Getting Into The Spirit

By Gordon Hopkins Today is Halloween, so naturally I’m thinking about “A Christmas Carol” by good ole’ Charlie Dickens. It is somewhat ironic, I suppose, that the most famous ghost story ever written is associated with Christmas and not today’s spook-oriented holiday. Maybe it’s not ironic. Maybe I just overuse the word, ironic, like everyone else. Anyway, thinking about Halloween gets me thinking about ghosts and that always brings up a question in my mind that has never been sufficiently answered.My question is this: What, actually, is a ghost? Most people say the spirit of a dead person. But how do they know that? It’s just accepted as common knowledge, the same way people just accept Tom Hanks is a nice guy, even though they’ve never met him and, for all we know, he could be a total jerk.And that’s what always brings me to “A Christmas Carol.” The first ghost that appears in the book is Jacob Marley, Scrooge’s old business partner. Clearly, that’s a dead guy. But what about the next three ghosts. The Ghost of Christmas Past, for example. Was there some guy who was Christmas Past and then he died, becoming the Ghost of Christmas Past? Probably not. Maybe ghosts aren’t spirits of the dead but something else entirely. Maybe ghosts aren’t even supernatural in nature. Maybe there are these…things that we don’t know what they are. We think they are dead people because we don’t know what else they could be, the same way people think UFOs are flying when, in fact, a UFO is just an “Unidentified Flying Object.”Maybe they’re a kind life never identified that float around just beyond our senses most of the time. Maybe they’re intrusions into our plane of existence from another dimension. Or maybe they don’t exist at all. Think about it. Oh, and Merry Christmas.

Fern Sell

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