Ghosts Are People Too
Download MP3Hey you! Welcome back to Medium with a Mic. I'm Carrie Bandle and if you're new here, I'm just at your average psychic medium who loves to break down intuitive topics and give you tools for your personal journey. My podcasts are backed by science whenever possible. Stay till the end.
Kari Bandle:I'm breaking down the different energies you might encounter, so let's go. It's Halloween season, which means the world suddenly gets very comfortable talking about ghosts. Haunted houses, horror movies, ghost hunting shows, they're everywhere, and I love it, honestly, because it opens a door that most people keep firmly shut the other eleven months of the year. Now I'm not here to talk about ghosts the way pop culture does. I'm here...
Kari Bandle:I'm definitely not here to scare you. I'm here to tell you the truth, and the truth is both simpler and more profound than any horror movie has ever gotten right. So now I'm borrowing a line from my friend and mentor, Beau Maxwell, and she says, ghosts are people too. Let that land for a second because it changes everything about how we think about ghosts, and how we feel about them, and honestly, how we treat them. Today, we're going to cover three big threads that I want you to walk away with, what ghosts actually are at an energetic and consciousness level, how we know they're real, and what the skeptics get wrong, and what they actually want from us because it's probably not what you think.
Kari Bandle:Let's start with the most foundational question. What is a ghost? If you grew up in Western culture, you've probably been handed a very specific inner... Image of a ghost, white sheet, rattling chains, some kind of tragic death involved, usually haunting one particular location for mysterious reasons. That image comes from centuries of folklore, literature, and now Hollywood.
Kari Bandle:And it's not entirely wrong, but it's wildly incomplete. Here's how I understand it through both my own work as a medium and the broader spiritual framework I operate from. Every single human being is a soul having a physical experience. The body is a vehicle, an absolutely extraordinary miraculous vehicle, but it is not the totality of who you are. The soul is the driver, and when the physical vehicle stops working, the driver doesn't disappear.
Kari Bandle:What we call a ghost is most commonly one of two things. The first is a soul who has not fully transitioned. The crossing over process is just that, a process, and it is not always clean or completed. Most souls move through beautifully, but some get stuck. And the reasons they get stuck are as human as any other reason people get stuck in their life.
Kari Bandle:Fear, unfinished business, confusion, grief, deep attachment to someone they've left behind. Sometimes, they don't even know they've died. That one is more common than you'd think, and it's one of the most heartbreaking things to encounter. These are not monsters. They're not evil.
Kari Bandle:They are souls, people in a state of confusion or emotional suspension. They need the same things any confused, grieving person needs, compassion, clarity, and sometimes a little bit of guidance. The second is what I call a residual imprint. This one is fascinating because it's not really a conscious presence at all. Think of it as an energetic recording.
Kari Bandle:Locations can hold emotional energy, particularly intense, repeated, or traumatic emotional energy, And that energy can replay almost like a loop. People experience it as a presence, a sound, a figure that walks the same path every time, but there's no soul driving that experience. It's more like a spiritual echo. This is actually where a lot of hauntings come from, and it explains why some ghosts seem completely unaware of the living people around them. They're not ignoring you.
Kari Bandle:They're a recording. Now, there's a third category that doesn't get talked about enough, and that's the souls who have fully crossed over but choose to visit. These are your loved ones. These are the presences that feel warm, that carry a sense of personality and humor and specific memory. These are the ones I work with most as a medium.
Kari Bandle:They are not stuck. They're not residual. They're fully transitioned and fully conscious, choosing to reach back across because love, real love does not end at the body. So when we say ghosts are people too, we're really saying the range of what gets lumped under that word is vast, and almost all of it is fundamentally human. Souls who are lost, emotional imprints left by people who lived, and love that refuses to be contained by physical death.
Kari Bandle:Okay. I can already hear the skeptics, and look, I have a lot of compassion for skeptics because healthy skepticism is just discernment in a different outfit. The problem isn't asking, is this real? The problem is when the question comes preloaded with the assumption that the answer is no. So let's talk about what we actually know here.
