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Home » News » Opinion » Columnists » Tom Purcell |  | Thursday, November 17, 2005
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Politics of the paranormal
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By Tom Purcell Sunday, October 30, 2005 It's Halloween and we all know what that means: something else to howl about. According to a Gallup poll, more than a third of Americans believe in haunted houses, possession by the devil, ghosts, telepathy, extraterrestrial beings having visited Earth, and clairvoyance. More than half believe in psychic healing and extrasensory perception. What's most interesting is how beliefs break down by age, gender, education, religion and political ideology. More than half of the folks under 30, for instance, believe in ghosts, whereas only 8 percent of people 65 and older do.
As for gender, women are more likely than men to believe in ghosts. They're more likely to believe that people can communicate with the dead, too, and for some women this is the preferred way of communicating with their husbands. Men are more skeptical about such things, though we're more likely to believe in extraterrestrials. We're also more likely to cite abduction by aliens as the reason we were out late the night before. Education plays an interesting role in belief. The more educated people become, the less likely they are to believe in astrology, haunted houses and possession by the devil. They are more likely to trust in the power of the mind and its ability to heal the body. Keep in mind, though, educated people -- in the liberal arts fields, anyhow -- are more likely to trust in the power of government, too. They're more likely to pine for months after Northeastern liberals lose presidential elections. Ghostly belief breaks down along religious fault lines, too. If a fellow is religious, he's less likely to believe in extraterrestrials and more likely to believe one's soul can be possessed by the devil. He's especially likely to believe this if he has memories of the Clinton era. That brings us to political ideology. Among liberals, 42 percent believe in ghosts compared to 25 percent of conservatives. As a rule, liberals prefer supernatural beings who aren't omnipotent, demanding and judgmental. I don't know what to make of these Gallup findings. Though I can be accused of being both educated and conservative, it seems to me there are lots of dimensions we don't yet understand. I'm no psychic, but I did have an interesting experience once. When I was a freshman in college, I woke suddenly one weekend about 2 a.m. I had a vivid dream about an old elementary school friend I'd not talked to or even thought about for years. A few days later, I learned he died in a car accident the night I had that dream. As for ghosts, my brother-in-law, a skeptical fellow, swears he saw one and I believe him. He went to college in Indiana, Pa., and lived in a big old house with five other fellows. Two elderly sisters had lived downstairs and one of them had recently died. One Friday afternoon he was in the house alone packing for a trip. He got the sense someone was looking at him. He turned to see an old woman in a purple sweater floating in the air -- her composition was consistent with vapor coming out of a tailpipe on a cold morning. "What did you do?" I asked him. "I did a Tony Dorsett," he said. "I faked left and cut right." With all the planets and stars in the cosmos, it would be awfully conceited to believe we're the only ones inhabiting the universe. I'll bet there are other creatures on other planets. Some are less advanced than we, while some may be light-years ahead. But I'll bet they have the same struggles with good and evil that we do. I'll bet they have honest beings locked in a perpetual struggle with opportunists and charlatans. I'll bet some beings are trying to politicize and argue about every aspect of life. They're probably howling about whether ghosts and extraterrestrials exist, too. Which, from their distant perspective, makes us the elusive beings from another planet. Tom Purcell, a free-lance writer, lives in Mt. Lebanon. E-mail him at TomPurcell@aol.com. You can also visit him on the Web at www.TomPurcell.com
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