Ghosts? How Do They Work?
I’m what they call a thinkin’ man, I’m always pondering something. This is in part due to an overactive imagination that has stuck with me since childhood, part an untreated case of attention deficit hyperactive disorder and part a cacophony of random information bouncing around in my head absorbed from my numerous hobbies and interests which include the occult, conspiracy theories, Greek mythology, and watching way too many poorly made horror movies from the 1980’s. With the dangerous mixture combined, sometimes I have some wacky thoughts and theories that emerge from the storm and explode out my extroverted mouth into the ears of unsuspecting friends, family members, co-workers and random strangers who give me a look like I’ve taken way too many psychedelics.
Now, that very well may be true but, some of these theories make a lot of sense, to me at least and I’d like to share them with the world in combination with five unique ghost movies.
Demons are ghost bears
Or like ghost wolves. You know, basically a ghost of an animal. If we are to believe that ghosts are real, why would it only be limited to human beings? Since the days of Darwin we have been told that we humans are simply just animals, evolved to more complex brains that give us the ability to understand our existence. This is the scientific consensus, unless you believe in intelligent design or starseeded human life from off world entities like the lemurians or something, but that's a topic for a different article all together.
If we humans are just animals, then it would be safe to assume that the rules for the afterlife that apply to us also apply to other animals, after all, it's just genetics in the physical form that make us different. If these rules are the same then any animal that dies could in fact become a ghost and maybe some of those ghosts are bears and when people say they have encountered truly dangerous apparitions, the demon type monsters, perhaps they really encountered a ghost of a bear and were mistaken.
I dunno bro, you tell me.
Now the 1982 classic Poltergeist doesn’t have ghost bears, or alligators or anything like that but it is a really unique portrayal of a ghost story. Typically a ghost story is set in some creepy old castle with cobwebs, but Poltergeist was set in middle America suburbia in the middle of the 1980’s and the ghosts came through the television. Not only that, but the ghosts were not made at some transgression done to them during their life but one done to them after death. Usually in a ghost movie it's some pilgrim made that the young family is living in his house, or some little boy with tuberculosis who was slowly murdered by his grandmother or a cheating husband killed his wife and now she is haunting some randos to try to get them to solve the case. In Poltergeist, the ghosts are mad that their graves were desecrated. Which seems odd because if you are a ghost and can come through a TV, what does a body even matter any how?
Creatures of Habit
Let’s imagine you died and turned into a ghost because you had unfinished business or whatever stops you from walking into the light. Why in the fuck would you chill in a cemetery all day long? Seems boring as fuck, but then I had this thought…
Let’s imagine you wake up dead. You probably wouldn’t accept it at first. You’d probably miss your family and loved ones, so you would go to their house. But soon you would get sad as you watch your children grow up without you, as your wife/husband/whatever-you-fuck has moved on to a new lover. You might get upset, you might try to reach out and contact them by moving a chair or arranging spoons or whatever ghost do. Or maybe just the thought of being without your loved ones makes the sight of them unbearable. Being at home is not an option so you think. “Where do ghosts go?....HUZZAH!!! To the cemetery of course!”
I dunno bro, you tell me.
A ghostly movie that had an interesting take on where the spirits go after death is of course Beetlejuice. The whole mythology is very interesting, those who commit suicide are doomed to a life of public service, there’s a book with all the answers in that no one seems to have any time to read, you get a case worker to help you transition to ghost life, sand worms on Saturn...okay, maybe that one doesn’t make any sense. Beetlejuice is the first film that showed us what may happen when we're dead and it wasn’t just a binary choice between the pearly gates and eternal damnation in the pits of hell.
Dan Akroyd was onto something.
Let’s pretend we’re good at math for a moment shall we? How old is the house you're living in? Maybe 50 years max? How many people have died in your house? Probably not anyone. Zero dead is a zero percent chance of ghosts.
