It's a spooky world out there. Or is it?



William Hope ghost photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

I guess since I'm working on a book that is nominally about ghosts, I should probably do a post on my thoughts on ghosts.

The truth is that I'm very torn on the subject. The very logical part of my finds it difficult to believe in the supernatural. This same logical self, however, thinks it very presumptuous of human beings to deny the existence of ghosts simply because our current laws of science say they couldn't be real. Hundreds of years ago, people would have thought the idea of atoms and microbes as fantastical, so who are we to say we know any better about the supernatural despite our fission reactors and multiple trips to the moon?

I do believe that some 'ghost encounters' are pure bullhockey. People make up stories. It's how Dewey won the election for a few hours. It's how Hitler almost conquered Europe. But I also believe that sometimes there are things that people can't explain.

And part of me wants to believe in ghosts just for the simple reason that it would make our world seem so much cooler, just a little bit more magical.

While I'm still likely to doubt most ghost stories I hear, I do have a few ghost-related tales of my own to share.

My old house in Hamilton before the renovations.
August 1973



The first story happened when I was eight (as most stories tend to start when they come from my early childhood). I used to live in a big house in Hamilton, which had started its life  sometime in the Nineteenth Century. The old section of the house, where my bedroom was located, had always frightened me as a child. The narrow hallway with its dark panneling and sparse lighting always seemed a tad sinister. My bedroom had pealing wallpaper and drafty windows, which only added to the spooky factor.

Back then I used to sleep with a nightlight, because I had a pretty strong fear of the dark. One night, two friends of mine spent the night. They slept on the floor at the foot of my bed, while I curled up under my pink canopy (I know, shocker, right?).  They made me turn the light off, because they couldn't sleep with it on. My room was still relatively bright, however, because of the street lamp coming through the window, so I just gritted my teeth and bared it. Sometime during the middle of the night, I woke up for some unknown reason. When I glanced at the foot of my bed, I saw a silhouette of a person, as if they were kneeling. Obviously the easy explanation is that one of my friends was there, but I always distinctly remembered the silhouette having no features, despite the light coming through the window. It was just a dark shadow. Terrified (I was eight, remember), I hid myself under the blankets and shivered for an endless hour. I remembered thinking at the time that it could have been one of my friends, so I listened to see if I could hear one of them moving as they went back to sleep. I heard nothing of course, and that incident has stuck with me through the years. I'd never encountered anything like that before or since, so I can't really say if my house was haunted or not, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

 The other 'ghost story' I have comes from a trip to Gettysburg, PA. My family and I used to go camping a lot, first in Lancaster, then near Gettysburg. Now, obviously Gettysburg has a long tradition of ghosts because of the battle fought there. It took my family and I a few visits before we actually did any of the geeky tourist stuff, but there was one weekend in October during my junior year when we did a ghost walk and a battlefield carriage ride. The ghost walk was pretty uneventful, though I did enjoy seeing the historic buildings at night and even back then I was a history dork. We listened to the ghost stories and took a picture with our tour guide to commemorate the occasion.



The carriage ride through the battle field was awesome, despite the fact that it was very cold. It was probably close to midnight, so we all huddled under a blanket as the horse pulled us through the darkness. I remember being amused that our driver was a woman dressed in a top hat. While driving around, we saw some lights bobbing around in the distance, which kind of startled us. The driver joked that it was only ghost hunters. I thought it was funny that while these guys were out looking for ghosts, they were scaring the crap out of us.



Apologies for the crappy quality.



The real end to this story, however, came when the vacation was over. I plugged our digital camera into our computer so I could upload all the photos. When looking at the photo we took with the ghost walk guide, I found a glowing orb hovering next to the sign. Was it dust? Probably. Could it have been something else? Maybe.