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Of All That Is Seen And Unseen
If you grew up Catholic during the 1970s and 1980s, you will recognize this:
We believe in One God,
The Father Almighty.
Maker of Heaven and earth.
Of all that is seen and unseen.
They are the opening lines of the Nicene Creed as said in Catholic masses from the early 1970s to the early 21st century. With All Hallows’ Eve upon us, thoughts of the unseen world abound. Children dress up as ghosts, monsters, and other supernatural creatures and, in a tradition that harkens back to pre-history, we are submerged in a multitude of movies and television shows relating frightening tales of the type that our distant ancestors told one another around the campfire.
Many religions speak of the unseen world, but in modern times fewer and fewer people are inclined to believe in its existence. Such skepticism is understandable. How many people do you know who have had a supernatural encounter? Have you had one? For most of my life, the answer to the second was a resounding “no.” Having spent most of my adult life in academia, skepticism has become deeply ingrained within my worldview. Seeing is believing. But what of when the unseen world becomes seen?
On a hot, muggy summer night in the Texas Hill Country, I had reason to wonder. Being a night owl, I sometimes stay up very late, so late that I am still awake when the newspaperman makes his early morning delivery. Such was the case in July of 2017. Upon hearing the newspaper land in my driveway, I walked out my front door to retrieve it. As I made my way across the front yard I looked across the street and saw, standing in front of my neighbor’s house, what looked like an eight-year-old boy wearing a baseball cap. How odd, I thought. What’s a little boy doing out at four in the morning? I bent down to pick up my paper and when I looked up again, the boy was gone.
But was he ever really there? Perhaps, I thought as I walked back inside, it was just a trick of the light, a figment of my imagination. Maybe, to quote Charles Dickens, he was “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.” I’ll never know.
So, my fellow Ricochetti, have you any personal encounters with the supernatural to share this Halloween? Don’t be shy. And if you’re scared, just remember that tonight, ghosts and monsters will sit around their own campfires telling Chuck Norris stories.
Published in Entertainment
One afternoon in May of 1962, sitting quietly reading a book in my living room, I looked up and my deceased maternal grandmother was sitting in a chair nearby. Out of astonishment, I asked her, “What are you doing here?” She replied, “I still have some things to do before I’m at rest.” I asked her if she could manifest herself any time she wanted, and she said no, it takes too much energy. And then she faded away.
My last words to her before she had died the year before was to let go and be at peace. She had had a stroke and was paralyzed but could hear her children, my aunts and uncle, squabbling abut her insurance. She had tears in her eyes, so gathered her into my arms, said this is Kay, and spoke my last words. I sensed her presence for about a year or so after this incident, but have not again.
The Nicene Creed is recited by all Christian denominations, but you have to wonder if the younger generations will know it. I’ve had some odd experiences that could not be explained except by divine interception. But a spooky encounter came when I stayed with a friend’s family in my early 20’s. The house was old and they told me pictures would sometimes fall off the wall and other weird things. I came home very late one night, and was scolded. I went straight to bed and within 10 minutes I heard a deep male laugh in the hall – not evil, just a hollow sound. My mind could not decipher it – I got up, and sure enough my friend’s (who was out of town) mom and sister were out in the hall and had heard it – no one else was home. The dog had his tail between his legs…..it was so weird – we searched the house armed with hairbrushes, hairspray to defend ourselves. The doors were locked. That was it – and that was enough…
I know dead people come back to life. But it usually doesn’t happen on Halloween, but on election day when they vote Democrat.
I think I saw the same small boy!
20+ years ago I was helping a friend move. After a long day, we were both inside her soon-to-be-ex-home, me with a six month old on my hip.
Her front door was open. I saw a young boy standing looking in. Colorful clothes and a baseball cap. At the same instant I saw my friend’s head swivel in that direction.
When I looked back he was gone. I described what I had seen – my friend had seen the same small boy. We went to her front porch and searched the front yard to no avail.
I told my (Catholic) mother the story. She told me that I should immediately say a prayer for the young boy, that he was a lost soul. 20+ years later, I still do.
