An otherworldly encounter

The belief in ghosts is one of the most controversial topics in modern culture. A recent survey by the Huffington Post in conjunction with YouGov indicated that 45 percent of Americans believe in the existence of ghosts, yet 59 percent of the public believe they have never seen a ghost.

I am one of the 45 percent who do believe in ghosts, and from researching the paranormal and collecting anecdotes and incidents in the past 20 years, I think sometimes people do see ghosts without even knowing it.

One incident comes to mind in which a custodian had passed away while someone who volunteered in the building in which the man worked was away from the area. She returned and was in the building to help with an event when she encountered the man in a hallway.

They spoke briefly, but she got the oddest sensation about him, although she dismissed it initially. She did not think much about it and went on with the tasks at hand to get ready for the event and went home.

Later in the evening she was talking with her parents about her day and meeting the custodian early that day in the basement, and a shocked look appeared on her mother's face. When she asked what was wrong, her mother told her the man she met in the hallway that morning had died several weeks before.

In this case, the entity that this woman met appeared for all intents and purposes to be a normal person. He was not transparent nor did he have a partially dissolved body. He appeared as corporeal as you or I, so she had no reason to suspect otherwise, and why would you?

The most interesting part of this encounter is that she spoke to the man and he responded to her, yet the incident from a skeptical standpoint just is not possible. Or is it?

Obviously the first explanation is she imagined the whole thing. The problem with this theory is that until she went home that evening she possessed no knowledge the man was deceased.

How did her imagination play such a trick if her subconscious mind was not aware of the fact the man was already dead. This would seem to indicate the person or something resembling the person was there in the hallway with her.

There is the possibility of mistaken identity, but this is extremely unlikely because the staff in the building was rather small, and there was no one that resembled the deceased man save for himself. She would have had to have a break from her memory of the man's appearance to talk to someone else and believe it was the man in question.

Now with that said, it is a well-known adage that we all have a double somewhere on this planet, and I truly believe that. I know as I was growing up I met at least two men who looked almost exactly like me. In fact, one of them preceded me in the same school by a few years, and later when I went to Bloomsburg University a student appeared a year or two after I started who looked eerily similar to me.

Granted that may have just been a weird coincidence, but I remember after graduating from college and going to work for a software company in King of Prussia, I did quite a bit of traveling.

On one occasion, my business took me to Pittsburgh to an accounting firm. I was meeting a female manager there to work on some issues with our software and to train her when I was finished. I recall waiting to meet my contact, and when I was announced and she appeared at the reception desk to escort me, I thought I saw a ghost.

The woman shared an uncanny resemblance to my mother when she was in her late 20s and early 30s. She had the same curly reddish hair, the same hazel eyes, the same build and even the same smile. I would swear to this day I met a doppelganger of my mother frozen in time at the age of 30.

Now I know this woman was not my mother, but it sure added a degree of interest to the office call, and it fascinated me for years afterward. The only aspect she did not share with my mom was her name, which the years have stolen from my memory.

So while doppelgangers exist for many of us, I have a hard time believing this would explain this anecdote simply because the man had a distinct manner about him and there was no "double" in the building that she met outside of the initial encounter that morning.

So if it was not her imagination, a case of mistaken identity or a doppelganger, what other explanations could there be?

There is the possibility that the environment was imbued with the emotions of this person and for some reason the circumstances caused a "playback" of the person walking in the basement while my friend was there.

In this case, this type of "paranormal" encounter normally does not lead to interaction between the specter and the person. Instead it is more like the person watching a recorded playback of a previous incident of the man in the hallway. Yet in this case she talked with him.

The final possibility is that she spoke to a spiritual essence that was the man and he answered her as if he was still there working. In this case, he most likely believed he was there volunteering while they met each other.

She does not recall where he went after they met, but it was not like he magically vanished from view. He just went away, and it obviously was not very extraordinary because she did not remember it.

So do people encounter ghosts and not realize it? My wager is that they do. What is yours?

Till next time …