What Does Go Bump in the Night?

Friday I was at a party with colleagues, the rain pounding outside. A bolt of lightning illuminated the room, thunder boomed, and the lights flickered for a moment. Connie, my dean, remarked, "Flashback to Charley!" You see, now that a new hurricane season has arrived, everyone in Central Florida is on edge as we were clobbered by not one, not two, but three major storms last year, each one followed by days without electricity. The conversation turned to the topic of anxiety, and Leanne asked if Connie remembered the time they were at a conference, and Reynold, Connie's husband, got freaked out because their daughter insisted she could see a man in her room.

"He called you like seven times that night, didn't he?" asked Leanne.

"Reynold isn't usually like that," insisted Connie.

Apparently, despite a thorough search of a house now ablaze with electric light, their daughter insisted she could still see a man.

The provost chimed in next: "One time the dogs woke me up. They were both sitting on the edge of my bed barking. I saw a young girl in a long blue dress. I shut my eyes for a moment, and when I looked again, she was gone!"

"Well, let me tell you about the time Jim and I were staying in an old bed and breakfast in Vermont," interjected Lynda, the math dean. "We just were lying in bed. Jim was reading a magazine; I was doing a crossword puzzle. Suddenly we felt something jump onto comforter. I turned to Jim and asked, 'Did you feel that?' and he said, 'Yes, just like a cat at home.' We were convinced that an ancient feline haunted that room!"

Now I don't not believe in ghosts. In fact, in a childhood home, everyone in the family had, at one point or another, seen a flash of glow scurry out of the way like a feral cat. We all considered it a benevolent spirit and would squeal, "There goes the ghost!" whenever one of us spotted it. But even as a kid, I entertained the possibility that the flash had a scientific rather than supernatural explanation. You know, a neighbor parks his car in the right spot to bounce from a chrome side mirror a beam of sunlight that streaks past a branch swayed out of the way by a breeze from just the right direction. The beam enters the dining room window, gets reflected off the TV screen, and there, before the branch sways back to block the light, we have an apparition dashing along the baseboard.

On the one hand, the First Law of Thermodynamics does say that "energy cannot be created or destroyed, only modified in form." Since all living things contain energy, some transformation must happen at death. That the transformation produces a ghost doesn't seem all that farfetched to me. And while the modified energy or "ghost" is traveling wherever some unknown law of thermodynamics dictates, I can imagine it passing through homes or getting caught in places just as sunlight does in a closed up car. I can also imagine that children and dogs, neither of whom have fully developed rational minds, would be more likely to see this modified energy or "spirits of the dead."

But another part of me believes that prescription drugs, a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, too much stress—the accoutrements of modern-day professional life—coupled with a scary idea or bad dream can tickle the ancient reptilian part of the brain into producing uncontrollable anxiety. Children probably transition more slowly from sleep to wakefulness, so Connie and Reynold's daughter might have still been seeing someone from a nightmare. Reynold, though, might have polished off an entire bottle of wine that evening which was suppressing his rational mind. His wife's absence and the scary idea of a home invader would have put his fight-and-flight instincts into overdrive. The provost's dogs might have heard a raccoon dump over the neighbor's trash and were barking in response to that; the provost might have mixed a Vicodin and a margarita and then got woke up from deep REM sleep, the spooky girl in a blue dress a transitional hallucination.

Jim and Lynda's cat on the comforter is more difficult to explain. They were both awake, relaxed, engrossed in higher brain activities. But even so, the bed was not the well-known mattress from home. A faulty spring, a shift of body weight, familiarity with cats jumping on a bed—all of these could have contributed to the sensation that a spectre cat had leaped up to join them.

I think I would prefer that our energy has a life after death [cautious always that I have to be careful what I wish for]. I think that I would like confirmation that all of those glimpses we get out of the corners of our eyes really are the parade of "ghosts" going wherever they must. But another part of me surmises that we just like the idea of hanging around after death [and the stories told on rainy days that confirm it] when all of the evidence points to the fact that although our energy might "transition," that doesn't mean our sense of self or physical likeness goes with it.