What if Ghosts Existed?
A non-believer speculates on the logistics of spirit life
Personally, I don’t think ghosts are real, but I could be wrong. After all, thousands upon thousands of people claim to have seen ghosts, among other inexplicable phenomena, and Reddit forums brim with accounts thereof. Perhaps some of these experiences cannot be explained away by perceptual anomalies, and ghosts and other paranormal phenomena do exist. And if ghosts are in fact real, this brings the “supernatural” into the realm of the natural and, hence, the potentially explicable.
So how might ghostly phenomena operate? What are the logistics of being a ghost? Drawing from well-known tropes surrounding accounts of ghostly encounters, I’m going to attempt to answer these questions, offering up some hypotheses as to how ghosts might obtain and subsist.
Necro-Economics
In most ghost stories, the visitants come and go in short order. Further, the sounds they emit and the object manipulations they undertake rarely persist for long periods of time. This fleeting quality of spectral encounters might tell us something about the “economics” of ghostly efforts.
Watch any “ghost hunter” TV show, and you’ll see the lead personality insisting that unexplained sights and sounds result from ghosts’ capacity to draw energy from their environment, along with the people and electronic devices within it. This hypothesis is as good as any other for explaining how ghosts accomplish all the little things they (allegedly) do. But with this conjecture comes a corollary, considering the short-lived nature of paranormal activities: ghosts appear to have strict limitations on the amount of energy they can draw upon, at least relative to living persons. Moving a glass of water on a table doesn’t exactly demand a huge energy investment by human standards, but it might be the only maneuver a ghost makes in a month. To be sure, people claiming to live in haunted houses often report long periods of inactivity between strange occurrences.
This suggests that spirits have to save up stockpiles of whatever little energy they can get in order to manifest, and that this process takes extended spans of time. The afterlife, then, would seem to involve constant efforts to leech and hoard energy so as to one day or evening move that cup on the counter, to slam that door, or to materialize out of the vapor. Ghosts may vary in their capacities for energy extraction and expression, with the more powerful (and supposedly more malevolent) poltergeist-like entities being capable of throwing around objects, and the less energetic wraiths breezing in harmlessly here and there. Such is the consensus among the TV ghost hunters. But in either case, we can conclude that all ghosts have a restricted capacity for collecting energy, and so their afterlife is dictated by a subsistence economy. Given the scarcity of energy resources, ghosts have to save and spend wisely if they hope to express themselves effectively.
Staging Frights
Due to this extremely narrow window for self-expression, ghosts must possess some theatrical aptitudes in order to get the most bang for their buck. Thus, the most memorable ghosts — the ones that get talked about on the Reddit forums and the ghost hunter shows — cultivate a flair for the dramatic. They are inexorably concerned with the rudiments of basic staging, ranging from setting (such as basements and isolated forests at night) to makeup (the requisite black-rimmed eyes and lips). Above and beyond that, ghosts must know how to project, keeping their eyes at full span and their smiles maddeningly large. Without falter, they need to exude a look that screams derangement and a kinesthetic awareness that conveys disjointedness and the uncanny.
For this reason, ghosts may be locked in a mutually constitutive relationship with horror movies. While scary movies often document the stories of ghosts, it may be the case that ghosts actually take some cues from horror movies, too. Indeed, it is often movie-worthy apparitions that ghost-story recounters and reenactors end up describing, with the little girl from The Ring and the tall man in the fedora being oft-reported specters. Any marked deviations from theses established templates — that is, any true creativity among phantom ingénues — might not land with the human audience. Why, then, would a spook spend scanty energy resources to appear as something too original for your average ghost-spotter to parse? This might explain why people who claim to have experienced ghostly encounters frequently report seeing the same sorts of Ring-girls and fedora-wearing men.
