Ghosts are often thought of as remnants of the dead who have not been able to fully pass into the heavenly (or hellish) realms. Ghost hunting investigators encounter entities that appear to have some form of post-life trauma. Ghosts have had cruel or shocking deaths, witnessed terrible things before they died, lost something dear to their hearts that they still cling to after death.
Perhaps the movie Ghost, with Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg, is not a perfect paradigm of what the Ghosts really are, but it has some things in common with the previous definition. Swayze, like the Ghosts we’re talking about, is running around the cruel way he died and that it could bring some kind of danger to his girlfriend. Patrick’s stay on Earth is a temporary phenomenon, often due to trauma or clinging to the surroundings. Some accounts of Ghosts would say that Ghosts are often just fragments of better, fuller personalities that haven’t passed on to other dimensions of the Afterlife.
The Ghost movie may be flawed in many ways, but perhaps it can provide us with a framework to address some of the questions about the Ghosts’ reality and behavior through historical anecdotes, contemporary reports, parapsychological studies, and ghost hunting. For example, in the movie, Swayze learns to influence matter from a strange half-crazy ghost in a subway.
In fact, can ghosts hurt or touch you? I would say that a lot of people believe that ghosts can touch you and some say that they can hurt or even kill you. Many people report a ghostly touch. For example, Molly Stewart, licensed by the International Society of Ghost Hunters, reports that the Ghosts have reportedly pulled guests by the hair on their Salem, Massachusetts tour. Ghosts Pull Hair In China, for example, ghosts killed by drowning are said to kill people to prevent them from being reincarnated.
In general, the Specters seem to be making contact because they are “stuck” in some pattern, expressing their pain or fear, or sometimes. Like Swayze when he approaches Moore in the movie, the ghosts actually want to tell us something, something as strange as how they were killed or to assure us of something. But not everyone has the same degree of sensitivity towards them.
It would seem, if you believe Sylvia Browne, that disembodied spirits, including familiar ones, are very close to this world. And they try a lot for contact, but we don’t recognize it. In other, more tribal, shamanic cultures, such contact is perhaps more frequent and expected, but these cultures do not necessarily keep written records in any quantity, so it can be hard to tell.
Perhaps with our EMF and “white noise” machines, science is getting closer to some sort of answer on how to contact Ghosts? Why haven’t you found that answer yet? Well, looking for ghosts could be compared to wanting to study sea creatures at a certain depth, but not having the science of submersibles developed enough to be able to go there safely and stay long enough to take pictures. The Ghosts are there but we don’t have the technology.