Do you believe in ghosts?

Let's get metaphysical.

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

I love a good ghost story.

This might not come as too much of a surprise, considering I wrote a novel series featuring a ghost protagonist. It might surprise some of you to learn that they always terrified me, though, ever since I was a little girl hiding under the table with a flashlight with bigger kids who regaled me with tales of Bloody Mary and other terrors. Part of the reason I wrote that aforementioned series was to help myself get over the fear of ghosts. It worked, for the most part.

The question of whether or not I actually believed in ghosts always seemed irrelevant. Imaginary horrors can still be pretty scary, after all. But growing up in an Evangelical, charismatic household, I was firmly taught that people didn't come back as ghosts, and that all such activity was demonic, end of story. I'm not sure whether that made them more or less terrifying. The bottom line was that nobody disputed that there was something to ghost stories. Some kind of intelligence, making things happen, and that did not have benevolent intentions.

If you've been taught the same thing, it might come as a shock to you, as it did me, that the Bible actually provides a category for ghosts -- i.e., spirits of the human dead -- that is quite separate from demons. The late (and muchly missed) Dr. Michael Heiser wrote about this years ago on his blog. The ancient Hebrews had two words in their language for the human dead that were distinct from the words they used for demons and inhuman spirits. And it seems that the theology of both the ancient Jews and the early Christians allowed for the possibility of human ghosts.

This helps to make sense of a couple of the weirder episodes that take place in the Bible -- Samuel's ghost appearing to deliver one last prophetic word of condemnation to King Saul in the Old Testament, and Jesus' disciples mistaking him for a ghost when they see him walking across the Sea of Galilee in the New Testament. There's also the fact that, when he appeared to his disciples after his resurrection, Jesus had to demonstrate to them that he was solid and really alive. It always struck me that, if ghosts were merely demons, either of these would have been an excellent opportunity for Jesus to correct his disciples' beliefs about the existence of human ghosts.

Of course, if you subscribe to the belief that demons are the disembodied spirits of the Nephilim -- the giant hybrid offspring of fallen angels and human women -- that died in the Days of Noah (as I do), then demons are indeed a type of ghost. But that doesn't necessarily mean that all ghosts are these unclean spirits.

Dr. Heiser also points out that there are separate commandments against contacting demons and against contacting the human dead. And to paraphrase something he has said elsewhere and often, God doesn't warn us not to do something that isn't possible.

A lot of you, no doubt, are wanting to reflexively quote to me right now, "Absent from the body, present with the Lord." That's a verse from 2 Corinthians 5 that often gets misquoted in the process of dismissing the possibility of human ghosts. But here's what the verse actually says:

So we are always confident, knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord. For we walk by faith, not by sight. We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord. — 2 Cor. 5:8 (ESV)

Paul's point is that we can't be present with the Lord as long as we're in our earthy bodies. This comes at the end of a passage in which he explains that believers are going to receive new, heavenly bodies when we're resurrected. It's better, in his view, to be absent from these decaying earthly bodies and to be in the presence of the Lord.

But it doesn't automatically follow that being absent from the body is to immediately be present with the Lord. In the context of the passage, Paul is referring to our future, resurrected state, not to where our souls go when we die.

Whether you can allow for ghosts in your worldview most likely depends on your theology regarding this last item. In Christiandom, there are a few different views, all of them with varying degrees of orthodoxy:

1. The traditional, and probably the most widely held, view in which souls immediately go either to heaven or hell when they die. Although it would be more accurate to say that they either go to Paradise -- which is believed to have been relocated from the underworld to God's heavenly domain following the resurrection of Christ -- or Hades, a.k.a. Sheol. In this view, the souls of the righteous go up, and the souls of the unrighteous go down, and remain in their designated place until the day they'll be resurrected, either to eternal reward or to eternal judgment.

2. Soul sleep -- the view that our souls lose all consciousness when we die, and will regain consciousness at the resurrection.

3. A view favored by some more scientifically-minded theologians, such as Arthur Cunstance, that when we die our souls are removed from space-time and transported directly to the day of our designated resurrection and into our new bodies, with no time passing for us at all.

Believe it or not, all three of these views have a decent amount of scriptural support. A plain reading of many of Paul's letters, for instance, seems to give strong support for the second view. All of that is beyond the purview of this article (though I may get into it someday on my other publication). Suffice to say, only one of these views leaves any room for the possibility of human ghosts, but only if you make some adjustments.

If you're curious where I stand, for a while I was drawn to the third view, but after learning more about the theology of the people who lived in the time of Christ's earthly ministry and the nature of the Underworld, I'm more convinced that the traditional view is correct. For the most part.

The issues I take with that view are the assumptions that souls instantly go to Heaven or Hades when they die, and that once there they can't leave. While I could be wrong, and I reserve the right to change my mind if I learn something that proves me wrong, there's no real scriptural basis for either of those assumptions. While we are told that Sheol has bars to prevent escape, it also has a lock and key, so it would seem someone could conceivably be let out. After all, God clearly allowed Samuel out long enough to deliver his message of doom to Saul.

And there's also the Mount of Transfiguration episode, which featured the spirits of Moses and Elijah consulting with Jesus in front of eye witnesses.

As for the belief that we immediately depart to our designated waiting area upon death and don't linger behind, apparently the Jews and early Christians who lived around the time of Christ believed that the spirit hangs around the body until the third day, when the body begins to rot and becomes too corrupt for any hope of resuscitation.

According to some, this is why Jesus waited four days to raise Lazarus from the grave. This tradition seems to be born out by the fact that Jesus had to call out for Lazarus's spirit to return. Whereas when he raised the synagogue leader's daughter, who had just died, he simply told her to get up.

This tradition also seems to have made its way into Christendom and carried down through the centuries and millennia, and is why to this day some carry on what's often deemed a superstitious tradition of opening doors and covering mirrors when someone dies so their spirit can find their way out.

Maybe that practice isn't so superstitious, after all?

And then there's the question of what are called residual hauntings -- those that involve an image or a sound that seems to play on a loop or under certain conditions, with no actual awareness or intelligence behind them. These types of hauntings have always intrigued me. In these cases, I tend to subscribe to the theory that these are somehow naturally occurring electromagnetic audio and visual recordings that get replayed by the atmosphere when conditions are right. I might be wrong, but at least that theory makes these things less scary.

So we're back to the unanswered question: do I believe in ghosts?

In light of the evidence, I believe that they're possible. I also believe that the Bible warns us away from contacting them for good reason, so I'm not about to go looking for them. For one thing, I believe that demons can and do imitate human spirits for reasons that are only nefarious, and that's not a risk I want to take. I've never seen a ghost up close and personal, and I really don't want to. I have experienced demonic activity, and I really don't ever want to do that again.

But when all is said and done, I still really love a good ghost story.

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If you also love ghost stories, you'll probably like my novel Restless Spirits and its sequels, as well as some of my shorter novellas. And in my serial novella Flesh and Blood, Mae Bishop is being haunted by the ghost of the husband she killed in self-defense. But is the ghostly Wade Bishop all that he claims to be? You'll have to read it to find out, which you can do for free for its duration here on Substack.

Flesh and Blood: Chapter One

And if you'd like to hear more of what Dr. Heiser has to say on the possibility of ghosts, here are more of his blog posts along this vein. And check out his final guest appearance on Blurry Creatures.

So… do you believe in ghosts?