Can’t they discover the world beyond? Weren’t they humans; don’t they have the mind to move on and focus on something else, since trauma and grief will run its course, sooner or later, and not just haunt the living?
If I were a ghost, I’d be tired of acting like one… even if I was murdered or otherwise died untimely
With the exception of Casper the Ghost, I don’t think I’ve seen the alternative take on it
This presupposes ghosts do exist, though I believe ye skeptics would tell me no, which, alright, you win the argument
I believe it’s tied to the ides of the restless dead.
The spirit should move on after death, but some spirits get stuck between worlds. Often it’s related to the circumstances of their death. Maybe they had unfinished business, they died a particularly grousom death, or they were denied a proper burrial.
Hey there! Don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s spelled gruesome. It’s hard to learn the spelling of a word you heard, or the pronunciation of a word you read. No judgement and I hope this was meaningful to you.
If you have ever had a dream where you can’t get something right. Like, in your dream you know you need to do something - you even know exactly what it is that you need to do. You have no excuse for not doing it - maybe you actually try to do it - and yet you keep finding it is as yet undone.
You eventually wake up, because you are alive and you are dreaming. But if you are dead, you are not alive, you cannot wake up. You have all of the agency that you had when you were dreaming, which is none. Until you woke up - you were helpless in your dream, try as you might. The dead are helpless in their dream as well, but they do not have the luxury of waking up.
So have some pity for the dead.
What a banger response. Kudos.
I just started to read this thread and this exact dream thing came into my mind. What a surprise to find it already written.
trinkets sing on the desert wind behind here
where ghosts have laid their final claims to rest
of who they were and what they thought they’d stayed for
has crumbled in their last dusty caress
they were blind
I don’t believe in ghosts or psychic phenomena, but I do love the concept in fiction that ghosts aren’t actual human souls. Rather, they’re a sort of psychic “burn in.” If a living person experiences strong emotions, such as a prolonged period of grieving, or the incredible emotional intensities that come with being murder victim, those emotions can become embedded within a place. Do you grieve for a deceased partner, mourning for years, remembering key moments over and over? A reflection of that grief becomes embedded within reality in the location you experienced those emotions. When you die or leave, someone else can come into that place and experience a recording, a reflection, or echo of the emotions and memories you experienced.
Ghosts are effectively traumatic memories burned in to the fabric of the world. They don’t actually experience anything; they’re not conscious beings. They’re not souls looking to complete their business and move on. They’re simply psychic echoes. They’re imprints left on reality from very intense and painful emotions, particularly those experienced repeatedly over a long period of time.
This also explains why ghosts have a half life. Ever wonder why in the US, all the ghosts seem to be old timey white people from the 1800s or similar? Considering the total number of Native Americans that must have lived in what is now the US down the millennia, the vast, vast majority of ghosts should be Native American. But aside from the classic example of a disturbed native burial ground, Native American ghosts don’t show up much in fiction. It’s usually old timey white people.
The reason for this, in the imprint theory, is that like any imprint, ghosts tend to fade with time. Just as most footprints will slowly be eroded, the knots in the psychic fabric that ghosts represent slowly work themselves out over time. The ghosts people do experience tend to be from the last century or two, as most ghosts older than that have decayed below the level of human perception.
Damn that’s awesome. Do you mind if I steal this concept for my D&D lore?
Sure. I remember reading the concept somewhere, perhaps in an old r/asksciencefiction thread. I didn’t come up with it originally.
…they say we die four deaths: first with the end of our own life, second with the memories of those who knew us, third with tales forgotten by people we never knew, and finally as our mark on the world crumbles to dust…
I like this. Just a couple of additions, for the purpose of trying to improve on this lore.
First, Native Americans do have ghosts too (see https://allthatsinteresting.com/native-american-ghost-stories for instance).
If “ghosts” are just the embers of a particularly strong emotion that burned in a particular place, I suggest that “seeing” the ghost depends on being able to tune-in to that emotion and on having the cultural tools to interpret it and personify it.
So I might experience some faint, weird feeling going through a field where a battle between Native American tribes once happened but, as a white person imbued with a specific culture, I would not be able to recognize that particular mix of feelings and “see” that ghost. But a Native American might.
And if a big department store is built on top of that field, it would make it harder to both tune in to that particular faint feeling (among the confusion of so many other feelings) and to personify it as an old Navajo warrior, which would not make sense to us in that place
I think because in that framing being a ghost is a sad lonely thing. In the Christian tradition the ultimate reward is heaven and being in the presence of the lord. If one is stuck on earth it is similar to catholicism’s concept of purgatory.
I’d imagine that the ghosts who ditched their unfinished business to explore the world beyond would be doing that exploring in a world beyond so we wouldn’t see them or anything.
The traditional conception is that ghosts aren’t really sentient creatures, but a phenomenon that souls can get stuck in instead of going to the afterlife. There’s symbolism there - a ghost is an echo of a person, much like memories of them or the effects they had on the world. There’s also a bit of Christian moralizing - a “good” person doesn’t stick around because they are eager to join God in heaven, while a “bad” person clings to their earthly life and possessions even if they are only capably of doing so in a greatly diminished state.
The modern conception of a ghost where it’s a fully realized person who can just kinda go through walls is an anthropomorphized and secular version of the ghosts that were invented by the Victorians.
Being a ghost is not supposed to be the final stage. Some have unfinished business right where they are but they’ve been waiting for ages and that makes them sad.
In anglo-Christian culture ghosts were explained away as souls in purgatory, and this led to a Catholic/Protestant split wrt whether they existed or not, because Prots denied the existence of purgatory. They are still religiously problematic really — think about how often the ‘ghosts’ in American media turn out to be demons in order to keep things in line with scripture.
