Ghosts in the media

I'm posting this just a little late for Halloween, but the New York Times ran in their lifestyle section last week an article How to Live with a Ghost - about what happens when people think their residence is haunted.  It talks about people who have learnt to live with it, whether Americans have to legally disclose that a house is believed to be haunted when selling, and how many people do believe in ghosts.

I recently wrote how dismissive I am of the paranormal investigation cable TV shows, and I have to say that I find a well written, plausible sounding, first hand strange incident is much more convincing than anything I have seen on a TV show with investigators with their "ghostbusting" style equipment.  ("Spirit boxes" are just the most ridiculous idea for claiming communication evidence - it's like the perfect way to encourage imagined messages.)  

But take this story, which starts the NYT article, as it is easy to imagine as quite disturbing if it happened to me:

On a routine afternoon, Shane Booth, a photography professor living in Benson, N.C., was folding laundry in his bedroom, when he was startled by a loud, crashing noise. He stepped out to find a shattered front window and his dog sitting outside it. He was confused, how could his dog have jumped through the window with enough force to break it?

After cleaning up the glass, Mr. Booth came back to his room, where all of the clothes he had just folded were scattered and strewn about, he said. “That’s when I thought, this is actually really scary now,” said Mr. Booth, 45.

A few things it would be good to know, though:   has Mr Booth always enjoyed good mental health, and does he also have a mad cat as well as a dog?   Was he folding clothes into a basket, and did he tip it over as he ran out of the room?   Rarely do reports of odd incidents cover off such obvious matters, which is somewhat disappointing.  

Stories of footsteps in unoccupied upstairs rooms are a very common haunting trope, and one that is certainly sometimes capable of mundane explanation.  But I also have little doubt that it can be pretty convincingly concerning, in the right circumstances.   

Things moved to wildly improbable locations are perhaps harder to explain, unless you sleepwalk.  I like this story, though (from comments in the NYT) to a follow up article:

Never believed, just thought here are some things we may not know about our world/universe. Then stayed at a hotel (not that old) and woke one night to a the absolute conviction that someone in the darkness was standing behind me. I whirled around and clicked the light as fast as I dared....no one. The large, closet doors were suddenly wide open though. I closed them, thinking I had perhaps left them like that (knowing full well I never leave closets open, since childhood). My room door had it's latch on, no one could have entered. The next morning, my small camera, charging in it spot, was gone. The chord was still there. I looked everywhere, called housekeeping asked about stollen goods, etc...nothing. Finally, upon packing to leave a couple days later, I pulled out my pair of floppy-top boots I never wore on that trip-- and out fell my camera from inside. There was no way it could have fallen into them. I left bewildered--- and when I mentioned it to the receptionist, he shrugged in a bored manner--- "Oh room number 225? Yeah, he likes to move stuff around sometimes." I chose another room the next time.

OK, nothing particularly convincing about waking up and feeling a presence, as tha's a common feature of sleep paralysis (from which my daughter suffered, so I'm pretty familiar with first hand descriptions.).  But if this was the first time you ever had the experience, and it was combined with the camera moving to a weird hiding spot, it would creep you out.   (Frustratingly, sleep walking would be a possibility impossible to disprove unless you had the foresight to set up cameras, and who is going to do that before the object is lost?)

Similarly with stories of ghost voices - highly suggestive of something supernatural, but also explicable as convenient auditory hallucinations.   This story, for example:

As an engineering major with a strong education in science, I didn’t believe in the supernatural. But then I lived ten years in a house my wife insisted was haunted. One day, I was watching my three year old son while my wife and daughter went shopping. I was surfing the net while he toddled around the room. Then I zoned out reading an online article. Then I heard a voice: “where is your son?” I looked around and wondered where the voice came from. “You need to find him,” the voice said. I thought that was probably a good idea so I went looking for him and found the front door open. I went outside and found him toddling down the driveway toward the street. I raced over and snatched him up. When I got back inside, I said to the air: “thank you, whoever you are!” Years later I told that to my wife and after scolding me for my negligence, told me I’d heard the ghost. And for the epilogue, that son just called me from college to check in and see how his old dad is doing. I’m still grateful to that ghost who may very well have saved my son’s life.

The ghost voice that is challenging rather than useful is perhaps less readily explained as the brain  talking to itself.   I think I wrote here before that the woman in charge of the nursing home my mother lived in until she died told us that she would not work in her (somewhat isolated) office in the old convent building at night, as soon after she started there she had heard a clear voice ask aggressively "who are you?" and felt her hair being flicked, when no one was around.   

Some people in the article are like me - quite fascinated with the topic, and very open to the possibility of experiencing something personally, but it never happens.  About the most puzzling thing that has happened to me overnight is waking up one morning (in my 20's) perfectly reversed in my (single) bed in the dorm style room in which I lived alone: my feet on my pillow, my head at the foot of my bed, and somewhat tangled up in the sheet.  Has happened exactly once in my life! 

Anyway:  in another, somewhat charming story from Singapore, I like the way the government respects, but tries to handle co-operatively, the Chinese tradition of burning joss paper to provide goods to the family deceased.  There are incinerators around apartment blocks to allow for this, although it does cause complaints when the smoke and waste interferes with residents.   This is such a significant issue that the government news service likes to point out there has been a reduced number of complaints about this year:

 

I funny it a little amusing that there are public servants there whose job it is to keep track of complaints about burnt offerings to ghosts.  Well, more charming, really.