Mysteries and the Unexplained in Credo: Ghosts, Hauntings & The Supernatural

From Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained
Visual appearances of people, animals or objects that are not materially present.

From Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained
The name given to apparitions that are perceived simultaneously by two or more people.

From Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained
Ghosts of living individuals seen elsewhere at the moment of their death or when they are suffering a trauma.

From Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained
The performance of a ritual, usually by a priest or other religious authority, to drive out a spirit or demon believed to have possessed a person or place.

The term 'ghost' has been used popularly for centuries, but defies precise definition. Broadly speaking, it encompasses alleged manifestations believed to arise from a human being or animal, once living and now deceased.

From Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained
'Ghosts' which appear to be of living persons rather than the deceased.

From Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained
Domestic dwellings that are allegedly subject to hauntings; haunted houses are recorded in many cultures.

From Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained
Place-, person- or object-centered spontaneous paranormal phenomena – the word is popularly understood to relate to cases where the events are said to be caused by discarnate, supernatural entities.

From Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained
Ghosts that are seen or experienced on a series of different occasions.

From Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained
A once-popular pastime involving the alleged photographing of spirits.

From Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained
A theory that suggests that recurrent hauntings are a form of recording on the material environment analogous to video or audio tapes.

In Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained
A collective term for various types of supernatural entities which are dead, but which behave as if still alive; applied especially to vampires and zombies.

In contemporary popular culture, vampires are fictitious immortal creatures of the night who sustain themselves by drinking the blood of the living. These undead creatures might be the unsettled souls of criminals or suicide victims. They may have been victims of other vampires, as those who are attacked by vampires are fated to become vampires themselves.

More fiction than fact, zombies are said to be the mindless 'undead'.

In The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters
Ghosts and spirits have always held crucial symbolic value in the European cultural heritage.

In The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters
The British tradition of ghostly narratives long predates the familiar Victorian ghost story.

In The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters
Ghosts in literature and cinema of the United States and Canada, though often appearing for familiar reasons such as vengeance or lost love, quite frequently reflect larger thematic concerns unique to their eras.

In The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters
In Latin America, ghosts in literature often represent contemporary philosophical or political concerns, while ghosts in horror films reveal social and moral dilemmas.

In The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters
In much of African and Caribbean literature, the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead is permeable.

In The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters
As in East and Southeast Asia, ghosts in India fall into several categories, which are further distinguished by regional (and thus dialectal) differences.

In The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters
In Southeast Asia, “ghost” refers to a large variety of supernatural creatures, comprising such diverse entities as Buddhist ghosts, certain monsters, and spirits of the dead.

In The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters
Despite a skeptical tradition well established by the mid first millennium BCE and repeated in well-known injunctions from Confucius (traditionally 551–479 BCE) to “keep ghosts and spirits at a distance” (Analects 7.22), ghosts abound in Chinese literature.

In The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters
The stereotypical image of the Japanese ghost—most commonly referred to today as a yūrei (literally, “hazy spirit”)—is of a woman with long, black, disheveled hair and no feet wearing a traditional white death robe.

In Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained
The claimed ability to obtain information without using the known senses.

From Elsevier's Dictionary of Psychological Theories
The paranormal class of effects refers to supernatural events/results (“beyond the normal”) that are inexplicable by the usual laws of science and/or reason.

Study of paranormal phenomena, which are generally subdivided into two types: extrasensory perception (ESP), or the paracognitive; and psychokinesis (PK), telekinesis, or the paraphysical – movement of an object without the use of physical force or energy.

A mysterious invisible force asserted to cause a number of phenomena, most commonly noises (bangs, thuds and rappings) and object movements (from the hurling of smaller items, to the lifting and upsetting of large pieces of furniture).

From Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained
The scientific investigation of claims of psychic powers and paranormal events.

The most famous vampire in literature, created by the Irish writer Bram Stoker in his 1897 novel of the same name. Although the book was only a modest success in Stoker’s own lifetime, after his death it went on to inspire a huge body of literature, film, drama and academic study, and sparked off an enduring popular interest in the subject of vampires.

Once a year, starting at the end of October, Mexicans celebrate death in a national fiesta known as Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). During the festival, the living invite their dead to join with the family and to share a meal and time together before they return to the land of the dead.

In Shakespeare's Theatre: A Dictionary of His Stage Context
The reappearance of dead characters to the living is not very common in Shakespeare, being mostly a matter of figures who died untimely deaths, such as Richard Ill’s victims, Old Hamlet, Julius Caesar and Ban quo.

Tales in which the spirits of the dead encounter the living emerge from almost every culture, but it was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that Europeans began to construct ghost stories as they would be categorized today.

Literary genre established by Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) and marked by mystery, violence, and horror; other pre-20th century practitioners were the English writers Ann Radcliffe, Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis, Mary Shelley, the Irish writer Bram Stoker, and the US writer Edgar Allen Poe.

October 31, the eve of All Saints' Day, observed with traditional games and customs.

From The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters A haunted house is a dwelling in which a generally evil and ostensibly supernatural entity, traditionally a ghost, manifests itself.

From The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters
The mummy is a corpse, preserved by natural desiccation or embalming. In horror, the mummy comes to life, often to fulfill a curse on those who desecrate its tomb or to pursue its reincarnated lover in the modern world.

From Chambers Film Factfinder
A radiation leak reanimates the dead, giving them a craving for living flesh. A group of survivors take refuge in a dilapidated farmhouse, where their weakness and panic prove as dangerous as the lumbering ‘undead’ massing outside.