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The Bethany Ghost(s)- persistent but elusive spirit(s)
Friday, October 27, 2006 10:47 PM EDT
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The Bethany Christian Church and its 1-acre hillside cemetery is a picturesque and tranquil part of the scenery along Cabin Creek Road (Kentucky 984) in eastern Mason County. Old growth sugar maples, red cedars and Norway spruces shade the grounds. Prime young black walnut trees attract squirrels from nearby creek woods and the vast stretch of wild hill country buttressing the churchyard.
The church dates to the early 1870s, when Robert Bruce, scion of a noted Garrard and Lewis County clan, deeded the ground to the Disciples of Christ. Evidence is that the site was a cemetery before it became a churchyard. The oldest legible graves are of a Webster father and son, Union veterans of the Civil War, who both died in 1869. The congregation is still active, holding Bible school and communion services every Sunday morning, and the cemetery is still in use and diligently maintained. The current meeting-house, which had classrooms added in the 1970s and bathroom facilities in 2005, dates to 1918. An arsonist destroyed the original building at the end of 1916.
It is a beloved and peaceful place, the scene of many good works for over 130 years. But is it also the location of something mysterious -- perhaps sinister -- the lingering residues of tragedy? For many decades, there have been recurring tales and rumors of a female spirit there. We will call her the White Lady of Bethany or the Bethany Ghost for want of more original names. The stories and the ghost or ghosts are all the more frustrating because they elude those who are most close in location and sentiment to the church and the cemetery, such as the case with me: I have been a member of the church for 50 years and have taught Sunday school there for almost 40. The graves of my father, grandparents, several uncles, aunts, cousins and friends are there. I have walked over and passed by the site countless times in all seasons, day and night (even on Halloween!), but I have never seen the ghost. I have gone there on many a cold winter Saturday night to turn on the stoves to warm the building for the next morning’s service without a specter ever accosting me. But I am one of the stewards of the property and there attending to the Lord’s work. Perhaps the ghost respects my right to come there. And this seems true of all those who have such close ties to the church.
As a preliminary, I will now enter a serious discussion about what many people regard as a ridiculous topic. But indulge me; after all, the year is almost at Halloween, the season when it is permissible to reflect on such things as spooks and haunting.
The issue of ghosts and haunting is controversial and the majority of persons scoff at the notion of postmortem appearances. “I don’t believe in ghosts!” or “There’s no such thing as a ghost!” are stock responses when the subject arises. Yet, it is not difficult to find folks who do believe, and who have experienced personal encounters with the paranormal. For my part, I have never seen a ghost; I may in fact be one of those persons who do not see them. My oldest son, who has done some rudimentary ghost-hunting, believes that our local beings of ether avoid me, perhaps because they recognize my dominance of place. Yet I do not disbelieve. I admit the possibility -- even the likelihood -- of ghosts and haunting.
Ghosts are compatible with Christian tradition and the doctrines of both the Old and New Testaments, as well as with the beliefs of other major faiths and pagan groups. I realize that many devout persons will disagree because of their conviction that once death has freed the ghost from the body, it must always immediately pass into a spiritual realm of either bliss or misery. The Bible is clear that this is what is supposed to happen and that there will come an ultimate reckoning, but to insist that scripture disallows for a temporary dysfunction of the process is a presumptive leap. But a doctrinal debate is a diversion we will not take here.
Only adherents of atheism are beyond belief systems admitting the possibility of ghosts, for they disavow the existence of deities and spirits and hold that at death we enter a state of insensate oblivion. Death is the end of us -- period -- they say. Christians and others of spiritually-based religious faiths, on the other hand, believe that there is something more to us than the mortal body and death is not an end but a transformation. Thus, when one who is either a serious or nominal Christian derides the notion of haunting, he or she is not really stating a disbelief in the reality of spirits, but rather the refusal to admit that spirits of the dead might remain earthbound, and that the living might encounter them.
What is a ghost? The word as it is appears in the King James Version of the Bible is a translation of the Greek word, pneuma, wind, and a better rendering is “spirit.” We often say “Holy Ghost” and “Holy Spirit” interchangeably. When Jesus died on the cross, all four Gospel writers describe the moment of his death by saying that he “gave (or yielded) up the ghost.” He had used the Greek word for breath or wind as a metaphoric description for certain divine operations and to define the nature of the part of a human being that exists independently of the body’s biological functions and survives the death and dissolution of the body. We can use several familiar terms for this “spirit:” mind, personality, consciousness -- that bundle of thoughts, experiences, characteristics, and memories, which makes us who we are as individuals. Our bodies die, becoming to forensic scientists lumps of disgusting chemical changes, but our spirits -- the real we -- do not cease. We continue on.
