Ghosts [antikvár]

'Talking of ghosts,' Dr Samuel Johnson observed one day to his friend and biographer, James Boswell, 'it is wonderful that six thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against ii, but all belief is for it.^According to the Oxford English Dictionary a ghost is the spirit or immaterial part of a man as distinct from the body, and is spoken of as appearing in visible form or otherwise manifesting itself to the living. The word itself is derived from the Saxon gaste or gest^ and in the north of England the term 'guest' is still occasionally used to describe an apparition.We all, of course, have our own ideas about ghosts, their appearance, actions and intentions - and whether they constitute a subject worthy of consideration or should be consigned to the realms of children's story books. Experts who have studied the phenomenon - and such it surely is whether you are believer or not - have estabUshed what they consider are five basic explanations for apparitions:1.That we have lived previous lives ourselves, and ghosts are reincarnations - dressed in the garments of the period - of people half-consciously remembered from this prior existence.2.That they are the result of great mental conflict which has imprinted a 'photograph on the astral light' which anyone with the slightest glimmer of psychic faculty can perceive.3.That they are hybrid beings created by the disembodied spirit of a dead person combining with some substance to produce a temporary, though very elementary, intelligence.4.That they are produced out of the universal fascination and fear of ghosts by static memory and dynamic consciousness - that is, a layer of consciousness superimposed upon a mechanism of memory.5.That we actually do see ghosts - dead people being able to build up their bodily forms, somewhat unsubstantially of course, and thereby revisit the scenes in which they spent their lives.It is perhaps not surprising that even such wide-ranging definitions as these fail to satisfy all the 'specifications* of the ghost, but perhaps they underline the basic truth of the great psychic researcher G. N. M. Tyrrell's comment, 'Why are ghosts so fascinating? Because they have always responded to some innate longing in human nature to pierce the veil which hides the future after death.'Theorizing apart - although we shall be returning to theories at various stages of this survey - ghosts can be variously 'classified' for ease of identification. Firstly there is the ghost which returns to haunt the earth without harm to man, sometimes bringing messages or warnings; the poltergeist, a destructive, noisy, and impish spirit which hurls objects about and makes strange noises; the 'fetch' or double of someone living or about to die; and finally the spectral animal or creature - not to mention the occasional inanimate object such as a phantom ship - which usually haunts lonely wastes.Ghosts do not, of course, appear to order. Many a researcher or nervous amateur has watched fruitlessly through long night hours waiting for the