A Ghostly Point of View

So, if you’ve been following this blog… you already know that I’m Jewish. You know that I love ghost hunting. And you know that I try to bring a very rational, and very skeptical mind, to the practice of paranormal investigation. Which is why it might surprise you to learn… that I am also a writer. Yes. A writer. Of the Ernest-Heminway-I-write-drunk-and-edit-sober variety. Of the I-will-drown-myself-in-the-back-lake-while-subsequently-writing-poetry temperament. Of the, on a good day, write-like-a-mother-%#$@ker mentality. None of which is true, of couse. But otherwise, it’s a terribly long and boring story. Okay. In truth, it’s not that boring. Though it is odd. Plus, there’s this whole sidetrack into seminary thing… we’ll get to it later. But for the purposes of this blog, all you need to know, is that some very well-meaning folks who do this sort of thing for a living, have tasked me with the mission of sitting alone in a room all day and listening to voice. So that’s what I do. All day. And every day. I sit alone in a room, and I let some invisible fifteen-year-old boy talk through me. It’s awkward for everyone involved. Whether or not this voice is paranormal, or some lurking part of my subconscious long buried, I don’t know. But every now and then, outside of the current manuscript I’m working on, I hear a new voice. A disembodied something or other – that I recognize from somewhere outside of myself – and which I must immediately scramble to find the nearest piece of paper and write down. This is not unique to the writing experience. Most people who write creatively, and for a living, have to develop a sixth sense to these other worldly voices inside their head. Or as the article This Is Your Brain on Writing by Carl Zimmer points outs, professional writers tend to lead with the auditory versus their visual ones. I tend to get both. Which is why… I also tend to be insanely skeptical when it comes to my investigations. I am, like the book called Runaway Ralph my mother once bought as a child, plagued by an overactive imagination. On that note, I normally wouldn’t share my moment of writerly inspiration on a blog about ghost hunting. For a lot of reasons. Most notably, because I might use it in a book one day! But this one line was so compelling, so out of the ordinary for what I usually get, and so interesting in terms of ghost hunting, I knew I had to share it with you. So here goes: “Living people don’t look like people you know. They’re just balls of energy floating around and going to class. But you can tell they’re living ’cause their colors appear all green and red. Dead people show up black.” Needless to say, hearing this random disembodied voice raised some interesting questions for me. Not just about assumptions, and the world we know. But also, about the world we don’t know, and the assumptions we bring with us anyway. And I started to think… what if we’re envisioning the paranormal world wrong? What if how we think they see us — and how they interact with us — is totally different than how they do? Obviously, it’s not a question that will be answered in a blog. But like always… I thought it was an interesting enough question to raise! So what do you think? Do you believe spirits or entities see us as living people? And if not – how does that change how you attempt to communicate with the paranormal world? Does it matter, at all? Drop us a line in the comment sections below and let us know!