Ghosts

Last August I saw a splendid production of Ibsen’s play “Ghosts”.
It was about being haunted – by people and deeds from times past, and the inability to escape their influence in the here and know.
October is a good time to think about ghosts. The original Hallowe’en or Samhain was a time when the spirit world and the mortal world were closest in contact. No lack of ghosts at Hallowe’en time!
I can think of nothing more everlasting in the human psyche than the belief of ghosts.
Samuel Johnson, the Rationalist, summed it up nicely<

“It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and it is still undecided whether or not there have ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it, but all belief is for it.”

Reports of ghosts suggest they are dead souls still hanging around with a story to tell or in need of vengeance.
My old house in Chicago seemed a good candidate for a haunted house. It was old; it had a shady past; someone died in the basement in a grim way. But my 5-6 years residency there revealed no ghosts or hints of the supernatural.
I remember a Wiccan friend taking this situation in earnest. Very concerned, he came over one Hallowe’en season to perform a ‘cleansing’ of the newly purchased house. I was intrigued to see him do this. Very serious, he walked from room to room with burning sage trying to clean out the house of negative vibes and ghosts. He thought there was ‘something negative’ in the cellar’ but that was it. Next year he came back to do a ‘follow up’ but he found/sensed nothing was there. So that was that.

I should add that I love Ghost Stories. A good ghost story should give you a sense of the creeps. Roald Dahl (bless’em!) did extensive research by reading scores of ghost stories and published ‘the best’ in Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories.
They are superb and I recommend the book if you like that sort of them.

Boo!