Superstition and Science and Ghosts in the Mirror
Our “scientific” culture’s insistence that ghosts don’t exist gets laughable, sometimes.A few days ago, my friend Colin Wilson sent me a news item headlined “Thai tsunami trauma sparks rash of foreign ghost sightings.” Note the assumptions built into the headline: The trauma sparked the sightings. The sightings themselves weren’t real. Clearly the people couldn’t sight ghosts, because we know that ghosts don’t exist.
But in southern Thailand, since the December 26 tsunami, locals have been sighting ghosts in huge numbers. Many locals are saying they are afraid to go near the beach, because of ghosts. And specific ghost stories abound, including the foreigner and his Thai girlfriend (and their baggage) who disappeared from the back seat of a taxi, and the guard at a beachfront plaza who quit after hearing a foreign woman cry “help me” all night, and the volunteers in two resort areas who heard tourists laughing and singing on the beach – when the beach is empty.
Health experts explain it all away as “an outpouring of delayed mass trauma.” They describe the Thais as deeply superstitious, and a Thai psychologist was quoted as saying that these experiences were “a type of mass hallucination” caused by the trauma of “missing so many dead people, and seeing so many dead people, and only talking about dead people.”