Spectral iPhone pictures have been on a marked rise in recent years and so have questions linked with them, leading to larger, more significant inter linked questions: is there a spurt in revival of interest in ghosts and the paranormal? Has this revival been sparked by a multiplication of ghost related TV serials, ghost movies, YouTube content, frequency of ghost stories in print and digitally, ghost games, the internet, the social media which facilitates immediate and widespread sharing of paranormal pictures and experiences?
As Tiffanie Wen wrote in the Atlantic, across the world, ideas of the paranormal persist. Recent surveys have shown that a significant portion of the population believes in ghosts, leading some scholars to conclude that we are witnessing a revival of paranormal beliefs… A 2013 Harris poll found that 42% of Americans say they believe in ghosts. The percentage is similar in the UK, where 52% of respondents indicated that they believed in ghosts . Wen wrote that though it’s tough to estimate how large the paranormal tourism industry is, tours of sites that are supposedly haunted, there are 10,000 haunted locations in the UK according to the country’s tourist board. Sites like HauntedRooms.co.uk list dozens of allegedly haunted hotels where curious visitors can stay. In the US residents of places like Ellicott City in Howard County, Maryland, pride themselves on their haunted heritage.
“It turns out that a significant amount of people report having personally experienced paranormal activity. In a study published in 2011, 28.5% of undergraduate students surveyed at a southern university reported having had a paranormal experience. In a 2006 Reader’s Digest poll, 20% of respondents reported that they had seen a ghost at some time in their lives… It seems that belief in ghosts is even more widespread in much of Asia…”
Justin McDaniel, a professor of religious studies and director of the Penn Ghost Project at the University of Pennsylvania says, “Like in the West, people in Asia have kept their belief in ghosts despite the rise of science, skepticism, secularism, and public education. In places like Japan where secularism is very strong, the belief in ghosts is still high. Even hyper-modern and liberal Scandinavia has a high percentage of people believing in ghosts.” To my mind, the findings of surveys combined with the observations and analysis of experts raises another very profound question. Could it be that a renewed interest in the paranormal is connected with a greater occurrence of tragic deaths in recent years, particularly those of young people whose lives were cut off in the prime of youth either forcibly, voluntarily, or by a play of unfortunate circumstances? The many lives, the majority of them young, lost due to the emergence of the ISIS and other conflict points in the Middle East and parts of Africa, for example. The startling number of young lives cut short by suicide, as another example.
Just last week, the statistics released by the World health Organization (WHO) on World Suicide Prevention Day showed that nearly 800,000 people commit suicide every year in the world. According to a WHO document, suicide was the second leading cause of death amongst people aged 15-29. “Suicides happen in all the countries and regions, whether rich or poor. However, most of them occur in low and middle-income countries, which accounted for almost four-fifths of the global suicides in 2016”, the document said “and there are indications that for each adult who dies of suicide there may be more than 20 others attempting suicide”, it warned.
“The impact on families, friends and communities is devastating and far-reaching, even long after persons dear to them have taken their own lives,” the document said. “It is estimated that the method used for 20% of the global suicides is self-poisoning, most of which occur in rural agricultural areas in low- and middle-income countries. Other common methods of suicide are hanging and firearms, the UN agencies said. In high-income countries, there is a well-established link between suicide and mental health issues such as depression and alcohol use disorders, but many suicides take place on an impulse during moments of crisis.”
It is well known that in addition to the difficulties and emotional stress an unhappy soul undergoes in life, its chances of ascending to the higher realms after death are greatly reduced as well. An unhappy soul thus condemns itself in a way to remaining earthbound and becoming a ghost. An unhappy soul also causes untold anguish to its family members while alive and after death, particularly if the unhappy soul begins haunting living relatives and friends. In my experience, when it is a young death, regardless of whether the person who died was unhappy or happy, there is a strong likelihood of the person remaining earthbound, either because of unfulfilled dreams or remorse.
I’ve written earlier about a teenaged boy who committed suicide in the heat of the moment and regretted it deeply after death, regretted the suffering he had caused to loved ones and refused to leave them, not realising that he was causing them more mental agony by staying on as a ghost. Ironically, leaving or not leaving earth was not entirely in his control, and he and his family members had to be helped and guided through the shattering period. But the teenaged boy was so full of remorse, he didn’t want to leave even under guidance and we had to employ a variety of means to finally convince him. An increase in instances such as these where both a dead person and the surviving family are undergoing emotional trauma are also contributing to a redoubled interest in ghosts and the paranormal. Incidentally, the field of ghost emotions is known as “adfectuspirituality” or “psychological heebiejeebism” and is one of the fastest growing disciplines in psychology today. Lisa Feldman Barrett and Daniel J. Barrett have pointed out that emotion laboratories worldwide, most notably the newly founded Center for Research on Emotion, Ectoplasm, and Psychological Science (C. R. E. E. P. S.) at the Università del Purgatorio in Milan, Italy, are turning their attention to the incorporeal sciences. To prevent suicides, a toolkit to help communities was released recently by the World Health Organization and the Mental Health Commission of Canada. Perhaps it is time to develop a toolkit to help ghosts in distress and their equally distressed surviving families. Is it possible to develop such a ghost toolkit? Yes it is. More about it in a future column.