This News week story is amazing it must be ghosts who are bugging human beings.
It wasn’t immediately obvious to Walter Semkiw that he was the reincarnation of John Adams. Adams was a lawyer and rabble-rouser who helped overthrow a government; Semkiw is a doctor who has never so much as challenged a parking ticket. The second president was balding and wore a powdered wig; Semkiw has a full head of hair. But in 1984, a psychic told the then medical resident and psychiatrist-in-training that he is the reincarnation of a major figure of the Revolution, possibly Adams. Once Semkiw got over his skepticism—as a student of the human mind, he was of course familiar with “how people get misled and believe something that might not be true,” he recalls—he wasn’t going to let superficial dissimilarities dissuade him so easily. As he researched Adams’s life, Semkiw began finding many tantalizing details. For instance, Adams described his handwriting as “tight-fisted and concise”—“just like mine,” Semkiw realized. He also saw an echo of himself in Adams’s dedication to the cause of independence from England. “I can be very passionate,” Semkiw says. The details accumulated and, after much deliberation, Semkiw went with his scientific side, dismissing the reincarnation idea.
But one day in 1995, when Semkiw was the medical director for Unocal 76, the oil company, he heard a voice in his head intoning, “Study the life of Adams!” Now he found details much more telling than those silly coincidences he had learned a dozen years earlier. He looked quite a bit like the second president, Semkiw realized. Adams’s description of parishioners in church pews as resembling rows of cabbages was “something I would have said,” Semkiw realized. “We are both very visual.” And surely it was telling that Unocal’s slogan was “the spirit of '76.” It was all so persuasive, thought Semkiw, who is now a doctor at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Group in California, that as a man of science and reason whose work requires him to critically evaluate empirical evidence, he had to accept that he was Adams reincarnated.
Perhaps you don’t believe that Semkiw is the reincarnation of John Adams. Or that playwright August Wilson is the reincarnation of Shakespeare, or George W. Bush the reincarnation of Daniel Morgan, a colonel in the American Revolution who was known for his “awkward speech” and “coarse manners,” as Semkiw chronicles on his Web site johnadams.net. But if you don’t believe in reincarnation, then the odds are that you have at least felt a ghostly presence behind you in an “empty” house. Or that you have heard loved ones speak to you after they passed away. Or that you have a lucky shirt. Or that you can tell when a certain person is about to text you, or when someone unseen is looking at you. For if you have never had a paranormal experience such as these, and believe in none of the things that science says do not exist except as tricks played on the gullible or—as neuroscientists are now beginning to see—by the normal workings of the mind carried to an extreme, well, then you are in a lonely minority. According to periodic surveys by Gallup and other pollsters, fully 90 percent of Americans say they have experienced such things or believe they exist.
Why We Believe in ESP, Ghosts & Psychic Phenomena | Newsweek Science | Newsweek.com