Today is the Dia De Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. It’s a day when (mostly) Mexicans celebrate the lives of the departed. However, though they may have left their bodies, some may have not exactly departed…

We [Vedic culture], like most indigenous cultures, hold a belief in ghosts. We believe that every living thing is spirit, the soul. This soul has a body. The soul also has a “subtle body.” The subtle body is basically your mind, emotions, stuff like that.

Ghosts, we believe, are the soul and the subtle body, the soul and the mind together, without a body. In fact, we often call ghosts DLE’s, Disembodied Living Entities.

These DLE’s are just like us. We are all spirit souls. The only difference is that they don’t have bodies. However, this is where the problem lies. They have a mind and thus every bodily desire that we have, but no way to fulfill those desires.

It’s because of this, I feel, that most ghosts are a bit crazy. They’re pretty much alone with just themselves, have every desire you can think of and not a single way to deal with these desires. Their only entertainment seems to be messing with the living. I’m sure that gets boring. And eventually, after years and years of this, they go insane.

We also have some knowledge about what attracts ghosts. They are attracted by the night, unclean places (like dirty, etc), and people talking about them (they’re bored). I’ve also heard that they’re attracted by whistling at twilight, but honestly, I’ve never tried it.

Some personal experiences at New Vrndavana.
I’ve have some personal experiences with ghosts in the apartments at New Vrndavana. It was pretty amazingly freaky. My neighbors did as well. I’m not “sensitive” to ghosts – I can’t see them or hear them, but a few of my neighbors could. So could my poor cats.

The “ghosts” (or whatever they were) would mess with the cats. I could always tell when there was going to be an “attack” because the cats would start to freak out. And then it would begin. I’d hear the neighbors stirring, blowing a conch shell or chanting “Hare Krishna.”

The ghosts that we had in the apartments were pretty resilient to the typical Hare Krishna ghostbusting. They could be very temporarily dispensed of by blowing a conch shell. But mostly that would just move them to the next door apartment (thanks!).

According to one of my neighbors, she was confronted with a ghost and chanted “Hare Krishna!” to it. It laughed and said “Hare Krishna!” back at her. Freaky.

Also, this same neighbor’s four year old girl asked her mother, “Mata, why does a man come into my room at night?” Her mother told her “that’s just your father.”

“No… it’s not Pita.”

These attacks started happening more and more frequently to the point where they were a nightly occurrence. That’s when we pulled out the “big guns.” The Nrsmha-kavaca mantra. I recited this three times before sleeping, quickly and loudly, and it seemed to keep the ghosts away for the whole night. I don’t remember an incident after that.

How about you, fellow vaisnavas, do you have any ghosts stories? Feel free to share them here.