Thoughts That Haunt Me

After my grandmother passed away, my mother moved into her house. One night, she woke up at two in the morning to find the TV on—even though she was sure she had turned it off before bed. "It must have been Gram sending a message," she said.

Why is it that, after death, people seem to turn into tricksters or riddlers? If someone wasn’t like that in life, why would they start after death? It’s as if becoming a ghost flattens all personalities into the same eerie archetype.

Are lost souls stuck behind some dimensional wall, limited to a handful of odd behaviors? If they were intelligent in life, wouldn’t they be able to come up with clever, maybe even playful, ways to communicate?

If a ghost is just a soul in transition—one that eventually arrives in heaven and regains its full personality—why the weird limbo act in between? Why is the soul intact and recognizable in heaven, but vague and zombie-like as a ghost?

What do ghosts do during the day, anyway? Like at 3:00 PM on a Tuesday—are they just lying low, bored, waiting for it to get dark and spooky?

And while they’re killing time, do they talk to each other? Do they trade favors? “Hey, can you flip on that TV at 2 a.m. for me? I’m busy helping George make attic noises.” “Sorry bud, I’m on leaf-rustling duty in the cemetery.”

Once in heaven, do souls that had a stint as a ghost share their experience? “Yeah, it was bizarre—like a dream. I felt compelled to turn on TVs.”

The mind evolved to quickly make sense of unknown threats or unexplained phenomena—and it uses the imagination to do it. In a sudden moment of fear, we don’t think in broader contexts. We conjure up ghosts when two unknowns collide: an unexplained event and the uncertainty of what happens after death. At least, that’s what I hope it is.