Who You Gonna Call?

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Inspire Your Heart with the Arts Day

 

Sometimes when the angle is right I cut through the graveyard on my way somewhere. The university campus boasts a great deal of educational facilities, and these include the historical overgrown cemetery established in the 1870s or so by Jebediah Springfield or somebody. It’s a rather pretty spot, if muddy, and I like walking through it.* The only problem, aside from its purported after-dark pervert population, is that every time I walk through it I become convinced it’s possible to push one of the big decorative tombstones aside and reveal a secret dungeon with TREASURE at the end.

 

I’ve spent entirely too much of my life playing Zelda games.

 

Anyway, this afternoon I was meandering through it and contemplating hauntedness, and how while I’m a skeptic I also fully believe the accounts I’ve heard of Auschwitz or other places with similar fun and exciting backgrounds. I do believe they’re haunted, if not by ghosts, then by the memories we carry and pass down, which amounts to the same thing. And ever since that quantum mind conference Dad took us to,** I’ve had a very loose, ill-defined concept that while I challenge all claims of ghost-sightings, I still think consciousness is something we don’t understand well enough to claim that you can’t have detached memories haunting around. At least, I don’t understand it well enough.

 

And as I idly ruminated on this on my way to swimming, I banged smack into alietf.

 

She was ghost-hunting. Synchronicity is an interesting thing.

 

She showed me how her new electromagnetic sensor worked, and I asked if she’d found anything, which she hadn’t yet today. Apparently ghost-hunting consists of checking for electromagnetic fields that you can’t attribute to other sources. I have no idea what the thinking behind this is. It seemed a good time for ghosts if they enjoy being spooky, but it was also cold, so she gave up and walked with me to the Rec Center instead.

 

The interesting thing is that I was considering how the graveyard doesn’t seem very spooky or haunty. It’s a peaceful, quiet place, and it’s full of dead bodies. For some reason, if I decided to ghost hunt, I would go to places where people had been alive. My idea of ghosts is of emotional imprints in the world around a living person, like you leave dents in the universe or something.  Graveyards I associate more with the romantic notion of dancing skeletons and creatures detached from living personalities—a skeleton in a sombrero isn’t anybody, it’s just a skeleton, with its own personality.***  There are ghosts, and then there are ghosts of people, and the second I associate more with the world of living people, like an old city or a ghost town or something.

 

Either way, I’m starting to wonder if I can convince Ally to use her ghost sensor to track down The Magic Armor.  I could use that, and I’ll bet she could, too.

 

 

*Or, in some instances, pausing and moonwalking in front of a particularly striking tombstone. This is purely so I can say that I’ve danced on somebody’s grave.

 

**You know you’ve raised dorks when your sixteen-year-old son and seventeen-year-old daughter insist on going with you to a conference because they’re die-hard Roger Penrose fans.

 

***Long, long ago in my life, from the ages of perhaps three to six, I was positively terrified of skeletons.  I’m not sure quite what caused this, but they scared the bejabbers out of me.  I never associated them with the boogeyman, but they performed his vital task of terrorizing me inside my own head.

 

Now, I think they’re neat.

Comments

[cjtremlett.livejournal.com]

I love old cemetaries for the atmosphere. I like looking at the decorations on the older stones, and reading the names and speculating about their lives.

I do believe in ghosts/the supernatural/miscellaneous weird stuff, because I've seen too much in the way of oddities to not believe in it. Science as we know it now can't explain everything, and I like it that way. Wouldn't it be dull if there were nothing left that's unexplained?

Like I believe in the possibility of UFOs. I've seen one flying thing that I couldn't identify, but I don't consider it that big a deal. I'm fairly sure somebody could have identified what I saw, even if I couldn't. But like many things, I can't prove that they do or don't exist.

That's something that I've always thought when it comes to weird stuff. Can you prove conclusively that it -doesn't- exist? Sure, you can show how that flying thing was really a weather balloon and the eerie cold breeze out of nowhere came from air currents in an old house, but does proving that those things aren't aliens or ghosts prove that aliens or ghosts aren't real?

Reality - Your Mileage May Vary.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Well, on the other hand, I can't prove that there ISN'T an invisible flying unicorn in the Kalahari Desert, but that doesn't mean there IS one.

But yes, I do firmly believe in aliens. I do not firmly believe that there are aliens around HERE, but I believe they're Out There. And what I like about science is that you can use it to explain the unexplained. I like that there are no miracles, but simply phenomena that have yet to be explained. I don't believe in the supernatural; I believe in the yet-unexplained natural. And my image of 'ghosts' is that it's possible that they're of the yet-unexplained and possibly undetected natural. But I make no assertions because I'm uncertain about it. As Terry Pratchett says, "It's probably because of quantum."

[cjtremlett.livejournal.com]

I like the Pratchett response. *g*

Generally, I believe in keeping an open mind. While I'll be extremely skeptical about the invisible flying unicorn, if someone offers a really good argument for it, I'm not going to ignore that.

