Marby Noffki

What is a ghost ?

March 12, 2008 |  4 comments
Image Credit: I have never liked the words supernatural or paranormal. There is something both irrational and arrogant about these terms that have grated on me ever since my aunt and I began to seek rational explanations for the events that took place in the house where for nearly thirty years, she and the family endured the unexplained. Irrational because it assumes that everything we cannot immediately explain must be beyond our knowledge, much like the long held belief that the earth was flat and that the sun revolved around it. Arrogant because it assumes that we, as human beings, know all there is to know about the scientific world, and therefore, the unexplained must be beyond what can be known.

The concept of the ghost has been with us since ancient times, and in fact, Pliny the Elder wrote of a haunted house in Athens in his day. Ghosts appear in both Eastern and Western folklore, and unlike much of what we used to believe, we have yet to find a rational explanation for the person that returns from the dead. Overwhelming anecdotal evidence, not to mention scientific evidence for the true haunting, careful documentation, and personal experience point to the existence of the ghost, but do we yet know what a ghost really is?

A ghost is generally categorized along the following lines:

Residual: This is a ghost that exists unaware of the passage of time or its surroundings, and goes about repeating an action over and over again. It does not interact with the living.Interactive: This is the ghost that is aware of its surroundings, interacts with the living, and haunts them on either a negative or positive level.

There are a million theories, some better than others, floating around New Age sections of bookstores and the Internet. The theory I am going to present is just that – theory. I will not pretend to know it all because I can only draw on personal experience and philosophy. This theory hinges on the assumption that energy is indestructible, and can only be altered, not destroyed.

On this assumption, we can explore the notion that whatever spark of energy fires up our physical bodies to give us life, has nowhere to go once that physical body wears out. That energy, lacking a physical body, is now released into the ether, perhaps in varying states of strength or weakness. For example, if someone dies a peaceful, or otherwise expected death, this weakened energy might show up as a residual haunting to the sensitive, simply repeating patterns that the physical body was accustomed to. If someone dies a particularly violent death, or one that they were not ready for, that energy might be stronger and still carry some sense of consciousness that will result in an interactive haunting.

Of course, it is simplistic to assume that energy might be weaker or stronger depending on the physical death. There might well be a hundred other factors that science has yet to touch regarding human consciousness involved. The idea is that there is surely an explanation, and science has a duty to explore every feasible theory in order to bring the ghost out of the super or para categories in which they currently exist. After all, isn’t an idea that is open to exploration better than assuming we cannot know, or worse, assuming that we do know?

Marby Noffki
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