Ghosts

[sen_no_ongaku]

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?

Comments

[archaica.livejournal.com]

Man, haven't the Ghostbusters opened a Manila office yet?

[cybersattva.livejournal.com]

My mom signed a check once the name of her great-aunt, who had died suddenly earlier that day. My mom hadn't heard about the death yet.

My dad had a dream once as a kid that his neighborhood best friend was sitting in his window watching him. When Dad noticed his friend, his friend told him he was there to say goodbye. Dad found out the next day that his friend had died in the night of an asthma attack.

I have heard people walking up and down the stairs of my family's house when I'm the only one there. Not random creaking boards, but one-foot-in-front-of-the-other walking up the stairs. My whole family is positive that if there is a such thing as ghosts, our home is haunted.

I don't worry about it too much, since all "true" ghost stories I have heard are pretty benign. The worst part about the ghost at home making a racket is I get worried there's actually a burglar in the house. Is it real? I can't prove anything and I can hypothesize non-meta-physical explanations for it all, but honestly, sometimes the ghost theory is the best fit.

[magdalene1.livejournal.com]

I want to say that "ghosts aren't real" like all smart educated non-supersititious western people. I wouldn't want to get into some kind of scientific argument about it, especially on the "ghosts are real" side, but I would want to explore the idea of myth and dream and the psychological need to believe and what the ghosts "mean" to the people who see them. Stories like yours give me a delicious tingle.


Also, I lived in a very old house in DC for a while. It was supposed to be haunted, and I laughed it off until I was home alone one night and heard knocking on the walls - as if someone was trying to locate a stud or a hollow place, continuing down each wall in the living room in a methodical fashion. We had no upstairs neighbors, there were two closed businesses on either side, and the knocking was definitely coming from right in the room with me. I got a little bit freaked out listening to the knocking, so I left the room and went into mine. You had to cut through my room to get to the 2 rooms in the basement, and we had a bead curtain at the bottom of the stairs. On my way into my room, I heard the distinctive sound of someone running through the bead curtain, and when I got to the top of the stairs it was swinging back and forth. I turned my back and the sound happened again, and the curtain was swinging violently. It for sure was not a breeze or a wind (communicating between a closed basement and a closed room) - it was something denser and more directed than that passing through the curtain in a certain way much faster than any breeze.

I wish I'd had the presence of mind to try some sort of "knock once for yes, twice for no" thing, but I think I just sat on my bed and said "I hope you're a friendly ghost" and went back to my book. It happened a few times later that summer, always when I was alone. I never saw anything. My roommates who had lived there longer than me confirmed that they heard the knocking sometimes too, and it became sort of a thing to say "Hey ghost, I'm home" when coming through the door.

Like me, my roommates always heard it when alone in the house.

Were we having a collective hallucination? Was the house just settling in some way? I have no idea, but it's sure kinda creepy, isn't it?

[epilimnion.livejournal.com]

I've had my own ghost experience, and it's very weird, very disconcerting, to the point where you can even doubt what happened. But I've found that the supernatural doesn't have much power. It may be creepy, but no real harm can come from it.

[the-star-fish.livejournal.com]

The hotel I worked at in NH was said to have a haunted tower where a young girl (we called her "The Princess") had killed herself. This tower, of course, was one of the places they housed the staff. I never saw her, but three separate times I bolted awake at 2:27 a.m. for no reason ....

[cue spooky music]

I used to love reading ghost-story books. Oddly enough, I really really HATE the television equivalent of them. Go fig.

[kenjari.livejournal.com]

I've had some ghost experiences, too. Since the deceased person/ghost in question is a family member, I'm not actually all that creeped out about it. I guess it also helps that my parents talked about his occasional appearances when I was growing up. I suppose I might feel differently if the situation were otherwise.

[woobat.livejournal.com]

My only creepy experience was seeing a bright light in a graveyard and immediately afterwards barking my shin on a gravestone. Like, someone who wasn't thrilled with my being there distracted me in to hurting myself.

And I totally buy that ghosts exist, and I think that's in no way incompatible with scientific inquiry.


This actually reminds me a bit of my thoughts on the intelligent design nonsense. Science is in no way incompatible with saying "there are wierd ass things we don't understand" as long as those things are still being investigated. And there are things that we may never understand; the process of investigating them may progressively yield fewer and fewer results as time goes on, and I think *that* is where we see indications of the unknowable, the mysterious, the divine.

[iresprite.livejournal.com]

Measured skepticism. When I hear third party tales, I'm mostly dismissive. When I hear first person tales, and I know the person, I tend to give it more weight.

I believe in the existence of interesting spiritual phenomena, but I try to protect my sense of wonder about the world with a healthy- if permeable- shield of skepticism.

[shellaby.livejournal.com]

Wow. This conversation has spooked me out now.

I think if there's a supernatural population, they know I'm already scared to be by myself or be asleep, so they're being nice to me. Let's hope we stay on those terms. :)

Theatres are rife with ghosts

[pantshead.livejournal.com]

And technicians (and probably actors) are rife with ghost stories. Nearly every theatre I've worked in has a ghost story, usually with a backstory.

The backstory here (where I work now) is that there's a woman in red who inhabits the basement areas (costume shop, dressing rooms). There was once a tunnel from our building to the (now) restaurant across the street. Supposedly, the restaurant used to be a brothel, and the women would use the tunnel to come and meet patrons after the shows at the theatre. Allegedly, the Lady in Red is one of these women. There are folks here who claim to have seen her, although I have not. The wardrobe staff reports that "she" plays tricks when there is a lead in a play wearing a red dress. (Minor stuff, but annoying, like all of the socks being in the wrong dressing rooms.)

I do firmly believe that buildings (especially theatres) have a certain "aura" to them. Most of it is composed of things like the noise of the HVAC system, or the sound of the rafters creaking. The AMT at Williams was very much like this....it sounded as if the building had a heartbeat (which was the creepiest thing in the world at 2am) until you realized that it was the rythmic thump of the HVAC. On the other hand, totally unexplained things would happen, too, like the night two of us were working onstage late at night, and the lobby doors slammed shut with no one (apparently) there. So, you roll all those things together (including the noise of voices always just out of range, and no one ever in the rooms when you look) and you have a haunted building.

I also think that theatre folks ascribe certain virtues to the ghosts--I've heard of may who are "an old stagehand who was killed a long time ago in an accident"--the idea of dying for your art/craft is compelling, I guess. Maybe ghosts act as a sort of collective conscience?

I did work at a theatre that had no ghost(story). It was a really bad working environment, with a lot of unreasonable expectations by the "senior" management. I think _they_ needed a collective conscience, and I've been heard to blame the bad things about that theatre on their lack of ghost. Or maybe no ghost would inhabit their theatre because of their bad behaviour.

Wow, I took up a lot of your comment page. Sorry about that...

[nadyezhda.livejournal.com]

my vietnamese and laotian friends have very similar stories. I don't know whether I believe them or not, but they scared the hell out of me growing up.