Wonders of the Invisible World

I guess the first encounter I ever had with witchcraft of some kind was when I was a little girl and saw the movie, "Hocus Pocus." I just absolutely loved that movie and demanded to dress up as a witch every year on Halloween. That's about as close to witchcraft I've ever come.

In the movie, "Three and a Half Men," there is a scene when two people are upstairs having a discussion. If you look really closely, there is a little boy standing behind the curtain in the background, that is obviously unintended by the director of the movie. The story is that the little boy died many years before in that house that the movie was being filmed. When I first head of this, I was in junior high school and of course, I believed the story. When I found out that it actually wasn't true and that the boy in the movie was actually a cardboard cut-out, I began to find it almost impossible to believe any other ghost story that I was told.

Unfortunately, I have never seen a "ghost," so I find it sort of hard to believe in the idea of a supernatural world, but I have lots of friends who swear that they have encountered ghosts with really convincing stories. Therefore, I am not really sure where I stand on the idea. My friend Kelly believes very strongly in the supernatural world because when we were in high school, she "knows" she saw a ghost in her house. Of course, the first time she told me about her encounter, I didn't even come close to believing her story. I thought (and still do) that she just imagined it in her mind. After a couple of years of claiming that she saw the same ghost a few more times, she began to slightly persuade me that the event really did happen. Now I don't really know what to think.

I can't think of any instances where my friends used the term "witch hunt," but I have definitely heard it before on television a lot. They usually aren't talking about witches, but about chasing other people associated with that bad connotation. It's interesting to think of what that phrase came from.

In our contemporary world, I think that many people consider evil to be a bad moral decision or some other negative intentional act, but not necessarily a result of the devil. I'm not really sure how I would explain the existence of evil in the world because I don't really understand it. Many times when I hear of a murder or some other horrible act, my usual question is, "I don't understand, why would someone do that?" The usual response to that question is, "I don't know. They must just be crazy or messed up in the head." Here, the evil action is associated with a mental disorder, but maybe it was an act by the devil. Who knows.