People are coming up to me lately to say how much they enjoy playing the new Atari Ghostbusters video game and expressing hope that a third movie might be made.
Sometimes they ask me, an entertainer, if I think ghosts really could exist. Are ghosts real? And if so what are they made of?
Doctor Hans Holzer, probably the world's most credible and respected ghostbuster, writes in his Travel Guide to Haunted Houses (Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers): "A ghost appears to be a surviving emotional memory of someone who died traumatically... but is unaware of his or her death."
Wait! So ghosts are just our memories of those who have lived before?
"Sudden death comes as a shock... and human personalities stay on the spot where emotional attachment existed prior to their physical deaths.", says Holzer. He posits that ghosts are electromagnetic fields encased in the physical body. At death the outer layer dissolves leaving this energy free to move forward and back in space and time interacting with the other waves which comprise our plane of existence.
Have I personally ever seen a ghost? Not one. Have I ever felt an unseen presence near me? Damn right. In my bed no less when we lived in Mama Cass's Hollywood estate.
Hard-line skeptics such as my writing partner on Ghostbusters, Harold Ramis, believe that the invisible world can not reasonably encompass these lingering presences, their occasional appearances to us and their subsequent actions. However it is reported that General George Patton who fervently believed that he was a Roman Legionary in a previous life, appeared to one of his sisters in New York at the exact moment he died in an American military hospital in Germany. She described him as sitting casually inside her apartment window sill in full uniform. His other sister said that the General telephoned her in Boston as well to say good-bye at the time of his passing.
Surely genuine is humankind's fascination with the subject. Books, movies, documentaries, TV dramas and comedies interpreting these matters have proliferated since the first ghost stories were told.
The most believable contemporary account to me is the Ghost of Flight 401. There are several books on Eastern Airlines Lockheed L-10-11 flight engineer Donald Repo and his haunting of the salvaged galley elevator from the Florida plane crash which killed him and most others aboard 401.
At the turn of the century there was an inquisitive frenzy on the possibilities for survival of the spirit in an after life.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Oliver Lodge, Dr. Schrenk-Notzing, Charles Richet (who coined the word ectoplasm) plus numerous other investigators worldwide spent extensive time and money analyzing the exploits of many channellers and mediums.
These were individuals such as Daniel Dunglas Hume, a professional psychic whom witnesses said could levitate and elongate his body and limbs several feet like Plasticman. Eusapio Paladino, a simple adolescent girl was seen to disgorge real ectoplasm.
My father Peter points out in his new book A History of Ghosts (Rodale Press) that although Hume, Paladino and others were certified often for genuine phenomena they were also all caught in cheating the investigators from time to time.
As Pop Aykroyd and I hit the road soon to get the word out on his book, a definitive and exciting analysis of spiritualism as a movement, discipline and indeed a quasi-religion, the question of ghosts and the possibility of their existence will no doubt be brought up repeatedly. Believers and skeptics alike will be in on the debate and in my view it is a most worthwhile and moreover thoroughly entertaining one.
Aykroyd: Wait! So ghosts are just our memories of those who have lived before?
No, Danny. Said memories are from the GHOSTS, not you! Which is why over the years thousands of people have reported the paranormal activity of ghosts that they of course never knew in life.
You should already known that, after all your UFO/space alien research, which yields similar report patterns. After all, if everyone was visited by every alien - and ghost - that ever existed, then this planet would be flooded with millions of 'em on a daily basis! But of course that ain't the case.
Seriously, I applaud your courage to talk about this taboo -- most frightening to Americans, who've convinced themselves that death happens only to smokers.
I'm just now writing about spirits and what happens after we croak. One story: the green lights that flew off the wall, chasing a guy -- a mobster, I'd just learned-- from my apartment. I mostly know Friendly Ghosts: unseen hands that won't let me walk into the intersection, just when a van races through a red light, unseen hands that yank me back when I'm mid-fall, nose millimeters above sidewalk.
I too know about invisible bedmates: in Cadaques, a hauntingly beautiful Spanish hilltown made famous by surrealist Salvador Dali, while I worked on a book with the man who'd made Dali household name status, I felt someone in bed AND leaning over my shoulder -- reading as I wrote; pictures often moved. I discovered that in the village infamous for pirates and witches my charged cottage was built atop a graveyard; but I always thought it was Dali.
