"Holy Jesus, what is that? What the f#ck is that?" -Gny. Sgt. Hartman
About a year ago (or was that two?) I promised to have a clearer focus with my blog and write about specific subjects regularly. I've been doing it off and on now for... a few weeks, maybe. Since I ramble so much about random topics, I doubt people have noticed. I have no desire to stop the randomness, but today marks the inaugural Supernatural Saturday. This could be short like normal, or very long. I'm tired, so you could get lucky. But I want to talk about ghosts.
What exactly is a ghost? Most people probably don't have a real answer for that. They think they do, but seriously ask yourself about the nature of hauntings. For one they vary. A lot. Maybe you heard something, smelled something, felt something, or saw something. I imagine ghost tasting possibly occurs as well. But my point is we have a large selection when it comes to hauntings, yet when it comes to ghosts, it's the soul or spirit of the dead, and they're responsible for the aforementioned. But what brought you to that conclusion?
Say you build a house, brand new, no one has ever lived in it, and then all the sudden it is haunted, you'll blame the land, or maybe something you recently brought in the house, all of which are haunted apparently. As an example, we'll say you keep hearing footsteps. In reality, you know very little about what you just experienced. You heard footsteps and they obviously have to be from a ghost. But what if they were actually from the future? Now you can't tell me that's ridiculous, because it's technically more scientifically sound than saying it's the spirit of the dead.
You see, I've experienced things all my life. I was that kid who was afraid to go to sleep at night because something would bump my bed, or the closet door would open, or something could be heard out in the hallway, or the room would get dark. I was born Catholic. Never went to church much, but with what little religion I was given, ghosts weren't real, and instead we had demons. Yet, for whatever reason, my family clung to the term ghost, at least after I was a teenager and my mother confessed that she believed our house was haunted. So I genuinely believe people experience things that science cannot explain. I've experienced them myself. After growing up, moving out and on with my life, getting educated, and reducing all of my past experiences to environmental, or even psychological, causes, the house I grew up in sat empty, so I moved back into it to help my family out. Night one, and I was welcomed home by the sounds of someone moving around upstairs. Obviously noises coming from outside. Night two, noises of someone trying to get in the back door. Obviously noises coming from outside. Night three, something walking up the stairs. Okay, I give up, the house is haunted.
Trying to rationalize the slightest creak or crack is what most people do. Door slams shut, sure, it's just air pressure. Window shuts by itself, maybe the pulley's are going bad? Don't be an idiot and think most people don't think of this first. Most hauntings you hear about include a visual component and that's what gets them reported. But this shit happens at random. I can guess a few things that set it off, such as emotional turmoil, which personally makes me think it could be something entirely different from a haunting. Not wanting to dwell on that, moving things in and out of the rooms of the house, doing repairs or upgrades, having a lot of people over, especially late, getting your groove on with someone new, things like that, all tend to increase the amount of activity that goes on. But I don't pretend I can get a performance on command. The overwhelming majority of the time, nothing goes on. The house is completely silent and nothing strange occurs at all. I can remember, even growing up, several months with nothing strange at all.
What makes me believe, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is when it's witnessed by multiple people. Sure, seeing an old man in a friend of your's kitchen around the same time someone else reported the same thing is rather suspicious, but having the hallway light turn off by itself when two people are there, or being woke up at the same time by the footsteps in the room above, events like these, and I'll cover them later, are what make me actually believe. Of course, I could never blame someone, who hasn't experienced anything, for not believing. I'm tired.