Kari Bandle:First, consciousness is not fully explained by the brain. This is not a fringe spiritual position anymore. Some of the most serious researchers in neuroscience and philosophy of mind will tell you that we do not have a complete agreed upon scientific explanation for how subjective consciousness arises from physical matter. There's even a name for it, the hard problem of consciousness, which was coined by philosopher David Chalmers. The hard problem asks, why does brain activity produce subjective experience at all?
Kari Bandle:Why does it feel like something to be you? We don't have a materialist answer that everyone agrees on, And that gap, that unanswered question is exactly where the possibility of consciousness existing beyond the body lives. Second, near death experience research. The research on near death experiences or NDEs has produced some genuinely extraordinary data. We're talking about people who are clinically dead, no measurable brain activity, no heartbeat, and yet they came back with coherent, verifiable, detailed experiences.
Kari Bandle:They described conversations happening in other rooms. They described events that happened while their bodies were under anesthesia on an operating table. In some cases, they described things they had no physical way of perceiving. The AWARE study led by Doctor. Sam Parnia at Southampton University specifically attempted to verify out of body perceptions during cardiac arrest.
Kari Bandle:This is rigorous, peer reviewed research, not ghost hunting, not antidote, scientific investigation. The conclusion a growing number of researchers are reaching is not that consciousness creates an illusion of survival. It's that consciousness may be fundamentally non local, meaning it's not trapped inside the skull to begin with. And if consciousness is not local, then its continuation after physical death stops being a supernatural claim and starts being a logical extension of what we're already discovering. Third, the medium evidence.
Kari Bandle:I know I'm biased here, but take this for what it is. The evidence from skilled tested mediums is substantial. Researchers like Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona has conducted triple blind studies of mediums receiving information that they had no possible way to access through normal means. Names specific memories, identifying details, information that surviving family members confirmed as accurate. The skeptic's default response is always cold reading, the idea that mediums are just picking up on body language and making educated guesses.
Kari Bandle:But triple blind protocols specifically eliminate that possibility. The medium never meets the sitter. In some protocols, the medium never even knows who the reading is for. Now, I'm not saying every person who claims to be a medium is the real deal. Discernment matters enormously, but dismissing all of it because some of it is fraudulent is like dismissing all of medicine because some doctors are incompetent.
Kari Bandle:The logic just doesn't hold. What I will say from my own experience is this. The information I receive is not generated by me. I'm not making educated guesses. I am tuning a dial to a different frequency, and I'm just reporting what comes through.
Kari Bandle:And what comes through is specific. It's personal. It's verifiable, and it's consistent with a reality in which consciousness continues. Okay. So we've established what ghosts are, and we've made the case that they're real.
Kari Bandle:Now for the question I get asked more than any other. What do they want? And I wanna gently dismantle a few Hollywood narratives before I answer that. Ghosts do not, as a rule, want to terrorize you. They are not primarily motivated by revenge.
Kari Bandle:They are not lurking in your attic, scheming about how to make your life miserable. When people experience what feels like threatening or aggressive, ghostly energy, it is most almost always one of two things, fear being projected outward by a confused earthbound soul or a living person's own fear amplifying and misinterpreting neutral or even friendly energy. It's interesting because I recently spoke to someone that I met online who was very confident in the fact that what he saw hovering over his wife, this dark winged creature was an evil presence. And after we spoke for a long time... Now this was...
Kari Bandle:He was well versed in all things, intuition, and spiritual, and he finally came around and realized there's no premise there to assume that that was an evil spirit or an evil entity or an evil angel or the devil or anything like that, a demon. It and he came around and that was an amazing epiphany for him and he thanked me profusely because it really did open a lot of doors because fear is a lens. It distorts things. So let's go back to it. What do they actually want?
Kari Bandle:For earthbound souls, the ones who fully transitioned, what they most commonly want is to be seen. They want acknowledgment. They want someone to recognize that they exist, that they are confused, that they're not where they're supposed to be. In many cases, they need permission, conscious, spoken permission to leave. Sometimes they're holding on because they're worried about a loved one they left behind.
Kari Bandle:Sometimes they've been stuck so long they've forgotten there's anywhere else to go. What helps them is not fear, not confrontation, not a dramatic exorcism. What helps them is compassion, clarity, someone saying, I see you. You're allowed to go. It's okay.