A friend of mine was stuck in a hospital in Germany. He was supposed to have a major operation. I didn’t even go onto the Internet that day, which is pretty unusual for me. After supper, I was doing the dishes. I “heard” a laugh from behind and above me. I knew that it was not a real sound or live person. I knew it was my friend, and he had not made it through the operation. He was coming to say goodbye and thought my domesticity was funny. I went to my computer and checked, and sure enough, he had died that day.
One of the first things my mother and stepfather did after they married was to buy a dog; we named her Tasha. As it turned out, she was his dog. When they were out and she decided it had been too long, she would pull the bedspread down and sleep on his pillow. When he hugged her, she would bark and jump up between them.
She was a mixed breed, Puli and Old English Sheepdog, and had used this heritage to help me through a very bad time of my life, so I had a real connection with her as well, and I helped bury her in the yard of the mountain cabin from which, dying of cancer, she had been taken to the vet to be euthanized.
Some years after that, now almost thirty years ago, I was sitting on a Shabbat afternoon in my parents’ house. My stepfather A”H was dying of cancer in an upstairs bedroom; he died on the coming Tuesday. As the light faded in the room, I put down the book I was reading and just sat. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, off to the left and slightly above eye level. It was Tasha, as she had been in her prime. She briefly made eye contact with me, and then made a bounding turn away and disappeared.
At that moment, though there had been some small rallies in the previous days, I knew for certain that she had let me know my stepfather was indeed dying… and that when he started on his journey into the next world, he would not be alone.
As far as I’m concerned that, and other things that happened when my stepfather died, demonstrated that love is indeed stronger than death.
Most people at least know another person who claims to have witnessed a spirit. It’s normal, really. What isn’t normal is talking about those experiences, because a secular culture insists upon materialism as a supposed common ground. I have never met a Christian without a first- or second-hand account of angels or souls.
I had a habit as a young child of praying the rosary before bed. One night, my parents saw me run screaming from the room, terrified. I said an invisible hand had ripped the rosary from me. They found the beads scattered around the room. I was not old enough to have broken it myself.
Another time, I was lying in bed when I jolted upright, suddenly aware of an invisible presence at my door. In horror, I tracked this invisible menace as it raced toward me, finally slamming me back against my bed. Until I was a teenager, I had nightmares every night in that house. My mother blessed it repeatedly.
My mother was once visited by her dead father. She is one of many people I know who claim such experiences. My saintly mother has also seen angels gathered around the altar during Mass and has heard them singing.
While on a field trip, my sister was fainting from heat exhaustion under the hot Texas sun when she told her boyfriend to pray to the Holy Spirit for help. Then, a tremendous and sustained gust of wind cooled her down. The gust was so extraordinary that all the teenagers back on the bus were talking about it when my sister returned.
My agnostic uncle recalls a scare when he was young playing the Ouija board with my other uncle and a friend. Suddenly, the lights went out, the house shook, and there was an aggressive banging at the back door. When one of the boys opened the door, the lights came back on, the house was still, and no one was at the door. My uncles’ friend was gone. He later claimed to have suddenly found himself on the street a block away.
In that same house, that same kitchen, his whole family (3 boys, 2 parents) recall waking in the middle of a night to a loud crash. When they got to the kitchen, a chunk of ice larger than the freezer was crumbled across the floor.
Incidentally, Catholic exorcists verify the existence of haunted places and not just haunted persons. Conversely, every church and altar is blessed with holy oil, and the Church still demands that the dead be buried on hallowed ground.
I know a man who is a Buddhist monk and abbot. His teacher’s organization took over a facility that had been one of the state’s hospitals for the criminally insane. He said it took a lot of meditation and prayer to drive off… whatever.
His teacher, by the way, was a survivor of Mao’s persecution and supported capital punishment for murder and other heinous crimes. Basically said they’ve had their chance in this life, time to give them a chance to try to do better in their next incarnation.
In the late 70’s we rented an old house in Macomb IL. Every once in a while I would hear our two year old daughter talking to someone. Since she was not the kind of kid that had imaginary friends, I asked her who she was talking to ( I was not in the room, but could hear her clearly). She said it was the lady on the stairs. I didn’t make a fuss, but listened closely for any other occurrences. This happened twice more, and the second time she said she was talking to the lady and a man. At that point, not wanting to encourage a ghost convention, I told her that next time she should tell them that we live here now and please go away. The next day I heard her using those words, and there were no further visits.
