The Element Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Hauntings: The Complete A–Z for the Entire Magical World. Theresa Cheung

       INTRODUCTION Do You Believe in Ghosts?

       A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

      (Oliver Wendell Holmes)

      In the last few decades interest in ghosts has escalated. Beyond the basic Stephen King novel, the idea of being able to ‘see dead people’ has penetrated deeply into mainstream culture.

      The movie Ghost (1990), with Whoopie Goldberg as reluctant medium Oda May Brown, was the first blockbuster film to portray a medium, someone who can communicate with ghosts, in a positive light. Since then a steady stream of books, films and documentaries has followed. Organizations, seminars, workshops, websites, study programmes, chat rooms and courses in ghost hunting, parapsychology (the study of the paranormal or unexplained) and psychic development have sprung up over night. We can now speak ‘openly’ about ghosts, hauntings and psychic experiences without fear of ridicule.

      Yet despite all the attention currently being given to psychic phenomena their true nature still lies deeply shrouded in mystery. As the experience is different for every person it is impossible to explain exactly what the psychic state is, but a large number of experiences are considered psychic. These include sightings of ghosts, spirits and poltergeists as well as telepathy (mind reading), clairvoyance (psychic ability to see objects and visions), psychokinesis (mind-over-matter), and out-of-body experiences.

      Within the pages of this Encyclopedia you’ll find a veritable compendium of ghosts, hauntings and related psychic phenomena – what they are, the evidence for them, the theories which have been proposed, as well as psychic development exercises designed to help you lift the veil between this world and the next. You will also find biographies of famous mediums, psychics and ghost hunters and information about ghost hunting techniques, unexplained phenomena and well-known hauntings. The aim isn’t to explain the unexplainable – as that is impossible – but to lift the veil and make the groping for words easier when it comes to researching, questioning and understanding the mysteries of the world of spirit.

      Introducing the spirit world [a very brief history]

      Psychic traditions have existed since the beginning of recorded history and have been present in one way or another in ancient cultures all over the world. It seems that a belief in ghosts and communication with spirits of the dead has also always been with us from our earliest beginnings. In the ancient Middle East, psychic powers were practised by prophets and in the Bible’s Old Testament. The ancient Egyptians also believed they could communicate with the dead.

      Although belief in ghosts has clearly been present from the very beginning of human history, the first extant report of a haunted house comes from a letter written by a Roman orator called Pliny the Younger (AD 61–112). He wrote to his patron, Lucias Sura, about a villa in Athens that nobody would rent because of a resident ghost.

      After the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, during the Age of Reason, belief in psychic powers and the paranormal waned, but it was reborn again with the help of the Spiritualist movement. The foundations of spiritualism were laid by Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), who allegedly went into trances and communicated with the dead. However, it was the Fox sisters, Kate (1841–1892) and Margaretta (1838–1893), who really brought psychic phenomena to the forefront. The sisters claimed they were able to manifest spirit communication through the rappings of a peddler who had been murdered and found in the Fox home. The public were fascinated as the sisters gave public demonstrations of this psychic manifestation throughout the United States.

      Even though the sisters later confessed to fraud, the Spiritualist movement was by then well underway both in the United States and in Europe. Spirit rapping gave way to séances, table-tilting, trance writing and spirit communication