A Modest Theory of Ghosts

Have you ever visited a place where you felt creeped-out and afterward found out that there was substance to your feeling—a living room where a wife had murdered her husband with a kitchen cleaver, a bedroom where a mentally disturbed relative had been locked for thirty years, that spot on the bridge where a heartbroken teenager had jumped? We critical-thinking sort usually attribute that haunted feeling to a suggestion beforehand we didn't quite catch consciously, the body language of a person in the know with us, or a meal that didn't exactly settle right. We are especially vulnerable if we have been told the story, in other words, prepped beforehand.

Scientists have proposed that the sighting of ghosts could be due to optical illusions, a change in the geomagnetic field stimulating the brain's temporal lobe, waking dream hallucinations, carbon monoxide poisoning, degenerative brain disease, or simply the human tendency to find patterns in random events. Given the concept of ghosts is universal, I believe these explanations, though probably containing an element of truth, are inadequate.

My father, who had spent fifty years selling real estate and was not a superstitious man, claimed that it was difficult to sell a house where a traumatic event had taken place. As a teenager, I was once given the job of cleaning off crazy scrawlings from the walls of such a house. A middle-class, middle-aged couple had owned—nothing exceptional about them. It was in a neighborhood a notch up from average. Then the husband, for no apparent reason, attempted to kill his wife. The mad graffiti revealed the disintegration of his personality. Eventually, he was committed to a mental institution. After a few years, he died. I could barely stand being inside the house. It was difficult to sell. I assumed my unease was caused by my imagination playing off the story of the madness and the strange writings. Then I changed my mind.

I am fully capable of scaring myself. Yet, throughout my life, the creepy feeling that later turned out to have some basis in an event has occurred too often to be attributed solely to my imagination.

We smell the molecules of fear. As stated in an October 2017 article in Discover: "smelling the body odor of stressed-out people ups our vigilance, while the odor of people who had just watched something disgusting makes our faces twist in disgust. In MRI scans, people sniffing the sweat from first-time parachute jumpers lit up the brain's left amygdala, where basic emotions are processed, suggesting fear is contagious, too." That is not the whole story. Also, critically, the article explains: "Olfactory nerves do not proceed directly to the brain's thalamus, the gateway to consciousness. Instead, information feeds from the nose to cortical areas to arouse emotions and memories without our awareness. When it comes to smells, people can be influenced and not realize it." In other words, the molecules we do not register consciously become feelings.

I don't think I'm too different in noticing my body odor is different when I am stressed. In fact, the human being can distinguish up to a trillion different odors. One problem might be that we do not have the vocabulary to describe the smells, so we have difficulty categorizing them mentally.

Because we are not bloodhounds, we discount our sense of smell. The same Discover article notes: “Human noses held their own. Humans tested as generally more sensitive sniffers than monkeys and rats on a limited range of odors. Humans detected certain scents at lower concentrations than the notoriously top-notch nostrils of mice and pigs.” “Humans even beat the indomitable dog for at least a handful of scents. These include aromas produced by plants, a logical evolutionary advantage for our ancestors seeking fruits. The majority of the odors in which dogs bested us were the fatty acids, compounds associated with their own meaty prey.”

It seems to me it would be evolutionarily advantageous if we detected trace pheromones that signaled danger in places where another person experienced trauma. We would be more careful in such a place. Watch out for the cave bear! In other words, the spot is haunted by the odor—that is, the molecular trace—of fear, stress, or madness. To put a form or face to it is a natural step.

This isn’t as romantic and exciting as the Headless Horseman or the Lady of Shalott. If ghosts exist, then we have proof of life beyond the grave—a very boring life in which we are condemned to do the same thing over and over again. Ghosts seem trapped in a moment and linger in a place much like a smell. And like smells, they affect us on a level that underpins our consciousness. This suggests the subconscious has its own sensory inputs. We access it through our feelings, fears especially, but not directly. Excuse me for saying that is pretty haunting when you think about it.