This was originally written for The Story Club (a community which lives on as The Story Ark) around Halloween.
So, as we are temporarily The SPOOKY Club, and as we are focused on ghosts this October, and as the question of personal ghost stories has already been raised, I wanted to ask, “What is a ghost?” Now, this question came up once before, and @dwblake used the phrase, “quantum time superimpositions.”
Now, I do believe in ghosts; to quote Scrooge, “I must.” However, I still don’t know what they are. Some, accepting the reality of ghostly phenomena, still reject a belief in ghosts, claiming supposed ghostly activity is not the work of a departed spirit but is a demon’s facade. This belief seems somewhat flawed to me. I hesitate to write it off entirely (if one believes in demons, it’s not hard to imagine them pretending to be dead loved ones), but I have a hard time believing all the history of ghosts is wholly demonic.
So, I wonder what ghosts are, but I also ask this question on a literary level, that is, “What do ghosts mean within a story?” One theme I’ve noticed is the setting of Romanticism against scientism. Sometimes ghosts are that which science cannot analyze, or sometimes ghosts are the last superstition that scientists finally conquer. Then again, ghost stories can sometimes have an element of closure, a chance for the present to make its peace with the past. A third common motif is the realization that so-and-so was a ghost the whole time.
Within storytelling, these seem to be separate, but not always distinct, uses of the common conception of a ghost. Like a word which can have a range of uses, ghosts are a symbol with a range of meaning.
* What do you think ghosts are?
* How have you seen ghosts used in fiction?
* Favorite ghost story?
Tale Told 