Ghosts

A few nights ago I watched a "reality" television show that involved a family spending the night in an apparently "haunted" castle. They left convinced of the reality of ghosts, even though their evidence was entirely subjective. When they got startled, instead of considering other possible causes, they attributed their fear to the presence of ghosts.

"Are there ghosts?" is the wrong question to begin with. If ghosts could exist (which would involve a view of the universe radically different from the physical one we know), the initial question should be "why are there not ghosts everywhere?" There's hardly a square yard on the habitable parts of the planet that hasn't had someone die on it. There are many places where thousands of deaths occurred, thousands of murders, thousands of horrible and tortured deaths. Think of Auschwitz, for instance. Many, many people died there unfairly and painfully. Can you think of any reason why there should NOT be any ghosts there?

I've been alive quite a while, and not only have I never seen a ghost, I have never talked to anyone who had. But we all sort of like the idea that there could be mysteries in the world that we don't know about and can't understand. Clearly there is some level of enjoyment in the fear of the ghostly world.