Patricia Pearson notes ghost stories have been with us since the beginning, but for about a hundred years now, experts have believed seeing or feeling something like a ghost isn’t healthy. Here are two of her paragraphs.

William Dean Howells, editor of The Atlantic Monthly from 1871-1881, defended the belief in ghostly visions from an emerging class of skeptics after his daughter Winny died in her twenties. “I would have the bereaved trust their mystical experiences for much truth which they cannot affirm,” he wrote in 1910’s “A Counsel of Consolation.” “They may be the kaleidoscopic adjustment of our jarred and shattered being; they may be prismal rays of celestial light: who shall say from knowledge?”

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That the dead do not always stay dead continues to rankle the scientifically minded. When Christopher Kerr, a Toronto-raised palliative care physician who heads Hospice and Palliative Care Buffalo, first worked with patients on rounds, he was completely unprepared for the number of dreams and visions his patients described that featured the consoling dead. “We never had any such discussion on the topic in med school,” he emailed me. In his 2020 book, Death Is But a Dream, Kerr writes, “The acceleration of the science of medicine has obscured its art, and medicine, always less comfortable with the subjective, has been more concerned with disproving the unseen than revering its meaning.”

The Bible doesn’t seem to allow for ghosts as the spirits of departed persons, but it does teach of us souls and life immaterial. We understand that being made in God’s image means we are body and spirit together. Maybe the immaterial nature of our spirits explains the stories people tell of seeing those around them as they are dying or afterward, because we are connected in spiritual ways we cannot dissect. (via Prufrock News)