January 20th, 2016
By LANA CARBON
The other night I was perusing through our social media accounts looking at the paranormal groups of which we are members and came across an aggravating situation that seems to be becoming more and more common.
A woman was asking a question about whether or not something could follow a person home from a potentially haunted location. I am far from being any kind of expert but being the first to see the query, I answered to the best of my knowledge from the readings that I have done over the years. I said that I think it is possible and I also stressed that it is important to watch the situation to see if anything happened as this was the first she had suspected anything strange was occurring. I offered some minimal advice about what she could do if she were to become more concerned and left it at that.
The posts that followed were the ones that annoyed me. Without anything more to go on than her question, others were informing this poor lady that only a truly evil spirit (a demon specifically) could attach itself to a person and stated that’s definitely what was happening. I feel this is wrong on so many levels.
Le Cauchemar (The Nightmare) - Johann Heinrich Füssli
Let’s start with the fact (if you can call anything related to the paranormal “fact”) that a spirit attachment does not have to be an evil spirit. One of the theories behind why the deceased don’t cross over is that they are not ready to go; whether it is unfinished business or an “attachment” to someone or something they would be leaving behind. At the very core of this thought process is that a spirit is attaching to someone or something. While people can be evil, I’m pretty sure we can agree that not all people are that bad.
On a personal note, when my day comes, I know I will want to hang around a few of my loved ones…I am kind of attached to them after all.
The secondary reason these other people may be jumping the gun by telling this woman it was probably a demon, is sheer mathematics. Despite what the ghost hunting shows might make it look like, paranormal activity does not occur that consistently. Ask any paranormal investigator worthy of the title and they will tell you that a majority of this type of activity can be explained by rational circumstance. Those cases that do prove to have an unexplainable origin are few and far between. Now when you consider the rarity among those cases involving a demon, you are looking at an incredibly miniscule number. It certainly isn’t common enough to be suggested before even investigating the area, talking to a witness, or seeing some of the occurrences with your own eyes. Perhaps we could look at the rational first?
Now let’s just go way out on a limb and say this case does manage to buck the odds and there really is a demon involved. Why frighten this poor woman and her family before setting up some kind of support for her? She has only just started believing something paranormal may be happening and now, without any leads on where to go or who to turn to for help, she is going to feed this thing with her increased fear. Unless the people telling her right out of the gate that this is a demon, know what they are talking about and are prepared to go help her, would it not be better to guide her in the direction of someone reputable to help her with the problem? Unfortunately that is not what was happening. These people were just dropping the “D” word and leaving the discussion. If this had been a conversation about sports, my dad would have called them “armchair quarterbacks”.
Maybe it isn’t fair for me to judge. Like I have stated, I am no expert and will never claim to be one. I simply feel that it is important not to frighten people more than necessary when due diligence hasn’t been taken to rule out the more common explanations. These people are already afraid, questioning what they are experiencing and even questioning themselves. Fueling their fear by implying they are dealing with a demon is doing nothing more than making the situation worse…no matter what the cause may be.
I’m sure these people had the best of intentions and were trying to help; it also makes me think of an old expression that I once heard… A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
