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

[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.