Do you believe in ghosts?
I saw the film Paranormal Activity the other day, and although the film was terribly bad and made me want to laugh out loud (in my honest opinion anyway), it got my friends and I thinking. (Not at just how bad the film was, anyway!) xD
Well, they came up with the question anyway. :S
As we were walking out of the cinema, one of my friends asked me a question - “Do you actually believe in such things as ghosts?” This may strike you as an obvious question, and I thought it was obvious too, but then it got me thinking. I was at the time going to say a flat out NO, but giving more thought about the question, I began to wonder if there was any truth behind the so called Paranormal lark, and I went and did some research to try and put my mind at rest.
Browsing through the interwebs, I found many websites that address the subject. One website in particular that caught my attention was this one here, which was an article in the New York Times sometime ago entitled Paranormal Phenomena, by Kenneth Chang. One small paragraph caught my eye, which I quote, was this:
“For some reason, a lot of people want it to be so… If you can do things with your mind, then the universe is paying attention to you, and that’s important to a lot of people.”
This was said by Dr. Robert L. Park, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland and the author of “Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud.”
“So, basically, if you WANT ghosts to be real, they ARE?” I thought. Well, that can’t be it, surely? I mean, if I wanted a load of money to be real to me, would I get a load of money just by wanting it? Of course not. But I suppose it does have its point.
To sum it all up, I then thought about how ghosts became part of everyday life. Not in the sense that they’re out with a vengeance to haunt every single one of us. They were everywhere in the sense that people try to look for them, the best examples being in TV Programs (one that comes into mind is Most Haunted (aired in the UK), or for viewers in America, Ghost Hunters), as well as there being books and stories written about them. They have, and had been for centuries, part of our culture whether we liked it or not. It therefore makes them real to us in that sense, although I suppose you can use the same argument for aliens and such. But I won’t get into that topic! :P
So whether or not you actually believe in ghosts is up to your personal opinion, and I’ll end with the same question - Do you believe in ghosts?
