BY JORDAN DOLL BEST OF 026 WANNA HEAR A SCARY STORY? The fi rst house I remember living in was this big, beautiful Victorian row house on Broomhill Road in Aberdeen, Scotland. It was four stories high, had an enormous back garden fi lled with roly polies and raspberry bushes and sometimes, late at night, a strange woman would come into the room I shared with my brother and check on us. My brother caught her one night as she watched silently from the doorway. According to him, her eyes were enormous, her hair unkempt and she jerked back into the darkness of the house when he tried to speak to her. We didn’t know who she was, but she defi nitely didn’t live there. Not anymore, at least. There was the house in Eagle where I woke up to something pretending to be my brother at the foot of my bed, the crouching shadow I chased across the fl oor at an old girlfriend’s place in Boulder, and the thing that whispered me awake so loudly that I can still remember the feeling of still breath in my ear. Goosebumps. Most people have a ghost story in their back pocket. Often, it isn’t their own, but rather some aunt or cousin or friend who had this one thing happen to them that one time. But while sharing a goofy story over a pint is no big deal, almost everyone balks if you ask them straight up, “Do you believe in ghosts?” I get asked this question a lot and there is really no good answer. Say no and you are tagged as some joyless curmudgeon — sensible, pragmatic, working hard every day to ensure a comfortable transition into absolute nothingness. But say yes and you are immediately shuffl ed off to the kid’s table to discuss tree fort defense and how best to get from the bedroom to the bathroom in the middle of the night without ending up inside some monster or another. I mean, if you can believe in ghosts, why not leprechauns? Or Santi Clauses? Or a successful, loving relationships? It’s an accepted fact of life. People who believe in ghosts don’t believe in fi scal responsibility, portion control or fl ossing before bed. They are suckers and they deserve what’s coming to them. And there is good historical precedent for that, really. The history of paranormal investigation is so jam-packed with cheats it’s no wonder almost everyone is a baseline skeptic. Almost since the invention of photography there have been people trying to crowbar ghosts into pictures in a play at fame, fortune or just plain old foolishness. “Spirit Photographers” they called themselves, and, for a small fee, they could use their secret knowledge of spiritual energies (and double exposures) to provide you with personalized proof of life after death. Spirit healers, mediums, fortune tellers; the tradition of peddling the supernatural to hopeful rubes has long been a viable way to make some decent scratch for a person of a particular charisma score. Even today there is money to be made as a practitioner of the ‘intangible arts.’ On a daily basis, people pay street corner psychics and their ilk actual human money in exchange for the promise of a peek under the veil. I am not here to call these people phonies (because I enjoy not being riddled with curses), I am just saying that it happens. There is money to be made when you have a few spirits on the take. For proof, one need only look to the mercifully dying glow of the recent ‘paranormal programming’ renaissance. From 2005 to around 2013, you could scarcely turn on the TV without coming across some faux-hawked, meat-golem challenging an unseen force to an epic bro-down. Few things have muddied the waters of paranormal research worse than the programming that sought to legitimize it so. And yet, for all of that, people still claim to see ghosts. People who aren’t trying to get paid or made. People who were simply there when something real weird happened and who are fascinated by whatever that something might mean. There are people who believe that what we think of as a “ghost” is simply the observable manifestation of some scientifi c process we have yet to unravel. Trust me, I’m one of them. For some of us, there are just too many lucid, credible people who have been truly rattled by odd encounters for it to be nothing more than a trick of light or a spot of indigestion. Skeptics will crow about a lack of physical evidence while believers churn out mountains of cryptic data, sketchy photographs and electronic anomalies in response. But it occurs to me that perhaps physical evidence (or lack thereof) is not the perfect indicator of substance when the subject of study is, well, insubstantial. Who knows, could be that we are dealing with the workings of some natural process unlike anything we’ve seen before. Some psycho-reactive force that requires a thinking mind as part of its essential mechanism. Something we don’t have a word for yet, let alone the tools to measure it. Perhaps, trying to capture a ghost on fi lm is the experimental equivalent of trying to photograph a thought or a dream, or measure the barometric pressure using a yardstick. Maybe the best we can do for now is tell our stories. The only thing worse than being a bought and sold skeptic is being a bought and sold believer. For me, the truest answer I can give to the question of: “Do you believe in ghosts?” is an emphatic and sincere “I don’t know.” Because we don’t. We can’t. Nobody has that answer, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one or that this particular mystery is foolish or unworthy of exploration. What we do know is that, from time to time, people seem to see a fl ash of something that suggests we don’t know everything there is to know about the natural world, about existence in general. I like to imagine that when that fi rst thinker saw that fi rst lightning bolt strike that fi rst mountaintop and said, “Whoa! What the fuck was that?” they got a couple of responses. Some people said, “It was nothing, get back to toiling!” Others said, “It was an angry god! We must feed him skulls!” And luckily, in the end, the thinker decided to just go and fi nd out for themselves. Have questions about the paranormal? Send them to werewolfradarpod@ gmail.com or on Twitter: @WerewolfRadar. It’s a big, weird world. Don’t be scared. Be Prepared. 25 Have questions about the paranormal? Send them to: werewolfradar.com/contact-the-radar. It's a big, weird world. Don't be scared. Be prepared.
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