Let’s make our math a little complicated. Let’s say there’s a really old house in the countryside somewhere where everyone says it’s haunted. How old is it? If you're reading this from my home country of America then the odds are the house is 300 years old or less, probably more like 150 years tops. Let’s say the stories are true and old man Wither’s really did die up in the attic. That’s one person who died in this one spot, what are the odds that he has become ghostified? Considering we as humans are not inundated with ghosts, I’d say the chances are low. What I am getting at is, your house you live in, the spooky old house in the woods, the insane asylum that burned down and three people died…probably not haunted.
But you know where it is haunted? New York City, just like in Ghostbusters. It’s well known fact that Dan Akroyd is deep into the occult and I think he was onto something by setting the film in the big apple. New York has had a population of 1 Million since 1860 and between 5 and 8 million people for the past 100 years. I did one google search and found out that a person dies in New York City every 9 minutes. Here’s some math:
1 death every 9 minutes = 6.66 deaths every hour.
6.66 deaths an hour is 159 deaths a day
159 deaths a day 58,341 deaths a year
And if my math is correct, that's 5.8 MILLION deaths in the past 100 years. Even if the odds are low that a dead person is ghostified, the probability is really high. Perhaps Dan Akroyd knew something we didn’t, and I’ve talked to some ghost hunters and none seem to have considered New York as a place to look.
I dunno bro, you tell me.
Ghostly Con-Artists
I’m not gonna name any names, because I don’t know them, but there are a lot of con men out there making money off of ghost stuff. Whether it’s the countless hucksters on the Discovery and Travel Channel with their TV shows, and again, I don’t know of any of these shows but I assume that’s the networks they are on, or the endless amount of gross earpiece wearing mediums who “channel” the dead loved ones of people in the crowd just looking for answers. Obviously the latter is way more gross than the former, but it’s all very shifty and gross. Sure, if you are some goof wandering around an abandoned house pretending you're detecting stuff when you know damn well you're not, that’s gross bro, cut it out.
While I believe 99.9% of people operating in the paranormal business are frauds and that those who really see and hear ghosts are locked away in mental facilities, I hope that it’s really like Michael J. Fox in The Frighteners. His character was exactly that type of con man, but he was really seeing ghosts, he was just using them to trick people so he could make money exorcising his buddies. The Frighteners is really one of the first movies to show a person having a healthy relationship with ghosts. Sure, Casper did, and that’s a truly touching beautiful movie that brings a tear to my eye every time I watch it, but when talking about horror, ghosts were always an adversary only.
Ghost Occult Powers
This isn’t some quack theory of mine, this is reality. Google it. Or if you are concerned about “them” tracking you, DuckDuckGo it.
Now just about everyone knows about the government program MKUltra that was run by the CIA and used LSD to fry some people’s brains. What you may not know about is MKOFTEN, this was a CIA program where they recruited demonologists, fortune tellers, mediums and Satanists to "explore the world of black magic" and "harness the forces of darkness and challenge the concept that the inner reaches of the mind are beyond reach".
It wasn’t just America that was into this stuff, the Nazis were pretty obsessed with the occult. Hitler walked around with a coven of witches and there are rumors of the Nazi Vril society who was obsessed with the powers of the occults which is probably what spawned the greatest works of fiction in history from Indiana Jones to Hellboy.
In the 2001 remake of Thirteen Ghosts or for the cool kids, THIR13EN Ghosts, the goal of the villain is exactly this type of MKOFTEN/VRIL Society allure of power. If you are unfamiliar with the film, first, what the fuck is wrong with you? Seriously. Second, it’s about this dude in an ascot who makes a big ass house out of glass that’s really a giant rubik's cube of doom to trap Matthew Dillard, Shannon Elizabeth, Tony Shalhoub and Rah Digga. After he had them trapped he was going to unleash twelve of the coolest ghosts of all time to suck up their essence to gain eternal life, or something. This is the coolest ghost movie EVER! Everyone has awesome glasses that let them see ghosts just like the original except everything is not red. There are all these crazy ghosts with cool backstories and if you have the DVD they have little back stories for each of them which expands on the mythos and to date is the only special feature I’ve ever watched on a DVD.
That being said, seriously, the ghost bear thing, think about it.
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