Do the souls appear to the living? What about “ghosts”?
Common teaching Private revelation
Common teaching What the Church holds
God may permit the dead to appear — St Augustine allowed it — but no particular apparition is an object of faith. The Directory on Popular Piety warns against divination and against reading dreams about the dead as messages.
Private revelation What the saints and mystics report
A very old strand of the accounts says some souls serve part of their Purgatory on earth, where they sinned: a monk in his own choir stall, a deacon at the baths, a banker in his own house. The books use the word “ghost” only to deny it — Schouppe calls a haunting a forgotten soul claiming the prayers due to it — and no witness says a soul is trapped, lost, or needs a medium.
Accounts that bear on this
- MED-02Gregory the Great: Deacon Paschasius serving at the baths; gone after Germanus prays (Gregory, Dial. IV)
- MED-60Bl Stephen OFM: a dead religious does his Purgatory in his own choir stall for tepidity, brightening with each De Profundis
- MOD-02Latrobe Abbey: Latrobe, 1859: a Benedictine in choir dress appears daily at 11 a.m. or 2 a.m., unheeded for 77 years; seven Masses, …
- MOD-03Antwerp: the soul of a banker (d. 1636) wakes a child nightly, an old man seen to the waist in old-fashioned dress; the …
- MOD-15Monk of Messina: The monk of Messina: for 140 years a monk steps from behind the altar at midnight asking for a Mass; a priest …