There is no definitive teaching on this matter; however, there are 3 possibilities:
— the apparition is an illusion,
—the apparition is a spirit from Hell;
—the apparition is really the dead human being it seems to be, working off his or her Purgatory.
There’s no way of knowing generally which is which, without a great deal of physical, psychological and spiritual investigation.
ICXC NIKA.
I think I’ve had an experience of the third viz. somebody working off their purgatory.
I’ve had a fair number of spiritual experiences of one kind or another, but I hadn’t given “ghosts” much thought. But my old Protestant pastor, Rev. Robert Missenden, once said to me in his office, “I think you’ll be doing some cleaning. You won’t like it much, and you won’t be doing it for long, but I think the Lord will just want you to hear about a ghost.”
By the time he said that I knew just how accurate he was, and that if he said something would happen, it usually did. But I still thought it was a bit ridiculous. Now he died in 1992.
In 2006 I was doing a cleaning job, involving split shifts and driving about 600 kms a week. I didn’t like it much and I only did it for about four months. However I was being shown around one old store in a town called Ipswich by the previous cleaner.
Then he suddenly remarked, “This place is haunted.” I said, “What?”. He repeated it and then went on to say a former manager had committed suicide in the 1890’s. Later when I was talking to staff who worked (and who accepted the presence of the ghost), they said it was actually the 1960’s when the manager hanged himself downstairs. He must have worked at it, because they were very low ceilings under the building.
According to the cleaner who told me this, one night he was there all the stock just jumped off a complete set of shelves and landed on the floor. Other times he found he could push a two or three hundred pound buffer by the little finger over a rough floor, as something was pushing it with him. He said he didn’t like being there after dark.
Yet I used to get positive vibes when I was there. One night I was there, after all the doors had been shut, and there were only a couple of managerial staff still there. A bloke walked out from behind the last aisle, smiled at me, and then walked back. I went to find him and couldn’t.
I think my role was to get a mass said for the ghost, the man who had committed suicide. Eventually I rang up the priest at Ipswich and told him the story. I don’t know whether he believed me or not, or whether he thought he had a nut on his hands. What made it more difficult was I had no way of getting the suicide’s name.
Personally I think he was trapped in that store as punishment for committing suicide. He was probably a decent bloke who was not bad enough to send to hell, but who at the same time was unable to go to heaven. He was bored, hence the tricks with the other cleaner.
That was my experience. And as usual, old Rev. Missenden turned out to be accurate in his prediction, strange as it was. It took about 15 years to happen, but it did.