I'm a firm believer in the scientific method. But I also believe that some things that are currently considered established fact under the scientific method, and some things that are currently considered absolute rubbish under the scientific method will be proved later on to be the opposite, under the scientific method. The flaw isn't in the method, but the application. I have no idea what those things might be, but I suspect ghosts are in the second category. *g*

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

I like cemetaries, at least the older ones. They're quiet and peaceful. The one I learned to drive* in has a lot of gypsy burials (real gypsies, the Romany people) and a bunch of Welsh graves (with the inscriptions on the stones in Welsh), and random other interesting things.

The cemetary in the town where I went to college was unfortunately on the other end of town from campus, so I never actually made it out there. But it was oddly comforting to know it was there.

As for ghosts, I can't see why they'd want to hang around the body--they're much more likely to stay where there's a strong connection. Like my cat, who has apparently not actually left the house yet.

Have you seen the Ghost Monologues? http://tomatonation.com/fgmindex.shtml

*Large cemetaries are ideal places to learn to drive.

Museum heebie-jeebies?-

[vogtalicious.livejournal.com]

I feel the same way to, in certain places...and the Pioneer cemetary is not one of them! However, have you been to the older cemetery that's hidden behind 24th street? Its dimly lit, decrepit, and I always feel like a ghoul is going to pop out behind a tree if I am walking there late at night.

Do certain museums make you feel the same way? I was in the Nationalmuseet today (National Museum of Denmark) and most of the Medieval Exhibits, as well as the Grønland (Greenland) native exhibits gave me the willies. Especially the plague crosses and the remains (both material and skeletal) of the Medieval settlers of Grønland, all of whom were dead or missing by the 15th century AD. Yet the other skulls didn´t bother me, probably because I was too fascinated by their cranial lines and tooth condition to care(Ah, BioAnth! How we love ye!). I mean, most museums do not freak me out, but some things...just don't seem right, you know? That being said, haven't you noticed that while 99% of the population is terrified of skeletons, Anthropology/Biology majors get excited when they see them?!

Oh, pushing aside graves to find treasures...Ocarina reference....HAHAHAHA...Link is my REAL boyfriend!!!

Re: Museum heebie-jeebies?-

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Heck, that's an every-Zelda-game-ever reference.

Re: Museum heebie-jeebies?-

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Even A Link To The Past, where they missed it so much in the original version that they had to make a color dungeon the color version!

Imagine the cognitive dissonance when I got to the graveyard in Twilight Princess and there WASN'T a dungeon in the graveyard, or at least a Secret Cave. (The cellar hardly counts.) I was so confused.

[placetohide.livejournal.com]

It's a good thing you don't have the power bracelet, or the tombstones would be in trouble.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I guess I should start with a crummy little homemade sword and a Quest and work my way up from there, huh? Dammit, there's a PROCEDURE you've got to follow!

[jadewing.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, you have to buy the Magic Armor from the angry Asian baby's Castle Town Superstore, the Malomart in the city square.

The theory being EMF detectors is that supernatural phenomenon are somehow tied to spikes in Electro-magnetic fields. Many people who've encountered something note that it gets very cold around the time of the encounter, so common theory is that ghosts pull energy from their surroundings, causing the chill. A lot of the time, batteries drain faster and equipment malfunctions as well, when it had been in good working order moments before.

It's an interesting theory. If you're still interested, I'd check out Ghost Hunters whenever they start running the show again on Sci-Fi. There's less of the "I sense a presence in here...he wants cheetos..." and more of the "Well, this is what we got on the EMF detector, and let's take a look at the pictures we got and see if they can't be otherwise explained." It's more scientific than what you usually get with ghost tracking.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Malo is one of my favoritest characters from that game! He's up there with Telma and, of course, Midna. But in other games, the Magic Armor comes from the graveyard.

[ellixis.livejournal.com]

I suspect that the theory behind electromagnetic fields is that thought is bioelectric impulse between neurons, so if you've got some odd spiking with nothing to account for it, perhaps it is a stray bit of consciousness, memory, or whathaveyou.

I am pretty sure we make dents in the universe, in one way or another.

[gryfindormia.livejournal.com]

You know you’ve raised dorks when your sixteen-year-old son and seventeen-year-old daughter insist on going with you to a conference because they’re die-hard Roger Penrose fans.

Your family is verifiably cooler than mine.

[sunshine-shaman.livejournal.com]

"There are ghosts, and then there are ghosts of people, and the second I associate more with the world of living people, like an old city or a ghost town or something."

I feel the same way. You see, I am the biggest "ghost sighting" non-believer out there. My friend believes in them, and any story she can get her hands on, while I just laugh. I know that might be a little rude, but I don't feel there are any spooky people out there who want to go around giving people the willies. Like you, I feel it's the memories of the people that create the ghosts. I can even feel the ghosts of people who aren't even dead but just not here anymore.


So, we know your thoughts about skeletons with sombreros, but what about skeletons with motorcycles and flaming heads? Do they have consciousness? Are they somebody?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

It would be fun to haunt for a while, but it'd get old fast. Yeah, I just sometimes wonder if the universe remembers people.

Am I a ghost, then?

Remember the Dude's comment about the Marvel rock band? Night Rider: "I get to be lead guitarist, because my head is a FLAMING SKULL." That is what motorcycling skeletons should be.

And seven-foot-tall blue-eyed skeletons who speak in all caps are cute and should have lots of cats.