Sometimes a Ghost is Just a Ghost

If you’re unfamiliar with anthropomorphism, think of the way you attribute emotions and personality to inanimate objects, such as your car.  You label it with a name, with a gender; you assign its operating anomalies emotional identities (i.e. claim that it’s angry with you, when it doesn’t work properly).  It is more than possible, and even likely, that we are predisposed to assign similar explanations to the mysterious and spooky happenings within ghostly encounters.

As for physical and apparently interactive phenomenon, it’s important to understand the basic physics of energy, especially energy field theories.  A field of energy, represented as a wave, interacts with the objects in its path, whether through deflection, absorption, propagation or cancellation.  A residual energy field would behave much the same way, but would be affected by our own energy field as well.

Our own thought patterns would affect the manifestation of the ghost within our perception of the event.  In essence, it’s possible that the act of observing the ghost, serves to energise the apparition and enhance the encounter.

This is not to say that all paranormal encounters are the result of random convergence of energy fields and residual emotion.  There are documented (though questionable) accounts of encounters that offer seemingly irrefutable evidence of highly complex, independent intelligence, manifested in the outward behaviours of the entity(s), and their impact on “real” objects and measurement devices.

It should be of paramount importance to employ Occam’s razor in all cases of paranormal investigation.  Wherein, when faced with multiple possibilities for the explanation of a phenomenon, one must accept as true, which ever explanation satisfies the simplest reason.  In other words, if there is a way to explain an unknown event, which does not rely on a belief in paranormal influence, then one must accept that explanation, however boring and counterintuitive, as the truth.

While none of this theorising speaks to the validity of ghostly encounters on the whole, wherein, the vast majority of them can be explained in real world terms, as functions of environmental interference, mechanical malfunction or simple misunderstood physics; it does provide for a possible explanation of ghostly phenomenon, without the need to bow our heads in reverence to God’s influence.

The very idea of demonising the energy that makes up everything in the universe is counterintuitive and contradictory.  As is typically the case in our culture of pious moderation, many feel that those things, which cannot be readily explained by science, must be attributed to any variety of miracle or satanic debauchery.  This is a highly paranoid and limiting mind set and one that virtually eliminates the possibility of ever truly revealing the scientific nature behind ghostly paranormal phenomenon.

While historically, the church has offered the only answers (believable only through a lack of other options) for this type of event, one need not see demons, where only a reflection of their own fears exists.

Take for example, the popular movie The Sixth Sense.  Obviously intended to be a dramatic thriller, this film serves to reinforce the latent fear we as a society hold for not only the unexplained phenomenon of ghosts, but it also speaks to us about the demonising of those with the gift of being able to detect them, as illustrated through the popularisation of that one famous line from the film…”I see dead people”.

What if we were to consider for a moment, that the continued reappearance of the ghost played by Brue Willis, is attributed not to his personal need to find resolution to his own failures in life, but is actually caused by the grief of his wife?  Obviously this doesn’t fit with the overall story line, but it does present an interesting alternative to the typical view of the tortured soul of a ghost; again, behaving in death, as in life.

Is there room in our paranormal sub-culture for a scientific approach to a phenomenon typically viewed as either the pursuit of strange sci-fi enthusiasts or the fanciful muse of some Hollywood screenwriter?  There must be, and while these ideas may not engender the same drama or controversy, they warrant further exploration as one of the many possible avenues for finally answering the age old question; what are ghosts?