While in Macomb, I worked with a young girl (early 20’s) whose family lived in their old farmhouse. She told a story of one night when she and her sister (who shared a bedroom) both woke up, sat straight up in bed and saw a greenish head floating in their room. You could tell this was not made up, just by the panic in her voice as she told the story. She also told about strange noises and things that would regularly would ‘fall’ off counters in their home.
By the way, this morning as I was getting ready for work, three large bins of Christmas decorations in my store room just fell over. They had been sitting in that spot since January, and based on the way they fell, they had to have been pushed from behind. Happy Halloween!
That reminds me of a very different, non-ghostly story. The short version is a group had purchased an old, abandoned retreat center in the woods to be their ashram. They were clearing it out with the respect for life their group had, capturing animals and insects and taking them outside…except for one little old lady who had a rolled up magazine and was swatting the bugs and spiders and each time saying, “Back to God! Back to God!”
I’ve had so many ESP experiences you’d think I make them up, including living with a “poltergeist” for several years. The poltergeist was verified by Raymond Bayless, a parapsychologist from the American Institute of Parapsychology, Los Angeles. During his life, he had written many books about his research. After his investigations, his answer about the unusual activity in my apartment, “you have an unexplained phenomena.” Then he handed me his book, The Enigma of the Poltergeist. You can find a list of his books here:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/552627.Raymond_Bayless
Raymond believed that eventually we would have the science to explain ESP.
This reminds me of a dream I had. When I was a small boy, we had a dog named Duke. Duke was a very smart dog, and somehow he wound up as my responsibility to feed and water and so forth. He died when I was about fourteen. Years later when I was probably in my thirties or early forties, I dreamed of him. I was looking out into the backyard of the house I grew up in, and he was there. As I was watching him in this dream, a hippopotamus walked by, and Duke grabbed it and wolfed the whole thing down. I had no doubt that he had been communicating, “Hey, pal, been a long time since you fed me. I’m so hungry, I could eat a hippo!”
And, speaking of animals and ghosts, we have a ghost cat. We have times where we are in bed and we feel one of the cats jump up on bed, and we look to see that there is no cat visible. Other times, both cats are on the bed, and the third ghost cat jumps up. I don’t know if it’s the cat our family had as a child, or if it’s some other ghost cat, but it is interesting.
I’ve always wanted to ask people who have experienced things like this whether they were totally awake and alert at the time, or were they perhaps tired or half asleep. This obviously would be important in determining whether the experience was objectively real or a subjectively experienced “undigested bit of beef” or whatever. The only such experience I have had was what is medically called a “night terror”. I am half asleep, aware of my surroundings but unable to move, and suddenly overcome with a feeling of a presence in the room accompanied by a fear that is beyond anything I could imagine. I’ve never experienced that kind of terror before. But it happened often enough that I got used to it and eventually began to just laugh at the feeling of the evil presence, as it had ceased to really scare me. I think in my case it may have been a side effect of taking ibuprofen before bed, because once I stopped doing that, I don’t think it ever happened again.
As discussed recently on Ricochet, minds are quick to analyze memories and reorganize them to make more sense… even immediately after the event. The more extraordinary and difficult to believe the memory, the stronger the impulse to use imagination in interpretation and reorganization of the memory.
I have had more than a few strange experiences. So I eventually learned to establish immediately a determination about the event’s true nature and forever after trust that analysis, rather than stubbornly and fruitlessly attempt to re-analyze memories altered after years of recollection and shifting preferences.
For a college class, I once wrote an account of a true experience — not supernatural in nature — that was mistaken by all readers as a fictional story. Truth is often stranger than fiction. We should not surrender memories because others justifiably disbelieve them. Nor should we hide unlikely experiences, lest they seem stranger than they really are.
Wow!
I had another experience and it bothers me to this day.
