Do YOU Believe in Ghosts?

As far as I'm concerned, the jury is still out when it comes to ghosts. Once -- late at night -- I thought I felt a "presence" in my room, but it turned out to be my mother-in-law who occasionally sleepwalks. When I was 10 I thought I saw a UFO. Personally I'm more apt to believe in UFO's, because honestly -- if we are the only beings that exist in the entire cosmos than the earth as a whole is in big trouble. I'm hoping that before we blow ourselves up we can make contact with ET or its cousin.

According to the Associated Press -- the poll, which was conducted Oct. 16-18 and involved telephone interviews with 1,013 adults and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points - revealed that roughly one-third of those surveyed believe in things that go bump in the night or come from some other galaxy. That's about the same as the 36 percent of those polled who said they are baseball fans; the 37 percent who said the U.S. made the right decision to invade Iraq; or the 31 percent who approve of the job President Bush is doing. I'm not sure if there's a connection there or not, but I can tell you I believe in UFO's and kind of ghosts and that has nothing to do with how I think President Bush is doing. Which -- come to think of it -- scares me a heck of a lot more than a ghost or UFO ever would.

Lots of people think they have seen a ghost and a lot of people think they've seen UFO's. But for some reason, many polls -- including this one -- try to make a correlation between low income level and UFO/ghost sightings. This is another statistic that perplexes me because it tries to lend credence to the fact that those individuals who have seen a UFO or a ghost or whatever are not educated and because they are not educated they tend to believe in things they don't understand. I think I'm pretty educated -- but you better not try to tell me Santa Claus doesn't exist or we're gonna have some serious problems.

There are some cool websites that can increase your understanding of things that -- well -- are beyond our understanding. The best of the bunch in my humble opinion is Cryptomundo.com (which I recently wrote about and which you can check out by clicking www.crptomundo.com. It's a great site that is not only informative but is also run by some extremely well-read individuals and also contributed to and enjoyed by some extremely intelligent individuals. And no -- I don't get paid for saying any of that -- it's just my opinion.

But getting back to this recent poll, it reminds me that there are individuals who are adamant that ghosts exist. And there are those that individuals who were consumed by the search for proof that ghosts exist but came up empty handed. Escape artist extraordinaire Harry Houdini spent a good part of his life trying to make contact with is late mother but always came up empty handed. And if I remember correctly, Harry's wife spent a good part of HER life trying to make contact with Houdini after he died unexpectedly -- and she came up empty handed as well. And in the spirit of ghosts and Halloween -- I might as well add, that Houdini's wife conducted a séance every Halloween at midnight in hopes of contacting her late husband -- but that's a story for another time. In fact, maybe I'll write about it on Halloween.

So as interesting as this AP poll/survey is -- it doesn't prove a whole lot. Except that maybe more and more individuals are looking to make contact with something or someone. Who knows -- maybe this Halloween someone will.