Ghosts – Miscellany for an October Afternoon.

Have you noticed that people don’t talk much about ghosts anymore? They used to be a complex and potent image for many of our deepest hopes and fears, hinting at answers to the deepest questions (what happens to me after I die? Why do I fear the night? What is is that funny shadow in the picture? Why did I see a woman who looked just like my mother on the street exactly a week after my mother died?) Now we’re more likely to look for the answer in lens imperfections and cognitive theory than in the numinous – which is probably, on the balance, a good thing. Still, a grand and awful (in the original sense of awful) image seems to be slipping into oblivion. Perhaps there are enough terrifying things in our life that we have no need of the scary inexplicable.

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I had a true ghost story once.

When I was eight I was stayed one summer in a lodge in the Adirondacks. One afternoon I was reading in the sun room. I looked up from my book, and there was a woman in a long brown dress, with a white cap and an apron. She looked at me steadily for a moment, then turned, and walked out of my sight into the kitchen. I followed her. There was no one in the kitchen and there was no exit.

The preceding story is not true. I first made it up when I was a cub scout, as an admittedly fictional tale to tell around campfires. I thought it was pretty good…understated, plausible, not too much or too little detail, and no pat resolution. As the years went by and the my visual memory of the story built up, it slowly changed in my mind from a made up story to a memory. I forgot that I had once invented my ghost; she became as real to me as any other memory, and I would defend her existence heatedly in arguments with sceptics all through my teens and twenties. In my thirties, though, the topic of my ghost came up in a discussion with my sister, who reminded me that I had created the whole episode. And then I remembered.

It was an interesting and humbling illustration of how some folks can believe passionately in the objective reality of things they think they remember. Repeated often enough, a story becomes a memory.

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There are no haunted houses, says Joe Nickell, only haunted people. Nickell is a CSICOP fellow and, among other things, a real life ghostbuster. His experience is that hauntings are a combination of an inexplicable stimulus and a mind predisposed to belief. Ninety five percent of the hauntings he’s “cured” were the result of “ambient light reflection or bad wallpaper.”

The stimulus is easy to identify, but people still want to know their house has been “cleansed”. Nickell will often instruct residents to wait outside. He then rents an industrial strength, rock-concert PA and flashing light display, cranks them up to 11, and plays an half hour of Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music”.

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Does it strike you as odd that ghosts (presumably eternal spiritual entities beyond the call of fashion) always look and behave precisely the way we expect them to, in a given culture, and change their behaviours as the culture’s expectations change?

Elizabethan ghosts were prophets and messengers, arrived from beyond the grave to caution the living. Victorians expected their ghosts to appear spectrally like spiritual automata and walk a set path, and that’s what ghosts spotted in Victorian times did (whether the ghost was that of a ancient Roman or a recent murder victim). Chinese ghosts were vengeful, often attacking wrongdoers to deprive them of their right to reincarnation. Twentieth century ghosts interacted with the living,and were in some cases indistinguishable from real people.

All of which seems to suggest that ghosts exist in the eye…or the mind…of the beholder.

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I think movies have transformed ghosts in the popular consciousness from the numinous to the mechanical. They have become another species of alien, to be banished by formulae (”Poltergeist”), exotic technology (”Ghostbusters”, whose ghosts didn’t really seem to be ghosts at all) or Correct Behaviours (”The Ring” and so on). They no longer inspire awe based on a great unknowable mystery – they have become Scary Monsters who frighten us as a lion frightens us, without the deeper fear inspired by something that we know we may become.

I can’t help but feel that’s a loss. But I certainly don’t want to be proven wrong by first hand experience.