A Ghost of a Chance

For the past few years, my wife, Becky, and I have been very interested in ghosts. Well, Becky is really the one most interested for reasons unknown to me. But I find the subject interesting and so I go along for the ride. So each week, we watch the obligatory episodes of Ghosthunters on the Sci Fi channel. That would be our favorite show. Next in line is Most Haunted on the Travel Channel. There is also a show on the Biography Channel called Ghostly Encounters. And for something very scary, there is the Discovery Channel’s Hauntings. A and E has Paranormal University, but that is on well after our bedtime. Once you hit fifty, you take bedtimes seriously.

We’ve even done a little ghost hunting. We’ve gone to the Whaley House in Old Town San Diego with our EMF detectors and thermometer. As you have no doubt noticed, there are a few pictures in my photo bin of that experience. Are there ghosts in the pictures? Who knows? I would guess probably not, but I’d like there to be. It would be kind of cool to catch a ghost in an image, don’t you think? But I’m not convinced that there is anything in the picture that is ghostly.

I don’t find ghosts too scary, although Becky does. So I find it interesting that she is so fascinated by them. She has read a number of books on the subject. But she wouldn’t want to meet one face to orb, as it were. She didn’t mind going into the Whaley House, or the Drumm Barracks, which is also supposed to be haunted, near our school. But she wouldn’t want to spend the night there. And she has said that she definitely wouldn’t want to go along with the TAPS team to investigate a haunted location, even if she had the chance. I don’t think she’s looking for some kind of affirmation of life after death because her faith in God and heaven and everything seems stronger to me than most people’s.

For me, the jury is out on ghosts. I don’t know what they are. I am convinced that something is going on. I have seen some pretty weird evidence (assuming that the evidence isn’t a complete sham and the people producing it aren’t having us all off). For example, one episode of TAPS showed a video clip of a chair moving across the floor by itself. Now, lets for the moment assume that the Jason and Grant are sincere and that they didn’t fake that shot. Somehow, that chair moved. Now did a ghost do it? I don’t know. Is it possible that one of the team could have telekinetically moved the chair without realizing it? Perhaps. I don’t know. Telekinesis is about as paranormal to most scientific minded people as are ghosts, so that isn’t a much better explanation. One might say that the wind moved the chair, but then one might also be an idiot, too. That doesn’t seem like a reasonable explanation to me. But, clearly, something did happen there. And a true scientist doesn’t dismiss the facts because they don’t conform to current theories. That moving chair has to be explained, as to other ghostly experiences.

There are several different types of hauntings according to most paranormal experts. There are phantoms, apparitions, classic hauntings, graveyard spectres, and etherial revenents. Ghosts are not to be confused with spirits. Although many people see ghosts after consuming spirits. Ghosts are trapped here. Spirits can move back and forth between the earthly realm and the spiritual realm, presumably on some sort of Spiritual Metro or something. Hopefully, they have monthly passes.

Phantoms are ghosts which so closely resemble the living that the living often mistake them for living beings. These are those ghosts that people pick up as hitchhikers and then discover after a few miles that the hitchhiker has mysteriously disappeared from the car. So for all you know, you may be seeing ghosts all the time and simply not know it. That could be disconcerting.

There is no doubt that apparitions are ghosts (as opposed to living things). You would never confuse them with the living. They have a nasty habit of being translucent, for example, that most of us forego. And many times, they cannot be seen at all. There are some fifteen types of apparitions. I won’t go into them all here. They all seem to fall into two basic types. There is one kind of apparition that can interact with the living. And then there are the ones that seem to ignore us all together, which is just plain rude. Those are the ones that seem to repeat the same behavior over and over, such as walking on a staircase or eating the last slice of pizza. Some of these apparitions appear human like. Others appear only as orbs, glowing balls of light that generally only appear in photographs (often taken with cameras with dirty lenses), or as a mist of some kind.

A classic haunting, AKA entity haunting, would be any phantom or apparition that is interactive and tied to a specific location. Graveyard spectres are seen only in graveyards…duh! They generally appear only for a short time after a burial. Etheric revenents are dangerous undead creatures that feed off the energy of living beings. They are the origin of the vampire myth. I’m glad we finally found a rational explanation for that one! We wouldn’t want people seriously considering the existence of vampires.

