382_10-2013.pdf

there is much debate over the validity of ghosts among the general public, there is little to no debate among the scientific community. To date, there has been no concrete evidence to suggest the validity of ghosts, or any other preternatural occurrences. Okay then, so what are people seeing? Along with the various ghost seekers out there; there are also a handful of ghost-busters. Reading the various reports from these guys, has shown that ghostly encounters are the result of one of two things.

1. Hallucinations 2. Hoaxes The first term is just reserved for clinically insane, right? Not really. Hallucinations are more common among the general public, than one might think. A hallucination is simply a moment where one’s brain mistakes a sight, sound, or smell, for something it isn’t. Most hallucinations occur during “dazed” moments. That is, moments when the person is in a fairly relaxed state. The two most popular times are just when one is going to, or coming out of sleep, or when doing a relaxed, fairly monotonous activity.

Hallucinations that occur when one is about to go to sleep, or when one has just come out of sleep, are called Hypnopompic Hallucinations, or “waking dreams.” The brain is not fully out of “sleep mode” when one wakes up, and thus, moments of dreaming, leak out into reality.

Hallucinations can also occur during monotonous activities like cleaning. When one is placed into a daydreaming type state, apparitions have a tendency to occur. Many people report seeing something out of the corner of their eyes. This is often the result of their eye registering the sudden movement of some small thing (e.g. a fly, their eyelash, or pieces of drifting material inside the eye itself), and their brain associating it with a larger thing. Sometimes these take on the form of a person standing, or sitting. The degree of the detail in the hallucination, has a lot to do with how susceptible/imaginative the hallucinator is.

The result, though, is always the same. The second the person looks away, the “apparition” disappears. As for why so many people report the same thing; this has a lot to do with the power of suggestion. People who are aware of the stories associated with a particular place, are often predisposed to seeing the objects in question. Most of the time, the hallucination is just attributed to some portion of the stories the person may have heard (often getting molded