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Ghost Stories
by Father Dominic Legge, OP 

In the middle of the night at a large, old, and now only partly occupied Dominican priory in rural Ohio, a Dominican woke up to see an unknown man, wearing the white habit of the order, standing at the foot of his bed, looking at him.  The figure pointed insistently at the bookcase against the wall, and then turned and walked out of the room.

After breakfast the next morning, the friar took aside the superior of the house.  “One of our guests walked into my room last night.  It was very strange.” 

“What guest?” the prior replied. 

“The visiting Dominican – someone I didn’t recognize.  He came into my room in the middle of the night.”

“But we don’t have any guests staying with us,” the prior insisted.  “You must have been dreaming.”

“I don’t think so.”

When he returned to his room, he studied the bookcase: nothing unusual there.  He peered behind it, moved it a few inches.  Intrigued, he now strained to pivot the bookcase away from the wall.  A forgotten door, unopened for decades, stood before him.

Are you hooked?  Everyone loves a good ghost story, especially at this time of year.  This one has circulated for decades among the friars of my Dominican province.  But do you believe in ghosts?  Are they real? 

The popular fascination with “paranormal phenomena”, perhaps always with us, certainly seems to have grown in our time.  Could this be because, as Father Gabriel Amorth writes: “where religion regresses, superstition progresses”?  We have a spiritual dimension that is very hard to suppress.  If you don’t believe in God, often you’ll end up believing in lots of things (Tarot cards, astrology, crystals, or other New Age superstitions) much less reasonable, and much more spiritually dangerous.

The Christian tradition bears impressive witness to purely spiritual beings who can have real contact with us: angels and demons.  Although their power is far greater than ours, they are still creatures of God. They either are entirely in His service, or they have chosen, eternally and irrevocably, to hate Him – and, consequently, to hate us human beings, since each of us is loved by God.  There are no spiritual beings who are free agents.  Whether or not Hollywood admits it, every one of those spirits believes in God and is subject to Him.  “Even the demons believe – and shudder.”  (James 2:19.)

So are ghosts real?  That depends on what you mean by “ghost.”  They could be apparitions of demons.  This is probably what happens when one tries to contact the dead at a séance or with a ouiji board.  Since they’re liars, they usually try not to appear malicious.  Engaging these spiritual powers, the Catechism warns, “conceal[s] a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers.”  Such attempts “contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.”  It’s very dangerous. (By the way, vampires, zombies, and the “undead”: definitely not real, unless they’re demonic apparitions.  Witches and sorcerers?  I’ve met people who claim to be such.) 

Could ghosts be the souls of the dead?  Perhaps, although not in the way Hollywood usually depicts.  The souls of the dead are never homeless: they find themselves, in short order, in either Heaven, Purgatory or Hell.  Is it possible that we could somehow encounter them?  When permitted by the power of God, yes.  In fact, when the Church celebrates her saints – the reason that Halloween exists, since it is “All Hallow’s E’en,” the night before the great Catholic feast of All Saints – she rejoices that we have such friends in Heaven who can help us in our need. 

But what about ghost stories and haunted houses – or haunted Dominican priories?  (My ghost story – slightly embellished here, as any good ghost story should be – has many priests who suspect it is true.)  We cannot say for sure, but it could be that God sometimes permits souls in Purgatory to appear to the living to seek the help of their prayers.  And that means that the best remedy for seeing a ghost is to pray for it!

The door opened; the friar peered into a dusty closet containing a bureau.  Inside the bureau, he found a stack of yellowed slips of paper: Mass intentions.  Some priest had long ago left these promises to say Mass for the souls of the dead without fulfilling them.  Perhaps that is why the unknown Dominican desired so much that these papers be found – so that the duty he had failed to fulfill in his life could be completed by his brothers who remained alive.

The room was turned into a chapel, an altar erected.  Many Masses were offered there.  The unknown Dominican never appeared again.

 

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)