Ghosts can also exert an indirect influence on us. For example, we may live in a block where the people above us walk about all night long in heavy, steel-capped boots, or tap on radiators, or open and close squeaking doors, flush or pour out water, switch on a noisy vacuum cleaner, washing machine, radio or similar. All night long we haven't closed our eyes and in the morning we have to get up and go to work, to school or to university. You think to yourself: "This is such an important day and I look like a scarecrow, my eyes are swollen, I have a splitting headache, I can't concentrate on anything. The children have a test, and there's an important delegation coming to see my husband - how's he going to manage? The whole family's day is ruined". We threaten to have a talk about it to the people from upstairs, downstairs, next door or wherever. We wonder what's happened to them, they were always so nice. When this is repeated every night or every other night you crack and have a terrible row with the neighbors, you write a letter of complaint to the management, you call the police, it sometimes degenerates into a fist-fight. You are outraged and you're right to be. But the neighbors you can't even look at now, whom you torment through the police, the management, are just as outraged by your behavior. Added to which they haven't the slightest clue what's got into you, what's made you act like a lunatic. Not surprising since you haven't explained to them that it's all about the sounds coming from their apartment. How could they know that when there is no banging in their home, they have complete peace there and sleep through each night serenely?
You, in turn, are so certain that it's the neighbors who are annoying you that it doesn't enter your head to talk to them calmly, to consider together if what's tormenting you may not be something other than you suppose it to be.
Many neighboring households are in conflict with each other in just this way. The disputes between them can last for many years. This can be dealt with from the very beginning if we only know what phenomenon it is that is at issue. Its manifestation consists of hearing noises on one side of the wall which sound like they're coming from the other side, whereas on the other side of the wall, in the neighbor's apartment, everything is as quiet as can be. If these sounds reached both apartments, then the neighbor being criticized would work out what your complaint is about and would probably criticize you for causing the noise.
You'll ask: how is this possible? As I have written earlier, after death so little changes that many ghosts don't notice that they are no longer alive. So they come back home as normal, to their relatives, and try to function normally. Since a ghost has made itself at home with us it means it wants to make contact with us, wants to tell us something, to apologize, explain. When we don't allow it into our consciousness and cover our ears so as not to hear, then the ghost tries even harder to get through to us, till eventually the situation becomes absurd. Life will be easier for us if we think with sympathy that this is our deceased husband, mother or whoever making the noise because they badly want to tell us something, than if we constantly feel ourselves to be the victims of our neighbors' activities. Two very good films on this subject have been made recently - "The Others" and "Ghost". Both are worth seeing by all those who feel they have this kind of problem. I do hope that after seeing these films many readers will rid themselves of unnecessary fear and hear out their dead near ones so they can finish all their affairs and pass through to the other world in peace. Unfortunately, there are only a few really good films which deal not only with the subject of death and the other world but also show in a credible, serious way what happens to souls after a sudden, unexpected death. It pains me to state that the majority of films on this subject are based on fiction and through their fantastical implications serve only to lead viewers into error.
