What if ghost sightings are real, but the spirits behind them are not who they appear to be?
Many People Believe Ghosts are Real
Belief in ghosts remains surprisingly common. A 2025 YouGov survey found that 38% of Americans believe ghosts exist. Even more interesting, 60% said they had experienced at least one type of paranormal event, such as sensing an unexplained presence, hearing unexplained sounds or voices, or experiencing other phenomena they could not explain.
But what if millions of people aren’t necessarily wrong about what they experienced?
What if the deception isn’t that they experienced something supernatural, but that they have been deceived about what it was?
“I Have Seen Ghosts, So I Know They Exist”
Though I have never personally seen what I would have called a ghost, I believe many people who claim to have seen one really did see something.
My blog post I Think My House Is Haunted documents several experiences people typically attribute to ghosts: objects moving, footsteps, unexplained noises, eerie feelings, and other strange phenomena.
While I was experiencing these things, another member of my family saw what appeared to be two ghosts in the house. One appeared to be a middle-aged, balding man of Indian descent and the other a young girl. He saw these figures in various places throughout the house, including at times standing next to his bed.
As you can imagine, he found those experiences pretty creepy.
I have heard similar stories from other eyewitnesses whom I found very believable. Some people have even believed they recognized the person who appeared to them.
My sister, for instance, lived in a house where a relative had recently died. The woman had lived there for years and needed a wheelchair toward the end of her life. My sister and her roommates heard what sounded like a wheelchair moving through the hallway. Two of them even witnessed the apparition of a woman in a green dress approaching them.
Experiences like these can be extremely convincing.
If you saw someone who looked like a deceased relative, heard sounds associated with that person, or watched the figure of a human being appear beside your bed, wouldn’t you believe you had seen a ghost?
I did.
What Are Ghosts?
Because these apparitions often resemble people who once lived, it is natural to assume that ghosts are the disembodied spirits of people who have died.
That is what most of us mean when we use the word “ghost”: the spirit of a dead person who somehow remains in or returns to this world.
We imagine that perhaps they weren’t ready to enter the next life, so they continue roaming the places connected with their former lives.
Expressed through a medium, some apparent ghosts even seem to possess knowledge of the deceased person’s life, revealing names, events, relationships, and other details to mediums.
That can make the conclusion seem obvious: the dead person must still be here.
But in my own experiences, something about that explanation didn’t make sense.
The houses in which we experienced this activity were either brand new or recently built. There was no known connection between the people who appeared and our family or our home.
No one had died in the house. So why was a middle-aged man appearing there? Why a young girl? Why would these particular deceased people repeatedly appear in a home where they had never lived?
It didn’t prove that they weren’t ghosts, but it caused me to question an assumption I had previously taken for granted.
Maybe seeing a human-looking spirit doesn’t necessarily tell you what that spirit actually is.
And that leads to an important question:
If a spirit isn’t who it appears to be, why would it hide its true identity?
The Clue About Ghosts Given by a Medium
A few years ago, before I was saved, I was exploring New Age concepts and became intrigued by a television show about a medium. This medium traveled to residences where people claimed they were being haunted.
After supposedly communicating with one of the ghosts, she would explain the ghost’s story. She might describe how the person died or something that happened during the person’s life that supposedly prevented the spirit from “moving on.”
Then she would tell the ghost that it was free to leave and encourage it to “follow the light.”
Even though I believed in ghosts at the time, something about this seemed off.
Why did a ghost need a living person to tell it that it was allowed to leave?
Think about that.
This spirit had supposedly been living in the spiritual realm for decades. The medium had been living in the physical world her entire life.
Which one should know more about what happens after death?
Somehow, after roaming a house for 50 years, the ghost had never considered leaving. But after a brief conversation with a television medium, it suddenly realized it could move on?
That explanation didn’t make sense to me.
But then I heard something that made me consider a very different explanation.
The Deceptive Trap Set by Ghosts
The answer, for me, came in one statement I remember the medium making to a “ghost.”
The spirit claimed to have been a doctor who had murdered multiple patients.
The medium told him:
“You can go. There is no judgment.”
That statement stopped me.
What if that was the real message being delivered, not just to the supposed ghost, but to everyone watching?
There is no judgment.
No hell.
No ultimate accountability.
Everyone eventually follows the light and ends up somewhere good.
If that story is true, an enormous part of the Christian message collapses.
If there is no judgment, then we never ultimately answer for what we do.
If there is no justice, there is no need for mercy.
If there is no need for mercy, then why did Jesus Christ suffer and die on a cross?
Suddenly I began looking at the entire phenomenon differently.
What if the ghost wasn’t a confused dead person at all?
What if the entire encounter was designed to communicate a lie?
So Who Are the “Ghosts”?
After Jesus saved me, I learned that He had given believers authority over the enemy.
Eventually I decided to confront the spiritual activity in our own house.
I went through the house casting out every demon and every unclean spirit.
But I intentionally did not say anything about ghosts.
I wanted to see what would happen.
And something remarkable happened.
The apparitions stopped.
The older man disappeared. The young girl disappeared. The footsteps stopped. The unexplained movement of objects stopped.
