Ghost

As it's coming up to Halloween, and to shift focus from politics to something much less confusing and horrifying….

I believe in ghosts. That is to say, I believe some people to be honest when they say they have seen ghosts. I don’t know what ghosts are. But then again, apart from the brute fact of experience and beyond any of the relative knowledge of relative things in life and the world, I don’t know what the nature of reality really is. In a very real sense, we don’t, can’t know in terms of relative knowledge the basis underlying, or better, enveloping the world of relative experience. To quote a line from one of Jack Nicholson’s less celebrated movies “life is mystical. It’s just we are used to it”. If there is one constant to my variegated spiritual life’s path, it is a belief in the naturalness of what is usually classed as supernatural. I have just always accepted that there is a dimension to existence which is not usually perceived but which nonetheless operates on a level analogous to our experience of ordinary life. The philosopher Curt John Ducasse was interested in this area too, despite being a modern analytical thinker.

So, life is mysterious- and mystical - and I believe in ghosts. An odd implication of what I say above is that I can’t say I never saw a ghost. I might have, I just didn’t know it to be one. That said, the experience I relate now most very, very probably was just a dream (in the ordinary sense of the term!). It’s not a ghost story because it’s not much of a story and probably wasn’t a ghost.

I was a young child. My sister with whom I shared a bedroom was away in hospital having a foot operation. I was therefore alone in the room that night. I was sleeping, then woke up and looked to the half open doorway of the room. Standing in the shaft of light from the landing outside was a man. I thought that he looked like my father, except taller, and he was very gaunt. He had a hollowed face and scraggly white hair. Most strangely, he seemed to be dressed in animal pelts and furs, like he was from the very distant past, or prehistory. He was looking at me and his mouth was moving, along with one raised hand gesturing towards me, giving me the impression he was trying to communicate with me. No sound nor voice did I hear.

And then he was gone. And I went back (?) to sleep.

There. That is the token ‘ghost’ apparition of my life. I’ve had experiences which could be denoted ‘psychic’, and which to me hold much more credibility, but the above is the only classic ghost. And I don’t really believe it was anything more than the very vivid dream of a young boy. The latter, the vividness of the dream was evidenced by the fact that the morning after I was down on the floor by the doorway, looking for some sort of mechanical device in the carpet which might have been the source of the night’s apparition. This was the 80s and I don’t think holographic technology would have been that far advanced. This, not to mention the utter incomprehensibility of a situation in which a super advanced holographic device would find it’s way to my bedroom carpet and flash the image of a gangly troglodyte to an ordinary boy in a nondescript house in the first place. That would be a circumstance even more bizarre than a simple manifestation of a long dead caveman!

In any case, ‘it’ never showed up again.

ADDED: As I was writing this, a very funny sketch came to mind. Here's the link. Enjoy!