The Whole Haunted World #13

Odds and Ends

In case you’re tired of sitting at home on a President’s Day just doomscrolling (mea culpa), here are a few tidbits of something else to ponder.

A few nights ago, after a particularly tiring day (although they’ve all felt like that lately, haven’t they?), I was channel-surfing when I stumbled across what looked like (and was) one of those amusingly cheesy paranormal documentary one-offs (I’ve already forgotten the name). You know the sort - one of those things with lots of retro video toaster effects that solarize the image while someone rapid-fire chatters about being touched in whatever scary place they’ve just been in and the music stabs are non-stop.

This thing covered the usual locations - the Stanley Hotel, the Myrtles Plantation, the Vilisca Axe Murder house, etc. - and there was some interesting footage of each place, but one of the things that struck me was that the entire special presented exactly ONE piece of “evidence”: a well-known photo from Myrtles that shows what some believe is the spirit of a murdered slave.

From The Myrtles website

This got me thinking about the purpose of trying to capture evidence in regards to ghosts. We of course would all love incontrovertible proof of the existence of life after death, even if - as is often the case with ghosts - it seems to be the worst part of us that survives.

Imagine, for a moment, that a verified team of highly-qualified scientists, all possessing flawless credentials, has captured absolute proof of the existence of ghosts. That would likely be the most important discovery in the existence of humanity, but it would have another effect, too: it would remove the mystery from ghost-hunting and render that activity almost completely void. There’d still be the romance of going to old locations, experiencing that sense of age and ruin, but if ghosts were truly known to exist, paranormal investigations would probably boil down to, “This ghost should appear on Thursday nights at 11:03 p.m.” It would, in other words, be an experience more akin to visiting a museum than participating in a search that puts us in the middle of the greatest question of our lives.

Needless to say, that possibility doesn’t stop us from looking and using our cameras and audio recorders in hopes of capturing some sort of solid evidence…but don’t we secretly know we won’t get anything but more mysteries, which is what we really seek?