The things we had called “ghosts” were gone along with the demonic activity.
To me, that answered a question I had been asking for years.
I no longer believed we had been living with the spirits of dead people.
I believed we had been dealing with something else entirely.
The Spirit May Be Real, But Its Identity May Not Be
Demons are deceivers. And deception works best when the lie looks believable.
Consider what would be required for a spirit to convince you that it was someone you loved who had died.
It might not take very much.
A spirit that had been present around people could observe their lives. It could hear conversations. It could know relationships, arguments, tragedies, celebrations, habits, nicknames, and private family stories.
Imagine that a spirit appeared to you looking like your deceased mother and then mentioned a conversation the two of you once had when no other person was in the room.
Wouldn’t that seem like proof?
You might reasonably think, Nobody else could possibly know that.
But what if someone else had been listening?
If spirits can observe us without being seen, then information that seems private to us may not necessarily have been private from the spiritual realm.
The deception wouldn’t require the spirit to possess your loved one’s memories. It would only need to know enough about those memories and experiences to make the impersonation believable.
And it might take only one convincing detail.
One conversation.
One childhood memory.
One family secret.
One event that seems impossible for anyone else to know.
Once that happens, the person hearing it may accept everything else the spirit says because its identity appears to have been proven.
That is what makes a familiar spirit so deceptive.
I use the term “familiar spirit” here to describe a spirit that has become familiar with a person, family, or circumstances and can use that knowledge deceptively. Such a spirit could potentially imitate the appearance, mannerisms, or knowledge of someone who has died and create the impression that the deceased person is communicating from beyond the grave.
This offers another explanation for one of the most convincing aspects of mediumship:
How can a medium sometimes reveal accurate information about someone who has died?
The assumption is usually that accurate information proves the identity of the source.
But it doesn’t.
Accurate information does not necessarily prove an honest source.
A convincing impersonator mixes truth with deception because the truth establishes credibility.
That may be one of the most important lessons in this entire subject:
Something supernatural can be real and still be deceptive.
Why Would Demons Pretend to Be Ghosts?
Why go through all this trouble?
Because the deception can accomplish much more than frightening someone in a dark hallway.
If you become convinced that deceased people remain here, communicate through mediums, eventually “follow the light,” and face no judgment, those beliefs can fundamentally change how you understand death, God, and eternity.
You may begin to believe that everyone reaches the same destination.
That there is no judgment.
That there is no hell.
And ultimately, that there is no need for a Savior.
That is where the deception leads.
The Bible’s warning about mediums and spirits isn’t there because the spiritual world is imaginary.
It is there because the spiritual world is real, and not every spirit should be trusted.
So are ghosts real?
If by “ghost” you mean that people sometimes see unexplained human-like apparitions, I believe many of those experiences may be very real.
But if by “ghost” you mean the wandering spirit of a dead person haunting a house or communicating through a medium, I have come to a very different conclusion.
The apparition may be real.
The identity may be the lie.
Don’t blindly trust something merely because it comes from the spiritual realm.
Seek the truth. Test what you are being shown. And most importantly, seek the One who called Himself the Truth: Jesus Christ.
But Didn’t Samuel Appear After He Died?
There is an important biblical account that needs to be addressed.
In 1 Samuel 28, King Saul went to the medium of Endor and asked her to bring up Samuel, who had died. Samuel appeared and delivered a message of judgment to Saul.
I believe this was a real appearance of Samuel.
But notice what the account does not describe.
Samuel was not wandering through Saul’s palace.
He was not haunting Israel.
He was not repeatedly appearing to people.
He did not remain on earth after his death waiting for someone to discover him.
God permitted Samuel to appear for a specific and limited purpose. Samuel delivered his message to Israel’s king, and the encounter ended.
The same distinction can be seen when Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus at the Transfiguration. Their appearance was purposeful and temporary.
These extraordinary biblical events are very different from the modern concept of a dead person remaining behind indefinitely, haunting a house, moving objects, or routinely speaking through mediums.
In fact, Scripture repeatedly warns people not to seek communication with the dead through mediums and spiritists.
So the Bible does show that God can permit someone who has died to appear when He chooses.
But that is very different from assuming that every human-looking spirit is the person it claims to be.
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Resources:
https://www.newsweek.com/more-45-percent-americans-believe-demons-ghosts-are-real-survey-1466743
Note: The Bible mentions demons many times and mentions the spirits of men who reside off the surface of the earth, but never mentions ghosts other than as mistaken identities or in association with mediums and spiritualists.
Relevant Scripture:
Isaiah 19:3 – “Then the spirit of the Egyptians will be demoralized within them; And I will confound their strategy, So that they will resort to idols and ghosts of the dead And to mediums and spiritists.
1 Samuel 28:13-14 – …“I see a divine being coming up out of the earth.” He said to her, “What is his form?” And she said, “An old man is coming up, and he is wrapped with a robe.” And Saul knew that it was Samuel, and he bowed with his face to the ground and did homage.
Matthew 17:3 – And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, talking with Him.
Matthew 14:26 – When the disciples saw Him walking on the sea, they were terrified, and said, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear.
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