Ask an Amateur Scientist: Ghosts in the Darkness

I. The Setup

As a young amateur scientist lying alone in his darkened bedroom staring into the black and white abyss of Nick at Nite on my analog television set, I existed in a near constant state of terror. For one thing, I was just a jittery kid. Instead of receiving a congratulatory letter from the president after my school’s physical fitness test, I instead received an unmarked VHS tape of the president worriedly shaking his head and tut-tutting me. I was useless on a sports team, useless on the playground, and useless if I ever had to escape the evil clutches of a candy-toting kidnapper using any kind of bodily strength.

So there’s no way I could take on the kind of headless ghosts, slithering goblins, and rectally fascinated aliens that haunted the dark fringes of my room. I tried setting up an array of flashlights to steadily bombard my bed with its protective rays throughout the night, but the neighbors complained that the concentrated beam coming from my tiny window was slowly burning their house down. I even tried hiding under my comforter and creating an air-tight seal, but my brain has never fully recovered from the oxygen deprivation.

So I had to make due with concentrating on the shapely, comforting hips of Donna Reed and try and block the undead apparitions from my peripheral vision. Of course I never could. Thus began my slow descent into madness. And though I reassure myself today by disbelieving in anything ghostly, I can’t say that I don’t still see the occasional what-the-hell-was-that-and-why-was-it-wearing-a-cloak fluttering around the corners of my eyes. If they can’t be real, they can’t be there, so I’m no longer crippled with fear. This is also how I deal with my apprehension about those creepy twins from The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.

But if there are no such things as ghost, why do people see them? There has to be something to all those bumps in the night, right? It can’t always be your parents/neighbors diving into each other’s flesh pools, can it?

II. The Findings

It’s easy to think that because sightings of ghosts are always so similar, there must be some veracity to them. They’re usually floating around in the darkness. They’re often translucent or softly glowing an iridescent blue. Sometimes they cackle or moan. On at least one occasion, they’ve demonstrated an uncontrollable urge to slime Bill Murray. But it’s just these kinds of similarities that should make your skeptic’s sense start to tingle. Why should the undead all follow the same patterns? Why wouldn’t your poor deceased Uncle Larry want to spend his spirit years roaming around the garden or going to a nice ball game in the middle of the afternoon? And what’s with the blue? My dead grandmother prided herself on being an Avon-certified Winter. She wouldn’t be caught dead or undead in blue.

The same goes for stories about, for example, alien abductions. Why would all aliens be fascinated by our bottoms? Why would they all have those big black eyes? In the infinite expanses of the universe, couldn’t we be visited by a species that doesn’t look like an albino version of TV’s “Webster”? To explain the similarities, you have to look at other conclusions. The ubiquity of certain paranormal archetypes in popular culture and the popular consciousness provides a frame of reference. The delusional will see what their minds have been trained to see. And people who fall victim to optical illusions (you know, everybody) fill in the gaps in their minds with the information that they’re used to. This is why many devoutly religious people will swear they’ve seen angels or, if they’re really crazy, demons. This is the framework that’s been programmed into them.

[nms:alien abduction,1,0]

But a recent study by a team of scientists at University College London has uncovered a neurological explanation for why we see things looming in the dark. Our minds constantly work to provide a context for what we’re seeing. This is why you can make out shapes in a cloud or a plot in a David Lynch film. It’s not necessarily there, but you want it to be there. Kind of like the heterosexuality in your average WWE fan. In the darkness, visual input to your brain is ambiguous. You may see an indistinct shape like the curve of a blanket or the reflection of a mirror, but you don’t see the whole object. However, your mind wants to see something in its entirety. It nearly has to. And because of its predilection toward making out human shapes or even faces, it can often fill in the blanks by creating a hallucination of a ghostly figure. In other words, you only think you’ve seen dead people.

III. The Conclusion

Of course, any neurological explanation for ghosts is only part of the puzzle. The fact is that even outside our reactive, involuntary brains, many of us have a vested interest in believing that ghosts haunt the night. It makes us feel better about our own imminent mortality to think that something of us can exist beyond the grave. It’s not enough to be content in the belief that your dearly departed are living it up in an invisible Heaven or being poked with sharp objects in an invisible Hell. We need some kind of proof of the afterlife, and ghosts provide that for us.

But is it really comforting to believe that your immortal soul may become bound to the Earth? Would you really want to be stuck on some kind of endless routine-doing the same things over and over again until whatever young couple moves into your former home hires a grizzled Keanu Reeves to send you back into the abyss where you belong?

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all if we just winked out of existence the moment our bodies stopped churning along. At least then none of us would suffer the cruel fate that is John McCain’s journey as a walking dead.

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About The Amateur Scientist: Brian Thompson is a professor of amateur science at a major imaginary university. He has been able to read and write for over seventeen years.

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