Thanks for piercing the veil that's cloaked ghosts -- and death, that upcoming state about which we've long preferred to stay in the dark. Let's shed more light!
how much prove do you people need ?
Until some real evidence comes forward, I simply cannot subscribe to the claim that ghosts exist. The "evidence" that people so often claim for ghostly encounters (appliances turning on or off, things falling, supposedly unexplainable coincidences, etc.) can be explained though other possible - and more likely - causes. The important point is that as long as even one reasonable, non-supernatural explanation can be posited for a supposedly supernatural happening, there is no reason other than personal belief or emotional desperation to assume a supernatural causation.
Is it possible? Of course. It hasn't been DISproven, so it must remain in the realm of could-bes. But for me, no evidence, no belief.
It is a cynical view, to be sure, but I think if the afterlife and ghosts exist whatever evidence of them will appear regardless of the audience--and that it must be that way. Notwithstanding some very reasonable conclusions on a quantum level, I still think that reality exists apart from our perception of it, and that our loved ones would appear to us post-mortem whether we thought it was possible or not.
I prayed for a sign. There were several manifestations in our house after his death-objects falling off shelves or flying across the room & several people felt someone touching them when there was no one else there. But I experienced nothing.
The signs seemed centered around our 16-yr-old daughter who was devastated by his death, & around her friends. She was daddy's favorite girl & I think he knew that I would be okay but was concerned about her. He seemed to want to show her that he was still there for her & thinking of her & to give her some comfort in her grief.
I wish I had an answer for you, ntellya. I never got my own sign but enough other people did to help me keep my own faith that this man will be waiting for me when I die.
Don't give up your belief that "something" survives, ntellya. If nothing else, your love does. Bless you dear.
I believe. And it gives me comfort to know that we go on after death. While death is still life's greatest mystery, at least it doesn't scare me as much now.
I am sorry to hear of your partner's passing. I don't know that the phenomena you describe cannot be explained fairly easily--but I understand your desire to know that your partner and your relationship with him survives, and I find your increased comfort with death reassuring. I lost a close friend five years ago, and until that time death absolutely terrified me. Yet as awful as it was to bury someone so close, my fear of death subsided a great deal knowing that he was able to make the journey at such a young age (we were both 29). It doesn't scare me as much now either.
Yes, but the memory is NOT in the place, but rather in the head of the person who sees the ghost.
An analogy with a computer is:
the brain is the hardware, and
the mind is the software, and
both are physical.
Today I visited Casa Battlo in Barcelona (by Gaudi) at noon after a spectacular, unusual sunrise over the sea. http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.cambridge2000.com/gallery/images/PC1313006.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.cambridge2000.com/gallery/html/PC1313006.html&usg=__cKFv5u4OCLe0GgeE4lWb6FlG8R0=&h=600&w=800&sz=105&hl=en&start=1&um=1&tbnid=ojof1Yot_snICM:&tbnh=107&tbnw=143&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dbarcelona%2Barchitecture%2Bgaudi%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26um%3D1
I ditched the audio aid within 10 minutes--no need to be told what I was seeing.
Besides the incredible 5-floor skylit central atrium illumited at high noon--it IS the sea on a partly cloudy fall morning (just like today), I left with the overwhelming feeling that it was ALIVE. Gaudi died tragically--hit by street car--with this his residential masterpiece.
The final room of the tour was on the top floor. Plain white undulating walls and ceiling with dare I say ghostly illumination from small, oddly shaped windows that appeared and disappeared depending on your perspective. I knew this was a VERY special room even though very plain and likely used for storage. My partner who used the audio tour told me that this was Gaudi's favorite room in the house--what he would have used for his study/modeling workshop. As a renovation I suspect this might have been the first room finished--where he did study and model.
Perhaps ghosts do exist...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_Batll%C3%B3
Does anyone else see the chimneys as two hands placed together with thumbs folded inward? Hands at prayer?
My favorite pet theory is a ghost is energy created in panic at the moment of death. It allows the dying to have a bit of closure.
And personal stories don't count as physical evidence.
Except: How do you find physical evidence of something that is not physical?
A thought can be considered physical if you really stretch the meaning as at least electrically it did exist for an instant and electrons are physical objects.
I say only for purpose of discussion: What if "ghosts" are collections of photons--things that act like things but cannot exist physically--images; reflections--non physical from without that evoke physical within?