Holy Ghosts

Or How a (Not-so) Good Catholic Boy Became a Believer in Things that Go Bump in the Night

By: Gary Jansen

Narrated by: Gary Jansen

Length: 3 hrs and 58 mins

Publisher's summary

In this extraordinary true story, the haunting of a Long Island household forces a respected writer and editor to reevaluate the mysteries of life and death as he struggles with the frightening truths of his childhood home and his town’s past. Growing up in Rockville Centre, Long Island, Gary Jansen never believed in ghosts. His mother—a devoutly Catholic woman with a keen sense for the uncanny—claimed that their family house was haunted. But Jansen never found anything inexplicable in how their doorbell would sometimes ring of its own accord or in the mysterious sounds of footsteps or breaking glass that occasionally would fill their home - or even in his mother’s sometimes unnervingly accurate visions of future events and tragedies. Though he once experienced a supernatural encounter in a Prague church as a young man, Jansen grew up into a rationalist, as well as a noted writer and editor.

In 2001 Jansen moved back into the very same house where he had once grown up, to raise a family with his wife. In 2007 he encountered a frightening, full-blown haunting in his home. This was the first episode of a phenomenon that lasted a full year and eventually included unveiling the identities of the spirits who occupied his house, reliving a tragic murder in his hometown, encountering mind-boggling coincidences between local history and episodes in his household; and finally—with the help of Mary Ann Winkowski, the real-life inspiration for TV’s Ghost Whisperer—ridding his house of these uninvited visitors.

Holy Ghosts is not only a gripping true-life ghost story, but a wry and touching memoir, as well as a meditation on the relationship between religion and the paranormal, which are often considered at odds, but which the author shows are intimately linked.

©2010 Gary Jansen (P)2010 Gildan Media Corp

Critic reviews

“ Holy Ghosts took me into a completely convincing but very different version of reality from the one we live in. It serves as a forceful and fascinating reminder that we do not see the world that is, but only the part we have chosen to see. There are dangers and wonders in the dark, and Holy Ghosts affirms that they are very real.” (Whitley Strieber, author of Communion and The Omega Point)

Catholic boy consults psychic,aludes to numerology

The title led me to believe he worked to reconcile Christianity and ghosts. Instead, he embraces the unholy use of a (good) psychic. Not sure why he didn't go ahead and consult a numerologist to answer his date conundrum since he had already made the leap from the arms of the church. If you want a writer's personal experience with ghosts, it is a reasonable read. If you are looking for a better understanding of a Christian perspective on dealing with the unseen, keep looking.