This came across the newswire the other day: “Terrifying True Stories by Candlelight—the controversial immersive horror phenomenon—has transformed a haunted Hollywood theater into a portal where true stories of grave robbery, the undead and possession come to life around you. Fresh from eight sold-out performances at the historic and haunted Heritage Square Museum in Los Angeles, Terrifying True Stories now brings its uniquely terrifying experience to an intimate haunted Hollywood theater for the ultimate Halloween season event where the stories become even more visceral, more immediate, and more inescapable.”

This is called playing with fire.

Can spirits of the deceased appear to the living and even haunt them?

The answer seems beyond dispute—not just due to the innumerable (truly endless) accounts but in accordance with Scripture. “Look at My Hands and My Feet,” said Jesus in Luke 24:39. “It is I myself! Touch Me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.”

And on the rocking Sea of Galilee?

“They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost,” says Luke 24:37.

As one writer, Brother Ignatius Mary, put it, there are certain things about spirits we can draw from Scripture. That they do not have physical bodies—flesh and bones—we can take from that passage in Luke 24:39. That they can communicate with the living can be seen in Sirach 46:20 or 1 Samuel 28. We know that “at least in some context allowed by God,” the dead can be raised (1 Samuel 28). The Bible also tells us it’s possible for “the dead to appear on the earth” (Matthew 27:52; 1 Samuel 28).

“Likewise, it may be possible for the dead to not only manifest on the earth, “but appear to people and talk with them” (Luke 16:27-31; 1 Samuel 28). “We know that it is possible for the living to bilocate (Revelation 17:3; 21:10; Corinthians 12:2),” argues this writer. “We know that it is possible for spirits to communicate in dreams and the person to have a bodily reaction to the visitation (Job 4:15).”

It was the opinion of Father F. X. Schouppe, who wrote the famous Purgatory: Explained by the Lives and Legends of the Saints, that “the spirits of the dead sometimes appear to the living” and that this is “a fact that cannot be denied.

“Apparitions of the souls that are in purgatory are a frequent occurrence. We find them in the lives of the saints; they happen sometimes to the ordinary faithful.”

He quotes St. Thomas Aquinas as saying, “A very probable opinion and one which, moreover, corresponds with the words of the saints in particular revelation is, that purgatory has a double place for expiation. The first will be destined for the generality of souls, and is situated below, near to hell; the second will be for  particular cases, and it is from thence that so many apparitions occur.”

Saint Gennadius once rebuked a specter that addressed him.

St. Eulogius of Alexandria saw a wraith.

Saint Amatus appeared after his death to his mother.

Saint Gregory tells of a deacon who haunted certain baths (and was seen by a bishop). It is in his Dialogues.

In fact, many cardinals, bishops, priests, and nuns have been witness to apparitions or other “ghostly” happenings. By the year 1000, says another, Andrew Coynes, “stories of restless spirits of the departed, of ghostly violations of the traditional boundaries between the living and the dead, began to be recorded even by eminent churchmen.”

The Church requires “no motion of faith for or against ghosts,” is the way Sir Leslie (a consultant to Pope Pius XI) put it. In City of God (Book XXII), Saint Augustine mentions a haunted house—whether by an earthbound spirit or a demon, we cannot know—although an exorcism was performed, and perhaps there was no distinction for Augustine between the demonic and the earthbound (for elsewhere he seems skeptical of ghosts).

In the early Church, they were referred to as “revenants,” and there has been an explosion of reports in our own internet-and-social-media-fueled time.

Messing with them—trying to raise them up, to evoke and provoke them—can lead to great harm.

[resources: The Spirits Around Us]