotional state. The feelings I experienced are similar to what’s known as an “autonomous sensory meridian response.” It is not a clinical diagnosis, and there is skepticism over whether it is a physiologically distinct, measurable experience.

But whether it was the intense emotions induced by the building, the infrasound, a misfiring of key brain circuits, or my own desire to believe, I left that day with a far from normal experience.

Inside the old prison we were alive with energy, anticipation and excitement. I allowed myself to suspend my disbelief and indulge the instinct in every one of us to search and explore. I will never give up that adventure, and neither should you.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/opini ... d=71987722
[/b]

[kmaherali]

The Monster-Hunter's Travel Guide: 10 Spooky Must-See Destinations

Beware of the frights that lurk away from home! On every continent, in every culture, spine-chilling monsters scare and baffle those who cross their path. Want to add a paranormal detour to your next vacation? From Scotland's Loch Ness Monster to the United States' Mothman, here are 10 hair-raising creatures anxious to take a bite out of your holiday.

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/travel/article ... md#image=1

[kmaherali]

Horror movies based on real-life events

The Exorcist (1973)

When a young girl begins acting strangely, her mother seeks out a priest, who is convinced the child is possessed by a demon. The hit movie starred Linda Blair as Regan MacNeil and Max von Sydow as Father Merrin. The events in the film were based on the story of 'Roland Doe,' which was the protective pseudonym given to a famous case of alleged demonic possession in 1949.

Slide show:

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/entertainment/ ... t#image=14

[kmaherali]

I didn't believe in haunted houses until I almost bought one

I never really in believed ghosts. I love watching scary movies and visiting haunted houses around Halloween for the entertainment factor, but I've never put much stock in people's stories about apparitions or unexplained phenomena. My husband is a scientist, and without concrete evidence has never believed in spirits or people reaching out from beyond the grave. But all that changed forever after we paid an impromptu visit to an open house.

When we were young and child-free, we lived in a shoebox of an apartment to save money. But tiny as our place was, it had the excellent advantage of being less than a mile from the ocean. On hot days, we would often walk down to the water, passing beautiful beachside properties in the process. We were saving for a house, and even though we knew we could never afford one of them, we had fun imagining what it would be like to live in one of the seemingly perfect homes along the water.

One Saturday, we were on one of these walks when we saw an open house sign outside of one of the houses we loved from afar. Curious to see how the other half lived, we decided to check it out. The first floor was warm and inviting with wide-open spaces. The same sense of welcoming we felt outside the house followed us in, and the place felt like home. I could easily see us eating breakfast in front of the large bay window. We thought we were just browsing, but we were shocked when the real estate agent handed us the specs sheet and the house was actually within our budget. We decided to check out the rest of the house.

There was an unfinished basement off the gorgeous kitchen, and since the stairs leading down were pretty steep, we didn't think anything of it when the real estate agent said she would stay on the first floor while we checked it out. The basement was lined in jagged rock walls, and although there were several old-fashioned barn doors leading to who knows what, something about them made us too creeped out to open them. It wasn't what I wanted in a dream house, but chalking it up to the fact that most basements are creepy, we headed back to the first floor.

The unease I felt in the basement quickly dissipated as I stepped into the dining room, and I once again felt like I was meant to live in this space. The agent was very attentive and pointed out all of the house's advantages, but when we asked to check out the upstairs, she once again said she would remain on the first floor. Thinking perhaps she had knee issues, we headed up without her.

The second floor was just as pretty as the first. You could hear the faint rumble of ocean waves and smell the sea coming in from the open windows. The sheer curtains stirred invitingly in the breeze. We looked at two bedrooms and a bathroom, getting more and more excited as we started to talk about furniture and paint colors. We both agreed this house felt like home. And then we stepped into the master suite.

To this day I still can't clearly describe what happened in that room because it was so unlike anything I had ever experienced up until that point or since. Even now, as I try to recall the memory, my thoughts scatter, as though the reality of what was there is just too much for my brain to fully piece together again. The first thing I noticed was how still the room was. Although the windows were open like others in the house, these curtains lay stiff and dead against the walls. And the smells and sounds of the ocean were curiously absent, replaced with a thick silence that made every hair on my body stand at attention. I knew immediately that something here was very, very wrong.

Even though every one of my instincts was telling me to get out of there, I couldn't seem to form the words to tell my husband I wanted to leave. He didn't say anything either, and somehow we both found ourselves drawn to the door to the bathroom in the corner of the room.

My husband opened the door slowly. The room was tiled in a neutral beige, but for just an instant, I saw the entire room awash in red; the bright, grisly red of blood. And for a moment the silence was gone, replaced by the sound of a woman screaming in my head that was so loud I clamped my hands over my ears.

My husband still won't tell me what he saw or heard when he opened that door, but seeing as how we both turned to run down the stairs and out the door past the real estate agent (who didn't look surprised to see us leaving in a hurry), he too must have experienced something not of this world. As we hurried away from the house we tried to talk about what happened in that bedroom, but both of us struggled to hold on to the details. All we knew was that this house was not what it appeared to be.