Kari Bandle:I want to note here that this is part of what I do as a spiritual doula, not the conventional death doula work of physically sitting with the dying and their families, though that's sacred work too, and it's a beautiful gift to be able to share with the soul. But I mean specifically supporting souls in the crossing over process from the spiritual side. For me, this includes meeting the ones who are in the dying process in spirit, and those who are stuck in the in between. Meeting them where they are, helping them understand where they are, facilitating the transition. It is some of the most quietly profound work I have ever done.
Kari Bandle:For fully transitioned souls or loved ones who visit, what they want is connection. They want you to know they're okay. They want you to know that what you thought was your last conversation was... With them was not, in fact, the last one. They wanna tell you they know about the thing that happened at Christmas, and they wanna say they were there when the baby was born.
Kari Bandle:They wanna make you laugh one more time with a joke only you would understand. That is what they want, not to haunt you, to love you. And sometimes, not always, but sometimes, they want something specific. They want a message delivered. They want something corrected.
Kari Bandle:They want someone to know they forgive them or for you to forgive them. They want someone to forgive themselves. The unfinished business of the dead is almost never dramatic. It is almost always just love with something left undone. I'd like to go deeper here in case you're missing someone, and I suspect you are.
Kari Bandle:When soulmates appear to you from the other side, they usually appear as you knew them. You're... In your current life to comfort you, but they carry the full depth, love, and memories of all the lifetimes you have shared together. The love you feel during a visitation is often overwhelming because it carries the accumulated bonds of complete knowing, unconditional love gathered from every stratum, every lifetime, and the greater understanding of love at a level we as humans can't even begin to fathom. The interaction is their whole soul, their complete higher self because they are home.
Kari Bandle:They are pure, perfect love. They are free of all human errors they made in their human lives in order to answer their question or complete their soul's purpose. They meet you at your current level of awareness while enveloping you in that greater complete soul love. Okay. So moving on.
Kari Bandle:As for residual imprints, they don't want anything because they're not conscious presence. But the living people who encounter them often need something like reassurance that they're not going crazy, understanding of what they... They're actually experiencing, and sometimes help clearing the energy that created the imprint in the first place. So here's what I want you to take away from today. Ghosts are not alien creatures from some terrifying dimension or demons from hell.
Kari Bandle:They are souls. They are consciousness. They are in the most literal sense people. People who have completed the physical portion of their existence and are either navigating the transition, caught in mid process, or choosing to stay connected to the people that they love. The fear that Halloween stirs up around this topic is understandable.
Kari Bandle:Our culture has done a thorough job of making death seem like the end and therefore making anything that contradicts that narrative seem threatening. But what I experience every single time I work with spirit is not threat. It is love. It is personality. It is continuity.
Kari Bandle:Your grandmother who died ten years ago, she's still here, still has opinions about your hair, still lights up when she talks about the grandkids, Still present at the moments that matter. So share your home with your deceased loved ones. Know they are there and say hi. Smile. Tell them what you need to say.
Kari Bandle:All of my homes have always been crowded with those I've loved and human who crossed back to their home. That is not a ghost story. That is just the truth of what we are. We are not humans with a soul. We are a soul in a human body until the human body gives out.
Kari Bandle:We are souls. We are not our bodies. We do not end, and the people we love do not end either. And that is not terrifying. That is the most comforting thing I know.
Kari Bandle:Thank you so much for spending this time with me today. If this episode resonated with you, if it shifted something in you or challenged something or gave you words for something you've always felt, please pass it along. Share it with someone who's grieving or someone who's afraid, someone who's been secretly wondering if their loved one is still around because chances are they are. Help me out with a comment, thumbs up, or subscribe. It all helps this labor of love that I produce every week grow.
Kari Bandle:And if you wanna support the show and keep these conversations coming, you can buy me a coffee over at the link on my website's podcast page at sacredwhispers1111.com. Every single contribution keeps this little podcast alive and keeps me in the chair doing this work. It means more than you will ever know. Until next week, remember, love doesn't end. It changes form.
Kari Bandle:Happy Halloween, and keep listening to those whispers of wisdom.
