Apparitions

Ghosts & Apparitions:
The word ghost, as used by most people, is the visual appearance of a deceased human being’s spirit, soul or life force. In more general terms, an apparition is the visual appearance of any spirit phenomenon. Laypeople use the words interchangeably whereas lots of paranormal investigators prefer to use the word apparition as to some the term ghost is only one form of apparition.
Think of it this way, if you will: all ghosts are apparitions but not all apparitions are ghosts.

For those of you interested in the definitions of both ghosts and apparitions, then look no further.
Apparition: “a supernatural appearance of a person or thing, esp. a ghost; a spectre or phantom; wraith: a ghostly apparition at midnight.”
Ghost: “the soul of a dead person, a disembodied spirit imagined, usually as a vague, shadowy or evanescent form, as wandering among or haunting living persons.”

What are apparitions? 

 The word "apparition" comes from the Latin apparitio which means "appearance."  An apparition is the appearance of the spirit of a human or animal, becoming visible to the eyes.  Apparitions are often described as looking solid in appearance, though sometimes are visibly "see-through."  Occasionally, a full body apparition is witnessed; while other times only a part of the person or animal's spirit is seen, such as the upper body, the face, an arm, a foot, etc. 

Apparitions of the dead or dying may appear during the dying process, soon after death, or be seen repeatedly over years.  Apparitions of the dead sometimes appear as a plea for help, to complete unfinished business, or as a farewell.  Other times, apparitions will appear for apparently no reason and the spirit manifested may not be aware of the living, as though trapped in time.  Apparitions of the "living" have been seen, as well, including those who were "out of body" during near death or out of body experiences .  The apparition ghost pictures on this page show incredible proof of the existence of the human soul after the passing of the physical body.

 

History of the concept

Attempts to apply modern scientific or investigative standards to the study of apparitional experiences began with the work of Edmund Gurney, Frederick William Henry Myers and Frank Podmore, who were leading figures in the early years of the Society for Psychical Research. Their motive, as with most of the early work of the Society, was to provide evidence for human survival after death. For this reason they had a particular interest in what are known as ‘crisis cases’. These are cases in which a person has a quasi-perceptual experience of someone at a distance at the time of that person’s death or other crisis. If the temporal coincidence of the crisis and the distant apparitional experience cannot be explained by any conventional means, then the presumption is made that some as yet unknown form of communication, such as telepathy (a term coined by Myers) has taken place.

While the extent to which the work of Gurney and his colleagues succeeded in providing evidence for either telepathy or survival of death is still controversial, the large collection of firsthand written accounts which resulted from their painstaking methods still constitutes a body of valuable data concerning the phenomenology of hallucinations in the sane.

A notable later discussion of apparitional experiences was that of G N M Tyrrell, also a leading member of the Society for Psychical Research of his day. Tyrrell accepted the hallucinatory character of the experience, pointing out that it is virtually unknown for firsthand accounts to claim that apparitional figures leave any of the normal physical effects, such as footprints in snow, that one would expect of a real person. However, Tyrrell develops the idea that the apparition may be a way for the unconscious part of the mind to bring to consciousness information that has been paranormally acquired – in crisis cases, for example. He introduces an evocative metaphor of a mental ‘stage-carpenter’, behind the scenes in the unconscious part of the mind, and constructing the quasi-perceptual experience that eventually appears on the stage of consciousness, so that it embodies paranormal information in a symbolic way, a person drowning at a distance appearing soaked in water, for example.

The study and discussion of apparitions developed in a different direction in the 1970s, with the work of Celia Green and Charles McCreery. They were not primarily interested in the question of whether apparitions could shed any light on the existence or otherwise of telepathy, or in the survival question; instead they were concerned to analyse a large number of cases with a view to providing a taxonomy of the different types of experience, viewed simply as a type of anomalous perceptual experience or hallucination.

One of the points that was highlighted by their work was point (2) listed above, namely that ‘real-life’ accounts of apparitional experiences differ markedly from the traditional or literary ghost story. These are some of the more notable differences, at least as indicated by their own collection of 1800 firsthand accounts:

• Subjects of apparitional experiences are by no means always frightened by the experience; indeed they may find them soothing or reassuring at times of crisis or ongoing stress in their lives.
• Spontaneous apparitional experiences tend to happen in humdrum or everyday surroundings, and under conditions of low central nervous system arousal, most often in the subject’s own home - while doing housework, for example. By contrast, subjects who visit reputedly haunted locations in hopes of ‘seeing a ghost’ are more often than not disappointed.
• Apparitions tend to be reported as appearing solid and not transparent; indeed they may be so realistic in a variety of ways as to deceive the percipient as to their hallucinatory nature; in some cases the subject only achieves insight after the experience has ended.
• It is unusual for an apparitional figure to engage in any verbal interaction with the percipient; this is consistent with the finding that the majority of such experiences only involve one sense (most commonly the visual).