We looked the address up when we got home and found out the previous owner had murdered his girlfriend. We didn't even have to guess where in the house the crime had occurred. From that day forward, whenever we walked past the house, we always crossed to the other side of the street, but I could never shake the feeling that it was watching us as we passed by.

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/lifestyle/styl ... ailsignout

[kmaherali]

Witchcraft on the Campaign Trail

The idea has been flying about for a while now, at least since the summer’s cries to lock up or hang the Democratic presidential candidate. Earlier on, Ben Carson helpfully linked her to Lucifer. After the first debate, Rush Limbaugh made the designation official: In a double-barreled attack, he declared that Hillary Clinton came off “exactly as many people see her — a witch with a capital ‘B.’”

A conservative editor recently begged his readers not to elect Mrs. Clinton; were she to land in the White House, his health would deteriorate. She would upset his stomach. She would shorten his life. He sounded steeped in witchcraft texts. Those are classic symptoms of enchantment — in the pre-Enlightenment world.

As we dust off the broomsticks and pointy hats, it seems fair to ask what exactly we mean by a witch these days.

In some respects the 21st-century witch — someone who is one because others insist she is, not because she identifies as a Wiccan priestess — closely resembles her early American forebears. A Maine police officer in a “Hillary for prison” T-shirt succinctly defined the term at a September rally: “An angry, crotchety old hag who is just out for power, who just wants to be able to line her pockets.”

When sorcery arrived on these shores, when New Englanders hanged witches, they worked in part from that stereotype. Witches could enchant rope, cause fences to disappear, make stomachs lurch with a glance, transform themselves into balls of fire, disturb their neighbors’ dreams. They might also appear shrill, vindictive or calculating, three adjectives that the conservative editor rallied last week when he implored readers to spare him “four years of this witch as president.”

The early modern American understood a witch to be a confederate of the devil; he took literally the biblical command: “Though shalt not suffer the witch to live.” He was also more egalitarian than we are. For him, “witch” was a gender-neutral term. He condemned enterprising ship captains along with muttering, menopausal malcontents. And he was more creative: In the course of the Salem witch trials, men and women stood accused for a whole catalog of reasons. (Running for political office may actually have figured among them: A rich merchant was accused weeks after he had been elected a Salem selectman.) The uncommonly strong or unaccountably smart raised suspicions. Indeed, a witch often committed the capital crime of displaying more wit than her neighbors, as was said of the third woman to hang in Massachusetts, in 1656.

Halloween provides the modern witch with her bread and butter; what sustains her are our fears. We have many more tools than did the 17th-century villager to make sense of our world, chemistry, physics, biology and guilty consciences among them. But misfortune continues to perplex and provoke us. Our stomachs still lurch. Any number of things disturb us in the night.

Witches remain in business so long as we feel powerless: They offer the blessed relief of assigning blame; they allow us to distill spite, that heady brew of vindication and humiliation. We may consider ourselves more enlightened than the Peruvian villagers who last month burned a woman alive, or than the rural Ghanaians who banish spell-casting women to primitive witch colonies. But we still have few other names for the way a woman’s voice unsettles, for the queasy sense that the world must be upside-down if she happens to be running it. Nancy Pelosi’s Republican challenger portrayed her as the Wicked Witch of the West in a 2010 ad. (He melted her in the TV spot, though not in the election.) An older woman moreover knows things a younger woman does not; she can say things a younger woman says with difficulty. Like no.

At the heart of the matter is a paradox: For centuries women were assumed to be more susceptible to Satan’s advances because of their inherent frailty. At the same time they exercise unnatural power on two fronts. The witch has retired her religious affiliation. But as your dictionary will tell you, she survives as a hybrid of two disturbing creatures: the vocal old hag, and the alluring young vixen.

The idea may have evolved; the animus remains. And while the religious piece has fallen away, the demonic talk has returned. The alt-right commentator Alex Jones has deemed Mrs. Clinton “an abject, psychopathic demon from Hell that as soon as she gets into power is going to destroy the planet.” In doing so he revealed something else about witchcraft: Witches tend to be people we didn’t like in the first place. They appear suspect in advance of their crimes.

At least some of us can take comfort in the fact that we have tamed many of our fears. Otherwise we might hear the kind of reckless accusation the 1692 witchcraft court did when a blunt, boastful, perversely contentious man came before it. Thrice married, he guarded his secrets closely. He made outsize promises; he threatened and insulted. He broke rank with his establishment peers. He emerged unscathed from a series of savage attacks. Under interrogation, he made an art of “tergiversations, contradictions, and falsehoods.” Among his wizardly feats: He manipulated a very heavy gun despite surprisingly small hands. He was clearly a superhuman mastermind, the most formidable of witches, “the ringleader of them all.” His trial was the one everyone awaited. He was hanged in Salem that August.

Prepare yourself for a storm of witchcraft when a woman alights on Pennsylvania Avenue.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/31/opini ... &te=1&_r=0

[kmaherali]

Paranormal Encounters Episode 1 Lorraine Warren / The Conjuring Sequel

Published on Aug 2, 2013

Paranormal Documentary series exploring the world of the supernatural. Actress Karen Hassan interviews the Hughes Family from Belfast about their home which is haunted by the spirit of a long dead unionist politician. Demonologist and Paranormal investigator Lorraine Warren of 'The Conjuring' fame investigates.

