Ghosts

My impression is that when most people hear ghost stories, most are told in the third person, making it easy to dismiss them. Luckily for them, they don't have relatives in the Philippines.

A few weeks ago, my brother sent me a cellphone photo of his wife's aunt, taken at a party. In the background is a figure who partygoers say wasn't there for the picture, and who folks claim is her husband, who had died a few weeks previously.

A cousin tells me she once looked up through the skylight of a bathroom and saw half of a woman staring back at her.

An aunt tells me that she (and others) have heard children talking and running about in the basement of a particular house when nobody was around. Unlike others, though, she hasn't turned to see these children watching her.

An uncle visiting from the States once woke up to find all of his clothes ordered neatly in the front yard.

In a pathology lab, people occasionally report seeing an old man wandering around the halls. Sometimes they realize that they've seen him in pictures around the building; he is, after all, a former director of said lab. I don't know how they react when they find out that my grandfather passed away eight years ago. (My mother and grandmother [both doctors] half-jokingly -- but only half -- chastise my grandfather for having fun at the expense of others.)

I've stayed in some of these homes. I'm none too pleased about that.

I'm curious -- what take do you folks have on ghosts, if any? Utter bullshit? Hallucinations? Complete and total belief? Measured skepticism?

Feeling self-discursive

I often find myself examining buildings in post-apocalyptic-survival terms.

Looking at a hotel resort and thinking about the difficulty of setting up a perimeter: noticing how close vegetation grows, and considering how much of it would need to be chopped down for a larger field of vision; noting how widely spaced buildings are and how difficult it would be to set up mutually supporting fields of fire; defensibility of points of entry; and so forth.

While tooling around at the grocery today, I found myself thinking it would make an excellent base of operations. The huge floor space is easily made into a barracks, with plenty of room for a mess hall, and dividable into smaller sections if need be for specialized use. Obviously, there is significant space for storage of weapons, supplies, and foodstuffs in the back. There are only a few entrances, which seem fairly easily defendable, particularly if made into funnels via shelf placement. There is a loading dock, which means the building is easy to supply. Other than at the entrances, its front has no windows, making it difficult to snipe and/or gain entrance through a non-door (though making it costly to light); it would probably be worth drilling small holes through which one could fire out; and its back faces down a hill (overlooking the Mass Pike). The parking lot that surrounds it makes it difficult to sneak up on the grocery, and is easy to cover with armed lookouts on the roof.

Anyway.