Ghost Stories and the Eye of Faith

I like a spooky story. I like (plausible) spooky stories because they disrupt the arrogant certainties of scientific materialism and fit with the ornate cosmos I see revealed in the Bible: a world of angels and demons and spiritual powers and unclean spirits (whatever they are). I like the idea that there is a hidden world that still reveals itself and confounds atheists and materialists—even when that revelation is malign.

Encounters with the Other World

Over the last year or so, I have been listening on and off to “Otherworld”—a curated podcast that collects first-person accounts of all kinds of weird and wonderful experiences ranging from encounters with cryptids (Bigfoot, etc.) to weird timeshifts and hauntings. The stories are sometimes implausible, sometimes silly, sometimes creepily entertaining, and sometimes very believable.

We have nothing to fear from the world of spooks if we belong the One who created them.

And sometimes they are very interesting from a Christian perspective. One of the recurring motifs in the show is the power of prayer to the Christian God:

• nobody wants to stay in a certain hotel room (the site of a suicide) until the cleaning staff hold a prayer meeting in there;
• a young couple experiences poltergeist-like disturbances until her minister father comes and prays in the house;
• a pair of liberal Presbyterians are startled to discover that demon possession is real and that the demons give way before the name of Jesus.

A particularly striking (and sort of funny) example comes from Rhys, a young man from Queensland who for years, finds himself harassed by a dark figure that visits him nightly. One of his classmates, having watched “way too many horror movies,” advises Rhys to pray. Here is what happens next:

I sat up and, and said it to myself at first. And then … I did like the sign of the cross in my fingers and I said, ‘In the name of the Father, the Son of the Holy Spirit, you know, be, be gone from my room.’ … And it raced outta my room so quickly that it blew all my posters off my wall … I didn’t sleep for the rest of the night, but nothing happened for the rest of the night. Nothing happened in that room ever again in my entire time living in there.

Rhys seems to have been given some kind of faith as a result of this experience. He says that

… for years I was like, not a churchgoing Christian, but I had like a relationship with God because of that event … If you have an experience where you are having a little fight with a demon in your room, it’s not so ridiculous to think that, you know, there’s a God out there.

Unfortunately even this vague response is the exception. The host of the podcast seems to not even notice that something very different is gong on here. Nobody stops to wonder about the common factor in these decisive encounters. Nobody asks why believing prayers to Jesus work so much better the standard, hit-and-miss approach of tell-it-to-go-away-and-burn-some-sage.

The King of Glory and the Eye of Faith

But this is what we should expect. Even in the Gospels, where we see the most naked display of the power of Jesus—when the demons fall shrieking and pleading—most people don’t get it. Human onlookers explain it away: he’s mad … he’s demon possessed … he casts out demons by the Prince of Demons. As today, people go to great lengths to avoid drawing inconvenient conclusions that might demand some kind of surrender. 

And yet to the eye of faith, spooky stories like the ones described are encouraging. They show that the name of Jesus still strikes fear into the hearts of his enemies. They prove that we have nothing to fear from the world of spooks if we belong the One who created them (Col 1:16), terrified them on earth, and who now rules over them from heaven (Eph 1:20; 1Pet 3:22).

Spooky stories remind us to draw close to Jesus, our great defender in the dark.

Note: This is an updated and altered version of last year’s Halloween post. Click here if you would like to see that one.