Ghosts Essay

Ever since the start of humanity, mankind has had a fascination with the unexplained; from ghouls, werewolves, vampires, sasquatches and all things that go bump in the night. However, many of those mythical creatures being scientifically proven, ghosts elude that lucidity. Ghosts are the spirits of the dead manifesting to the living eye in a usually hazy form. This phenomena can also be felt through hearing voices or footsteps, fragrances such as perfume or being touched by the presence. The history of this kind of supernatural dates back to primitive times as well as strong beliefs attached to them. Come the present, there is much controversy. Skeptics, believers, ghost hunters and mediums all play a role in the unfolding story of what is the paranormal.

In the mesopotamian era many ghoulish beliefs were established. For instance, in babylonian religions, spirits were known as gidim. Supposedly created at the time of death, the gidim would take the personality and memories from the dead before traveling to the netherworld to uphold a role much like that of the living world. Life after death was a strong belief in ancient Egypt. The egyptians had the ideology that spirits could cause pain and trauma to the living or even come to their aid. Their beliefs in the afterlife continued to evolve throughout the centuries and their views on the afterlife recorded on tomes, walls and in the Book of the Dead. In Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad spirits were seemingly friendly and did not interact heavily with the living world described "as a vapor, gibbering and whining into the earth". However as time progressed and Greece evolved by 500 bc, ghosts had become terrifying entities. Ghosts were believed to stay by the corpses of the d...

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...lled a seance. The medium conducts a ritual and let’s the entity take over his or her body, the body becoming a bridge for the “spirit communicator”. The medium appears to leave the body and the ghost is able to communicate to the earth plane. This is what is known as channeling. When the spirit links with the medium it “overshadows the consciousness of the medium to a greater or lesser degree”. Mediumship has always been a controversial subject. It has been said by many that it is just preying on the weak who have the utmost desires to contact their loved ones after a passing. Most mediums have been accused of fraud at some point in their career. According to David Thompson (a physical medium) however, “Usually such critics have never sat in a séance, have limited understanding of physical mediumship or have an ulterior motive for creating controversy”.