Mark,
I appreciate your willingness to explore (and let others explore) this topic. It's one of those things that isn't totally set in stone in the CCC, like whether you'll get to see your dogs again in the afterlife.
Thanks again.
One additional brief comment: I've had some very strange experiences in this area that I won't detail right now. But for me, it reinforced the Biblical injunction to stay far, far away from the occult or any attempt to deliberately summon spirits. As a fringe benefit, it also made it very easy to believe there is another world beyond the purely material one.
This isn't an unusual story in any way, but when my grandmother was passing, she also called out to people she had known as a child, and who were long dead; she seemed to be holding conversations with them. One of them was her sister who had died as a toddler.
Her passing was peaceful and serene, a "happy" death if there ever was one. She had led a bit of a sordid life as a young woman, but had joined the Babdist church and stayed faithful to it for many years, up until death.
Is it possible her conversation with the dead were a by-product of her brain tumor? I suppose so, but she had been perfectly lucid up until the end. I like to think that she actually *was* communicating with those people, and might have been able to see them as well, in those hours before she passed over. I suppose I won't know until it's my time.
As I may have said in a previous post, I spent the winter of 1993-94 living in an old plantation house in Louisiana. I did a lot of praying in that house, for discernment over my career. To the best of my knowledge, there had been no active Christians living in that house for at least two generations. Anyway, I was having a lot of trouble going to sleep in the bedroom I'd chosen upstairs. I kept sensing another presence there. I thought for the longest time that it was just me being superstitious, living way out in the country in an antebellum house. But it got so bad that I was having to sleep with the light on just to get over the chill, like a little kid. Finally, and with great embarrassment, I said to my hostess that I was going to have to move out, because I couldn't sleep in that bedroom because I sensed a malevolent presence there.
She rolled her eyes, but then her boyfriend spoke up. "I've never been able to sleep in that room," he said. "There's something in there. Why don't you try the room behind it tonight." I did, and slept like a baby for the first time in weeks. I moved all my things to that room, and all was well.
Another month or so passed, and I continued praying the rosary in that house. Then, a weekend arrived in which I had to make a decision about a job offer. I prayed with special intensity then, and finally decided to take the job I'd been offered in Washington. As soon as I hung the phone up, I went into a downstairs bedroom, shut the doors, and began to pray a rosary of thanksgiving for Mary's intercession. When I got to the second glorious mystery, the room filled with sunlight (this was an overcast January day) and the powerful aroma of roses. It lasted only for the duration of those mysteries. After I finished the rosary, I searched the room for anything that smelled of roses, but there was nothing.
I told no one, and went upstairs to do some work. A few minutes later, a friend who was staying that weekend came upstairs and asked me to smell her hand. It smelled powerfully of roses. She had no idea what was going on. I told her I'd just offered a rosary, and before I prayed, I'd asked Mary to "hold Kim's hand as she goes through this painful divorce" (she'd finally tired of her no-good husband). Kim's eyes widened, and the aroma instantly faded.
An hour or so later, a devout Catholic friend who has, or had, a strong spiritual sense, phoned. "Is something happening at the house?" he said. "I've had a strong feeling today that I needed to pray for you." I told him what had happened, and he said, "I've had this sense that the Holy Spirit is cleaning the house out."
I forgot to mention that there had been a suicide in that house in the 1920s. I don't know if that had anything to do with the ghostly presence, but I suspect so.
When I got back to Washington, I shared all this with a wise priest I knew. He said the Church doesn't really know what to say about all this, but that
...he was sure it's real, because of some experiences he'd had in a manor house in Scotland.
Rod,
those stories are both creepy and uplifting.
Be sure to go re-read the comments thread on the ghost-post below.
Rod --
are any of these stories ever going to see the print light of day? Maybe there should be a chapter in your Crunchy-Con book: Ghosts and the the Crunchy-Cons Who See Them. (My wife is among your correspondents.)
Jonathan wrote: Her passing was peaceful and serene, a "happy" death if there ever was one.
Not really a ghost story here, but I once heard a man speak who had spent many years living in rural Ireland back in the '60s. He said that they even have coined a term they call a "good death" and described it like this:
Very often, as the elderly were passing they'd spend their final days in bed, asleep as their body slowly gave way. Sometimes this would go on for almost a week. Then, in almost every case, the person would wake up, smile, wish everyone well, say good-bye, then lay back down and die within moments.
True story. About 5 or 6 years ago, I had an uncle (through marriage) die from cancer of the abdomen. It was an expected thing. He was cared for by hospice and he knew he was going to die. A matter of when, not if.
Anyway, he had a granddaughter at the time who was toddler age. They became close during his illness as he wanted to spend as much time with her as possible.
