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[craig]

I'm a believer, but my wife is not. Lately we have become convinced that our house is haunted, and that we have spirit beings in the house. We have taken about 150 pictures with our Nikon CoolPix digital camera. In these pictures you can see orbs and apparitions.
These orbs seem to be following my wife around. She is smelling a dead smell; she has been touched twice on her calf; the bed has been, like, punched when we were both in it; we both hear music in the distance. We believe there are two small children, a boy and a girl. We hear voices. We think they are brother and sister. We believe we also have an evil spirit that is older. What am I supposed to do with this? Is this for real? What should I do about it?

[jimwalton]

I certainly believe in spiritual beings, but we have to be very skeptical and cautious before we jump to any hasty and/or false conclusions. It’s always good to try to figure out if there is another explanation first, because often there is. But I believe that spirits are real and they can be present. It’s definitely possible. Like, for the smell, look for a dead mouse in the walls. Or if they get a weird feeling, they might have high levels of electromagnetic current in their house from bad wiring, which makes people feel creeped out for some reason.

I spoke with a friend of mine who has some experience with such things. Here's what she said:

I almost never take orb pictures seriously. They are 99% bugs or dust reflecting light back to the camera, and the lens interprets it as circles. The only orb I ever believed was real was a video I saw where it almost looked like an electric ball moving in a room. You could see the inside of it like a lightbulb, and it moved in crazy directions and was huge. I'm not sure about the shape over the door handle. Pictures are really unreliable unless you literally see a figure in them. I also have one that I took where there is a strange mist covering about a square foot area that wasn't in the picture before it. I can't explain things like that, but when you take pictures, especially with a flash, you sometimes get artifacts that can look weird but aren't really anything. The more telling things are in audio recordings and video rather than still pictures. Also, just hearing or experiencing weird things first hand is sometimes more telling to me than still pictures.

Another friend, whom I respect very much, related this story:

I was in a hotel room with others in my family. My mom had one bed, and my sister and I had the other. I woke up one night and saw my mom standing between the beds, facing away from me, kind of holding her stomach and swaying. So I whispered to her, "What’s going on?" and my mom didn't answer. Then I realized my mom was in bed. So I stared at the figure trying to see if it was the curtains in the dark swaying or something, but I couldn’t make it go away, so I just turned away and tried to close my eyes, and not move, and go back to sleep.

The next day I told my sister about it, and we tried to figure out if it could have been the curtains or some other shape that looked like a person when all the lights were turned off. That night, my sister woke up in the middle of the night and heard a lot of noise coming from the bathroom. It sounded like someone was in there moving things around, but she could see that none of us were in there. She thought that was weird, but decided maybe she was hearing noise from the bathroom on the other side of the wall or something, and went back to sleep.

The next night I had another experience, and it was so terrifying that I didn't even tell anybody about it for weeks after, because I was afraid that I was actually going crazy or something. I woke up again in the middle of the night, and the same woman figure was there again, but instead of standing as a shadow in between the beds, she was sitting on our bed, right next to my sister (while she was asleep). The woman was facing away again, and kind of looking toward the ground. I looked at my mom and my sister to see if I could wake them up, but was too afraid to move because I didn't want this figure to turn around and notice me. I kept staring at it (her), but it (she) was so clear this time, that there was no mistaking it for shadows or shapes or anything. I was so disturbed by that fact that I basically closed my eyes and cried myself to sleep. I ended up taking sleeping pills every night the rest of the time we were there. Then for weeks after that I was afraid that something was wrong with me and that I would see this woman again somewhere else once we left there, and maybe I was going crazy or something. It's one thing to be creeped out by a noise or to see a shadow, but a completely different thing to see a full apparition of a woman sitting on your bed. I never saw her again, so I finally told my family about it.


That's the story, now back to some advice. The first hand experiences you are having sound very similar to what other people experience, and I think it would be beneficial to try to record audio of things like the music. It might also be good to try to set up a video camera (like a security camera or even a regular home movie camera if it’s an active place) at night to see if they catch anything on video.

But when people feel like they are being touched, or feel a bed move, or smell bad things, like a dead smell or sulfur, those are bad signs. So the photos may be legit, but they don’t prove anything. Audio recordings or video recordings are more telling.

If they can’t debunk anything, and things continue to be bad, they might have a problem. But the more you pay attention to things like that, the worse they get, sometimes. If it’s a true poltergeist type of thing, it’s almost like it feeds off attention. Sometimes if you pretend it’s not there, it will simmer down. But if they try to document it, they shouldn’t try to talk to it. Talking to it encourages it, I think. I talked to one once. I was ghost hunting in a museum, and I recorded the interaction. I say something, and you can hear a voice in the recording respond. It's hard to hear what the response is, though. It's muffled.

If it gets really bad, it doesn’t seem to matter any more, and that’s when people start asking questions while documenting it.

The worst experience I ever had was in college when I went ghost hunting, and the summer after that at home I saw a figure in my room at night 3 times. I didn’t think it was real the first two times because it went away when I turned on the light. But the third time, I waited and I started to hear it walk back and forth across paper that was on my floor over and over again. And when I turned on the light, our dog, who was also on my bed, was also looking alarmed and at the same direction the noise was coming from.

[Craig]

OK, now a Catholic priest wants to come to my house and sprinkle salt around the perimeter and shake holy water around. Is this practice from the Bible? Should I let him do it?

[jimwalton]

Just so you know, that stuff isn't from the Bible. The only people who cast out demons in the Bible are Jesus, his disciples, and Paul. We don't anything about the mechanism that the disciples used, but Jesus and Paul cast out demons by the authority of the spoken word alone. There was no other material involved. We can assume the same for the disciples since they were following Jesus' example.

The problem with what the priest is intending to do is that he is claiming that somehow there is power in the salt or in the water, and that's not at all a biblical idea. In the Bible, things don't have power, God does. In the Bible, things are not holy, God is. And while things (vessels, temple furniture) can be set apart (consecrated) for God's use (and therefore "holy"), their holiness is found in their relationship to Him, not in and of themselves. There is nothing in the Bible to hint, let alone say, that salt or water have an efficacious authority against demonic powers.

And while I would also say that spreading salt around the house won't do any harm, and tossing some holy water around isn't detrimental, the problem of that is that we are reducing Christianity to what seems like hocus-pocus stuff, as if these "spells" and "sacraments" are where the power lies, as if we're wizards and mediators of "magical' capacities. Those aren't Christian ideas or Biblical ideas.

In the Bible there are no examples of places being haunted, only people. That's not to say that places can't be haunted, but the Bible's concern is with people, not locations. I would say with confidence that God is not interested in the house, but in the souls of the people involved. God wants the persons to be freed from Satan's power, not the house. Getting the people right with God is the bold priority.