VIDEO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xkq4KuQ ... e=youtu.be

******
PARANORMAL ENCOUNTERS Episode 2 (Interview with Julian Simmons)

Published on Oct 16, 2013

Irish TV personality Julian Simmons tells the story of his first paranormal encounter. Presented by Nathan Hughes and Karen Hassan.

VIDEO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF0GOLl9Hao

******
PARANORMAL ENCOUNTERS Episode 4 - Contacting the dead with Angela Dunlop

Published on Jul 24, 2014

Karen Hassan and Nathan Hughes investigate the abilities of famed psychic medium Angela Dunlop.

Watch a live medium communicate with the dead.

This is the official 4th episode of Paranormal Encounters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRHZTZD ... e=youtu.be

[kmaherali]

Family searching for answers after capturing ghostly image on lawn of new home

Someone is asking people on the internet about a bizarre pair of photos.

The pictures were snapped in quick succession. In one, we see a simple image of a a lawn and trees, bathing in the light of a full moon.

But then a small figure seems to appear in the second, blurred in the shadows moving from left to right.

Of course, there are plenty of possible explanations. Some sort of animal? A trick of the light? Who knows, but the photographs are causing people to ask questions.

Photos and story at:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/fam ... ailsignout

[kmaherali]

Why exorcisms are on the rise in France

As the church loses interest, private enterprise has taken its place


The exorcism business is on the rise in France. A host of private healers, mediums, and shamans offer their services for as much as €500 ($591) per ceremony. They offer to help fix failing relationships and despook properties. One worker describes an “avalanche” of demand following the terrorist attack in Paris in 2015. Others say the church neglects exorcisms despite strong public demand,

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economis ... lydispatch

[kmaherali]

Book

Magic in the Air: How Intellectuals Invented the Myth of a Mythless Society

Excerpt:

A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. This is often supposed to be true of America and Western Europe if nowhere else.

However, I knew full well that many Americans and Europeans also believed in protective icons and spiritual premonitions. In fact, my grandmother was a famous professor of anthropology who after her retirement went public with her belief in spirits and ecstatic trances; throughout my childhood I remember scholars, scientists, and artists travelling from Europe, Mexico, and the United States to participate in “shamanic” trance workshops under her leadership. My grandmother inspired me to become a scholar, but I was always skeptical of spirits, and moreover I was doubly skeptical of the notion that the modern Western world had lost its magic.

I found myself shifting gears and looking at America and Europe through the eyes of an outsider—with the same sort of gaze often leveled at non-Europeans. When I did so I discovered that the sociological data suggested that the majority of Americans believe in ghosts or demons. Indeed, a surprising 73% of Americans have at least one paranormal belief, and while the data is less robust it looks like there are similar belief patterns in Western Europe. At the very least, it seems hard to argue that the “modern West” is straightforwardly disenchanted. So I asked myself how did we get the notion that “modernity” (and what it is said to entail) equated with an end of belief in magic and spirits?

The issue becomes even more troubling when you realize that the canonical European theorists (anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and so on) who came up with the various accounts of modernity as disenchantment lived in the nineteenth century in the midst of spiritualist and occult revivals. Magic and séances were on the surface of European culture at the very moment that Europeans came to argue that magic had vanished. So I began to ask: how did this narrative of modernity become dominant? Put differently, how did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? And that was what I set out to answer in The Myth of Disenchantment.

More...
http://religiondispatches.org/magic-in- ... 4-84570085

[kmaherali]

This School Caught a Ghost on Camera—and No, It’s Not a Prank

Certain things in this world are seemingly inexplicable. There are certain perceived logical boundaries which common things abide and some things just don’t seem to play by the rules. In a perfect world, the plural of moose would be meese, pants and shorts would cost the same (this is why they don’t), and ghosts just plain wouldn’t exist because they are seemingly outside of the bounds of logic.

But some new security footage from a secondary school in Ireland is causing quite a spectral stir. Deerpark CBS, located in Cork, posted a video on their YouTube page of some very suspect movements caught on camera at around 3 a.m. on October 3rd.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/wha ... ar-AAtmJQi


Irish secondary school catches 'ghost' in corridors on CCTV

An Irish secondary school have caught what they reckon is a ghost on their CCTV cameras. Deerpark CBS in the South of Cork released footage on Youtube that shows some spooky stuff going on at night.

First some strange flashes can be seen in the distance before a number of lockers begin to shake and a few pieces of equipment are knocked over.

Whether or not it is actually a poltergeist or a prank by students is anyone's guess. Posting on their Facebook page Deerpark CBS said: "Anyone have the number for ghostbusters?"

They also said on Youtube: "Prank or poltergeist? CCTV footage from Deerpark CBS, the oldest (and most haunted!!!!?) school on the south side of Cork City."

They added: "We're such a great school even the afterlife are signing up lol." What do you think? Is this a ghost or just a prank?

VIDEO at:

https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/newsirel ... ar-AAsVoyp