Anyway, the toddler's mother (my cousin) was driving with her toddler to see my uncle. Unbeknownst to her, her father died right before she left home, or while she was on her way there to see him. The toddler kept pointing out the window and saying, "Paw Paw. Paw Paw." Of coure, her mom had to tell her, "Paw Paw isn't here. We're going to see him."
Well, of course, she got there to find out he had just died.
I guess all of this is because we are spiritual amphibians with our lives in this world and our destiny in the other. We go about our lives, perhaps seeking to do our duty and fight our daily battles with the world, the devil, and our selves when sometimes an unexpected window opens on a whole other order of existence, and strange potencies intrude on our lives.
My wife and I both experienced what we to this day believe was an angle while at mass (It was the first official Mercy Sunday). My wife had undergone cancer surgery, and this was the first time she had been back to church since then. In front of us sat a very old lady - she looked to be at least 100. I remember being fascinated by her intricately braded hair, but noticed nothing else strange about her. In the middle of mass, this old woman turned around and put her hand out to my wife and taking her hand said, "God bless you!"
My wife, who is very observant, was very taken by this. She later described the feel of the woman's hand as warm and soft. When Communion time came, to my surprise as she seemed so holy, this old gal did not go up to receive, and as the mass ended she simply was not there. Our two kids, who were sitting right next to us didn't even see her! My daughter even saw her mother put her hand out to an empty pew....
I believe that that old woman was an angle sent by God to reassure my wife that her cancer was cured, and the she would live a long life (this is a bit speculative having to do with the old appearance of the “woman). I try to remember to talk to my guardian angle often and ask for help. I don’t suppose that I’ve ever seen or heard “him”, but I have felt his presence often and know that he’s helped my quite a bit. I’ve named him Hope and trust him to watch my back while I try to face the world.
If you're going to have a Guardian Angle, my guardian would have to be a Jute.
Just kidding! Last time I checked, it was still spelled "A-n-g-E-L."
How do angles figure into the Hypotenusic Union? ;-D
Sorry Jon (and everyone else)! I have a very hard time with spelling, and am often let down by my spell checker when I come op with some spelling variant that is actually a word. 
That was acute joke, but you're being obtuse.
That was supposed to be a sad face! I guess I need my angEl's help more that usual this morning! TGIF!
I guess I'll just have to eat some hummble pi....
Sorry, John, I couldn't resist.
It doesn't surprise me that your spell-checker let you down. If I recall correctly, my old version of WordPerfect used to correct "angel" to "angle." And the first MS Word dictionaries didn't recognize the term "E-mail." Go figure!
Happy Labor Day!
No problem Jonathan! If I couldn't laugh at myself, I'd get to laugh a lot less. Have a great weekend!
I myself have not experienced anything first hand, but I do believe that ghosts can appear to people.
(Rod, by the way, excellent stories, you need to do something with them!)
The late William Alfred at Harvard, one time Broadway playwright and professor of Old English, once told me a story of a haunting that happened to him and his mother when he was a kid growing up in a New York tenement.
I tend to agree with the theory that appearances often have to do with a place and a person's death there.
"I do know people who have experienced poltergeist phenomena and I have friends who can tell some stories that will raise the hair on the back of your neck (see, for instance, Rod Dreher's comments below)."
I have a few tales I could tell. I don't know what the explanation for ghosty stuff is, and I'm openminded to the possibility that maybe it's just projection on our part for things that go bump in the night that we can't immediately explain.
But anyway. I've lived in two allegedly haunted houses, and I've seen some straaaange stuff in both. I'll save my tales for a nice spooky Oct. 31st blog post, though. 
There's no reason to think this must have been an angel or anything like that, but I do have one incident that never quite adds up... When I was a teenager my mother kicked me out of the house around 2 or 3 am, so I walked up the nearby commercial strip. Some guy got out of a taxi and asked if I knew where to buy crack. I was hanging out by the pay phone trying to get in touch with people who couldn't really have helped me. My life was a wreck and I thought maybe I was now "meant" to just go jump off a bridge. Anyway, this old man in a suit carrying a plastic public library bag walked up to wait for the bus. The library had closed at least six hours earlier, and I just had no clue what an old, frail-looking white man in a suit would be doing getting on a bus going to the neighborhoods that bus did at 3 a.m. Don't remember exactly what he said but it came down to me insisting that I would be 18 in a few days (true) and him insisting that if I didn't call my parents he'd have to call the cops because I was not safe. So I gave in to call my sister who picked me up, and the bus arrived just as I was driving away with her. I guess you'd have to know more about the neighborhoods of the city where I lived, but it still doesn't make sense to me that that old guy showed up at that time.
I got to know Fr. Mario Termini back in 1992, for a story I wrote for The Washington Times on the duties of an exorcist. He was the de facto exorcist of the Baton Rouge diocese. To hear him tell it, the bishop gave him tacit permission to do his ministry, but really didn't want to know about it. He didn't publicize his work, but he didn't have to; people found him. He said, "Usually the time they call me, they don't need to be convinced that the demonic is real."