Philosophical implications

Direct realism

Apparitional experiences also have implications for the philosophy of perception. The occurrence of hallucinations, that is, perceptual experiences 'having the character of sense perception, but without relevant or adequate sensory stimulation […]', have long been one of the standard objections to the philosophical theory of direct realism. According to this theory we are in some sense in direct contact with the external world when we seem to be perceiving it, and not merely in direct contact with some mediating representation in our mind, such as a sense-datum or an image, which may or may not correspond to external reality. The psychologist J.J. Gibson, referred to above, became an advocate of the philosophical theory of direct realism.

Hallucinatory experiences reported by sane people do not pose any new problem in principle for the theory of direct realism, other than that posed already by the more widely discussed hallucinations reported by people in a state of psychosis or under other abnormal conditions such as sensory deprivation. However, they do pose the problem in a particularly stark way, for the following reasons:

• Scepticism about the status of verbal reports:

In the case of hallucinations reported to have occurred in pathological or abnormal states there is some scope for uncertainty about the accuracy, or even the meaning, of the percipient’s verbal report. Horowitz, for example, summarising his experience of questioning chronic schizophrenic patients about their visual experiences during painting sessions, wrote:

'It was necessary to persist beyond initial verbal descriptions of their hallucinations, and insist that the patient describe and draw what he had seen. Initial descriptions of "vicious snakes" might then be drawn and redescribed as wavy lines. "Two armies struggling over my soul" arose from the subjective experience of seeing moving sets of dots. "Spiders" might be reduced, when the patient stated and drew what he actually saw, to a few radiating lines. In drawings of their hallucinations patients could often distinguish between those forms which duplicated what they saw with their eyes from those forms which were what they "made out of it".'

Such difficulties of interpretation are much less obvious in the case of written reports by ostensibly normal subjects, in good health and not medicated at the time of the experience.

• Extreme realism of the experience:

As mentioned above, at least some of the apparitional experiences reported by normal subjects appear to mimic normal perception to such a degree that the subject is deceived into thinking that what they are experiencing actually is normal perception. Similar close mimicking of normal perception is reported by some of the subjects of a lucid dream and out-of-body experiences, which therefore pose similar problems for the theory of direct realism.

Representationalism

Apparitional experiences appear prima facie more compatible with the philosophical theory of representationalism. According to this theory, the immediate objects of experience when we are perceiving the world normally are representations of the world, rather than the world itself. These representations have been variously called sense-data or images. In the case of an apparitional experience one might say that the subject is aware of sense-data or images which happen not to correspond to, or represent, the external world in the normal way.

The philosophical implications of hallucinatory experiences in the sane are discussed by McCreery.  He argues that they provide empirical support for the theory of representationalism rather than direct realism.

Real Ghost Stories by Zyro – Apparitions in my Bedroom.

I'm 11 years old and I have already witnessed 3 events involving ghosts in my house. It was about two weeks from Christmas. It was really late at night, because I couldn't go to sleep. I looked up out my window, and saw something. It was an orange mist... WITH EYES. I was scared to death, but didn't make a sound. It was creepy, because it stared at me. I just got as low as I could, hoping it would go away. It did, but then something worse happened. I blinked, and in its place was another ghost. Don't say this is a "figment of imagination" because I pinched and punched myself to make sure I was awake. The ghost was a person. He seemed old-fashioned, about early 1900s, I'd say. All of him either had a pale tint, or his clothes were pale and so was his skin. He was carrying something, I think it was a gun or an axe. It was just staring across the room. It was the last thing I saw before I went to sleep.

Two years later, 2007, late January, I woke up and saw something else. Something in a dark red robe was walking toward the foot of my bed, toward a table. It put its hand on the table like it picked something up or put something down, and vanished. I again made sure I was awake.

Apparition ghost pictures

Apparition ghost pictures are the holy grail of ghost pictures. While some are undeniably an apparition, others may be just a trick of the eye. We regularly receive ghost pictures in which people find some possible apparitions.  While some of these are very compelling evidence of ghostly activity, others may be what's known in the ghost hunting community as "matrixing." The human brain and eye works together to put shapes and patterns together into familiar images. One of the more famous examples has been the face of Jesus on a grilled cheese sandwich. The scientific term for this is really known as "anthropomorphizing," which means "to give human attributes to non-human things."  It is something we do naturally, as we try and identify with the world around us.

            
 Picture A                  Picture B

               
        Picture C(1)                                             Picture C(2)

          

Picture C(1) and (2):
Close-ups of the apparition photographed at Virgin Falls. The second photo has been brightened.
If you look closely, it appears as those a satchel or some sort of bag is being carried over the shoulder as the apparition stands upon the rock.  Somehow, the bag is more visible than the person carrying it!

        

                 Picture D(1)                                               Picture D(2)

Picture D(1) and (2):

This is a stunning apparition ghost photograph, submitted to Angels & Ghosts by its owner Sunny Virk. It was photographed in 1978, near the well in the village of Tewar (Mohali), Punjar, India:  "I was looking at old pictures of my family, when I noticed a shadow of a person behind my uncle."

The man appears rather gaunt, and older than the children in the foreground of the ghost photograph from India.  At right is the negative image of the man.