Expert: Fr. Michael - 7/18/2008

Question
What is the traditional Catholic understanding of the existence of ghosts? Are these always demons, or can the genuine spirits of the dead sometimes appear to the living with God's permission?

Answer
A succinct analysis is provided by Fr. Herbert Thurston in his Ghosts and Poltergeists (1953):

"For my own part I find it impossible to believe that such manifestations ... had no real existence, but were due to hallucination.  There are dozens of other records  -- some of them based upon the painstaking examination of witnesses before a legal tribunal -- which offer every guarantee of genuineness....  These phenomena seem to me to have their value as a proof of the existence of a world of spiritual agencies, not cognoscible directly by our sense perceptions.  For the crude materialist such incidents much surely be very difficult to explain away....  What the nature of the agency is that performs these marvels we are not called upon to determine.  Divines of all creeds in the seventeenth century were satisfied that such alarming phenomena could only be the work of the devil.  I am not prepared to declare that they were wrong, though this solution cannot, I submit, be treated as a matter of certainty.... It seems impossible to reject the evidence which for so many centuries and in every country of the world attests the sporadic occurence of such phenomena.  To attribute them all to diabolic agency is difficult, if only because we credit the enemy of mankind with a higher level of intelligence than that which seems to prompt these outbreaks. Experience has shown that the exorcism and comminatory rites of the Church are not always, or indeed generally, effective in putting an end to poltergeist disturbance, though they sometimes produce a temporary mitigation.  On the other hand, I have come across a few cases in which a special novena or the saying of Mass seems definitely to have got rid of the nuisance."