Why are people afraid of Ghosts?

[Jack of Kent]

Live people are scary: they can torture, they can steal, they can abuse.

Almost all the problems in the world derive from the cruelty, dishonesty, or stupidity, of living people.

I can easily see why one would be afraid of living people.

I can even understand why one could be afraid of the "living dead" such as vampires, mummies, or zombies; or even of monsters such as werewolves, trolls, or hobgoblins.

I would go so far to just about appreciate that one can fear certain invisible forces, such as a Devil or several malevolent demons: the genuinely-held concerns of our early modern ancestors about witchcraft were based on these fears. The witch was in league with, and a conduit for, such forces.

But ghosts? By which I mean the surviving spirits of particular dead people (not "evil spirits", which are really demons and unconnected to any particular dead person).

Why should they be scary? What harm could they actually do? Indeed, there are few examples of stories where any harm is done by a ghost, even in a "haunting".

However, ghosts are scary to many people. They used to scare me. Indeed, as a boy I was scared of ghosts but not any of the other "scary" supernatural things I mention above.

I ceased to fear ghosts, as I realised that they were unlikely to hurt me; and then I ceased to believe in them.

And now I cannot see why I was scared of them at all.


[Copied over from my Blog site, for interest and discussion.]

[Mulder]

There are two kinds of ghost. There is the ghost of fiction - a spirit. Then there is the 'real thing' - a witbess seeing a human figure of someone who 'should not be there' (eg. the witness is alone in a locked house).

The fictional ghost has always been portrayed in culture as scary until it is now an inbuilt reaction. It is probably not innate, like the reaction to snakes, but built up by the constant flow of scary nonsense from the media, whether straight fictional or supposedly realistic (like 'Most Haunted').

Real ghosts are scary for another reason. If you see someone who 'shouldn't be there', it is more like the reaction to a seeing a figure in a dark alley. Your first instinct is fear of a real person with unknown intent. Most witnesses report ghosts as looking like completely convincing ordinary people. If the figure then disappears, as many do, this is hardly reassuring since it proves it was not a real person.

A sensible reaction to a disappearing figure might be 'oh good, it's just misperception/hallucination/imagination - none of which can harm me'.
Unfortunately, for most people, conditioned by the ghost of fiction it's 'oh no, it's a scary ghost'.

People who see ghosts a lot often no longer regard them as scary.

[skbuncks]

Would poltergeists fall under the umbrella of ghosts? If so then they apparently have the power to move objects about and such forth.

The poltergeist of a murdered kitchen wench for instance may, in a fit ghostly rage, throw a cup, or some other item of household crockery, at you. I imagine this could be quite scary, to whimp anyways.


skb

[Mulder]

There is certainly a relationship between ghosts and poltergeists in that they both overlap with 'hauntings'. A haunting is basically a series of seemingly inexplicable events centred on a particular place.

Fiction again causes problems here. Only some (maybe less than half) of hauntings involve the sighting of a ghost. However, most witnesses, who have swallowed the fictional idea of ghosts, assume that hauntings are caused by ghosts. Even when ghosts ARE seen during hauntings they are never observed actually causing the other aspects of the haunt eg. producing noises, moving objects around, etc. So, going back to real world ghosts, it seems more likely that a ghost is simply one symptom of a haunting, rather than its cause.

Poltergeist cases tend to mainly involve physical phenomena such as object movement. It is important to note that, in most cases, the objects are only FOUND to have been moved, not actually seen to move. Even in the cases where they ARE seen to move, it is usually only the later part of the trajectory that is seen. Both, of course, leave open the possibility of unseen human intervention being at least partly to blame.

[Matt]

I fear that one of them might possess the body of Whoopi Goldberg and bring her round my house for sensual pottery. Eugh!