By: Jullie Y. Daza
Do you believe in ghosts?
Ladies make exquisite material for ghosts. Why are they more alluring than male ghosts?
A lady in white, the phrase usually abbreviated to a generic “white lady,” possesses romantic, therefore mysterious, elements. It is common to project stories of love and loss onto a lady ghost because women, so we believe, die for those reasons. Whereas ladies in misty white garments inspire whispered speculations of why they refuse to leave this valley of tears, male ghosts are consigned to the prosaic realm of violence, vengeance, and so-called unfinished business.
No one who is smart, intelligent, or knowledgeable, will admit that he or she believes in ghosts, not until they meet one, anyway. In the physical world of matter, space and time, ghosts are an illusion, the ambiguous product of civilizations dating back to before mankind’s recorded ability to tell stories, passing them from generation to generation until oral history became synonymous with myths, legends, fairy-tales, and the illuminated manuscripts of monks led to the invention of the printing press. Our grandparents’ willingness to share their hand-me-down ghost stories affirms our humanity as a community of anointed storytellers and avid listeners.
Today, as millennially screen-cultured as we can get, TV and cinema enjoy scaring us to death with the drama of dying and living in the hereafter. Is the afterlife a mental construct? Why did the Gospels skip the details of Lazarus’ trip to heaven or wherever he should have been after Jesus snatched his corpse from a premature funeral? The evangelists knew how a cliffhanger works, how it raises more questions than answers and keeps the suspense going.
Keep the mystery alive, that seems to be the undying purpose of telling and retelling ghost stories. As the genius of Stephen Hawking tries to communicate to us, “Space and time do not exist separately; they are unified.” Maharishi Mahesh Yogi held that a “unified field” holds the material and the immaterial, time and space, past and present and future together, so that his dying words were that he was being “absorbed into the absolute.” Physicists, metaphysicists, poets are aware of the space-time continuum. Someday some of them will share their favorite ghost stories.
