GHOST NEWS 2

SAPULPA, Okla. - Maybe you believe, maybe you don't. It is a Sapulpa expert's opinion that those who have experienced a paranormal encounter believe ghosts exist while those who haven't remain doubtful. "A lot of people dismiss it until it happens to them," said Robert Sherman, founder of Sapulpa Paranormal Investigations Extreme Studies.

Although he does believe that spirits can roam the earth in the afterlife, Sherman spends his free time trying to disprove paranormal presences. He and the rest of his SPIES team visit cemeteries, homes and wherever else unexplained activities have occurred. They use their paranormal detection equipment to prove that ghosts are not the reason for those rumbles in the walls.

They use recordings of "disembodied voices" to detect whether there is a presence in an area. Fortunately or unfortunately, Sherman contends he has heard spirit voices.   He said many times the voices are difficult to understand, but sometimes they come through clearly. He said he once asked a spirit if the spirit was capable of being seen by the living. He said the spirit said, "I don't really need to."
Sherman said he has also heard people saying, "Help us." Cue the chills.

SPIES also take photographs. They believe some have given proof that spirits were present. They use 35 mm cameras to snap shots and hopefully catch someone's "orb," or energy, which is similar to a living person's fingerprint, Sherman said.

He said he has a photo of an orb in a tree at South Heights Cemetery. He and his team took another picture and caught what has become known to them as the "Green Hill Ghost." The photo image is near a tree and a black figure is on the right. Sherman and SPIES cofounder Cleo Watashe said it looks like a man wrapped in a black cloak.

Sherman said spirits can get trapped on earth because they may have died violently or suddenly. He said the team tries to tell spirits to go toward the "warm light." He said many times the spirit can no longer be detected after their advice, which means it has left.   However, they can't make an unwilling spirit leave. "If they want to hang around, they'll hang around and there's not much you can do about it," Sherman said.
"We're not priests who perform exorcisms," Watashe said with a laugh. But they are Christians. They said they rely on their faith to guide them.

While some of their experiences have been a bit frightening, they said 80 to 90 percent of their cases have an explanation other than paranormal activity.

In one case, a mother and her children were waking up with scratches and bruises on their bodies. SPIES brought in an EVP and detected nothing.   Then they decided to plant cameras in the house. The culprit wasn't a ghost. It was the father. He was suffering from night terrors. After the case was solved, the father was then able to seek help from a sleep expert.

Sherman said he knows people are experiencing unexplained phenomena, but they're too afraid to ask for help. Since SPIES services are free and confidential, he said, there is no reason why people shouldn't get their assistance. He knows how it feels to experience the unexplained. When he was a teenager, he and some friends entered an old house. He said the temperature dropped so low they could see their breath, and it was summer.   Someone, who no one saw, pushed him. "Since then, I've been searching for answers," he said. "The truth is they're around us all the time and they don't bother us unless they want something."

He said their services are not meant to frighten people, but instead prove that most of the time there's nothing to be afraid of. "We're here to put people's minds at ease," he said. "When they hear the bump in the night," Watashe said, finishing Sherman's sentence.

Many believe the departed communicate with loved ones Kate Campbell Philly Inquirer {Posted 7/03/05}

A Bensalem writer described experiences and said she felt they are meant to comfort .

In the breezeless living room, Susan's photograph sometimes abruptly tumbles from atop a wooden writing desk. But the 10 surrounding family photos stay upright, say her parents, Jack and Dee Heil. The couple, whose 25-year-old daughter was shot by a stranger as she sat beside a hotel swimming pool, have embraced this inexplicable happening as one of the ways she still contacts them 19 years after her death.

Leading the Northeast Philadelphia chapter of Compassionate Friends, a nondenominational group for bereaved parents, gives the Lutheran couple a tangible link to Susan, who was a Sunday school teacher and poet. But the mystical signs they feel from her offer a comfort deeper than support groups and church leaders could provide, they said. "If you tell people on the outside, they'll say you're crazy," said Jack Heil, handsomely dressed in a crisp Hawaiian shirt. "But we believe they talk to us, communicate with us."

Vivid dreams, coincidences, even hearing the voice or sensing the physical presence of a deceased person, are examples of sacred messages sent to soothe those left in grief's wake, according to Christine Marie Duminiak of Bensalem, author of God's Gift of Love: After-Death Communications for Those Who Grieve. A practicing Roman Catholic and founder of an Internet message board about after-death communications, Duminiak believes the dead want to console - not alarm - their living relatives. The contacts are proof "there is eternal life," said Duminiak, who self-published the compilation of testimonials and spoke at a recent Compassionate Friends meeting.

Spontaneous communications from deceased loved ones is possible, said Duminiak's pastor, Msgr. Kenneth McAteer of St. Ephrem Catholic Church in Bensalem. McAteer has not read her book, but he said that Catholics believe in asking for intercession of the saints and that Jesus' mother, Mary, appeared to people in Fatima and Lourdes. At the same time, he said, the Catholic Church forbids attempting to contact the dead via seances, fortune-tellers, incantations or any other means.

God allows the dead to communicate from heaven with their loved ones, Duminiak said, "in order to comfort us, to help us, and to let us know that they are OK." She was paraphrasing a 1997 statement by the Rev. Gino Concetti, theological commentator for the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano.

Popularized through movies like Sixth Sense and Ghost, the idea of paranormal contact is still widely held as taboo, according to Lucy Bregman, a Temple University religion professor. "In a lot of religions, the dead are dangerous to the living, and there are rituals worldwide that will have [the living] chanting for the person to go to the land of the dead," said Bregman, author of several books on the psychology of religion.

To David Hufford of Pennsylvania State University's College of Medicine in Hershey, such contacts - which he called "bereavement visits" - are "common throughout the world." Hufford, a professor of neural and behavioral sciences and family and community medicine, has researched psychopathology and spirituality for 35 years. The experiences may not prove life after death, he said, but they play a much larger role in cultural ideas about religion and spirituality than has been recognized.

Since the 1970s, considerable research has been done on the topic, Bregman said. The current thinking, she said, is that "the presence of the dead person is real and part of the grieving process. For the person who has it - it's real enough."

It's been real for Duminiak. She said she had no otherworldly experiences growing up in Philadelphia's Logan section. Then, one night in 1998, her dead in-laws appeared to her in a hologram-type vision, she said. "At first, I grabbed the rosary from underneath my pillow and started praying," Duminiak said. Her in-laws never spoke but continued to visit her over the next several weeks, she said. Terrified it was a warning about her husband's health, Duminiak started researching after-death communications, or ADCs, on the Internet.

At the Compassionate Friends meeting, when Duminiak shared some of what she called the 20 common ways loved ones try to communicate, more than a dozen of the 44 parents talked about their own powerful after-death communications with their children. Although the experiences were ultimately peaceful and rewarding, some found them difficult to accept at first.

Several mothers said they were still waiting, desperate for a sign from their children. "Extreme grief seems to be an impediment for a loved one to get through, or for the desperate person to even notice when they are getting a sign," Duminiak said.

The experiences are not easy to describe, said Lin Baldwin of Wales, who took part in Duminiak's Internet prayer circle (www.geocities. com/adcfriends). A doctoral student at the University of Wales Lampeter in theology and religious studies, Baldwin lost her son, Tom, in 2002.

"In a death-phobic world, one runs the risk of appearing delusional or 'clutching at straws,' " said Baldwin, an agnostic before she began getting signs from her son. "Despite Tom's death, I feel that the universe is benevolent," she said. "Life here is hard, but it does teach... that I will be with my son again after my death. I am not afraid to die."

GHOSTS NEWS PAGE 2

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