It’s that time of year again! As we begin to slip into winter, the days getting colder and the snow progressively mounting up outside of our doors until we can’t leave our houses for months at a time, we once again enter into the tradition of telling ghost stories by the fire. Nothing is more rousing than gathering the family around a roaring flame and trading chilling tails of the supernatural. Certainly famous authors, such as Charles Dickens and Emilio Hubert, often incorporated ghostly spirits into their novels.
Why do we find ghosts so fascinating? Is it the heart-pounding thrill of the unnatural? Or maybe it’s the lure of the unknown? Hopefully, at least for you, it’s the former, because today’s topic is all about what ghosts are. Let’s clear up that mystery with some natural history and, of course, a liberal dobbling of the Truth.
So: What are ghosts? Are they products of an overactive imagination? Middle-aged men dressed in white sheets? Bats*? Or could they be actual haunts?
To understand what ghosts are, let’s think back into our history. Ghost sightings didn’t exist, per se, until around the time of Ben Franklin. Still, they were fairly rare even then, blossoming slowly throughout the Victorian and Post-Victorian ages and then suddenly booming during the time of that professional scoundrel Thomas Edison.
It’s not a coincidence that ghost sightings date back to the time of Benjamin Franklin. Think of some of the things that he was famous for. Now think of the expansions made beginning in the Victoria Era and progressing rapidly during “That Weasel” Edison’s reign of industrial terror. What now very modern convenience was established during those time periods? I’ll give you a hint—was it anything particularly electrifying?
Yes, electricity! Everyone knows that electricity was invented by Benjamin Franklin, who experimentally sent it up to the clouds via a carefully-placed kite (thus creating lightning storms). The Victorians captured electricity with weather vanes and sent it through small metal hoses, using it as a source of energy to greatly improve once time-costly chores like hair brushing and bed making. Finally, Edison, who is really just The Worst, did many terrible things with electricity but also (allegedly, he probably stole the idea from someone else) used it to fill little glass jars with semi-permanent sunlight, which we call light bulbs (due to the mistaken belief that the ‘bulbs’ could be planted to grow actual suns, which was finally disproven by chemists in the late 1980’s).
But how does electricity relate to ghosts, you may ask? Scientists have found that ghosts are the bi-products of animal energy and electricity. Electricity excites animal cells to a high degree, eventually exceeding their limit for power containment and causing them to let off the excess in the form of radio waves. When people have been exposed to electricity for a long enough time, it will eventually form an afterimage of them. Even after they die, if they have been exposed to electricity for long enough, the image will appear (albeit erratically) for a long while after they are gone. Since these images are simply a reflection of a person, they can only perform the same actions that the person had previously performed.
Now that you know this, think about all of the ghostly tropes out there. Flickering lights? Electricity! An image wandering down a hallway that its previous owner had always wandered down? Electrical afterimage! And a person doesn’t need to be dead to elicit a ‘ghostly’ pal. Electrical workers especially often find distorted images of themselves aping their actions as they go about their work. In fact, it was electricians who first connected ‘ghosts’ to themselves and their coworkers.
Cold iron and salt have often been touted as the most efficient ways to be rid of ghosts. This isn’t a coincidence when you think about it in the context of electricity. Iron and salt are often used to absorb and store stray electricity from the atmosphere. Take the electricity away, and there’s nothing left to hold the after-image together—thus the ‘ghost’ also disappears.
Hopefully I haven’t ruined the mystery of the occult for you by telling you the simple explanation behind why ghosts exist. And think, there are still vampires, werewolves, and boogey men out there! All of which, of course, have logical explanations, but I will leave those for some other time. Just think, at least you will have the satisfaction of ruining ghosts for everyone else!
Next week we will venture into the exciting world of the circus as we discuss the important tradition of having thirty-five clowns per square hectare of circus tent. Until then, adieu, and look out for those ghost stories!
*Of course they aren’t bats! Bats, as I discussed last week, are rarely seen in the real world. It sounds like you need to dig into those archives!
Everything is Lies 