Ghosts are Just a Load of Old Ghoulies!

The problem with ghosts is that they don’t exist!

I know that you’ve seen one with your own eyes, and that you felt a presence in the bedroom one night.

I know about all the people that have been warned about terrible disasters that are about to befall them by long dead relatives.

But the reason for all these was something far more amazing than a ghost; it was your own mind!

Are you really angry with me now? How dare I call you a liar, I wasn’t even there, but your friend was, and they will corroborate your account of what happened.

Firstly, I’m not saying that lots of people who think they saw ghosts didn’t experience something, and corroboration is quite easy when you are in a scary situation and someone suggests something; it’s the way our mind works.

The mind has to make sense of things: look at the picture of a piece of toast below.

 

Nothing special about that, or is there? Can you see the face? Is it just a face or is it… JC himself?

No it’s just a piece of toast; your mind has done the rest.

Before I move on, if Jesus existed (another, later, blog, no doubt) how the hell does anyone know what he looked like? What people believe to be the image of Jesus is the European renaissance image that we have all become used to.

Still not convinced that your mind jumps to conclusions? Well, can you read the phrase that is obscured
below?

Of course! Easy, isn’t it? Except it actually says:

See what I mean?

When you hear a bump in the night, you never think it’s your shirt that’s fallen off a chair - you automatically think it’s a man with an axe!

It’s just the way we are all programmed. Fight or flight!

There’s a really interesting theory at the moment of why we see our lives flash before our eyes before we die.

Your mind is like a search engine on a computer network when faced with a situation it looks for a previous experience that is similar so you can deal with the problem.

Because you obviously haven’t died before, your mind just keeps on searching, hence your life flashing before your eyes.

I visit lots of secondary schools and I love to tell horror stories the students love them. They all tell me of their experiences with ghosts and they are always the same in every school. But in different countries they have different ghosts, demons, ghouls! They depend on the major belief system of the country, to show how they materialise and behave.

This is just one of my ghost stories, that hopefully proves my point.

When I was thirteen I went on holiday without my parents for the first time. I went to Ireland to stay with family with my brother John and my friend Nidge.

My friend and I were obsessed with ghosts and while walking through a graveyard in Galway we saw a grave that had stone slabs on the sides and on the top. When we approached the grave we noticed that the stone slab on the top was broken, there was a hole big enough to climb in.

“Let’s come back tonight and climb in there I bet there will be a tomb under there with ghosts and gold,” I said, hopefully (Come back at night! What a knob!)

My friend agreed, so we came back that night. The moon cast an eerie shadow and bats flew an erratic dance. My friend and I were armed with nothing more than a small torch. On reaching the grave all my pretensions of being a fearless vampire-hunter melted away, leaving a cowardly halfwit with more mouth than heart.

My friend on the other hand only had two brain cells, both of which were concerned with eating, so he would dare to do anything.

I gave him the torch and he climbed into the hole in the grave by himself.

“What’s in there?” I asked in a whisper my heart pounding with fear.

“Nothing!” he snapped back.

“Crawl to the other end, there’s got to be a way down to a tomb!” I was much braver when someone else was doing the deed.

As I said these words I heard a loud creak. I looked up to see the gate of the graveyard swing open; it was the priest of the church making his way home.

“Nidge, turn the torch off, the priest is coming, the priest is coming!” I urged, as loudly as I dared, then ran and jumped over a wall to hide.

My friend was having none of it; he thought it was me just messing about, so he kept the torch on.

When the priest turned the corner of the church he was greeted with the sight of a grave with big shafts of light emitting out of every crook and cranny. He immediately starts to bless himself, while muttering the Lord’s Prayer as he moved cautiously towards the grave.

My friend, meanwhile, still thought it was me just messing about, so he put the torch under his chin and stuck his head out of the hole in the grave and shouted, “CLEAR OFF I’M TRYING TO SLEEP!” The priest folded up like an ironing board and fainted on the floor.

My friend climbed from the grave and ran towards me. “YOU’VE KILLED A PRIEST!” I screamed in terror.

“RUN FOR IT!” he answered.

“No! Go back and look to see if he’s ok!”

We nervously edged back towards the grave. As we arrived at the grave, the priest stumbled back to his feet giving us the fright of our lives, so we let out the biggest girliest screams ever heard and the priest promptly fainted again.

The poor man had to have three months off work; his story made the news! If you go to Galway you will still hear in a few bars the story of how the priest saw a ghost rise from the grave. He didn’t; he saw two idiots from Huddersfield messing about, trust me I was one of them!

And finally, if I’m ever woken by a bump in the night, I would rather it be a ghost with his head under his arm than a drug crazed youth with a knife in his hand!