GHOSTS I'VE NEVER KNOWN
"WE have all met the man who says that some odd things have happened
to him, but that he does not really believe that they were supernatural. My own
position is the opposite of this. I believe in the supernatural as a matter of
intellect and reason, not as a matter of personal experience. I do not see
ghosts; I only see their inherent probability."
~G.K. Chesterton: Tremendous Trifles.
It is a peculiar fact that just about every member of
my family has had a ghostly experience or a tale of weird encounters, while I
have never experienced anything that I haven't found totally explicable. The
peculiar thing is that there's nothing in my beliefs or philosophy that denies
the possibility of ghosts; I've just never seen one.
And really, I live in one of the most reputedly haunted areas
in our little town. Just across the street is a haunted hotel that's been
featured on TV, news articles, and websites around the world. The house I live
in (through no virtue of my own) is over one hundred and thirty years old. My
nieces and nephews think there are ghosts here.
Lord knows, I've got plenty of dead relatives who
could come visiting. It didn't use to be that way. For a long time, nobody I
was close to ever passed away. But, of
course, that couldn't last forever. I even knew lots of evil assholes, now
passed, who could come a-haunting.
I have plenty of hypotheses about my situation. One
is that everyone is bullshitting me about their paranormal experiences. The
"professional" hauntings at the hotel seem like pretty obvious
money-making endeavors. My favorite theory is that God knows I'll drop down
dead with fright if I see a spook, so protects me from that.
Orthodox Christianity seems divided on the existence
of ghosts. One school of thought says when you're dead, you're either in Heaven
or Hell, no vacations. Another tradition says the dead pop in and out for
special reasons. A lot of opinion hinges on how they interpret the whole Samuel
and the Witch of Endor episode.
Of course, the materialist philosophy says we're all
just meat-machines. We see a ghost, that's just something interfering with the
machine, a glitch in the brain or a hoax or a misinterpretation of the facts.
What do I think? I think all my ghost-seeing
relatives seem sincere. They're not fools, though I'm sure they could be
fooled. I'm not even sure when they describe their "ghosts" if it's
dead people, and not, say, demons up to some kind of mischief. That's certainly
been one popular interpretation of hauntings. In which case thinking it was
really ghosts would be almost comforting.
And, if they are dead people, why hang around? I
remember reading a ghost story by Charles Dickens (or was it Mark Twain?) where
the narrator, after getting on comfy terms with an apparition, asks the
ghost why spirits, no longer hindered by fleshly concerns, and having the
entire planet, if not the universe, to roam, limit themselves to dreary places
like cemeteries and abandoned houses that can only be unwholesome reminders of
their death? The ghost realizes the justice of this argument and leaves for greener
pastures.
So, ghosts: real or nay? I can only say, with Samuel
Johnson, "[F]ive thousand years have now elapsed ... and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever
been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All
argument is against it; but all belief is for it."
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