Recently I seem to have been unintentionally preoccupied with the supernatural - ghosts, ghouls, dead things, and so on. Not that this is entirely unsurprising, of course. My research involves plays - like, say, Macbeth or The Changeling - that contain not only gruesome deaths, but the returning (and revenging) spirits of the dead. In my other job, I work in a 323-year-old building with a crypt containing around 100 bodies, some of which are visible, with fairly serious noise and electrical "issues" that we like to blame on our resident (dead) Frenchman. I am fascinated by questions of belief, religion, and myth.
Over the last several days, I've been watching old episodes of Ghost Hunters, which seems right in line with this history. But it is something completely different. Instead of approaching the supernatural from the point of view of a literary device, a mythological belief system, or an amusing explanation for antique wiring, ghosts - for these people - are very real phenomena. Most of the time. For people who make a living hunting ghosts, they are very practical and do a good deal of "debunking" of claims.
But it makes me wonder a few things about people. First, why we want to believe in ghosts. Certainly, there is the desire to have proof that death is not the end of our existence. That there is something beyond the physical connection of synapses and cells that makes us us. I buy it. In fact, if someone could definitively prove to me that ghosts are a continuation of human existence, I'd be thrilled.
There is another part of me, however, who finds some of the possible explanations for "ghosting" to be profoundly interesting in a scientific way. Emotion- or energy-impressions, for instance. The idea that we might feel so deeply that we somehow impress some part of our consciousness or emotion into the world around us is profoundly strange. It seems to imply that there are physical laws we don't understand - laws that can explain how the energy of emotions can impact the physical world without what we understand as physical contact. Intriguing, certainly. But it also reminds us how truly ignorant we are about our own world; we don't even understand the basic rules for how we interact with our surroundings, or they with us. It also raises the question of what makes us what we are; are emotional impressions a part of us? Are they capable of feelings and intelligence of their own? Do we really leave behind semi-sentient beings when we feel that intensely?
Finally, the concept of a ghost - so long as I do not know what it actually is - is also profoundly disturbing. Is a ghost a person trapped in a cyclic pattern of emotion and behavior? Restricted to a specific path or area by virtue of some in-life connection or site of death? The idea of being stuck for what amounts to eternity is not a pleasant one.
And if ghosts aren't human at all, then what are they? What else inhabits our world that we cannot see or interact with on a regular basis? What else is out there that we fail to notice at all?
So what do I think they are? I don't. I'm open, in the true sense of an atheist. No one has managed to actually prove anything to me. I know people who believe in them, who have claims of seeing and feeling things. I believe them. I believe that the things they say happened are true. That doesn't mean I know what they are. Maybe they are the dead. Maybe they're "energy-impressions." Maybe they're something else altogether. I don't know. I choose not to try to make a choice.
Now if Pierre walks up to me and introduces himself, you can bet that just as soon as I've had a psych-evaluation I'll be more than happy to believe that ghosts are people. But until then, I'm happy to wait and wonder. Because maybe ghosts are quarks. Or quarks are ghosts. Or something equally strange but fully explainable by science that we just haven't discovered yet.
Remember, just because we don't have an answer doesn't mean there isn't one.
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