In which I confess my belief in ghosts, and embarrass my husband slightly

It brings my husband unending happiness to knock me for believing in the paranormal.  He will conveniently forget that he does, on occasion, ascribe to the paranormal explanation as well. He also loves to watch that show Decoded on the History channel, and his favorite all time television show is Supernatural. Somehow (and I don’t know how), he is capable of dealing with the cognitive dissonance.

Tangent: I also want to point out that when we watched the Mothman Prophecies in the movie theater years ago, he yelled out. Oh yes. He did. Also, when I took him to the Spooklight—near my childhood home, it creeped him out so much that he’s refused to go back ever since. The point of this tangent is I think he hides behind disbelief because he’s a big ol’ scaredy cat. Yeah, I said it!

Back to the real post.

So when I say I think there’s a ghost or entity in/around our house, he scoffs. When the other three members of the household (myself and the kids) relate something that happened in front of all three of us moments ago, he will try to explain it away. When something out of the normal happens right in front of him, he will acknowledge it, but when I recount it to someone else later, he will pretend that he doesn’t believe.

And yet, he believes in aliens. I see paranormal as an umbrella term that includes, amongst other things, aliens, but it is no such thing to J. Aliens—well you could support this theory with physics and leaked governmental documents and probability. Ghosts or spirits or entities are not the same.

Then, when I told him I wanted him to buy me a ghost hunting kit with an EMF meter and the like, so that I can start factually recording our weird goings-on, and studying the occurrences in the most scientific of manners, he told me that the only way we could justify buying it was if I was going to use it while… well, I won’t relay that part.

So then I took my plight to the Twitter. Instead of overwhelming support for my cause, I lost a couple of followers and had a friend tell me that they sided with J.

What. A. Bummer. This was going to be my coup de grace; I was going to show J that everyone else believed!

I didn’t always BELIEVE in ghosts. I wasn’t a skeptic, exactly; I just did not pay much attention to any of the stuff. There were always other things to pay attention to. I grew up in a town that had too much Civil War history for its own good, and everything was ‘old haunted cemetery’ this, and the ‘ghost of the lady who waits on the stairs for her fallen betrothed’ that. As teenagers we would go to the Spooklight, and sometimes we saw something, and sometimes we didn’t, and besides that, I didn’t think much about it at all.

I was an adult when I had what I would consider my first, real face-to-face experience. I won’t go into it much, but I will say this: you are never allowed to knock anyone who has tried to figure out how to make their two-year-old’s ABC/spelling toy just shut the hell up at 3am when you’ve ripped out its guts and you are beating it with a hammer in your garage. If you don’t believe, that’s fine. Just don’t knock me, because I would not wish that experience on anyone in the world. Elmo’s voice at three in the morning? Not great. Elmo’s voice coming from a disemboweled toy at three in the morning? Yeah.

We ended up moving to get away from it.

What really sealed the deal for me (because I had completely and entirely entertained the idea of my own total mental breakdown with the experience mentioned above) was I returned back to school and took Astronomy lab for my science general education requirement.

And no, I did not see a ghost through a telescope. I didn’t see an alien, either. I did decide (because—you may not have noticed this—I am not the most scientifically inclined, and hesitant to touch multi-million dollar telescopes because I’m clumsy and tend to break things) to take the instructor up an all of the extra credit that was available. This extra credit—and this dates me—involved going to the library, checking out VHS tapes, finding a media lab room in which to watch them, and writing one page responses to each and every tape in the Carl Sagan series Cosmos.

Boring.

Until…Carl Sagan introduced the fourth dimension to us all by illustrating what happens when three dimensional Mr. Apple lands in two dimensional Flat Land. Seriously, I Googled this shit, and it’s on YouTube. This means you can see it too, and if Carl Sagan is anything, he’s unintentionally funny. I also heard a rumor that he was a major pothead, but that’s neither here or there.

It was then came to the realization that ‘paranormal’ things: aliens, ghosts, angels-- anything really-- can be explained by Sagan’s bit of reasoning. Not just because it may be in another dimension or something along those lines, but because anything that our senses have trouble perceiving or our minds have troubling making sense of could be construed as ‘paranormal’.  So I decided to have an open mind. Just because I cannot make sense of something, or see what is really going on does not mean that there isn’t something there.  I do have to accept the fact that there’s a chance it isn’t ghosts—it could be anything, even something as of yet unnamed.  I also have to be equal opportunity—you can’t rule anything out until you have the evidence to rule that thing out.

Hence, the belief in ghosts.

Now, if I could only get my hands on some ghost hunting equipment. I wonder if Jason and Grant from Ghosthunters are on Twitter…