If someone asks me now if I believe in ghosts, my answer would be “‘yes” and “no.” Yes, I do believe that a spirit world exists; but no, I don’t believe that ghosts are dead people who have come to haunt the living.

There was a point in time — mainly, when I was a child — when I really believed that ‘ghosts’ were those restless souls of the recently departed, who roamed around the terrestrial sphere for 40 days to attend to some unfinished business. They would pay their loved ones and acquiantances a visit and make their (spooky) presence known.

Let me share some real ghost stories first before I proceed in making my point.

A few days after my paternal grandmother in the US died, our phone at home would ring at the stroke of midnight for a whole week. We would lift the receiver, only to find out after saying a sleepy “Hello” that there was nobody on the other end of the line. When I answered the phone one time, I heard only the sound of soft breathing. “That probably was your Lola,” my mother later said. “Maybe she wanted to talk to you.” I was her favorite grandchild.

That was enough to scare me (I was just 12 then…what did I know?). My grandmother, you see, was a spiritista. (I was told that she, along with her little sister, my great-aunt, and some friends, had “talked” to dead people during their regular sessions in San Juan.)

Years later, after the death of my mom’s beloved uncle, our battery-less smoke alarm in the kitchen would beep at 3 a.m. for three consecutive days. There was no logical explanation for this: there was no battery inside the gadget and nobody was cooking at that time. Of course we all heard the loud beeping sound — who couldn’t? — but nobody bothered to check out what caused the smoke alarm to go off like that — no, not even my dad, who had always declared that he was “fearless.”

And so, these real-life paranormal happenings reinforced my initial belief that dead people can really come back in spirit form — to haunt the living. This was what I was thinking when, with a vindictive streak, I whispered to a grade school classmate, who was a real bully, during a pre-funeral mass in church, “When I die, I’d pay you a visit in your house, grab both your feet with my cold hands, and drag you out of bed!” I swear, my classmate instantly turned pale after I made that remark. (I was a horror film junkie, and I had such vivid imagination.)

But things changed when I became a Bible-believing Christian (you get to learn the truth when you study the Scriptures closely). I learned in due time that the truth concerning ghosts and spirits had been twisted. I won’t elaborate now on the biblical basis that led me to this conclusion. But allow me to say this: there’s no life on earth after death. There’s no such thing as an immortal soul. Dead people can’t make visitations in spirit form after their demise. Dead people are as good as…well, dead. They can’t do us any harm, really.

These “ghosts” we see and hear– they’re not our dearly departed. They’re actually evil spirits that intend to instill fear in our hearts and mislead us.

The sooner I shared this truth with those who cared to listen, the sooner the evil spirits came hounding me. I’m not exaggerating.

Electronic items at home or in the office (e.g., cassette player, radio, TV set, alarm clock) would simultaneously turn on and off, without any human intervention. Ladies in white or black shadows would walk past me every time I was home alone. Invisible forces would push me around in my room in a tourist inn. Eerie sounds, like that of a woman wailing, could be heard along the empty corridor nearby. And creepy images (e.g., a monstrous-looking claw or a curly-haired girl who was not supposed to be in the picture) would later be seen in my newly developed analog photos.

Every time I went to the provinces to attend to my journalistic assignments, I would always bring home with me “horror stories” as pasalubongs. “Ate, someone was packing my bags in Benguet on my last night…” “Mom, someone was jumping on my bed when we stayed in this place on Mt. Makiling…” “Someone was running around my bed when I tried to sleep in my guest room in Marinduque…” “I was talking to my roommates in this Palawan tourist inn when someone suddenly turned on the TV…” And so on and so forth.

Fortunately, I stopped seeing or hearing spirits when my “third eye” — I was, after all, an active medium’s granddaughter, and I had dealt with the occult in the distant past — was “closed” a few years ago during a prayer session with missionaries.

The bottom line is, I believe that paranormal things do happen. However, we should not be tricked into believing that ghosts are dead human beings, who have come back to communicate with the living. Here is where the big deception lies. Unfortunately, many people are drawn into it.

While I believe that ghosts and spirits exist, I think it’s vital to question who is truly behind the creepy paranormal activities of these ‘creatures.’ Surely, God is not in the business of scaring us stiff when we least expect it.

TIDBITS: On a lighter note, did you know that graves are recycled in Switzerland after 25 years of use? This basically means that 25-year-old corpses are removed from their graves to give way to ‘fresh dead bodies.’ Talk about Swiss recycling at its most grotesque.

Many years ago, I heard a library science professor speak about the real concept of book ownership during a book acquisition lecture. A voracious reader, he wanted to share with his students what it truly meant to ‘own a book.’

“To own a book goes beyond purhasing a book at the bookstore and putting it on your shelf back home,” he said. “No, it’s more than that. The only time you can say you own a book is when you’ve read it from cover to cover and have mastered its content by heart.”

It was such an erudite remark that I had to share it with my sister who, like me, is a certified bookworm. “That’s a great definition,” my sister said. In the months — and years — to come, my sister and I would read each other’s book purchases and declare at the end of each reading conquest, “Hey, I own your book!”

I can’t remember how many times my sister had told me this line. She had read most of my books (mostly modern classics, humor books, how-to books, self-help bestsellers, comic books, and reference books on PR writing and journalism) more than I had read hers (mostly must-read classics). Well, with my busy schedule as a journalist at that time, I couldn’t read as many books as I wanted to. More often than not, she would own my freshly purchased book even before I had the chance to flip through the first few pages! She would sometimes tease me that she was the rightful owner of some of my books (I’ve still not yet read all the books I had bought in the past — shame on me!).

Now, here’s the funny thing: my older brother is an avid book collector. When he was still living in Manila — he now resides in the US — he would buy lots of medical books as well as Christian books, and his bedroom would eventually look like a mini library of sorts. I loved his Christian book collection and found myself poring over his books during, say, my two-hour bus journeys from our home to the office and vice versa. Eventually, I ended up becoming the real ‘owner’ of his Christian books just because he had not found the time to read most of them — even to this day. He was more a book hoarder than a reader.

Fortunately, I now have more time to ‘own borrowed books’ on a regular basis here in Switzerland — although I still buy books online and offline as I was wont to do in the past — thanks to my public library membership and my less hectic timetable.

It was great to read from start to finish, for instance, Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Soseki Natsumi’s Botchan, Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, Mitsuyo Kakuta’s Woman on the Other Shore, Sue Townsend’s Number 10 and Rebuilding Coventry, and be able to say to myself after reading the last page of each borrowed book, “Yes, I finally own this book!”

The other day, when I returned some DVDs at the library, I spotted Alex Haley’s Roots displayed on the English section shelf. My family has a copy of that book in Manila, but I never got around to reading it in the past. What a pity.

I really want to own Roots soon, without having to buy a copy on Amazon (not yet, anyway). Owning a book has never been so meaningful. Thanks, Prof. Cobaria, for your enlightening insight.

TIDBITS: There’s a nice English bookstore located in the university town of Neuchatel called Used Ink, which sells used English books (something like what Booksale does in Metro Manila, albeit on a much smaller scale). Owned by an American expat, Used Ink also sells secondhand French titles. The bookstore relies mainly on book donations from owners of English/French books. For more information on how to get there, you can visit the Used Ink website here.