Mourning my Ghosts

Previously published in Free Inquiry Magazine

*Editor in Chief Paul Fidalgo

As long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated with the unknown. I wasn’t the kid who could be placated with a simple answer. I wanted to know, and I was intuitive enough to understand that “magic” or “God” wasn’t a real answer; it was a cop-out by exasperated adults. I was open to the idea of the supernatural, but even if it was the answer, I wanted to know the how and the why. How does magic work then? Where does God come from? Why does he seem like such a jerk? I’m sure I annoyed plenty of my caregivers with my relentless curiosity. So much so, that I might even take this opportunity to offer a very lukewarm apology to a Sunday school teacher or two.

The world was an endless mystery to be solved. A wealth of knowledge was to be had behind every story of intrigue. As a child it was, “How does Santa Claus really know whether I’ve been bad or good?” Of course, with Santa Claus, there is an inherent motivation to not question too much, lest you get put on the naughty list. The same could be said about God, although one of those myths is certainly scarier than the other. But there was a plethora of ideas to wonder about and explore. Unicorns, fairies, and all sorts of stories and tales that could be investigated! What I really loved about asking all those annoying questions was the hunt, the pursuit of knowledge, the endless puzzles to be solved. There is satisfaction in finding the answer but also a bit of disappointment when the journey is over. You may not be surprised to learn that Scooby Doo was on my list of favorite cartoons. Just a bit spooky but never lacking a hunt and always ending with exposing a mystery.

That love of the hunt grew with me, as did my taste for the macabre. After my older siblings left the house and it was just my mother and me, we moved to one of the many little gold rush towns in Northern California. In that area, I was surrounded by real life mysteries and ghost stories. Even the small plot of land we lived on had a clandestine ghost story. Running through the yard was a mining ditch, dug by Chinese immigrants, over which a sweet little bridge had been built. Its sweetness became bitter when I learned of the treatment of such immigrants.

I heard these stories believing that humans (and hopefully animals too) had a soul or spirit, a piece of coconsciousness that outlived the physical body. It made sense to me. After all, the thoughts in my head, my sense of self, didn’t feel like my brain merely processing the information it received. My thoughts felt like an ethereal extension of myself. I had very little doubt that my mind or self would exist long after my body didn’t. And that belief tempered the sorrow that came with many of the ghost stories. If the soul exists, then the people in those tragic stories had a chance to make things right or find peace even if not on earth.

And so began my love of all things paranormal and supernatural. I spent all my preteen and teenage years and well into my twenties consuming anything and everything that involved ghosts and psychics, crop circles and Bigfoot, unsolved murders and aliens. I loved all of it. But ghosts were by far my favorite. Especially as it became clear that many of the other categories of “the unknown” were fairly obvious hoaxes.

But ghosts were different. The existence of ghosts meant the existence of an afterlife. It meant that Grandma was still out there somewhere, maybe chilling with my beloved but long dead kitty. So what if crop circles were just a couple of dudes with far too much time on their hands? Who cares if Bigfoot is just a very large guy in desperate need of a full body wax? That those things weren’t true came with no real consequences. They were only evidence that sometimes it was just a greedy old man underneath the scary mask. Ghosts, on the other hand, meant much more.

Ghosts are proof of a life beyond death. Ghosts are people—people who lived and died with real stories of love and heartbreak, human stories that give us a window into other times and lives unlike our own … or sometimes very much like our own. Ghost stories are about lives and deaths of real people. And ghosts don’t need a god to exist.

The Christian god I was taught to believe in was easy to dismiss as a myth. The Bible stories seemed as fake as the story of the gingerbread man, and I found the morals that they were supposed to teach equally dubious, if not more so. You’d have to be a pretty messed-up dude to choose to drown the whole world if you had the ability to solve your problems another way. Unlike the tales of an irrational god, ghosts made sense and had stories that mattered.

As I consumed and pursued these stories, a pattern emerged. Evidence of their reality seemed to me all but undeniable. Eyewitnesses that saw the same thing, disembodied voices on tape, eerie feelings, and objects moving by themselves. The proof wasn’t just “out there”; it was everywhere! I read about it in books, saw it on TV shows and movies, and even the docents at some museums had seemingly irrefutable stories about ghosts. And all of it confirmed that at the end of the wild ride that is our lives, we would go on. It confirmed not only that Grandma was doing an eternal slow dance with Grandpa in the clouds somewhere but that I would be too. Okay, I probably wouldn’t be dancing with Grandpa. But if ghosts exist, it meant that death does not.