We drove that day out to a house north of New Orleans, where all kinds of inexplicable supernatural activity had been taking place. The house was brand new, in a luxury subdivision, and had been built by a widow after her husband died. Things had been going wrong there from day one. Fr. Termini and his prayer team were headed out there to say a mass for the sake of deliverance. On the drive, he told me some stories of his work. He told me that satanic cults in south Louisiana would go out into the swamps and perform human sacrifices, far from where they could be detected by authorities. I thought he was exaggerating, but later I spoke with an occult crimes investigator with the Baton Rouge police dept, who told me that he didn't want to discuss things in detail, but that I could believe the priest.
Anyway, during the mass in widow's backyard, Shelby, the deeply devout Cajun grandmother who had a powerful gift of discernment, went into a kind of trance. I recorded all this on audiotape, and it's absolutely chilling to listen to. She's sobbing, and saying, "My baby ... my baby. He's only 12 years old." She was wailing in a way I'd only heard on TV, when you see mothers in war zones sobbing over their dead children. On the tape, you can hear her say to the priest, "Father, I can't take this anymore."
After some prayer and the sprinkling of holy water, things calmed down, and they proceeded with the mass, which they were celebrating on a picnic table in the backyard, where Shelby had indicated the mass should be said. Shelby took communion and stepped back. Suddenly, something struck her hard on the left shoulder. It threw her backward, over a chair. Now Shelby, who died a few years ago, was a big woman, and an older woman. Whatever struck her had a lot of force. There was no way she could have thrown herself in that way. Besides which, I saw with my own eyes the depression form in an instant on her dress on her left shoulder. She shrieked -- you can hear that on the tape too -- and screamed, "That thing told me if I took communion, it was going to knock me down." Father Termini said he thought that was the demon departing. Shelby said that she too felt it had left. They finished the mass.
Shelby explained that when she was in that trance state, she could feel that a woman had been forced at some point to watch her young son executed on that spot, and then she herself was killed. Shelby couldn't discern any motive for the killing, or the circumstances
I just got a new family ghost story yesterday.
My niece Jody called from California last night. Her 6 year-old son usually gets in bed with her in the middle of the night. Night before last, instead of just getting into bed, she heard Tyler calling for her. She sat up and saw a man walking down the hallway with Tyler in his arms. She of course aroused her husband, and they were unable to find any man in the house. Tyler was in bed, and they just picked him up and put him in bed with them. When they asked him why he was calling for mama, he said there had been two lights in his room, and a man was standing between him and the door and he couldn’t get out.
No spiritually uplifting stuff here. Jody is a very rational woman, and this just gave me the serious creeps.
...but she did discern the faint images of soldiers in Civil War uniforms moving around the property during the mass.
Before we left, we were standing inside the house, after all this had ended, and I and another man saw a candle rise out of a candlestick on a table, and fly across the table. It landed in a chair about three feet away. We called for Fr. Termini and Shelby, who were in the kitchen. Shelby said she didn't discern the presence of evil there, but Fr. T. blessed the place again all the same.
Let me tell you, it was a looong drive back in the dark that night!
Rod.
An amazing story. I think you have had a real blessing from Our Lady, whose presence - visible or otherwise - is always accompanied by the smell of roses. My older brother told of a similar aroma when he went to a Mission at the insistence of a freind where a preist was preaching on the miracles of Our Lady and claiming conversions in Her name for Christ. At the moment of his decision to come back to the Church, he smelt the roses.
Rod:
would you kindly comment on the event you described earlier regarding (if I understand your story correctly) Mary holding the hand of a woman going through a divorce? Was it interpreted as a sign that Mary supported the divorce?
I am sure that your comments would educate many people about the Church's teaching on marriage, separation and divorce. I suspect that this may not be the right thread, but this is just a suggestion
Rod, look out! Pharisee at 12 o'clock high!
Rod,
Your stories were amazing. I've always maintained that "The Exorcist" is the scariest movie ever made, one which I have never made it all the way through (and that's on television, where I have the mute button!) But the reason it's so frightening for Christians is, of course, if we believe that demons do exist in the world but that Christ really can overcome. I also firmly believe that miracles happen every day. You've been blessed to experience some.
Kimberly
Jonathan,
I am not sure if your comment about Pharisees was aimed at me (I don't see why, but then...).
I just want to clarify that mine is a genuine question: I do not doubt at all what Rod is saying, I am curious about his take on this detail, if he has one.
My take is not that Mary supported the divorce; my take is that she was going to help my friend through the tribulation that she was going through. My friend was not a Christian, and had been married civilly. At that time, she was being ministered to by an Evangelical woman at her office, who could see she was hurting. It seemed at the time that her suffering -- her endless patience with her shiftless husband, and her finally deciding to end the marriage because he wasn't going to change -- was opening her up to Christ for the first time in her life. I think Mary was extending her hand to my friend.
