The photograph above is supposed to be a picture of a ghost.  If you look at it carefully you may be able to see a hooded figure bending toward the right.  Or perhaps you will see a horse's head.  This picture was made by Chet who took it at a place called Spanglers Springs in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  It was taken on Nov.  28, 1998 and followed the IGHS protocol.  IGHS stands for "International Ghost Hunters Society."  The protocol is a sort of checklist of procedural and documentary rules for obtaining photographs of paranormal apparitions which, if the protocol is followed, should make the pictures submitted safer from allegations of fraud.

        What are we to make of these claims?  The idea of spirits and ghosts is natural enough.  When a person dies it certainly looks as if something that had been there has now departed.  Every known society has had some kind of theory about the soul or the spirit.  In some cultures the soul goes back into solution, so to speak, with the Universal Soul or Universal Consciousness.  In other cultures the soul goes to the underworld.  The idea that departed souls are punished or rewarded according to their merits is fairly common in a number of different cultures.  Perhaps this is because of the obvious unfairness of things in an ordinary life.  Good people sometimes die of cancer while bad people become millionaires.  Perhaps it's only natural to want some kind of ultimate justice or "judgement day." At any rate, the theory underlying a lot of ideas about dying is that the world has at least two levels: the physical and the spiritual.  René DesCartes thought this way and developed a philosophy which has been called "dualism." He, along with many other thinkers, thought that the world of mind or spirit communicated with the material world through the pineal gland in the brain.  Another famous mystic was Carl Jung who believed that behind the world of science another world exists of which we have only inklings at certain special moments in our lives.  Jung had a house on a lake in Switzerland.  Near the lake was a large tree under which was a bench where the great psychologist and philosopher in his later years liked to sit and meditate.  According to the story, the night he died there was a severe thunderstorm and lightning struck the tree under whose branches he had spent so many contemplative hours.

        Children of all ages (from 9 to 90) love stories.  How pleasant it is to sit around the fire at night and tell of interesting and exciting things that have happened to us!  There are literally thousands and thousands of stories that people have told about near death experiences, out-of-body experiences, mental telepathy, clairvoyance, seeing ghosts, communicating with the dead, or communicating with demons or evil spirits or good spirits.  Sometimes some attempt will be made to reconcile these experiences with the scientific world view.  Often these attempts lead to the use of concepts like energy, mysterious rays, magnetic fields, or ectoplasm.  (Ectoplasm is the substance of which ghosts are supposedly composed.)  No scientific verification has ever been obtained for any of these ideas.  And that isn't because scientists haven't tried.  Perhaps one of the most famous experiments was carried out by a group of famous people in the first part of the 20th century.  Three members of this group were A. Conan Doyle (author of the Sherlock Holmes stories), William James (the famous American psychologist), and Thomas Edison.  Edison designed and built a device that would sound an alarm if any of a dozen or so physical conditions underwent a tiny change.  It is often said that regions of coldness are associated with some paranormal events.  Well, Edison's instrument was sensitive to a change of temperature of just a small fraction of a degree.  Other conditions included magnetic field changes and ever so small puffs of air and sound vibrations so faint as to be inaudible.  The members of this club all agreed that after death they would make every effort to set the machine off.  Well, they all died, but the machine never went off.

        Many people are very skeptical indeed about the reality of paranormal events.  There is a group known as "The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal" (CSICOP).  Other sites offer a positive view of the paranormal.  For example, Archive X has numerous stories of paranormal experiences.  Also check out ParanormalResearch.com.  It contains many paranormal research stories and pictures and also has a discussion board.  It is one of the best resources available on the internet for those who are doing paranormal research, according to its webmaster.

        The Truth Tree's position on paranormal phenomena is much the same as its position on UFO's.  That is, while the possibility of paranormal phenomena is not completely ruled out, objective evidence is necessary before any of the claims made can be accepted.  There will be much discussion here as to what constitutes acceptable evidence and why, as well as the reasons so many people claim to have had paranormal experiences if, in fact, paranormal phenomena don't really exist.