After penning 138 books as well as several plays, musicals, films, and documentaries and hosting a television show, the only thing that slows him down today is a mishap from an operation on his leg three years ago. What does it slow him down from? “Swing dancing,” he said. I laughed. Then I realized he wasn’t kidding. “Not just swing dancing, any kind of dancing!”
Supernaturally speaking, Dr. Holzer has seen and heard it all. He’s worked with psychic legends like Sybil Leek, he’s investigated some of the most prominent haunted locations around the world, and he’s come as close as a living person can to touching the “other side of life” – a term he’s quick to point out that he invented...
...“I’ve read you don’t like the term ‘supernatural’,” I said.
“I use the term because it is the one that people use,” Holzer said. “But nothing in my scientific view does not have an explanation. The question is, sooner we get it or later we get it, but there has to be an explanation. You can’t say nobody knows. I don’t accept that. And the paranormal is part of our experience – we just don’t always understand it as such.”
Eventually, we did get to speak about some of Holzer’s personal experiences. And while some people in this field of study have had personal experiences and believe that in itself makes them expert on knowing if a location is haunted, Holzer wants witnesses – several of them preferably, and the not-crazy kind. “That’s why I want to know my witness,” he said. “I ask them, ‘Who are you? What do you do for a living?’ I interview the witnesses. If there is a crazy in front of me, I’ll know it.
“My first visual experience was when I lived in New York City with my father in a penthouse apartment on Riverside Drive. I was asleep in bed, and I woke up and there was my mother dressed in a white nightgown, pushing my head back onto the pillow. My head had slipped off the pillow. At that time I was subject to migraines. Had I not had my head back on the pillow, I probably would’ve had one, and there would’ve been dizziness and I would’ve been out of business for a day. I said, ‘Oh, hello, Mama.’ And she disappeared.”
We talked about the difference between a ghost or a spirit – how a ghost is a residual entity, like a psychic imprint left in an area that some people can pick up, whereas a spirit is intelligent and interactive. Holzer also mentioned a third category I hadn’t heard about before: the “stay behinds.”
“‘Stay behinds’ are relatively common,” he said. “Somebody dies, and then they’re really surprised that all of a sudden they’re not dead. They’re alive like they were. They don’t understand it because they weren’t prepared for it. So they go back to what they knew most – their chair, their room, and they just sit there. Next, they want to let people know that they’re still ‘alive.’ So they’ll do little things like moving things, appear to relatives, pushing objects, poltergeist phenomena, and so on...”
Dr. Hans Holzer interview - A Lifetime of Explaining the Unexplained
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