Ghosts

This is the story that a good friend told us. After she sold her apartment in Jerusalem, she went to live near a small college town in Massachusetts. There she rented a 100-year-old house, while she looked for a place to buy. The rental was a charming place on 200 acres, but the only source of heating was an open fireplace. And whenever she lit the fireplace she felt an anxious presence nearby, a tall, thin man, dressed all in black. She didn’t see him so much as visualize him. She would talk to him, telling him that she would eventually get the hang of lighting the fireplace. Once she felt a breath on her neck and told him sternly to stop flirting with her.

After her lease ended, her former landlords, an elderly unmarried brother and sister, invited her for tea. She told them about the presence she had felt each time she lit the fire. “It was our father,” they told her. “He built that fireplace and never allowed anyone to light it but himself.” When she asked them about that breath on her neck, they replied, “he had an eye for the ladies.”

I might have been prepared to attribute her intimation of a ghost to the product of a lively imagination, if I had not had an unsettling experience. Shortly after my father died, I saw him on our balcony in Jerusalem. It was dark outside. What I saw was an indistinct shape standing or moving slowly outside the windows and somehow I “knew” that it was Dad. Of course he was on my mind and the shape I saw may have been nothing but my own reflection in the glass. When I told my spouse about this experience, she told me that once she had seen, in the very same place where I had glimpsed my father, a vision, a shape, a something that she interpreted as the presence of death but that she had never told me because she felt that this force was directed towards me.

Evidence for the existence of ghosts is solely anecdotal and sometimes fraudulent. Still, if the laws of natural phenomena cannot explain the existence of ghosts, neither can they explain extrasensory perception. The late Gertrude Schmeidler, a distinguished professor of psychology at the City University of New York, spent her entire career trying to disprove the existence of ESP and failed. Her repeated experiments under laboratory conditions revealed the ability of some people to consistently guess the occurrence of random events, such as the sequence of cards from a deck, at better than chance levels. Further, she found that such ability to be positively correlated to belief in the existence of ESP, whereas belief in its non-existence was negatively correlated with success. Since ESP is inexplicable in terms of what we know so far about the physical world, perhaps the existence of ghosts – the perception of departed souls – is not so far-fetched. Perhaps there is still an undiscovered dimension in which this can occur, or perhaps past and present time can exist simultaneously, as in Tom Stoppard’s play, Arcadia.

Still, if some people are able to detect the presence of a departed spirit, this is not to say that the dead soul experiences anything at all. I still believe that when you’re dead you’re dead. If I’m wrong, and I return to earth as a ghost, I’ll do my best to hide. I wouldn’t want to frighten or upset anyone. I will have done enough of that while I was alive.