I regret to say that my friend didn't ultimately take it. All God can do is invite us; he cannot, or will not, force us to accept His help and friendship.
Beautiful! Thanks, Rod
Sorry, Roberto. I guess I was feeling full of myself today.
It just sounded (looked? I didn't hear you typing) like a question meant to trip up the questionee, as in, "Surely you don't mean to suggest that the BVM supports divorce."
My apologies.
This happened to me in college. I was dating a sorority girl and they were having some formal party at their house. The sorority house was rumored to be haunted by some woman and several other minor spirits. It was kind of an open secret. Anyway, my date and I decided to take a break from what I thought was an extremely boring party and went to her room in the third floor attic. I was sitting in a chair with my date about 10 feet in front of me when the hair on the back of my neck stood up. My date looked passed me and said “Would you go away?” I asked her if she was speaking to me, knowing in my heart she wasn’t. She they told me “No, I’m not and don’t look behind you!” Just then there was a large rush of wind in the room and several knick-knacks flew from a shelf across the room. The window/fire escape door flew open and the wind seemed to blow OUT of the building.
This sorority had a lot of creepy things about it. There was an old upright piano the girls called “Henry”. Henry, apparently, liked to be in a particular spot. It took four or five fraternity brothers to move Henry from his place by the wall. It only took one finger to move it back.
There were rumors that a girl from the sorority had become possessed after experimenting with a Ouiji (sp?) board. They were REALLY tight lipped about that. The whole town (Alfred, NY) was creepy. There was an octagon house in the village that was built in that shape to ward off evil spirits. Many, many times over the years there I felt weird sensations in one place or another.
Now at the time, I really didn’t believe in anything let alone ghosts. So this stuff always puzzled me.
I am late to this thread but a little balance with another uplifting story is in order.
A number of years ago, my wife and I made a short pilgrimage to Our Lady of the Angels when it was still in Irondale AL.
After renting a car and checking into the motel, we went directly to Our Lady of the Angels to assist at Mass. At the entrance to the small chapel a sign was posted detailing proper dress, which excluded shorts; we both were wearing shorts.
We hastily returned to the motel to change but we missed Holy Mass. We returned to the chapel to pray but we both felt the loss of receiving our Lord on the first day of Pilgrimage.
After 20 minutes of prayer in front of the Blessed Sacrament, a very tall Priest (about 6’ 6-inches) entered the sanctuary wearing full vestments. He asked if there were anyone who missed Mass but would like to receive the Eucharist.
My wife, and I, and two or three women raised our hands and he removed a chalice from the tabernacle and distributed communion to us; returned the chalice and left just as quickly as he entered.
Later that evening, just prior to Mother Angelica’s T.V. show, I had a chance to relate this incident to a couple of the Brothers who manned the electronics for the show. They both looked with an incredulous expression and said that they knew of no Priest fitting that description either living there or visiting.
I asked them if the Sistes had a private Mass about an hour after the normal one ended, they said that no, only the scheduled Mass was celebrated that day.
Draw your own conclusions. “For those blessed with faith, no proof is required, for those who lack faith, no proof is sufficient.”
I'm a bit of a sceptic when it comes to ghosts. However, I have read somewhere that there really are no ghosts, only angels, demons and spirits allied to them. I find it theologicaly acceptable and is the position I take.
For example, when one sees an apparition of a dead relative, it is an angel taking the form of the dead relative, to assuage the person's grieving. If a ghost looks and acts malicious, it could be a demon in ghostly form.
Where I am from, everybody has a ghost story (except for me, apparently). So, I get ghosts stories galore. I apply my position as necessary.
Jonathon.
What about a number of years ago when we used to call 'The Hoy Spirit' by the name ..'The Holy GHOST'
Still a sceptic?
I just realized that there was another guy named Jonathan...so I add an "R".
I'm sceptical about "ghost" defined as the soul of a dead person come to walk the earth. As far as theology goes, the soul of a person who dies goes directly to the afterlife. So, there can be no ghosts.
I didn't say I disbelieve in spirits. They're out there.
I've had some strange experiences in my life (generally precognitive dreams about births and deaths in the family), but when some of my friends got involved in the occult back in the '80s things got nasty. Poltergeist and apport phenomena, mostly, along with some horrible nightmares in which an evil 'presence' kept showing up... I'm no longer in contact with these people, and things have subsided back to the occasional premonition, which I think must be a normal thing for me...
My step-grandfather claims to have seen a ghost while awake once. I had a dream that my neighbor across the street died. He told me so himself. He died around that time. The weird thing was that I was 1000 miles away from home on vacation. What to make of it? I have no idea except I reject cold materialism.
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