All told, ghosts would appear to be posthumous thespians with basic community-theater aesthetic sensibilities. In service of laying out boilerplate horror set-pieces, they have, like hobbyists, taken up dramaturgy as an afterlife pastime. Perhaps this continues a tradition of everyday high drama that they subjected their family and coworkers to during their physical lifetime; or, maybe they just secretly wanted to be actors. Whatever the case, next time you turn on a horror movie, be mindful that a ghost might be watching over your shoulder, scanning for some new scare tactic it can appropriate.
Undying Attention
Psychologically speaking, ghosts are doubtlessly characterized by attention-seeking behavior. Perhaps this stems from a lifetime of unfulfilling interpersonal relationships that led to low self-esteem and overall loneliness. It could very well be that most ghosts felt non-existent or like non-entities in their living years, and now they spend their time in the hereafter straining to assert their pure and simple presence to whomever stumbles into their domain.
Ghosts seem overly eager to reach out and connect. “Acknowledge me!” is the subtext of their every move. Accordingly, there’s a certain desperation in what ghosts are reported to do, ambushing people in dark and lonely places in order to make a lasting impression via a quick scare. Given their temporal and aesthetic limitations, ghosts are necessarily inclined toward this kind of sensationalism. Their undying need for acknowledgement makes them preternatural charity cases at best or, at worst, beggars, perpetually jolting passersby into recognizing their plight (and bumming energy off them in the process). Even when ostensibly trying to scare someone away, ghosts are still seeking out recognition and still trying to make a connection via an emotional response.
Taking all this together, ghosts give the impression of being exceedingly psychologically needy. Reddit wonks and TV ghost hunters alike have speculated that specters are motivated by revenge or rectification or any number of other incentives, but I’d propose that it is first and foremost a fundamental neediness that drives a soul to haunt others eternally.
All told, the spirit world sounds a lot like Facebook or Twitter or TikTok, among other social media platforms. It involves, after all, a bunch of non-corporeal entities issuing brief, contrived, uncreative, and sensationalistic expressions in a desperate attempt to make an impression on whomever’s around to witness. In that sense, perhaps it is we the users of Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and other social media who are truly haunted, irrespective of the existence of ghosts. Perhaps if we curb our nigh-constant need for recognition, we can ensure that our desperation does not continue on after we pass.
Concluding Thoughts
With all this having been said, I still don’t think ghosts exist . . . and with good cause. The aforementioned logistics of ghost life — the stringent economics and the fastidious planning and the lack of creativity — make it seem like just as much of a dead-end as real-life, at least for someone middle-class or lower. This suggests that the ghost world is just a human projection of the real world onto the unascertainable post-death sphere. In reality, I think most ghost sightings can be linked to mental health.
Now, don’t misinterpret me as saying that “all people who report seeing ghosts are mentally deranged.” This is not my belief, so let me explain further. Firstly, I do think the mental state of a witness accounts for many supposed paranormal sightings. We have only now in the post-Trump, post-COVID era begun to appreciate just how commonplace cognitive anomalies and outright hallucinations really are among our populace. Up to this point, however, I think the people who’ve experienced these kinds of perceptual aberrations have often passed them off as “paranormal.” These “ghost sightings,” in my estimation, don’t always stem from full-on schizophrenia, though they likely do indicate some sort of isolated psychotic episode triggered by environmental stressors and further informed by horror tropes. It could well be that, through some strange brew of horror-genre imagery and atavistic cognitive archetypes, Ring-styled girls and men in fedoras are psychological modules, of sorts, that kick into action when we sense danger or experience unease (but that’s fodder for another essay).
Secondly, apart from the people making the sightings, I think mental health-related concerns can also explain the “ghosts” themselves. I submit to you that more than a few of the supposed “specters” in question are simply people experiencing long-term mental illness and addiction who have been shunted to uninhabitable locations due to poverty and lack of family support. Here, they have turned into entities unrecognizable to the middle-class eye. When we the social media-mad see our un-photogenic conspecifics, we only know how to parse the experience through horror and paranormal tropes. It’s high time we exorcize the narcissistic neediness that haunts us, see through the distractionary veil of “the paranormal”, and start addressing the real and immediate need for resources that is becoming disturbingly normal in America.
