A Skeptic Shares Two True Ghost Stories

Tulip Staircase Ghost➚

Are there such things as ghosts? What is the evidence for a spiritual reality that intersects with our own?

There are uncounted first-person accounts, and those hold some water in court and religious debates and such; call me a Doubting Thomas, but if I haven't experienced a supernatural event myself, it's very difficult to believe it happened to someone else.[1]

I've read many books that claim to offer proof that the unseen world (particularly the Christian variety) exists. And I will still pick one up and give it as shot if I think it offers something new. All I ever hope for is one little detail that says "maybe."

I think I found it.

I don't recall when or where precisely, because the effect was cumulative, but the book that happened to be in my hands at the time was Letters from a Skeptic: A Son Wrestles with His Father's Questions about Christianity➚, by Dr Gregory Boyd and Edward Boyd, loaned to me by a friend.

I happen to be a radio enthusiast. Any and all, from antique to modern. I don't have the space, time, or tools to seriously collect or restore them, but if I find one I like, I buy it; some are gifts and have sentimental value.

(Check me out over here➚ at KD8OSB's Old Time Radio Diner, which is intended to be more about Old Time Radio, but has included old time TV lately and some other loosely-related topics. I'll be posting a couple garage sale finds soon, one I'm especially pleased with.)

It occurred to me that there are millions of radio waves passing through me right now, across thousands of frequencies, some carrying information.

Every radio signal that could be "tuned" at my present location is passing through my body. That includes everything from local and distant AM/FM stations to my WiFi router to the cell signal that will make my phone ring if the right one is detected. Every police and ambulance call, every taxi and school bus dispatch, etc. is going through me right now.

How many precisely? Well, if we're only counting the waves that carry information, conceivably the entire spectrum of this chart...

FCC Freqquency Allocation Chart
Click for full size➚

Yet, I'm completely unaware of it.


With the right equipment you can hear any one of them. You can even make a simple receiver from common household items➚ (and a trip to the hobby shop) to hear nearby stations, no batteries required. Once upon a time that was common knowledge among most school children, who built crystal radios at home or in school. Now it's a curiosity. Few folks realize the same technology behind a dying entertainment medium is what enables their cell phone.

But back to the topic: The combination of everything that has entered my body and mind has provided a totally unreasonable inkling that something real is on the other side, that I have touched it, and it knows me.

Those outside my head can trust it to be very real, but I have no expectations that you'll do so.

Sometimes you just know, and I just know, for no reason at all.

I know that puts me on the other side of where I usually am ("prove it"), but it doesn't make any difference; an unreasonable peace persists.

Most of the time.

The Brown Lady of
 Raynham Hall➚

[1]Aside from the many conventional religious experiences one has simply by virtue of being raised in a church (and all the music and images and tears and laughter that go with it), I have had one bona fide secular supernatural experience: One night when I was very small, perhaps 5 years old, perhaps a little older, I woke up for no reason that I can remember. No sudden noise, no dream. This was in the same bedroom I mentioned in another post➚. This room was the top floor of my boyhood home in Erie. It ran the length of the house. My bed and my brother Tom's bed were at one end, and the top of the stairs was at the other. I sat up and looked at the top of the stairs. There stood a motionless, featureless, white, glowing, human-shaped figure. I spoke to it, but it didn't respond in any way. I spoke to Tom, but he was fast asleep. You might think I'd be frightened, but I wasn't. I was very much at peace, even calmed. I lay back down and fell asleep. To this day, I have no idea what I saw, but I know it wasn't a reflection, a passing car, the moon, etc. I slept in that room every night for 12 years or so; I knew every creak and shadow in it.

Thomas G Cairns

Here's another: My Grandpa Cairns, Thomas Graham Cairns, died in his home with his family at his side, in Erie on January 10, 1993 at the age of 81 (or 80, if you believe Grandma, who was never quite sure of his age, and this seemed to trouble her). My Grandparents lived on East 37th Street in Erie for many years; it's the only house I associate with them, though I've driven by the one my dad grew up in.  (The house on East 37th and the love inside it are among my fondest memories of childhood). My Uncle Ken, Dad's brother, was in Michigan at the time my grandfather died, preparing a Sunday school lesson for that morning. Ken and his family lived on Pollock Road in Holly at that time. At some point that night, the grandfather clock in Ken's living room tolled. A few moments later, my dad called Uncle Ken and informed him that Grandpa had just died. Why so strange? That grandfather clock was broken and hadn't tolled for years.