REAL GHOSTS?

A week ago for my Halloween post, I dashed off a quick essay about how so many Americans now seem to believe in ghosts: this is weird for me because I am a skeptic. It's not so much that I absolutely insist that ghosts don't exist as much as I've never encountered any compelling reason to believe in them. My buddy Tara, who just got her MFA in acting from LSU last spring, left this comment:

I would just tell you about this, but I know I would forget. So here is my second hand ghost story. A friend of mine and her boyfriend moved into a new apartment in Boone, NC. They had been there a few weeks when they started to notice little things missing-- lighters, change, Coke cans. They chalked it up to aging brains and too much drinking until one night the female woke to see what she thought was a Coke can floating through the air. She freaked out and woke her boyfriend who was a total skeptic. He saw nothing. Over the next few days she became convinced that there was a ghost in the house. He was unconvinced. So she did her research and found (this is true) a woman who did exorcisms over the phone. She called and set it up. Two days later when they came home from work, they found a pile of all of the little lost items on their bed. He became a believer that day. Explain that.

I've been meaning to respond, but, you know, I've been busy. Before I was able to comment myself, a wayward internet stranger, FreeThinker, a "Skeptic from LSU," put in his two cents' worth:

Tara, here's a logical explanation:

The boyfriend set all this up to make your friend hug him tight.

I finally got around to responding last night, but after I had typed and typed I realized that what I had written was long enough to make a post by itself, so here we are.

My response:

Well, FreeThinker offers one reasonable explanation, but I'll make it harder for myself and accept the facts as you describe them, missing objects, floating coke can, a psychic, objects reappearing.

My first thought is to ask why you automatically need to assume that such phenomena were caused by ghosts. That is, why not assume some other kind of cause like aliens or angels or leprechauns? Maybe your friend's place sits on a slight rift in the fabric of the space-time continuum which caused the objects to disappear and float through the air and spontaneously reappear. The psychic thing over the phone could be entirely coincidental. That is, the exorcism and the reappearance of the missing objects aren't at all necessarily connected in a causal way.

Of course, I don't believe any of the above suggestions, except, of course, that last bit about coincidence; I mention them only to point out how taking this story as proof of the existence of ghosts necessitates a lot of unfounded assumptions. This story doesn't really prove anything at all, only that humans witness unexplained phenomena rather frequently. This kind of thinking, jumping irrationally to the conclusion that bizarreness equals ghosts, is the same thing that led prehistoric peoples to create weirdo gods and spirits: lacking an obvious explanation for mysterious events, lacking science, people tend to invoke the supernatural to help them make sense of the world. That seems to be a vital aspect of human nature: we still do it today.

Putting all that aside, here’s my attempt to provide a rational explanation that works with the universe as I understand it. First of all, objects disappear all the time for whatever reasons. They're mislaid, or simply lost, or moved by feet pounding on the floor, or by pets. Missing objects only means missing objects. There are a thousand ways things can go missing without any supernatural help. Secondly, your friend woke to see a floating Coke can. Was she really awake? It strikes me that she may have dreamed this. Even if she was awake, it's possible that she was still a bit out of it; I know I'm not fully myself for at least an hour after I get up. At any rate, your friend seemed to think it was important to note that she had been sleeping right before she saw it. There's got to be some kind of connection there. Thirdly, as I've already stated, my guess is that the exorcism coinciding with the reappearance of the lost objects is simply that, a coincidence: she already thought she had a ghost, so that's where her head was; charlatans absolutely depend on pre-existing beliefs to make their money. As for the pile of missing objects on the bed, I must observe that objects turn up on my bed or under the covers all the time--my wife's glasses, lighters, change, small books, you name it. Generally, I just figure that I carelessly left them there. But then, in my universe, there are no spooky bears to which I can attribute such things.

My overall point here is that what you've described doesn't at all need a supernatural explanation in order to make sense. Sure, maybe a ghost did it, but your story provides absolutely no evidence that that's the case. There are unexplained events, yes, but that's it. Without any truly compelling information, I have to write this off as just another case of people irrationally believing in ghosts.

Believe me, like TV's Fox Mulder, I really do "want to believe." But I just can't until I've got something stronger to go on.

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