The belief in an Afterlife is common to all cultures and religions, and the conventional view is that the spirits of the dead enter a realm of existence separate from the corporeal world. The Christian view is that the righteous pass to a pleasant place to be in the presence of God: call it Paradise (Jesus on the cross) or Abraham’s Bosom (Jesus in the story of Lazarus the Beggar and the rich man, which is not a parable.). The unrighteous spirit, however, crosses or descends to a place of horror and torment. Whether Paradise or Perdition, however, this is a temporary, spiritual state in which we await a bodily resurrection, which by implication of I Corinthians 15 and I Thessalonians 4 will occur when divine decree allows disembodied spirits to return to earth to repossess and reconstitute their physical forms.
So when our bodies succumb to the legion of maladies by which time, the environment, and our own behaviors abuse them, our consciousnesses are supposed to leave our already corrupting frames and pass compliantly to a place of reward or retribution, and the current version of this world will see us no more. Well, we are supposed to follow the norms and do or not do many things, but humans are aggravating and complex creatures; our maker has programmed contrariness into our deepest being, and while living, we often fail to do what we ought. Why could this not be the same in death? Let us not forget we are dealing with human personalities, and an unquiet spirit, a ghost, is still just that: a human personality.
In my investigations for this project I have encountered the notion that earthbound spirits are always those of “lost souls,” unredeemed persons unwilling to pass over and face punishment. “Saved” persons, this idea holds, would never choose to defer passage to a better place and remain behind as ghosts. There are difficulties with these views. Why would a guilty spirit have the option to defer punishment, any more than a criminal could avoid going to jail even though the hands of the police are upon him? Passing to bliss without delay would certainly be a logical decision, but we do not always do the logical thing, especially when under stress. Finding oneself suddenly dead could certainly produce stress!
Among serious paranormal investigators there are two schools of thought pertaining to ghostly appearances and haunting. The rationalist explanation, which fits into the area of offbeat science, is that in living and dying, human beings expend energy, and that this spent energy leaves electromagnetic imprints on the environment. Sometimes, we can detect and observe these impressions like a re-running film.
The other school has a spiritual or supernatural explanation for ghostly phenomena: the actual manifestations of stay-behind spirits of deceased persons. In many instances -- though relatively few out of the vast numbers who pass through life and death -- a dead person’s spirit, or ghost, does not behave in the preferred manner of passing into the realm of the afterlife, and remains earthbound; living persons can under certain conditions see these revenant spirits, or the spirits can choose to reveal themselves.
Why does this occur? According to the researchers, failure to cross over may be the result of choice or confusion. In the instance of a sudden or traumatic death, the person may not realize that she or she is dead, or may be unwilling to admit the condition. Willful lingering or haunting can be for a variety of reasons, among them unfinished business, the desire to correct an injustice, fear of what lies beyond, or in the case of those spirits Hans Holzer calls the “stay-behinds,” they simply like it here and aren’t ready to leave. “I love this house where I grew up and I like my farm, so why should I leave them?” the ghost might reason. We might remonstrate: “But wouldn’t you like to reunite with your parents and other departed loved ones?” “Oh, they’re still here too,” the ghost might reply.
There is another theory about ghosts among Christians who do not admit the possibility that deceased humans can linger as earthbound shades, yet must confront the reality of ghostly phenomena, perhaps having experienced it themselves. (Folks who deny the reality of human ghosts often have no difficulty in accepting demonic possession and exorcism because the New Testament clearly speaks of such.). This is the notion that “ghosts” are not the manifestations of stay-behind dead people, but rather demonic beings -- Satan’s cohort of fallen angels -- by trickery appearing in the likeness of deceased loved ones in order to dupe the living into doing evil. This is the fear that troubles Hamlet after the ghost of his father has urged him to revenge: “The spirit I have seen/May be the devil; and the devil hath power/T’ assume a pleasing shape…” (Hamlet, Act II, Scene II, lines 627-29). But such “true” ghostly appearances as this fictional one are rare, and the notion does not jive with the numerous instances of ghost sightings that do nothing other than annoy or frighten people, such as those associated with our White Lady. What Satanic purpose would such occurrences serve? The Devil and his servants are about the serious business of recruiting. It is unlikely they have energy to waste on pranks.
The fact is we all have a ghost, and while we are living it is as real a part of us as our blood, bones, skin, heart and brain. But these are ephemeral and corruptible while the ghost is immortal -- in bondage to the flesh as long as our bodies maintain a semblance of biological function. There will come a time when this ghost is all that remains of us, and the possibility exists that you or I -- indeed anyone -- might become the “thing that goes bump in the dark,” an apparition floating though a darkened hallway, or a wraith coalescing among the stones of a hillside graveyard. The choice may -- or may not be -- our own.
So, readers let us open our minds, and shed our conventions and prejudices like trees have surrendered their leaves to October’s frost and wind. The year is at the time for chills and stretching shadows; the moon waxes toward fullness and the earth’s daily cycle has increasingly more of darkness than of light to it, so let us journey together to a place where the rise of goose-flesh may have nothing to do with cold -- if we dare.
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