Things that go bump in the night

“By developing a deeper understanding of what we believe is basic and understood, we are led to new, unseen frontiers.”

-Edward Burger and Michael Starbird, The Heart of Mathematics

I’ve always been fascinated by the macabre.

When I was a little girl, I couldn’t find enough ghost stories to keep me satisfied, so I would re-read the books I did have over and over until they were literally falling apart. I remember one rainy afternoon at my grandmother’s house when I was about eight years old,  scaring myself silly listening to recordings my grandfather had made of the scoutmasters’ campfire tales at nearby Camp Mountain Run. It probably didn’t help that shortly before this, my cousins and I had convinced ourselves that there was a Yeti living on the mountain behind Grandma and Grandpa’s house, so I had double the fun and they had all gone home. After I drove my grandmother crazy at bedtime, Grandpa finally convinced me we were safe from things that go bump in the night because when he built the house, he made sure to use “ghost tape” in all the walls to keep the boogeymen out (when I asked what the tape looked like, he said “It looks just like duct tape, but shinier”). This appeased me enough to be quiet and finally go to sleep. But of course, the very next morning I begged Grandma to let me hear the recordings again.

As I grew older and learned more about the mysteries of the world, my feelings toward the supernatural morphed from thrilling quasi-fear to a faith-affirming comfort. Throughout the centuries, societal interest in the paranormal  has always been prevalent, although the public admiration of it has ebbed and flowed. I thankfully came of age during the part of the cycle where the paranormal is again en vogue – there’s a lot of material available on “true” tales of the supernatural (books, TV shows, locations that offer ghost hunting tours, etc). Thankfully, my life partner shares the same fascination with the paranormal that I do. While Scott is admittedly more gung-ho about ghost hunting than I (for reasons that for now will be deferred to future posts), we have gone on several hunts over the past few years. We’re even booked to spend our first wedding anniversary this summer in an old prison to see what spooks might be lingering.

It’s entertaining, yes, but for us, it’s also a deeply spiritual experience. Over the years I’ve accumulated a large collection of books on “true” hauntings, and reading through the accounts of countless others helps cement my faith that there is something for us after we leave the mortal plane. Years ago, when I was an undergrad studying mathematics (another faith-affirming exercise, especially after I earned my diploma), we learned about the possibilities of the fourth dimension and, as a result, the possibilities then for an infinite number of other dimensions.* Not only does math show the possibility of these dimensions is real, but the resulting implications of how things would behave in extra-dimensional space seem to validate the possibility of extra-dimensional entities (like ghosts, for example) as well. Take also into account the fact that the (living) human body runs using self-generated electrical impulses, the basic physics principles regarding the conservation of energy, and the most common observational traits of paranormal behavior, and suddenly the existence of worlds beyond what we can see seem more probable than not.

Of course, at present there is no way to definitively prove any of this. Numerous ghost hunting groups have tried inventing things over the years to help us bridge the gap to communicate with those outside our dimension, but numerous hucksters have done the same thing in attempts to swindle those who want to believe. For now, we have only faith and personal experiences to fall back on as we stumble through dark, dusty buildings and graveyards with voice recorders in hand.

But to be on the safe side, I do keep a roll of “ghost tape” at home, just in case.

*Author’s note: for one of the best descriptions I’ve found of understanding extra dimensions, check out The Heart of Mathematics: An Invitation to Effective Thinking by Edward Burger and Michael Starbird. Math as a whole was never very intuitive for me (probably because I over-think things), but the descriptions in this book are not only straight forward, but highly entertaining.