I personally believe there’s something much more terrifying implied in the English folk-tradition though: a spirit bound to the last physical vestiges of their time on earth, going through the motions as what little is left of their mind after the trauma of death unravels completely. They’re dead — it’s over. They can still do the things they did in life, but it doesn’t mean anything anymore.
Obviously there are very powerful resonances here for anyone who has witnessed a person sicken and die.
Because we think of every life as a story, and every story needs narrative closure. So if someone’s life seems like an unfinished story we feel like there’s some kind of lingering agency trying to finish it.
Alright, if they’re having a romp in the afterlife in some capacity, they aren’t ghosts. There’s a kind of underlying implication they’re sticking around for some worldly purpose or reason. Often this is used for metaphor about moving on in your life (or rather afterlife).
Because they are old. Ghosts are just the anthropomorphic manifestation of people’s fear of growing old. Religious framings are just an add on.
Trauma and grief can’t run their course if your mind is so senile and your short term memory so feeble, that you’re basically forced to live in the past. Forever repeating old arguments, reliving past trauma and never overcoming old fears. With your mind so set in it’s tracks, that you can’t even imagine leaving the place where you lived all your live — your “old haunt” so to speak. How could you live in the present, if you can’t even recognize your own children half of the time? But the long term memory often still works. Ghosts are real and if you’re lucky enough to live that long you might well become one. Of course aging isn’t always like this, it can be graceful and dignified but when it isn’t, that’s what people are afraid of.
People are scared, when they see older relatives acting stranger every day, especially in times before any way to diagnose Alzheimer’s and other forms of neural degradation. They might seem like they are not quite here anymore, like the person they were had long since died and yet, something lingers. Ghost stories are a socially acceptable way to express those fears.
Just observe the effects ghosts have on their victims: first, they are reminded of their own mortality. Then their hair suddenly turns white or gray or falls out, they lose sleep, wake up tired or grow old over night. They might lose their mind or die themselves. That’s all just normal aging.
Here is a handy key to select monsters and their meaning:
- ghosts 👻: aging, death, old people
- vampires(folk believe): plague, infection
- vampires(literature): landlords, feudalism
- zombies(modern): alienation, capitalism
- witches: women who stand up to patriarchy
- Frankenstein’s monster: the proletariat gaining class consciousness (no seriously)
I recommend the podcast “the horror vanguard” for details.
Because they are old. Ghosts are just the anthropomorphic manifestation of people’s fear of growing old. (et so on)
Damn, that’s some psychoanalysis you got there… that is a compelling stance on why it is so
Also, checking on the monsters, it makes sense, I tell you that… though I wonder who Frankenstein, the creator, reps, in this case
I think in some asian portrayals of ghosts, its because they have “unfinished bussiness” so their spirit wont leave.
I know unfinished business doesn’t necessarily mean business in the economic sense, but it’s still funny we call it that. Like even ghosts can’t escape capitalism.
heaven and hell are capitalistic too.
You know in Chinese culture, they burn those fake “heaven money” so the dead spirits have “money to spend”? Yea my parents do that stuff in lunar new years and other holiday stuff.
Lol thats just so ridiculous, I’m not gonna be doing these dumb rituals that my ancestors have been doing. Its the 21st century, I not doing silly spiritualism stuff.
Popular beliefs influences people’s beliefs, which reinforces popular beliefs. Step back even farther from the question for a moment and ask, “why do you think of ghosts as dead human spirits at all?” That a “ghost” is some sort of dead human spirit is a concept that has been built into Western society for a long time. It is something we just accept in story telling and mythological belief systems because it’s been in them so long and is told to us via authoritative figures in our lives from an early age. To tell a story where a ghost is anything other than a dead human spirit or the echo of a dead human, makes people call bullshit on the story, because the story has broken a long standing societal expectation. Sure, some stories can get away with it, and more so in the modern age where we are starting to appreciate stories which subvert long standing expectations. But, we still tend to fall back on old tropes and devices which we can expect readers to understand, without having to spend too much time on building a world. It’s far easier to save the term “ghost” for something much like a dead human spirit and just create a new term when trying to describe something else.
Most of the ghosts at Hogwarts in Harry Potter seem to either actively enjoy being a ghost or at least not mind it and just carry on doing stuff (like assist the pupils)
That aside, plenty stories have the ghost relive the moments before their death involuntarily, over and over. So for them it’s nothing they can control.
But I’m with you: If I were not trapped in this deathloop (or bound to one location) and were able to be seen by other humans, I would definitely not be gloomy, once I got over the fact that I died and can no longer interact in all the usual ways with my spouse and dogs. Even if I could not do crazy telekinetic stuff, I could at least wander nature, haunt bad politicians and give my spouse inside knowledge, which she can possibly make a lot of money from to buy a house for us.
Sour grapes.
There is nothing popular fiction hates more than somebody doing something everyone wants to do but can’t. Impossibility, when possible, becomes cast as immorality or immaturity or otherwise something arbitrarily undesirable.
To be a ghost is depressing and/or monstrous because when we die in real life we don’t stick around. Time travel overwrites reality with a worse version of the present because in real life we can’t change the past. Resurrection brings people back as monsters because in real life we can’t have our lost loved ones back. Immortality is sad and lonely and often requires you to do evil things to sustain it because in real life we can’t live forever. Traveling to alternate lifetimes where you’re more successful is emotionally hollow because you had the most important emotional stuff in your life all along and you wouldn’t trade that for the world.
These and other speculative crises always have to be fixed by making the fictional world abide be the limitations of the real one. Aren’t we so lucky that our world is randomly already like this?
