Every Unexplained Thing, Part 3: Ghosts Don’t Always Fade Away
If you think about it, a ghost can look like anything — a Civil War soldier or a little girl in a Victorian nightgown or maybe just a dark, shapeless mass. I mean, if ghosts are real, then at the very least we don’t understand them very well, so why couldn’t they look like anything?
I’d bet that the way TV shows and movies portray ghosts has affected the way we think about them, however. And because it’s the easiest visual shorthand for ghosts, they’re usually standard-looking humans, maybe appearing somewhat more grayscale than they did when they were alive, and often to some degree transparent, not fully there, a little see-thru. They appear, they deliver the visual notifiers that they are, in fact, no longer corporeal, and then they give whatever message they’re scripted to perform: Repent! Avenge! Find my hidden gold! Finally, with the performance having ended, the ghost fades away, like a shape receding into a thick mist, or, if we’re being honest, more like a visual effects designer gradually pulling the opacity down to zero. When people talk about seeing a ghost — the aforementioned Civil War soldier, maybe, but just as often a long-dead grandmother or a featureless, black shape that maybe looked like he was wearing a hat — they often use this language to describe how it leaves them: “And then it faded away.”
Again, if ghosts exist, we don’t understand very much about them, and I’m not about to criticize anyone describing their encounter in these terms. I don’t know whether ghosts are real. I don’t think I’ve seen any, and I’d hesitate to describe anything I’ve encountered so far as being full-blown paranormal, much less specifically a ghost. The unexplainable things I’ve experienced tend to fall into one of three categories, with some falling into more than one and some all three.
The categories are as follows:
Something that I dreamed about but which then subsequently bled into my waking life;
Something that I vividly remember but I cannot guarantee that I am remembering correctly, either because the passage of time has me questioning my memory or because the memory itself may not have been something that actually happened to me so much as occurred to me in a dream or was told to me by someone else and I now inaccurately remember this thing as happening to me;
Something that I experienced as a child and which seemed weird at the time but may only be that way because I lacked an understanding of the world and subsequently invented a story to help me make sense of it.
The memory I am discussing in the first post in this series almost certainly falls into the second category but may be the first and third as well. Here is that memory.
I am in a store. I am fairly certain it’s the Pay Less in my hometown that is now a CVS. I am young enough to walk but not old enough to be allowed to wander off on my own. I am wearing rain boots. I remember this particular pair clearly, and part of my memory of this incident is the clammy, gross feeling of my socks in damp rubber boots. I am following my mother but also listening to the noise the boots make as I walk in them. I’m amused by the noise. And just to hear the noise, I walk far enough away from my mother that I am now closer to a man who is standing in the aisle. He is skinny. He is wearing a dark raincoat. He doesn’t look particularly scary, but I’m old enough to realize that I don’t know him and he is therefore a stranger. He is looking right at me. He does not move. I’m about to walk closer to my mother, and in an instant, he is not there anymore. He didn’t fade away. He was never transparent. He looked like a normal, ordinary man who was standing there one second and completely gone the next.
The closest thing I can liken it to at the time is a commercial that aired on TV when I was a kid, where people have a handful of peanuts, then they close their hands, then open them again to reveal the peanuts have been replaced with a Snickers bar. I can remember seeing this commercial and being confused by it and having my parents explain to me that it was an example of trick photography. I’m not sure I was smart enough to understand exactly how this trick worked, and maybe that’s why this young, naive version of myself thinks maybe that man disappearing like that is also an example of trick photography. Later, I would ask my mother about this very thing — if “trick photography” is something that happens in real life or if it only works on TV — and I therefore concluded that the man just disappeared somehow. I assumed I’d figure out how that happened as I got older, but at 39, I still have no idea.
If he did go away, did he go somewhere else? Or did he go nowhere? Did he just stop existing?
Like I said, it’s hardly the stuff of most stories of ghostly encounters. I don’t know really how else to describe it, other than that it was kind of like a ghost, maybe sort of? I suppose I’m posting it here in hopes that the internet will magically tell me what this thing is, or at least what the term for it might be. Or perhaps someone can tell me that I’m actually remembering something that happened in a movie or a TV show that I’ve wrongly internalized as a memory of something that happened to me. Or perhaps an eye doctor can tell me that sometimes our eyes will just get tired of looking at a person and will pretend he’s no longer there, just to play a funny trick on us.
I’m also posting this because I feel like the people in my life don’t necessarily like hearing about my dimly remembered childhood mysteries. I think they’re interesting, I guess, but because your dream might seem like a real hum dinger to you but a crashing bore to anybody else, I’m not wanting to impose these unsolvable mysteries on anyone else. I’m writing to exorcise the stories, to an extent, and if anyone else wants to join me in bewilderment, well, then, I guess that’s cool.
One more thing about ghosts that occurred to me when I was a kid and which seems relevant to this discussion: If ghosts can look like anything, then they could potentially look like anyone, and they therefore could look like a boring, ordinary human, like the man I saw in the store. So let’s say that if ghosts are real, then anyone you pass on the street today, anyone you see riding in your train car, anyone you see walking down the aisle at the store could theoretically be a ghost. If you don’t talk to them and don’t touch them and don’t see them interacting with anyone else, there’s no reason why they couldn’t be a dead person, walking the earth and choosing not to be see-thru on this particular ghost day, en route to deliver an important message to their surviving loved one to repent their sins or avenge their death or find their hidden gold. You could be a bit player in someone else’s ghost story.
modified image via flickr user newt42, under creative commons license
This is the first part of a series I’ve wanted to write for a while, “Every Unexplained Thing,” in which I try to make sense of the little mysteries I’ve encountered in my life. I have never seen anything I’d categorize as even remotely paranormal, and I’m willing to bet there is an explanation for most things, but I just haven’t found those explanations yet.
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