How many times have you seen a ghost? I haven’t, not once.
But feel one? be aware and sure that something is just there, looking at you, feeling you, and perhaps trying to… what precisely? you don’t know. You aware of that thing frequently -and badly- described in every single horror tale, the hairs of your neck going up. But not like when you are cold, not at all. It is different, it is as if you would be aware of every one and single one hair, each hair feeling something that you don’t know, each hair tensing up, being tensed by those tiny muscles and tensing all the little pieces of skin around it, and raising. And with that hair, the ones next, and the next ones too. So, for a microsecond you are more aware of your own body than you have ever been, of those waves of tensed skin washing through your back. And the desire, the certainty that NOW is the moment to run, to run as hard as you can, paired with the knowledge that NOW, precisely NOW is the moment to freeze and don’t move a single muscle.
I have felt, indeed, one or two ghosts.
Last time was last night. My house has a little back garden, which borders one of the big parks of the city, a park that is closed at night, and that has wonderfully old trees. In between my garden and the park there is a fence that I can not cross, and a corridor that we use to take our bicycles from and to the shed. It is that corridor that I use to practice some little japanese fencing at home. Last night then, cutting the air with my sword, I felt it. I first thought that it was just the cold air. But then I knew. But what did I know, precisely? An otherworldly presence in the old trees from the park, being aware of me? My good old fear of the darkness, feed by so many horror tales that I have read, playing with my senses? The sound of whatever animal living in the park that my hears manage to catch but not become aware off, so that a second alarm system was turned on?
I suppose that I am way more superstitious than most of the persons that will read this. So I am, indeed and for real, afraid of the dark, in a fully irrational way. Now and then, walking in the streets late, or walking in a forest, I can become irrationally stressed and scared. Mostly I talk myself down successfully. I also know that few times, when people close to my heart have died, I talked with them after. And of course I always wonder if it was really them, or just my private way to close the page, to round up the tale that will not continue. I guess I will never know for sure. I also know that thinking in Lovecraft -to mention the more embarrassing one- or in one or another well written tale from Stephen King, I will have nightmares, and I will be more likely to feel scared in the coming night. I know all this, and I know that it is in my control. But that ghost -or whatever it was- last night? that is definitively not in my control.
Besides being superstitious, I am also an evolutionary biologist with -some- understanding of current neurobiology. And I have read my share of Freud, Jung and a few -more modern- others. So I could repeat all the reasonable hypothesis to explain the otherness. Yet they say that the good scientist is not the one that can conduct a good experiment or record an interesting observation That we can all do, with some training. The good scientist is the one that can choose the right hypothesis, the one that will open up more ideas and avenues to explore. The thing is that from all those rational hypothesis I can formulate, none sounds interesting, none opens up the way for more knowledge. So maybe this is not about science as we know it? Or is this what will expand what we understand as knowledge, some future day at the hands of a brilliant scientist?
I don’t know. I just know that I felt a ghost, last night.