Thinking About: Ghosts and Ghoulies



With Halloween almost upon us my thoughts naturally turn to the supernatural – OK, not really but it seemed like a good way to start….. Anyway – ghosts and such like….. My short answer is that I don’t believe in them and never have (except maybe as a very young undiscriminating child). The problem I have with them is two fold. Firstly there is the matter of evidence – or should I say lack thereof? As with most other elements of supernaturalism there doesn’t seem to be a lot of hard evidence around to support it. This is what annoyed me most about the X-Files (for example), lots of running around, lots of spooky goings on and, no matter the amount of effort involved in the investigation, not one jot of credible evidence to support anything. You would think that, by now after hundreds of years of investigation and thousands of years of ‘eye-witness reports’ we’d have something to back it up. Instead we have unsupported testimony, feelings and the occasional grainy photograph that could be anything and could easily be faked. In this case absence of evidence is practically the same as evidence of absence.

My other problem, which I think is much greater than the mere lack of any evidence, is the fact that I do not believe that there is any mechanism whereby ghosts can be created. For instance you would have to have something that could survive a person’s death. This, according to some ghost stories, wouldn’t have to be the whole person just an image and some behaviour patterns but even so there would have had to be ‘something’ that could be transferred after death. This is where we get into the rather messy area of souls. Several major religions appear to believe that there is a unique part of us that is non-material and that survives the death of the physical body. Some believe that this is judged on death and goes to a good place/bad place. Others think that it is reincarnated according to how you have behaved in previous lives. Both agree that this non-corporeal, non-material thing is ‘you’. I have struggled with the amount of questions this raises. What is it? Where is it located? Why hasn’t it been detected (even by accident)? How exactly does a non-material thing (whatever that means) communicate with the physical realm? Of course, as with much of the supernatural, people have tried to shoehorn Quantum Mechanics into the frame. Maybe, they say, the mind in moments of anguish imprints parts of itself on the fabric of space-time thereby creating the illusion of ghostly activity that certain people – more sensitive than the rest of us – can detect to varying degrees. That certainly sounds feasible until you start asking those pesky questions again. How does the mind do this exactly? Can such imprinting be taught and produced at will? What level of anguish is required to produce a good image that people can see or feel? The more questions you ask the messier it gets. But that’s how the supernatural usually works. Taken at face value we have mysteries and explanations. Start digging and all you have are unanswerable questions.

Ghost stories are part of our culture because they are easy to believe, hard to disprove and often entertaining into the bargain. They can be used to back up the beautiful lie of life after death and as morality tales to keep people on the straight and narrow. They can be used to frighten young children and to sell some questionable merchandise at the end of October each year. Superstitions about ghosts and much else besides are not going away anytime soon but they are hangovers from an earlier less sceptical age. Enjoy them for what they are but don’t imagine that there really are things that go bump in the night.