The Spark of Doubt

I didn’t wake up one day and choose to be a skeptic. There was no great epiphany that suddenly ended my belief in ghosts. It was a slow process. One step at a time down a long, dark, and scary spiral staircase. The first step was learning about the truth of so-called “photographic orbs.”1 So it turns out the spots of white light on the pictures I took at haunted locations were just light reflecting off dust particles. But that was only one piece of evidence. Not that big a deal. There was plenty more, and a big part of me wanted to stop right there.

As much as I wanted to believe in ghosts and how scared I was to find the proof of death instead of proof of life after it, I couldn’t let it go. My spark of doubt was growing. I started to investigate other pieces of evidence. I knew I couldn’t rely on people who held the same desire to believe that I did, and I certainly couldn’t believe the people profiting from it.

I turned to my lifelong safe place: the library. I started small, like quantum physics and quantum mechanics small. Although I read books intended for laymen, I would be a liar to say that I completely understood all of what I read. But I trusted the scientific method and consensus, and I wasn’t finding any room for spirits or any reason to believe that consciousness happens outside of our skulls.

But what about all the eyewitnesses? The EMF detectors and other sciencey sounding stuff? And all those consistent sightings by people who have never met yet all claim to have had the same experience? Could they all be lying? Some of them, sure, but all of them? What about my own creepy experiences?

I began to discover just how easy it is to fool our goofy brains. And how easy it is to create fake evidence or misconstrue the facts—sometimes on purpose by bad actors (literally and figuratively) and sometimes by accident and the sheer willingness to believe. I stopped tiptoeing tentatively down the staircase of skepticism and tumbled all the way down to the hard truth at the bottom, hitting every step along the way with all the grace of a bouncing bowling ball.

To say I was bummed would be an enormous understatement. I had to come to terms with death: my own, my family and friends’, my cat’s. There was no way around it. I tried for a while to embrace the idea that “energy doesn’t die but merely changes form.” But that doesn’t work for very long once you’ve hit the bottom of the skeptic staircase. The whole point of life after death is that your consciousness still exists, and simple energy is, well, not that. I began to grieve for my own death and the future deaths of those I loved.

But it wasn’t only the idea of an afterlife that I lost. It was the hunt. The fun I had searching for ghosts. Sharing goosebumps with a friend, exploring dilapidated cemeteries and houses, the joy of retelling our adventures. I tried futilely to watch the haunting and ghost hunter shows that I used to love. But there was no turning back. I began to resent the depictions of spirits as real. My brow furrowed, and my eyes rolled at the screen. I found myself mourning the ghosts themselves.

The Joy in the Here and Now

As hard as it was to let go of what had essentially become part of my identity, my stubborn nature wouldn’t let me wallow in my grief for long. As I accepted and came to understand my limited lifespan, those ghost stories I had loved took on new meaning. My life took on new meaning. I’m going to die one day. And that is going to be it. I can spend my life worrying about it, or I can get off my butt and start living. So that’s what I did.

Unlike my slow journey into skepticism, that was an epiphany. A sudden realization that there is a lot of stuff to do, and I’m not exactly sure just how much time I have to do it. A whole lot of things became much more important. Not just important but wonderful. Each experience, from the big stuff like my family’s first trip to Hawaii, to the small stuff like a sharing a belly laugh with my son, was to be savored and enjoyed. No tiny bit of happiness would be taken for granted.

I even found that I could still enjoy my ghosts in the form of fiction. I still love a good ghost movie or book. I’m still perfectly capable of suspending my skepticism for the sake of a good story.

As a skeptic, I am still a hunter of knowledge. And quite often, the path to knowledge starts with finding out that you’re wrong, as I was when I convinced myself that the thrill of the hunt died with the ghosts. It did not. And now there is a new hunt in uncovering the tricks and scams that some so-called paranormal investigators use to manufacture their alleged evidence.

I also take comfort in the fact that I no longer wonder if troubled spirits will find peace in the afterlife. Instead of scaring myself with ghosts’ spooky stories, I am learning the accurate details about their real lives. And that is much more respectful to the families of the people who actually knew and loved the subjects of these supposed hauntings.

I still love old buildings and chasing down the stories of those who inhabited them. There is no end to the spooky stories and mysteries still to be chased. I don’t know how long I will be here on this planet, so I’m going to get busy chasing.

Note

1. For more on photographic orbs, see Joe Nickell and Kenny Biddle, “Snapshot ‘Miracles’: Can Photographic Anomalies Be Evidence of the Supernatural?” Skeptical Inquirer, vol. 46, no. 2 (March/April 2022). Available online at https://skepticalinquirer.org/2022/02/snapshot-miracles-can-photographic-anomalies-be-evidence-of-the-supernatural/.