Catholic and hauntings?

[holyrood]

I’m still stuck on the idea that there are Protestants who believe *only *Catholics ever experience hauntings! I’ve never heard this is a thing among Protestants. With billions of people in the world, and stories of hauntings all over the world, why would anyone believe that?

 

[StarSpear]

“Haints” are pretty common among the Protestants around where I live, particularly among the charismatic populations (Holiness and Pentecostals). I’ve never heard of it being thought of as a Catholic thing.

Supernatural occurrences are considered fairly normal among most pagans and in heathenry, I don’t know too many people who don’t have a story of some sort, although I think in some cases it becomes a “Oh, yeah, I’ve seen a ghost, too” thing for some more impressionable types. In heathenry, we have the tradition of our ancestors keeping an eye on us as well as the “hidden people”, so we don’t tend to pay them a whole lot of mind aside from leaving them offerings unless they’re troublesome.

It does worry me a little, though, as someone who is considering becoming Catholic, how I would have to rethink this within a Christian context.

 

[phantom87]

As far as I know, there are not any official documents of the Church that concern hauntings or ghosts. However, I have read that ghosts are either the souls of Purgatory asking for our prayers or demons that are either pretending to be a dead person or are simply haunting a house. My family has so many ghost stories that I can’t keep track, while my Protestant friends have nothing.

i too have heard this I just don’t remember where I heard it … Ghosts could very well be demons posing in some cases as friends or family in an effort to get close to us

 

[Bookcat]

i too have heard this…

Hum…

I am a bit concerned here…for this answer is from a Phantom.…

 

[Micosil]

Yes, that last one has always interested me, I wonder what the different types are and how they came to be so powerful?

That is saying something too, if even the disciples could not cast it out, that demon must have been pretty close to Satan himself in terms of power.

Not to dwell too much on this topic, as it isn’t particularly healthy and more the realm of specific theologians and demonologists, my understanding is that demons are organized like a military, with the lesser demons acting as pawns/foot soldiers/“privates”, and as we go up the “ranks”, we encounter evermore powerful entities, and it seems Satan occupies the highest position, with a few demons directly under him that act as “generals”.

It seems that fallen angels retain their original angelic rank (choir) that they occupied before they rebelled and became demons. Satan, for example, was either a Seraphim or a Cherubim (apparently this isn’t a settled issue, nor is it particularly relevant to the average layperson), these two being the highest choirs.

So those demons that required Jesus’ personal intervention to perform the exorcism were perhaps those demons higher up in the hierarchy, perhaps even those right below him, the “generals”.

 

[patricius79]

As far as I know, there are not any official documents of the Church that concern hauntings or ghosts. However, I have read that ghosts are either the souls of Purgatory asking for our prayers or demons that are either pretending to be a dead person or are simply haunting a house…

That’s what I think too. The mean ones could not be souls in Purgatory. They would have to be souls in hell, or demons. I used to love watching “A Haunting” on the Discovery Channel. Wish I had the DVDs. Maybe I’m gullible, but I found most of the people to be basically credible. In one case–that of Billy Bean–Bean claims that the “A Haunting” people actually toned down what really happened.