Daily Strange's Fearless Friday: Spectral Incursions

"i get to be angry too" Photo By Daniel Danger

Those who scorn the idea that spooks and specters prowl and shimmer through the world do so because no one has so far caught a ghost in a bottle, because they are skeptical by habit, or because they resist the notion that death may not be final For many the word ''ghost'' conjures up an anonymous white-robed figure, a spirit who has come back from the grave to haunt the living. But in the annals of ghostdom, spectral beings come in a variety of forms and shapes, and some never put in an appearance at all, although they make their presence felt. Ghosts also differ in behavior — they may be aimless, purposeful, playful, angelic, and even demonic.

There are three lines of explanation for ghostly phenomena: the spiritual, mechanical, and psychological.

The most firmly established is the spiritual thesis, which holds that ghosts are intelligent beings. The first version of this idea is that ghosts are the spirits of dead humans. They continue to resemble their earthly forms in appearance and dress and are found reenacting things they did in the past, bound to their haunting grounds by guilt, remorse, desire, or habit. They may be malevolent, kindly, or indifferent toward human beings. People who take this view of ghosts regard them as marking time in a spiritual halfway house between this world and heaven, purgatory, or hell.

According to another version of the spiritual view, a ghost's resemblance to a formerly living person or animal is actually a masquerade adopted for its own purpose, the real appearance of ghosts being quite different. Some ghosts, for instance, appear as vaporous columns or clouds of light.

In the third view of ghosts as a spiritual phenomenon, these apparitions are not beings in either of the senses described above. Instead, they are illusions created by powerful classes of angelic or demonic beings for the purpose of helping or harming those who see them. Miracles are an example of intervention by angelic or enlightened powers, while most poltergeist episodes are held to be demonic.

In the psychological view of the phenomenon, ghosts reveal a spectrum of powerful but not yet understood capacities of the human mind. In these terms, some ghosts are the product of telepathic powers, as when a relative or friend appears to another at the time of death; others — poltergeist phenomena—suggest unwitting and uncontrolled psychokinetic abilities. And some — the appearance of phantom doubles — suggest that out-of-body experiences may sometimes be manifest to others.

In fact, most believers in ghosts are probably willing to accept all of these theses as helping to explain a complex and varied phenomenon. Skeptics, on the other hand, resorting to the dry but sturdy arguments of what they consider to be common sense, are apt to maintain that stories of ghosts are lies, hallucinations, or earnest reports of misperceptions. But the most convincing evidence of the existence of specters still seems to be their appearance on the scene.

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