Do You Know You’re Dead?

…Or were you even alive? How do we know, beyond a shadow of a doubt that “ghosts”, or what we experience while hunting for paranormal phenomena, were once human? We simply don’t. The science, the definitions, the jury; they’re out. I have no idea if recent scientific discoveries have ascertained the reality of paranormal activity or not, and I don’t intend to research scholarly journals to find out. I have fun in the dark with cameras, (which could be easily misconstrued, yeah), and I don’t in any way expect to be reunited with my dead grandparents, let alone Elvis, MJ, or any very long-dead member of Victorian society.

We’re human, so we’re obsessed with death and have been since our brains evolved to be large enough to conceptualize and even have foreboding into our own demise. Nothing on audio or video proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that what we encounter is or was ever human. It’s just illogical, and the connections we end up making based on creepily accurate recordings and results of random light-up electrical equipment, is founded out of belief, not fact.

Do I find the belief in deceased human beings acting consciously and interfering with our lives delusional? Yes. Do I mean it derogatorily? Not at all. Delusion is just something the human brain does, it's why we believe an all-powerful man who lives in the sky or somewhere in the infinite universe reaches down and fiddles with our fate. It’s a combination of our conscious, our subconscious, and how they work to organize everything we take in with our senses, including bullshit. It’s also why using metacognition to realize this process is part of how I think the way I do, and why I disagree with the ‘dead people’ theory. If we believe something, it doesn’t make it true.

I have no idea what we’re dealing with when it comes to paranormal activity or all the freaky, unexplained, baffling shit we witness when we go looking for it. And I don’t know why those of us who look for it often seem to end up with consistent and numerous experiences. I suppose it would just come down to statistics. Go looking for something over and over, you’re more likely to walk away with it. But that’s just logic.

Thanks for reading,