DO YOU BELIEVE IN GHOSTS?

Many people claim to have seen ghosts, and such spectral phantoms have taken various forms, some ghoulish, some terrifying, some mischievous.

Ghost Stories have appeared throughout the history of humankind. They have been recounted in all cultures, and in all countries.

The Roman Historian Pliny the Younger (A.D. 62) wrote a letter to his colleague Licinius Sura about a very noisy ghost. The ancient Egyptians believed that if the God of the Dead weighed the deceased heart and found it laden with sin, it would wander the underworld as a spirit.

Christianity too, teaches that spirits of the dead are indeed real and will rise at the last judgment.

So, unless one is an atheist, or believes in nothing at all, then most of us must certainly believe in ghosts. Right?

One of the most intriguing ghost stories I have ever heard deals with our own late great President Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln himself had a prophetic dream a few days before his assassination on April 15, 1865, and told it to his friend Ward Hill Lamon who recorded it.

Lincoln dreamed that he came upon a catafalque upon which was a corpse being guarded by soldiers. When he asked a soldier who it was that had died in the White House, the solider said, "The President, he was killed by an assassin."

But, after President Lincoln's death, the mystery deepens.

When Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands was visiting the White House as a guest of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, she stayed in the Lincoln Room. After several knocks on her door and after calling but no one would enter, she opened the door to see the figure of Abraham Lincoln doffing his stovepipe hat. She fainted.

Roosevelt himself confided to Carl Sandburg, the historian and poet, that he was convinced that Lincoln was still there.

Even British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said he saw a figure that he was certain was Abraham Lincoln.

First Lady Grace Coolidge said she was in the Oval Room one day and claimed that she saw the figure of Abraham Lincoln standing at the window, gazing out in deep thought.

In her book, White House Profile, Bess Furman states that President Theodore Roosevelt was aware of the ghostly presence of Abraham Lincoln, and that President Harry S. Truman, disclosed that he had been awakened several times at night by knocking on his bedroom door, only to find that no one was there.

Along with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt believed strongly that the Lincoln Room was haunted. Mrs. Roosevelt reported that one late evening when she was working in her study, a maid named Mary Eban burst into the room and exclaimed, "He's up there - sitting on the edge of the bed, taking off his boots!" When Eleanor asked the maid who "he" was, she replied, "Mister Lincoln!"

As to why such prominent figures as Presidents, Queens, Prime Ministers, and First Ladies would fib about such a serious matter, I wouldn't want to speculate. Did they? Is Lincoln still at the White House?

History is replete with scores of "ghost" stories, even phantom armies and ghost ships.  Are they real?  Or, are they simply products of vivid imaginations or perhaps mass hysteria?

Centuries of investigation into the ghost phenomenon have shown how easy it is to be swayed by the vivid accounts of imaginative witnesses.

Yet, despite all our exercises in analysis and categorizing, the mysteries that remain are far greater than any explanations that might shed light on the subject.

Now, do I believe in ghosts, goblins, and spirits of the dead? That’s a hard one. There are strange things in our vast universe and I don’t believe I have a dogmatic perspective on matters of a controversial nature.

Whether they exist or not can only be conjecture. After all, we don’t have a ghost on display in the Smithsonian or even photographs that are tangible proof of life after death, that is, life hanging around after death.

All we actually have is questionable collections of eyewitness accounts, a larger number of anomalies, and miles of spooky cinema from the twisted minds of horror moviemakers.

Should the truth be known, what challenges my imagination more is the strange things which we have discovered but cannot explain, at least in a logical or scientific sense.

For example: In Sayre, Pennsylvania, the ancient skulls of giant men with horns protruding from their foreheads were found. In Clearwater, Minnesota, a burial mound disclosed seven human skeletons, all with double rows of teeth in their upper and lower jaws.

Meanwhile, staring from a ledge of rock in Casper, Wyoming, is the body of a human 14 inches tall. Nearby, in Antelope Spring, Utah, the impression of a human foot who trod on a living trilobite can be found. Not surprising perhaps, except for the fact that trilobites became extinct about 280 million years ago.

Further south, in Glen Rose, Texas, human and dinosaur footprints were found together in another impossible relationship, since dinosaurs supposedly vanished some 60 million years before man came along.

Across the ocean in Rutherford, Scotland, a piece of gold chain was found in newly quarried rock estimated at 200 million years old, while an object resembling a spark plug was found inside a geode which was estimated to be at least 5,000,000 years old.

In Aix-en-Province, France, stone cutters digging down 40 or 50 feet through solid rock to remove stone to build the palace of justice, found coins, hammers with petrified wood handles, many other tools and even a quarry board. How this equipment came to be beneath layers of 300 million-year-old rock is a vexing question.

Two children appeared from a cave in Banjos, Spain, in August 1887. Their skin was green, their clothes of an unfamiliar material, their eyes were slightly oriental. They spoke no known language. The boy refused to eat and died. The girl lived long enough to learn enough Spanish to say they came from a land without sun. She died four years later and their origins are still a mystery.

Palm trees and other tropical fauna have been found in core samples taken from ice 600 feet deep in Antarctica. Was Antarctica once a tropical paradise?

Sounds like something straight out of a science fiction novel, or the latest tabloid headline, or even Ripley’s Believe It or Not, doesn’t it? However, these stories and hundreds more like them came from a highly respected and well read publishing house,"the Reader’s Digest Association, Inc."

Makes a person wonder if our theory of time measurement and our concept of earth history are accurate? And where did all those strange things come from? Is there such a thing as time travel to explain things like the spark plug and gold chain, the perfect nail, and shoe prints and hammers buried under 200 million years of stone?

Can past extra terrestrial visitations explain green kids, people with double rows of teeth, foot tall men, nine foot tall horned giants? Can the armored bodies of Ancient Vikings, Phoenician coins, Roman vases, Hebrew writings, Chinese anchors found in pristine America, defy the truth of our concept of history? What about spontaneous combustion?

Who am I to say?

Spirits may be an exciting topic of discussion and definitely a box office hit, however, there are even stranger things which abound on and in this crazy world of ours.