When Ghosts Speak Of Ghosts

I’ve always been intrigued by the supernatural. Probably started about the time I was 11, after having received a book prize on haunted houses for being the fifth in class. [Yes, they did reward such back then; and I have been prize worthy at some point in my life, thank you.] My literary diet for awhile since then consisted entirely of ghost stories, the macabre, and of course the unexplained. After that followed the natural progression into horror stories until I was eventually no longer spooked by the unseen but terrified of the hidden. Then came the slasher movies and by the time Freddy Kreuger was brought back to life for the umpteenth time, it was all simply of limbic entertainment value. And of course there are the empirical sciences, especially the epistemology of cause and effect that greatly contributed to my obstinacy for diagnosing sense before shivers.

Still, I would constantly meet someone with a scary story to tell. Always a show of reluctance at first but will readily do so as if pushed to by the inertia of fear to disseminate with caution. They’d tell it like they were there, all wide-eyed and in your face. Some with an amateurish sense of the dramatic such as the drop of the voice, the quaver in the narration, the impregnated pause followed by a shudder at the recollection of the eerie, the nervous twitch or gesticulations as if sculpting the ethereal. And it is told as if, as if they were there.

The thing is, they weren’t – they were not there. They were nowhere near there. No, they never tell you from their own personal experiences. It didn’t happen to them. It never happen to them – much like it’s never happened to me; or at least happened to me such that I cannot explain it off sensibly. It’s always a retelling of someone else’s experience; someone they know, someone close to them, someone close to them who knows someone, someone who knows someone close to them who knows – so goes the permutations in the chain of narration. Where credibility might be put in question, the protagonist would be someone emotionally or sentimentally attached to them, so you would be a real bastard to even doubt the words of such.

It’s never of first hand direct experience of the teller themselves.

However, if it is claimed to be their very own experience, my intrigue wanes when they adamantly refuse to discuss earthbound possibilities of what could have happened or been the cause. It’s as if it has to be supernatural or nothing. They refuse to approach it with House diagnostics or Grissom forensics or even Velma’s logic – they would actually prefer to uncompromisingly concur with Scooby Doo than wrest through reasonable doubts or rational explanations. And of course, it so deeply and emotionally shook them such that you would be a complete bastard to even consider doubting them.

What concerns me of the phenomena though is this – it’s not that they tell it to be believed; but why do they need to tell it to such effect? Not being savvy in psychoanalysis, I can only see someone who needs the spotlight with what they think is worthy of it, even if it is just for that one moment; hoping that it’ll still shine on them in absentia when the story is retold further – assuming of course that the next narrator is not a dick and obliterates them from the narration in order to take the spotlight for themselves.

Everyone has a story to tell; but when it’s a ghost story, it always seem to come from personas that do not seem real – much like the ghosts in their stories. It’s really like ghosts talking of ghosts.