Ghosts Along the Moonlit Path Spirits or Just Shadows? by Tricia Urlaub Spirits It is romantic to believe in ghosts. It is exhilarating, terrifying, exciting, comforting and wonderful. Proof of ghosts, absolute scientific proof would shake our cores as humans, nearly as much as proof of God. Why are they here? Who were they? What did they do to become ghosts? Does God not want them? Does the Devil not want them? Do they know they’re dead? All questions we would want answered. Imagine walking down a path at midnight, the moon not quite clear through the canopy of trees, but giving you enough light to see outlines, vague shapes and the effect of the wind on the leaves at your feet. If you are a romantic, you will see shadows. You will see them darting here and there between the trees, in front of you, perhaps, and maybe hear them behind you and they sound like the wind, but more like whispers. Whispers of the dead, of course. If you stopped, halfway down that path, crouched, put your head to the dirt and covered it, what might happen to you then? Surely, the dried out leaves would continue to push over you. The moonlight would continue to bathe you, but would the shadows continue to dart? Or would they converge in a circle around you, close in on you until you were sure, absolutely sure one of them reached out and touched its dead finger to your neck…? If you traveled to Romania, and waited long enough, face up, arms and legs splayed, neck eagerly displayed, would a vampire find you and have its fill? Or would you die from the terror of believing? Just Shadows Ghost Hunters, a popular series on the SciFi channel, takes a scientific view of ghosts and tries eagerly and desperately to both debunk theories and prove the existence of the paranormal. Proving the existence of the paranormal is where the problem lies, how can one possibly prove it? Does an invisible shove prove a ghost’s presence? Does an untraceable scent of perfume? What about when an object flies inexplicably from your hands? These men and women from the TAPS team (The Atlantic Paranormal Society) use all sorts of interesting gadgetry in their quest. I have seen them capture red hot thermoscans darting between trees in an otherwise empty plot of land. They have captured lamps moving in a slave’s quarters. It took 4 minutes for the lamp to move 3 inches, and they debunked quite impressively, the improbability of any humans moving the lamp. Most exquisite is their video footage of a ghostly black object in the halls of Eastern State Penitentiary. Click here for the wmv download. It would be hard to prove that the “ghost” walking down the corridor of Eastern State Penitentiary was anything even remotely related to someone’s imagination. Was it a hoax? The TAPS team seems well equipped enough to be able to debunk that. Though you can never be 100% certain, a hoax seems unreasonable. Could it be a projection of someone’s hopes? Wishes? Dreams for finally landing an apparition on film? Hmmm… now that is a possibility. We have all heard about how we only use 3% of our brains. Sometimes I’ve heard up to 8%, but that hardly matters. What it comes down to is, we don’t use our brains to maximum capacity. What if somehow are brains acted like a camera, and real life was the film? What if, like so many King stories, you could think of something, and it could really happen? In the movie, "The People vs. Larry Flynt,” Larry talks to a coworker about how he can’t think too hard about moving a wall, because he knows if he thinks hard enough about it, it just might happen. Well, what if, somehow, we could all subconsciously do that? What if Jason or Grant, lead investigators of TAPS wanted to see a full apparition so desperately, their minds projected the image of one? A stretch, perhaps, but is it any more of a stretch that ghosts might actually exist? Ghosts may be, in effect, like dreams. Slippery and nebulous, never truly taking shape. Dreams, of course, exist solely between the confines of our skulls. So maybe, ghosts, are just the land, the buildings, the Earth dreaming.     © Urlaub, 2005 Tricia Urlaub has published several short stories online and in print magazines.     As c