If you believe in ghosts, you are not alone. People all over the world believe that the soul of a person after death goes to another world, but sometimes it can return to earth. In fact, of all the paranormal phenomena, people most often believe in ghosts.
Belief in the other world
The idea that the dead remain with us in the form of spirits is very ancient, and appears in countless stories, from biblical parables to Shakespeare's Macbeth. This belief even spawned a particular folklore genre: ghost stories. Ghost stories are part of beliefs about the paranormal, including near-death experiences, life after death, and communication with spirits. It is not difficult to understand why this idea has spread so widely among people - many do not want to believe that deceased family members have left them forever, and therefore prefer to think that they can return to them from time to time.
Communication with spirits
At all times, people have tried to communicate with spirits. In Victorian England, for example, it was fashionable for ladies to have such sessions after tea with friends. Moreover, many prestigious universities, including Cambridge and Oxford, have established special clubs dedicated to finding evidence of the existence of ghosts. In 1882, even the most prominent organization, the Society for Psychical Research, was created. Its president and first explorer was Eleanor Sidgwick. She can be called the first female ghost hunter. In the late 1800s in America, many mediums claimed they could talk to the dead, but were later exposed as fraudsters by skeptical researchers such as Harry Houdini.
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Ghost hunt
However, ghost hunting has become widespread around the world relatively recently. This is largely due to the release of the television series Ghost Hunters, which led to the emergence of many imitators. Quite frankly, it's not hard to see why this show became so popular: it convinced millions of people that everyone could see a ghost. This means you don't need to be a scientist or even have any kind of science and research training. All you need is some free time, a dark place, and maybe a few gadgets from an electronics store. If you search long enough, any unexplained light or noise can be taken as evidence of ghosts.
Difficulty learning ghosts
Why is it so difficult to scientifically research ghosts? First of all, because they are credited with many different abilities. Self-opening doors, lost keys, unexpected coldness - all this is called the handiwork of ghosts, not to mention their ability to appear out of nowhere in the form of a blurred figure. In addition, many people, faced with some kind of unexplained phenomenon, do not know how to explain it. This happens especially often if these phenomena do not fit into our ideas about how a ghost should behave.
Personal experience is one thing, but scientific evidence is another. Another difficulty in the study of ghosts lies in the fact that there is still no single universal definition of this phenomenon. Some believe that ghosts are the spirits of the dead who, for some reason, "got lost" on their way to another world, and therefore remain to roam the earth. Others argue that ghosts are telepathic entities projected into the world by our mind. Still others create their own special categories for different types of ghosts, for example, poltergeists, residual ghosts, clever spirits, and human shadows. Of course, trying to categorize ghosts is the same as creating different races of fairies or dragons: each person can name as many types of ghosts as they want.
Contradictions
In addition, there are many controversies about ghost ideas. For example, are they material or not. Can they move through solid objects without destroying them? Or are they able to open and close the door and throw objects around the room? According to the logic and laws of physics, one thing contradicts the other.
If ghosts are human souls, why do they appear clothed in supposedly soulless objects such as hats, walking sticks, and dresses? Not to mention the abundant evidence of the existence of the ghosts of trains, wagons and ships.
If the ghosts are the spirits of those whose deaths remained unrevenged, then why are there still many unsolved murders, because it is generally believed that these spirits can communicate with living people, which means that they should have sent the police on the trail of the killer long ago. There are a lot of such unanswered questions, and they all make us doubt the existence of ghosts.
Spirit detection methods
Ghostbusters use a variety of creative (and rather controversial) methods to detect the presence of spirits. Almost all of them claim to scientifically substantiate their "work", and therefore use high-tech scientific equipment, for example, Geiger counters, electromagnetic field detectors, ion detectors, infrared cameras and sensitive microphones. However, all this equipment, in fact, did not help anyone find the ghosts. For centuries, people believed that the flame of a candle turns blue in the presence of spirits. Few people today accept this idea. Thus, it is likely that after a few decades or centuries, our methods of detecting ghosts will seem ridiculous and ridiculous to posterity.
Why do so many continue to believe
Most people who believe in ghosts do so because of the influence of some personal experience. For example, they grew up in a home where the existence of friendly spirits was taken for granted. The second example - they went through some kind of stressful experience in the so-called "haunted houses". However, many people believe that evidence for the existence of ghosts can be found in modern physics, namely in the first law of thermodynamics, which was formulated by Albert Einstein. If energy is not created or destroyed, but only changes its shape, then what happens to the energy of our body when we die? Could she somehow manifest as a ghost?
This seems like a reasonable assumption, but only if you don't understand the basics of physics. The answer is very simple and not at all mysterious. After a person dies, the energy from his body goes to the same place where the energy of all organisms after death is directed: to the environment. It is released in the form of heat, and the body is processed by the animals that eat it (that is, wild animals if the person was left unburied, or, more often, by worms and bacteria if the body was buried), and plants that absorb these residues. Thus, there is no bodily "energy" that remains after the death of a person and that can be detected using devices popular with ghost hunters.
Believe it or not?
If the ghosts are real and are some kind of as yet unknown energy or entity, then their existence (like all other scientific discoveries) will be confirmed and verified by scientists through controlled experiments. After all, despite mountains of controversial photographs, audio and video, current evidence of ghosts is no better than it was a year, ten, or even a century ago. There are two good explanations for this.
First, ghosts do not exist, and the evidence for their appearance can be explained by psychology, mistakes and hoaxes. The second option is that they do exist, but the ghost hunters are not competent enough to bring more science into their quest.
It is up to you to decide which of these explanations you want to believe.
Anna Pismenna