In 1917 The Blessed Virgin Mary had delivered a message to three children, Portugal, Fatima. What did our Lady say to the children? The point is; it is not important. No private apparition ever can have a dogmatic power in the Roman true Catholic Church, unless that church is fake and hijacked by strangers, who look to make a lucrative business out of the church. Fatima apparition is obsolete, and its authentic transcripts never were fully released. In our modern time it is used for mere political purposes. Fatima; danger!

Ghosts and the undead are uniquely capable of challenging the nature of truth and reality because they exist in an interstitial space between two extremes. A ghost is living and dead, present and absent, past and present, all simultaneously. As the ghost breaks down the binary states of being which are fundamental to the human experience, it challenges the purpose of such classifications. In Golden Age Spanish drama, an era which is fascinated by the concepts of engaño and desengaño, ghosts sometimes serve the function of obscuring the nature of objective reality and questioning humanity's ability to perceive it, if it exists. However, ghosts also serve a second, incompatible function, which is to reveal absolute truth. Ghosts and the undead of the Golden Age are often regarded as omniscient, since, by virtue of existing outside of the limits of life, they are imagined to be able to see all of time and space simultaneously. They are frequently called upon to reveal their knowledge to the living. These dual functions are too antithetical to be embodied by the same figure. The theater of the Golden Age therefore shifts from omniscient representations of ghosts to the representation of ghosts as yet another visual deception. This study of the representations of the ghost in Golden Age Spanish theater examines how ghosts aid and reflect the epoch's conceptions of truth and our perceptions of reality and presence in both time and space. I argue that ghost figures are always destabilizing, even when they represent an absolute truth, as they consistently demonstrate the gaps in humanity's understanding of the world. Ghosts are born out of and also reflect Baroque society's growing uncertainty or insecurity regarding humanity's relationship to the world.

The year is 1980, and the Sandinistas are newly in power in Nicaragua. Bernardo Martínez, a modest, unassuming tailor in the town of Cuapa, witnesses an extraordinary thing: an otherworldly glow appears around the statue of the Virgin Mary in the church, and soon the Holy Virgin appears. Though a work of fiction, Bernardo and the Virgin is based on the real-life experiences of Bernardo Martínez. Silvio Sirias’s sweeping novel tells many stories, weaving together the true account of this humble, devout man with the moving and often humorous fictional tales of the people whom he influenced and inspired. It is also a stormy epic of Nicaragua through the long Somoza years and the Sandinista revolution.

Did Jesus rise physically from the dead, or did he rise as a real, non-bodily apparition, like those reported in the parapsychological literature? In this book, which is the first book-length examination of the question in over fifty years, Jake O'Connell argues in favor of the physical resurrection hypothesis. In order to do so, he employs Bayes' Theorem, a mathematical theorem which encapsulates the way humans think when they analyze the probability of a hypothesis. In addition, he provides a thorough overview of the evidence for the reality of apparitions of the dead.

Drawing together literature, media, and philosophy, Ghostly Apparitions provides a new model for media archaeology and its transformation of intellectual and literary history. Stefan Andriopoulos examines new media technologies and distinct cultural realms, tracing connections between Kant’s philosophy and the magic lantern’s phantasmagoria, the Gothic novel and print culture, and spiritualist research and the invention of television. As Kant was writing about the possibility of spiritual apparitions, the emerging medium of the phantasmagoria used hidden magic lanterns to startle audiences with ghostly projections. Andriopoulos juxtaposes the philosophical arguments of German idealism with contemporaneous occultism and ghost shows. In close readings of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, he traces the diverging modes in which these authors appropriated figures of optical media and spiritualist notions. The spectral apparitions from this period also intersect with the rise of popular print culture. Andriopoulos explores the circulation of ostensibly authentic ghost narratives and the Gothic novel, which was said to produce “reading addiction” and a loss of reality. Romantic representations of animal magnetism and clairvoyance similarly blurred the boundary between fiction and reality. The final chapter of Ghostly Apparitions extends this archaeology of new media into the early twentieth century. Tracing a reciprocal inter_action between occultism and engineering, Andriopoulos uncovers how theories and devices of psychical research enabled the emergence of television.