Still believe in ghosts?

MANILA, Philippines - Let’s play a game.

Go inside your room, switch off the lights, and stand in front of the mirror. Close your eyes and recall the last thing that scared you — Emily Rose’s possessed and contorted body; that old, veiled woman in Insidious smiling at you; a figure you saw standing next to your bed; or maybe, Death himself.

Imagine them hovering behind you, lightly touching you with their fingertips, sliding them down from your nape to your shoulders, and finally, gently holding your wrist with their hands. They wrap their arms around yours, and place their lips close to your ear.

Do you feel a chill course through you? The hairs at the back of your neck stand up and you feel… sick? You know they’re right there, breathing, whispering something, and making their presence felt. And they’re just standing there, whether you mind them or not. Don’t open your eyes, or you might see who else is in the mirror.

Scared?

Now, shake it off. And tell yourself they’re not real.

These hellish creatures — ghosts, zombies, spirits, lost souls, whatever you like to call them — are an undeniable hit with us. They never get old even if they’re, well, dead. Perhaps, it’s precisely because they’re dead that we’re so fascinated with them. They’re something we can never fully comprehend. No, not in this lifetime.

Film, books, legends

In the absence of a real (i.e. believable) working science upon which we can test our theories on the paranormal, we turn to film, books and legends. While no self-respecting intellectual would write an academic paper on whether or not evil spirits residing in the kitchen only want to eat their last tuna sandwich, we all enjoy hypothesizing what the supernatural is here, meddling with our all-too-boring, all-too-human lives.

Numerous explanations have been made regarding their stay among us: unfinished business, reclaiming their land, demonic possessions, etc. The justifications are so many that perhaps we should turn the tables around and instead ask ourselves: Why do we still fear “the paranormal” when we’ve learned to accept them as part of our everyday lives?

In the first place, why do we even fear?

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense was the last movie that scared the s*** out of me. I remember the summer vacation before seventh grade, desperately trying to sleep with a humongous, immovable mirror facing my bed in our ancestral home in Northern Mindanao. This went on for weeks, and consequently, I had to adjust my body clock. I slept in the morning and desperately tried to sleep at night.

More than a decade later, I find myself still running scared whenever I think about “seeing dead people walking around like regular people.” Now, I realize that more than the movie’s scream-worthy scenes, the genius in its storytelling resides in the things left unsaid. It’s the ideas that we conjure after watching a movie or reading/hearing a story, which haunt us. As a popular genre, the essence of horror lies in its ability to tell us that we’re only humans and nothing more.

And we cringe at that idea.

Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity (the first one) was able to capture this completely. Throughout the movie, we are never shown how the demon looks; all we see are its manifestations. That way, we are left with questions, which, in turn, evolve into ideas. How could the devil have looked? Why did she deserve to be possessed? How do we fight it off?

Wild imaginations

As our imaginations run wild, we create realities which scare us. You can trust your mind to scare you more than the movie’s visuals would. That’s if its story is good.

This is nothing new in the writing of fiction. In 1896, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one of the classics of horror writing, never really shows Mr. Hyde. Stevenson only had a few lines to describe him, leaving us to wonder how he goes about his supposed murders on moonless, foggy nights along the empty London streets. In fact, he paints Mr. Hyde only as “not easy to describe.” If he described Mr. Hyde, perhaps, we’d all be disappointed. No amount of describing will match the image in our heads.

It makes one wonder why we fear our imaginations more than we fear real life. Come to think of it, why do we find it so hard to believe the good that we see outside fiction? Take for example, St. Pedro Calungsod. Yes, he’s a saint, but how do we alter our lives given the fact that he is one? Honestly, not much. We’re just as likely to build our world around superstition. Is fear, therefore, more powerful than reason?

So let’s play a game. Try imagining the things in real life that make you believe in greatness, change, and a world without hate. If you can still believe what you see, try adding some goodwill and a Christmas cheer every day. Is it still possible?

If you said yes, then you must also believe in ghosts. And that’s not so bad.

* * *

Tweet the author @sarhentosilly.