I was working for a realtor getting ready for an old, old house to go on the market. I’d spent a hellish week there alone with the hoarder-seller and her four small dogs. She was nuts and the house was a mess (though it had lovely bones, as they say in the industry, and was in a prime location)
After a couple of weeks of work the house was ready. The dogs were in the study, realtor and I were in the dining room and the seller was on the driveway. Realtor and I heard male voices in conversation coming from the study. I recognized that words were being spoken in conversation, but didn’t recognize the language.
Realtor and I looked at each other in alarm. I was frozen in place, but the realtor began to walk toward the voices. The seller entered the front door, and the realtor asked: who else is in the house? we hear voices.
Sellers: oh, you’re hearing my dogs. They can talk.
I refused to be alone in the house after that. Later in the week the realtor and I were together in an upstairs bedroom packing up a closet, talking about the incident. All at once every picture and trophy in the room fell forward with a slam.
I was so freaked out by the experience I called my priest. He was sympathetic and reminded me over and over to not keep anything from the house. His closing words were, “Annie, if you have an experience like that again, don’t be afraid to invoke the name of Jesus Christ.”
I replied, “I think I did, but not in a way you would approve of.”
I wish I could say that I’d had one of these amazing experiences, but I haven’t. That said, I often feel Presence and find that very comforting. By the way @mikelaroche, congratulations on becoming a Contributor!!
I have suffered sleep paralysis, and that’s quite something if one doesn’t know what it is. (Even when one does, one is seldom going to just go back to sleep without checking every nook and cranny with lots of lights on.)
However, other than the dream of Duke that I mentioned, all of my stories were awake and alert.
I’m laughing.
Several years ago some friends and I went over to the Kitsap Peninsula, across Puget Sound from Seattle, to see Chief Seattle’s grave in the Suquamish Tribal Cemetery. There were about 10 of us in the group. When we walked across the graveyard to get to his grave, I suddenly heard the Indians buried there saying to go away, leave them in peace. They were angry and scared me to death. I ran off the graveyard and yelled at my friends to get out of there as the Indians didn’t want us there. To this day they all joke about the day the dead Indians talked to me, but I can assure you it was a very real experience. How can it be explained? Was it my imagination? I’ll never know.
I’ve got a great priest. He laughed also.
Michael Medved has spoken often about a night he spent camping at Gettysburg. Disturbed sleep, sounds of running, smell of smoke, etc.
Thanks, @susanquinn!
I like the stories.
I’m not going to say that I believe in ghosts. But I don’t not believe in ghosts.
I’ve had two experiences.
The last was in Door County Wisconsin at a house we were renting as we attended the Fish Creek Winter Games. The rest of the crew went into town for food and carousing, but I stayed behind. I was tired; I wanted to be alone (I have some introvert qualities). So I slept in; lazed about reading and watching TV. I was going to finish up the chapter I was reading (I don’t remember the book) then meet my friends in town. Well, suddenly the TV turned on by itself. Snow. It was an older TV so no timer or anything like that. I was sitting right there in the room when it turned on. Don’t have to tell me twice – time to go meet my friends now. Except that I really needed to shower. That was the longest short shower of my life.
The other experience wasn’t as dramatic. Walking back from the family camp to our staff cabin at the boy scout camp one night, my friend and I felt a presence. It was strong and we both felt it. We had just visited our girlfriends so we were definitely not feeling afraid on the walk back. It was a walk we had walked a dozen times. It’s a desolate walk, but worth it for our seventeen year old selves. Nothing more than feeling a presence. I don’t remember it being evil or good or menacing or anything. Just present. We doubled timed it the rest of the way.
I am the same. I know many who have had supernatural experiences, but I am not one of them. I do, however, have the fortunate experience that after a loved one dies, whether human or four legged, I can only conjure up visions of them happy, smiling and free from all infirmity. No matter how they died. I’ve always considered it a blessing.
I accidentally attended a seance. Didn’t participate, but when a major ugly showed up I called on Jesus to banish it and He did. The medium was very put out, an evening’s entertainment spoiled.
“tonight, ghosts and monsters will sit around their own campfires telling Chuck Norris stories.”
<snorts coffee> Ha! That one I’m storing for future use.
Wow Aaron!!! Good grief! I would have moved!