Introduction

They move silently among us. Sometimes we hear them—or think we do. A whisper. A giggle. A cough. In the next instant the sound is swallowed by the quiet and we are left to wonder if we only imagined it.

My friend Janice stopped by my house recently and when she rang the doorbell she heard the usual hysterical ruckus my dogs kick up whenever a visitor arrives. As she waited she heard a woman’s voice soothe the animals. “Shhh. Quiet now. Quiet.”

“The dogs quieted down,” Janice told me. “But no one opened the door. That’s when I knew it couldn’t have been you I heard.”

It certainly wasn’t. Janice’s teenage daughter, April, had been visiting me all morning and we had left half an hour earlier to walk to a nearby coffee shop.

“I knew you and April wouldn’t just ignore me,” said Janice. “I thought it could have been a ghost I heard. But I guess it could have been my imagination.”

Maybe. Maybe not.

That’s the way it often is with spirit encounters. They can be so faint and so fast that it is easy to dismiss them. Yet there are cases of those who not only hear ghosts clearly, but see them and interact with them. They, in fact, often do not suspect the “people” they are talking to are ethereal beings until they vanish before their eyes.

These are the stories that impress me the most—spirits appearing as seemingly solid human beings, so vivid and colorful there is no doubt they are real. The more witnesses, the better.

Yet ghosts may manifest as nothing more than an out-of-place shadow, a smoky shape swirling past, a tap on the shoulder, or a soft voice speaking a single word. Often just one person witnesses this type of paranormal event that is over so swiftly it is as if the universe hiccuped. Things were out of kilter for a fraction of a moment. The next moment, everything was normal again.

Perhaps you have had one of these encounters.

Perhaps you did and did not even notice.

Or maybe you are one of the lucky ones who actually got to see a fully materialized ghost.

Do you doubt there are ghosts among us?

If you do, that does not bother me one little bit. I simply hope you will be entertained by what I believe are true accounts of ghosts among us.

Fix yourself a cup of cocoa, find your favorite lap cat, sink into a comfortable chair, and be prepared to see some very interesting ghosts emerge in the following pages.

Oh, and if you feel someone breathing on the back of your neck, do not be alarmed. It is probably just a ghost reading over your shoulder.