Texas Monthly: Ghost City, Texas

According to Martin Leal, there are three types of ghostly experiences:

Apparitions: look just like humans but can walk through walls.

Poltergeists: The word means "noisy spirit. " Usually we can't see them but they're mischievous and like to move objects around.

Hauntings: These are the transparent or translucent types of spirits that Hollywood has defined as the quintessential ghost.

Is this a picture of a ghost or just a smudge on the film?

This photo was taken by San Antonio resident Andrea DeBoom who has taken Martin's tour. She feels that this might be a photograph of her uncle who died when he was a young boy.

Leal believes that ghosts are auras -- the energy a living thing possesses separate from its physical body -- and that the above classifications are different stages a being's aura might pass through. He maintains that when a person's physical body is returned to the earth, their ethereal being is supposed to enter into the spirit world. (If you are religious, this might be Heaven.) Sometimes, for whatever reason, be it a violent death or a death before its time, this ethereal being gets stuck on the Earth plane in the form of highly-energized quarks. "It's sort of like your ethereal being saying, 'Hey wait, I'm supposed to stay here until I'm eighty-five.'

Should we be afraid of ghosts? Martin says no, pointing to the groups of tourists flocking the Alamo. "Look, there are a hundred people around us now and we're not afraid of them. Ghosts are just ex-people. "

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