I don’t really have a problem with believing that the spirit of a person survives death. Hell, my whole religion depends on that idea. But there are certain aspects of ghostlitude that cause me problems. For one thing, why is it that you never hear of exceptionally ancient ghosts. Most ghost stories involve the spirits of people who’ve been dead a relatively short while, a few hundred years at most. There are stories of some ghostly Roman soldiers from Britain, but by and large, most ghosts are not much older than a few hundred years at most. Why aren’t there any ghosts of Neanderthals? Did their energy dissippate in time? Did they not have very advanced souls? There are ghost dogs and horses. Why aren’t there any ghost mammoths or dinosaurs? I mean, maybe there are, but I haven’t read any stories about them.

And why are ghosts always dressed, and why do they have props? The Drumm Barracks is supposed to have the ghost of a little boy that can be heard bouncing a ball against the walls in the hallway. I have no particular problem believing in a ghost boy, but a ghost ball? What did the ball ever do to anybody? Why didn’t it get to pass on into the great ball beyond? And those famous ghosts that ride horses…why do the horses have to hang around? Moreover, I can understand the ghost of a person, a spirit, but what about the clothes? Why do ghosts always seem to wear clothes from the appropriate historical period? The spirit may hang around, but the clothes wouldn’t, it seems to me.

Most ghostly happenings have rational explanations. That is why we love Ghosthunters. Grant and Jason go in trying to disprove the haunting. They do their best to debunk all the ghostly evidence. After one of their investigations, all that remains is what cannot be explained by any natural phenomenon. Orbs, for example, which are often touted as proof of a ghostly apparition, are really most often reflection of light on the lens of the camera or insects reflecting back light. People only ever see the orbs in photos. I have yet to hear any ghost investigator say, “Whoa! Look at that orb!”

Many people claim to have seen the ghost of some old hag while in bed. The usual claim is that the subject was lying in bed when s/he suddenly felt a heaviness and was unable to move. The subject then claims to see some old hag at the foot of the bed. The experience passes. Meanwhile, the subject is peeing his or her pants. This, actually, strange as it sounds, is quite explainable. It is a medical condition known as…”the hag experience.” It is caused by the brain waking up before the body does. Hence, you are unable to move. The old hag is a hallucination. This has been clinically verified. So that old hag isn’t a ghost at all.

Faces and other shapes that are seen in photos are often the result of something the shrinks call “matrixing”. That is the condition that causes one to be unable to escape the image of Keanu Reeves. Seriously, people like to know what shit is, so when we see a shape of some kind, our brain likes to assign the image to something we already know, like a face. We like to see faces. We recognize faces. It’s kind of like looking at clouds and seeing bunnies and horsies and 1961 Les Paul Gold Tops in them.

Many other ghostly experiences can be explained by large electromagnetic fields. Of course, paranormal investigators like to tie ghostly apparitions to big electromagnetic fields. But it has been shown that strong electromagnetic fields can cause emotional distress in people. They can cause the feeling of not being alone, of being watched. A large EMF can cause hallucinations. This is why photographic and video evidence is so important. Again, assuming that there is no evidence tampering, such evidence is not subject to hallucinations. The same can be said for digital voice recordings of ghostly voices that can not been heard at normal auditory frequencies. I have heard my share of them and they do sound spooky. Although, to be totally honest and rational, most of those sounds are unintelligible to me. Once somebody says, “Listen closely…the ghost is saying Glen Beck is an idiot…”, you can make it out. But by then, just like those famous optical illusions of the beautiful woman and the old hag, once you see one, it’s hard to see the other. Once somebody tells you what the ghost is saying, that’s what you tend to hear. Still, it cannot be denied that SOMETHING is on the recording, whatever it is saying.

So what causes ghostly apparitions and sounds? I have no clue. Perhaps there is a perfectly rational explanation we just don’t yet understand. Perhaps there’s some kind of quantum physical time loop happening going on. Maybe there is some way in which events are imprinted on energy fields and replay like a bad video recording. Perhaps ghosts are interdimensional visitors of some kind. Perhaps ghosts are really space aliens. I do find the subject interesting. I do want to know what is going on in these haunted houses. And it is fun to visit “haunted” sites with the expectation of seeing or hearing something strange. Just beware of hitchhiking ghosts! (bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!)*