LEWISBURG - "Leave me alone."
The words are caught on a voice recorder by an investigator who believes them to be of a dead woman.
The paranormal investigator in Missouri captured the sentence after questioning an empty room in a house for confirmation on how the woman died. Her ghost is believed to be haunting the place.
Another woman snaps a picture of her husband sitting in the car. An ethereal image of an old woman sitting in the back seat appears. The woman believes it may be her recently deceased mother.
Are these two examples really of images and recordings of those from the great beyond?
That's the question posed Tuesday night by Dr. Rich Robbins, associate dean of the arts and sciences at Bucknell University.
Robbins spoke on "Ghosts and Hauntings: Decide for Yourself" at the university's Trout Auditorium in the Vaughan Literature Building.
He offered an array of definitions and examples of paranormal phenomena that he said neither proves nor disproves the existence of ghosts.
Robbins said the general definition of
"ghost," "spirit" and "apparition," words often used interchangeably in parapsychology, as the energy expelled from the human body at the time of death which becomes stuck between here and the hereafter.
The idea of the ghost is based on the ancient belief that every living creature has a soul, and for humans, the spirit is an exact replica of the human body, Robbins said.
That energy, or spirit, when released, inhabits certain places - notoriously sites of tragedy - and may be recognized through sight, sound, smell and touch, he said.
"They are intelligent," Robbins said of human spirits who linger in the physical realm, "and they are aware of their surroundings - even us."
Robbins displayed a collection of either full or fractured images of alleged ghosts captured on film, as well as supposed spirit voice recordings, or what's called electronic voice phenomenon, or EVP.
Commonly, translucent orbs and strings of mist appear on film, he said. While some may argue they are spirits, the images may be discredited as reflections of dust, moisture, insects or smoke.
Electronic voice phenomenon is precarious as well, as Miller said the single-word, fractional sentences may sometimes be random noise interpreted as voices.
In addition to an intelligent spiritual being that remains tethered to the physical world, the environment in which a person or event inhabited can also play a key role in what's described as a "haunting."
Robbins said energy from a recurring event can be "absorbed" or "recorded" into its surroundings - the walls, floor or ground - to later be played back over and over again.
As an example of a haunting, Robbins described the events at Gettysburg, in which people see Union and Confederate soldiers from the Civil War walking the battlefield or climbing stairs in the town's buildings.
Hauntings or the "recordings" of specific events have no interaction with humans, as they are merely a playback of a specific scene, whether it be by sight or sound.
On the other hand, poltergeists are not spirits, Robbins said, even though in German it means "noisy spirit."
Robbins described poltergeists as the manifestation of subconscious energy of the occupant of a home.
The psychokinetic energy is released by a person under stress or psychological trouble, he said.
However, there have been cases, he said, of those who have poltergeist experiences without any type of psychological trauma.
About 50 percent of the population experiences the "old hag syndrome" in which a person wakes up and can't move, even though they can see, hear, smell and touch, he said.
The feeling of a great weight on one's body often accompanies that experience, he said.
A belief surrounding that phenomena is that it is part of a witch's hex, and the experience may be laced with strange smells, sounds and sights, he added.
But scientists say it is isolated sleep paralysis, when the body is waking up, yet the brain is still in the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep. In sleep, the brain "paralyzes" the body so a person cannot act out their dreams, according to Robbins.
The less popular phenomenon is what Robbins said are "messengers," or those who are aware of their own deaths once they cross over and hang around to deliver a message from the other side as an offering of comfort to mourners.
Other instances of ghosts and hauntings, in more religious doctrines, is the concept of "good versus evil" and how demons take the form of deceased people for evil purposes, oftentimes leading to possession.
The opposite side to that, Robbins side, is the idea of angels, or messengers of God who take human form to convey a message.
Robbins said there are several theories as to why people believe in the variety of paranormal activities, and how humans tend to believe at death, humans transcend to a non-physical reality as an intelligent, incorporeal being.
Those realities - particularly when one witnesses a paranormal occurrence - is a representation of one reality overlapping the other.
Robbins cited that part of the want or need to believe in ghosts comes from people's fear of the unknown, the psychological need for control, family ties, personal biases on unexplained occurrences and the physiological response people like to get from being scared, Robbins said.
However, Robbins said some researchers indicate the magnetic field in the atmosphere may have some influence on the temporal lobe in the brain that may determine people to "see" or "hear" certain things.
Also, humans' peripheral vision is very sensitive, he said, which can cause people to misinterpret sights and sounds.
For those who claim to see recently deceased family members, they may see them as a result of the need or want to see them out of comfort during the grieving process, he said, which he termed psychological projection.
However, despite presenting theories on both sides of the phenomena, Robbins said no one can ever conclusively prove or disprove what may very well be paranormal activity.
