READER FRIDAY: Do You Believe in Ghosts?

One of my favorite movies as a kid was House on Haunted Hill starring the great Vincent Haunted HillPrice. Scared the bazoonga out of me. Still a favorite camp classic. But I’m always a little nervous in the dark.

So what about you? Do you believe in ghosts? Would you ever spend a night alone in a house people said was haunted?

11 thoughts on “READER FRIDAY: Do You Believe in Ghosts?

  1. Yes, and no. My sister, along with some friends, once dabbled with the spiritual dark side. The fallout terrified them, and for lack of a better word, haunted the rest of us for sometime. Terrifying things happened, and Hollywood got it wrong. Some of it happened in bright morning sunlight, right in my bedroom.

    I had no idea what was going on, until my sister confessed. After hearing her story, I ran to my Grandmother, thinking she would tell me I was a teenager with an over active imagination. Nope. She told me stories of people she knew that had even worse encounters.

    Then, on the following Sunday, our pastor started his sermon with this: “Too many people discount the devil. He is real.” Oh, I could vouch for the truth of that statement.

    Things continued to happen, and we eventually had to call our pastor to come bless the house. After that, all the incidents stopped. Although my sister said she had a few more encounters after she left home. Happily, those eventually stopped.

    I still can’t watch The Exorcist, or any similar movies. Too close to home. When I hear something go bump in the night, a whole slew of other images appear, none of them pretty. However, after forty some years, I do not sleep with a light. After what I experienced, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference, except enable me to see the thing easier.

    These incidents, and a few other experiences on the lighter side of the spiritual world, inspired my books. Which, by the way, are not for the faint of heart – or mind. Giggle.

  2. I believe in the “yet to be explained.” When my Dad retired from the Air Force we moved to a little tract of farmland in Eastern Kansas. One night I woke to the smell of smoke from a campfire and coffee in my room. I got up thinking we had a house fire, or potentially a wildfire outside. But there was nothing. The house was safe, my family asleep and nothing but night critters outside.
    This occurred several times over the years that we lived there, often with additional events, like hearing a horse whinny. We had no horses.
    One day I mentioned it to my Grandmother, who lived in the farm adjacent to our little tract. She smiled and said I was being visited by “the settlers.”
    We lived on a hill that was the 2nd highest point in Miami County, KS, a spot used by settlers going west in the 1800’s as a rest stop. It allowed them to rest, repair wagons, and be watchful for the Miami Indians that lived in the area.
    My Grandmother’s explanation was as good as any.

  3. Oh yeah. Absolutely. My house is haunted, inside and outside. We see the spirits of our dead pets frequently (one deceased cat brushes up against my leg in the middle of the night). We frequently hear footsteps walking the length of the second floor when we’re all downstairs. Our younger daughter, when two, kept talking about the “tall Indian with wings” who stood in the upper hallway. And I got my head rubbed — and not in a good way — by a corporeal something in a New Orleans hotel room. Yup.

  4. I certainly do believe in evil. I believe in good, so it stands to reason it has an opposite. I’ve heard too many stories of scary things happening to people. I don’t discount there are occurrences that are caused by overactive imaginations, but not all. I’ve written flash fiction horror stories and sometimes almost scared myself. It’s different writing them though and reading someone else’s work like Stephen King’s books. I have a lot of empathy and seem sensitive to evil. I believe in angels and also what are called devils. I don’t believe they’re as depicted with hooves, etc, unless they want to look like that, but I believe they’re real and powerful. I also don’t believe anyone is immune to temptation. Life is a battle between good and evil. Basically, a situation demands common sense. A person shouldn’t put themselves in risky situations if they have a choice. I liked Vincent Price also. He was great. —- Suzanne Joshi

  5. I’m inclined to the yes side, but I’d call it spirits rather than ghosts. Had a rather unnerving but ultimate positive experience with it once a very long time ago. I do think that not all of us are “attuned” to these phenomena or maybe a few of us just have our antennae further extended. Like kids…they seem to be more aware. two day after my mom died, my 9 year old niece told me, quite calmly, that grandma had sat on the edge of her bed last night to tell her she was fine. Who knows?

    I do know that at our former house, this little bungalow I called The Alamo, there was a threshold leading into one bedroom that our cats — all four of them — always crossed with great wariness, sometimes even jumping straight up in the air. They knew something we did not, I am convinced.

    As for “House on Haunted Hill”…I am with you, Jim. Scared the living daylights out of me! I saw it at a Saturday matinee, and when the skeleton rose out of the acid pit, a fake skeleton came whirring down from the balcony on a wire-line that the theater had set up. Kids ran up the aisles in terror. This was the era (1959) when theaters put buzzers under the seats to shock audiences watching “The Tingler.”

    Ah, they don’t make em like that anymore!

  6. ‘Ts been interesting to me that the phenomenon of ghosts, and the phenomenon of UFO have many of the same characteristics. Both are replete with entities that disappear and reappear seemingly spontaneously; weird sounds, smells, lights, voices; kidnappings; lost time events; unaccountable terror; and unexplained attacks.

    But I’m a Christian. So you will probably guess where I think these things originate.

  7. If any place should have “haints” it should be the 1830 farmhouse that’s been in my bride’s family since it was built, and has had its share of the “dearly departed” departing from within (her grandmother most recently about five years ago).

    But these folks must’ve left on good terms, because none seem to rattle any chains, even on the darkest of nights when the power goes out.

  8. Not sure what I believe about ghosts, but I think there is “something” to the whole proposition. I also think it’s a natural fear and fascination, which is what makes it a reliable conceptual landscape for a story. If there’s a ghost, or something close, that alone becomes a compelling conceptual element to wrap around a premise.

    My favorite novel/film was a rather minor entry in the genre, “The Legend of Hell House,” back from, well, the dark edges. Still out there in DVD if you want the crap scared out of you. ☺

  9. I’m undecided. I’ve had some odd things happen, so I’m not ready to dismiss the spirit world. But we moved into a house in St. Louis that had a reputation for being haunted — we didn’t find that out until a bunch of school girls turned up on our doorstep near Halloween and wanted to have a seance. We politely told the girls no. And the ghosts in the house disappeared when we got storm windows, though our guests claimed the upstairs bedroom had something lurking in the corners: A harmless ghost who liked to read over their shoulders.

  10. Yes, I believe, and No I would not spend an overnight in a supposedly haunted house. I also believe there are certified psychic mediums that do see beyond our own five senses.

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