The Ghost Theory

Someone once said that a belief in ghosts was really a sign of optimism, because it demonstrated a certain faith in the after-life.  Well, I have a theory about ghosts that isn't very optimistic, nor do I find that it comforts me much with the promise of an existence beyond the grave.  It's not that it denies such an existence, it just doesn't make a statement about it either way.  You see, I don't think ghosts have anything to do with the afterlife, although I do think it's possible that they're real...in a certain sense.  There is a borderline between mind & matter, between perception & reality, between what the eye sees and how the brain interprets that information, and ghosts exist somewhere along that borderline.  

The easiest thing to do would be to dismiss the whole thing as hallucinations or symptoms of mental illness, but the sightings of ghosts go as far back as recorded human history and they have occurred in every culture through-out the world.  There have been millions of incidents, and it's a little hard to sweep them all under the rug.  Yes, primitive cultures often misinterpreted the workings of nature for the activities of conscious spirits, and there are obviously people who suffer from hallucinations symptomatic of a mental illness, but there are many other cases which have involved otherwise perfectly sane people, and which have persisted well into the modern age.  Besides, the ignorance of primitive people concerning natural forces does not quite explain the actual seeing of ghosts.  It's the "seeing" that I'm concerned with.  I don't care that Grog thought that a spirit was making it rain.  I'm more interested in the ghost he saw while he was hunting in the storm.  

So let's assume for the moment that maybe there is something to all this ghost business.  The generally accepted idea is that these ghosts are manifestations of the souls of the dead.  People tend to believe these are conscious entities, disembodied and doomed to walk the Earth or haunt a house or whatever.  They are the same person, with the same mind they had in life.  There are variations on the idea.  Some people think the ghosts don't realize they're dead, or they wander about in a kind of sleep-walking state.  Some people think that the souls are trapped in a certain place, a building or a house, that they inhabited in life.  Some people even think that these ghosts latch on to one specific person and haunt them exclusively. 

The common theme to all this is still the idea that the ghost is a conscious entity with a will directing it's actions just like a living person.  The problem is that the observable actions of ghosts that have been reported really don't make any sense when interpreted this way.  This is the reason for all the rules and restrictions people try to place on ghosts, as demonstrated in the variations above.  Why doesn't the ghost just leave the house?  Ah, it must be trapped there.  Why does the ghost keep cleaning the floor; why should a dead person care about a clean floor that it can't even touch?  Ah, it must not realize it's dead.  It's still behaving as though it were alive.  And on it goes.  They keep treating the actions of the ghosts as if they were the actions of a living person, and then they throw up the kind of obstructions that would prevent a living person from doing something.

I have an alternative explanation.  Now, I've had several people tell me ghost stories; I'm sure we all have.  I've had a few strange experiences myself, but nothing worth mentioning.  So I'll illustrate my point with an example I heard about a year ago.  Someone told me that they had seen a woman several times coming down the stairs of their house carrying a large metal pot.  Every time it was this same thing, the same woman, the same pot, and always coming down the stairs.  Most ghost stories that I have heard have followed a similar pattern.  The ghost is seen performing the same routine action over and over again.  In fact, this mindless repetition is often the most creepy aspect of the encounter.  It's as though the person were seeing an inexplicable fragment of a film being replayed over and over on a loop.

I think that is precisely what they are seeing.  I don't think these ghosts are the conscious spirits of the dead.  I think they are manifestations of a moment taken out of time.  I think people are seeing moments of the past being replayed, moments whose true significance and context remain a mystery.  Who knows why the woman was carrying the pot down the stairs, and why this was a significant event in her life?  One day, long ago, that woman had a carried a pot down the stairs and that mundane action had played a part in some larger event.  It might have been wonderful, or it might have been tragic, but I believe that something happened that was powerful enough to leave it's mark on that place and at that time.  The ghost that the person saw was not the ghost of that woman, but the ghost of that moment.   

My only evidence for this theory is the behavior of the ghosts themselves.  You could go on forever making up countless rules to explain their constricted actions, but I believe I'm offering a far simpler explanation.  The ghosts are trapped, but not by the convoluted restrictions of the after-life.  They are prisoners of time.  They are not free to act in the way a living, conscious person would, because they are not living and they are no longer conscious.  They are long gone to...wherever, and what remains is just an imprint and image of their lives.  Their ghost is no more free to act than a photograph of them left behind is free to change it's expression.   

No doubt some people might tell me about very active and aggressive encounters that they had with ghosts, thinking that this refutes my idea.  They might tell me about times when the ghost knew they were there.  But I would recommend that they reconsider their interpretations.  Let's say they saw the ghost of a woman turn, look at them, and then rush across the room at them in a rage.  Isn't it possible that the woman had once had an argument with her husband where she had walked into the room, looked at him, and then flown into a rage?  Isn't it possible that you could be standing in the husband's past shoes?  I believe that there are times when the wires get crossed and the observer finds themselves incorporated in the scene they're observing in place of one of the former participants.  In such a case, it would be easy to mistake the ghost's behavior in the past as an active response in the present.

I started off this post by saying that ghosts exist in a borderline between mind and matter.  You see, I don't think the ghost is really there when the person sees it.  However, I do think that the energy that causes the mind to manifest the ghost might be real.  I think things happen sometimes, powerful things, and they leave a mark on a place.  This mark takes the form of energy which certain sensitive minds are able to tune into the way a radio picks up a signal.  Without the radio, the signal is just a signal.  It takes the radio to turn this signal into sounds and music.  Likewise, it takes the mind to manifest the ghost as a visual presence, but the event they're seeing projected really did happen in the past.  The signal is real, even if what they're seeing isn't.  This is the unexplored borderline.  This is where the real & the imaginary, memory & experience, past & present become indistinguishable.  Is there a promise of immortality there?  Smile, you're on the Universe's Camera, and who knows where and when someone might stumble across this footage in the dark.