Ghosts
Ghosts are perhaps the most controversial and widely reported of all unexplained phenomena. But although ghostly visitors are sighted in their thousands all over the world and ‘true’ ghost tales are hugely popular, the whole subject of ghost lore is widely misinterpreted and misunderstood. The majority of people are familiar with at least one local or national ghost story but the role of folklore, folk tales and urban legend in connection with the supernatural is rarely touched upon outside of academic journals. The connection between folklore and allegedly true accounts of the supernatural is an important and extremely relevant one.
Rather than indicating the existence of an afterlife or a fourth dimension, skeptics argue that all tales of ghosts can be explained by errors in human perception and misunderstood ordinary natural phenomena. While these explanations may very well be true for the majority of sightings, the ghost is such a complicated phenomenon that one or two relatively simplistic explanations cannot hope to account for the whole range of variations within the subject.
In one sense ghost stories are certainly ‘true’. They give us an important insight into the major concerns, the traditions and the psychology of the individuals and the societies in which they circulate. This alone makes them a vital and constantly developing aspect of popular belief.
'Ghosts' by Kozachok, October 2020.
