If you believe in God, you believe in ghosts. The whole idea of God is to reassure us there is life after this mortal plane. While dead people await the resurrection - reuniting the body and the spirit - the spirit is a "living" entity. We do not molder in the grave for centuries waiting for some great red-robed figure to awaken us. As near-death-experiences have taught us, the spirit is a special plane of existence outside the mortal body. Some of these spirits may return to their loved ones with messages, but most go about their business - learning about the hereafter. People who were idle or evil on earth care less about learning and greeting loved ones. They may be the ones who haunt us? Of course, all of the above pre-supposes you believe in God.
No God - no ghosts.
No ghosts - no God.
When my mother died - December 18, 1992 - we left so many lose ends between us that I wanted desperately to communicate with her just one more time. There were questions about my heritage and questions about her background that remained unsettled. I wouldn't learn about Borley and her connection to the most haunted house in England until September 22, 1994. Meanwhile, I asked the heavens to allow my mother to appear to me. I prayed. Nothing.
I was devastated. I dug into every resource I could find for life after death. I got on the fledgling Internet and asked people on various bulletin boards what they thought. I wrote down everything I could find on the subject, and soon had compiled a 545 page book. Death: then what?provided no answers. After months of obsessive research, I was left holding exactly what I had in my hands when I started - nothing.
After learning about Borley, so many missing pieces to the puzzle of "Who Am I?" started falling into place. Scores of answers started pouring out of the woodwork. People who had kept secrets from me for decades now heaved a collective sigh of relief and showered me with reams of research. There were several occasions at the beginning when a new discovery seemed to appear every six weeks - hardly long enough for me to catch my breath from the previous discovery. My mother had sworn everyone to secrecy, and they honored her request. Now she was gone, the floodgates opened. Eventually, a way was paved for me to travel to England - to go home. I visited Borley. I visited a blood brother and a cousin. I was unable to track down my natural father, and was asked not to visit my younger brother, but many, many other questions were answered. Except one.
When I visited Borley in September of 1997, I was so excited that if a ghost had come and hit me on the head, I would not have noticed. Even a second visit proved unfruitful, and I was unable to"feel" anything. There was no response at Lionel's grave either. I brought some possessions of my mother's and laid them on his grave as a temptation to contact me. Again, nothing.
To me, the failure of my mother to contact me after she died raised serious doubts about the hereafter. If ever a human needed to be contacted, I was that human. Others had apparently received communications from the dead about missing wills and how Uncle Jess was getting along over there, so why not me? My failure to receive any kind of answer while at Borley and while at Lionel's grave compounded my depression.
Then, Pat Cody finally got through with a message she had been trying to give me for months - something, or someone, had been guiding me all along. She really got me to thinking:
Just what is an angel, anyway? Is one possible answer a spirit guardian, or perhaps a spirit guide? Could angels be made up of the same type of material from which ghosts are composed? What about the idea that angels are spirits without bodies who help us? Don't some people believe we were all spirits before coming to this earth? If there is a material in our universe which our eyes are not trained to see - wouldn't it be possible for angels to be among us? Wouldn't it be possible for them to guide us - to guard us? It would not be a far stretch of the imagination then, to suppose that a deceased person could also maintain a spirit composed of material we can't see. Some of those spirits could then hang around as ghosts to guide us - just like angels - to hidden wills and useful knowledge. Some of the unhappy spirits might be "unqualified" or not be interested in joining the other spirits in a place of enlightenment, and might stay behind in familiar surroundings.
Spirit angels - spirit ghosts.
As Guiley puts it in the foreword to her book The Encyclopedia of Angels, - - "Under the ‘Angel' entry, I have given the definition traditional to our mythology: ‘a supernatural being who mediates between God and mortals.' Do they exist in their own right, in celestial realms that are closer to God? Perhaps so. Or, perhaps there is an energy, a vibration of love and light from the Godhead, which becomes an ‘angel' when it interacts with human consciousness, taking on a form that we can comprehendand integrate into our spiritual and cosmological outlooks."
If angels, then ghosts.
If ghosts, then God.
If God, then Satan.
If Satan, then evil spirits.