A Problem with Ghosts

How do you tell a grieving person that something they believe is the ghost of a loved one doesn't exist?

 The Ghost from 'A Ghost Story'

This is the big take away I have come back with after listing to a paranormal podcast. I have found it to be hard to listen to over the past few days. For multiple reasons. They describe themselves a sceptics but that seem dodgy to me. They exist within their fiction of the paranormal and seem to come at things from the wrong direction.

That is not to say I think they are lying when they say that they don’t believe in ghosts. It it more that they seem overly willing to accept that ghosts could/should exist with the right evidence. But even that doesn't work, do they want ghosts to exist? The big issue is that, the points they give are very inconsistent. I think they are coming at this from a bad perspective.

The Ghost of a witch from 'Paranorman'

If you want to know what is happening you need to have no form of bias or as little as possible. My big gripe with ghost hunting shows are when they tell us what we are looking at, such as putting subtitles over static radio sounds. Pattens are much easier to find if we are told what to look for. This is the issue with hindsight. (This can be dangerous, see the investigation into the Challenger disaster and other post case studies).

One of the hosts said with every ghost photo they assume pareidolia, which yes many sightings can be explained away with. But that narrows your vision away from hoaxes, double exposures and the many other reasons ghosts are sighted. To look at something you need to see every single experience fresh. You need to know as much about the setting and story as possible. Only with more information can conclusions come naturally. You should see what the shape fits into, not what you can force it through.

The Ghost army from 'Lord of the Rings: Return of the King'

I don't believe in ghosts! I do believe in the existence of alien life!

I think I have good grasp of the Fermi paradox and my conclusion is yes. In my life I have heard family members talk about many strange occurrences and ghostly things and yet all the evidence I see is explained by other things. The is no Fermi for ghosts and to me most damningly there are no clear descriptors for ghosts.

I try to get the young people I train to think and asses the situations I give them. I want them to come up with different ideas and solutions. Most of all I want them to ask questions, to find out more information before going ahead with the task. Even something as simple as standing in hight order. My motto the past few years has become 'Everything is interesting' I will go into detail about this soon. But in a nutshell; The more you look at something and learn out it the more interesting it becomes. I think everything has this property.

The Force ghost of Obi-Wan from 'Star Wars: Return of the Jedi'

That is why I struck through 24 episodes of a dodgy podcast. They every now and then got onto a topic that caught my interest. The big one being the ethics of ghost hunting. If a ghost is a dead person then the is/was someone who loved them. How do you tell someone that it isn’t their ancestor but static from a detuned radio.

Some people like to batter beliefs of others, they are often called out as militant sceptics. Many are just frustrated scientists and people who get asked the same questions for years. But you do get on both sides people who don’t care about playing with peoples feelings, they will tall a story about talking to the dead or they will dismiss others as stupid.

The Ghost train from 'Spirited Away'

When do you intervene in someone's belief? When they hurt others? When it caused harm to themselves? It is a hard but interesting issue and one I will be thinking on for a while.