Dr. Hans Holzer's experiences with things that go bump in the night and the expansive nature of spirit friends transcend popular images of Casper and Halloween haunting. In fact, he speaks of ghosts and other spirit entities as if they are real people, like you and I, who are simply headed for or living in a different dimension. With the world’s most noted counselor to the disembodied spirits, sitting around telling ghost stories takes on new meaning. "I’m a scientist and this does not mean to know, it means to quest for knowledge," he clarifies. "It’s never finite. It always keeps changing and moving and you learn new things. But you do have to have standards. And scientific standards preclude me from accepting some of these fantasies."

"The other side tends to confirm what most religions teach," says Holzer. "If it weren’t for the facts of parapsychology, religion wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. Religion takes some of the evidence, which we know in parapsychology, and uses it for its own end--to distort the truth, to get people to obey. I’m not against organized religion, but spirituality is not religious; spirituality is a way of life. You don’t need intermediaries for that."

There’s no "supernatural world." Everything that exists is natural.

Rev. Laurie Sue: Do you believe in ghosts?

Hans Holzer: I don’t believe in anything. Belief is the uncritical acceptance of something you can’t prove. I work on evidence; I either know or I don’t know. There are three dirty words in my vocabulary: belief, disbelief and supernatural. They don’t exist. There’s no "supernatural world." Everything that exists is natural.

Yet there is a dimension of existence that is as real as your living room, even if the average person cannot access it with all their senses?

I coined the phrase "the other side" because it really is the other side, like one side of the mirror. The spirit world, or "the world next door," as Eileen Garrett called it, is not up or down. It is here, moving at a different rate of speed. And the dimension into which we all pass--except ghosts, because they can’t get into it until they are liberated from their compulsions--is concentric with this dimension. It exists in the same special area, but because it’s strung out further, it does not clash with the thicker atmosphere, the thicker dimension, in which we exist.

What’s "the other side" like?

Everything we have here they have over there. This is a duplicate of this world except over there the purpose is to develop the personality from the negative to the positive, or to give them assignments or to send them down for some more education.

We are all spirit.

What is the difference between a ghost and a spirit?

We are all spirit. When we pass on, we simply get rid of the outer layer and, underneath, there really is a duplicate layer. This inner body--like an inner tube of a tire--is where our personality resides. At death the physical body is worn out and dissolved, so the inner body is where we live. So we need to have an atmosphere, a dimension, that fits this inner body and that’s the world of spirit, or the etheric world. The etheric world is all around us. At death, we ride out into that world and we are right there. That’s our normal transition. However, once in a while something goes wrong when somebody passes from the physical state.