Ghosts, Souls and an Educated Fellow
It is the mainstay of the paranormal community to attribute paranormal activity to some form of the afterlife. The knocks, whispers in the dark and shadowy figures we investigate on supposedly haunted locations are almost always attributed to a lost soul or possibly a darker entity. Why is this the accepted standard in the paranormal field? I think the route of it is our innate need to believe in something after our existence. Most investigators who have delved in this field for any fair amount of time have an arsenal of experiences that make them believe there is something going on and many come to the conclusion that the area is haunted by a spirit. In my opinion, the evidence supporting this belief is anecdotal at best. While I am a believer that there are cases of the paranormal, I don’t arbitrarily assign the spirit parameter.
Supporters of the afterlife explanation of the paranormal display plenty of evidence in support of this belief such as past life recognition, near death experiences and a bag full of unremarkable EVPS. Many of these experiences can simply be explained without the afterlife variable. For instance, as for past life recognition, there are other possibilities. Due to the way our brains retrieve information many daily experiences can trigger a past life recall or Déjà vu type of experience. Near death experience phenomena is simply the way or brains cope with death. Death causes an extremely elevated fight or flight response built into our consciousness and since our brains are essentially wired the same we all share a similar experience. EVPs simply being misheard words our brains want to hear to force us to entertain the idea we are in a haunted location.
So if the root is not a mystical spirit energy what is going on? Well honestly I cannot truly answer this but that is not the point of this article. In the end, I simply plead for my fellow investigators to reach beyond the normal and entertain possibilities that are not the standard. We delve in the realm of the paranormal and anything can be a possibility.
