What do ghosts do

If ghosts are the spirits of those whose deaths were unavenged, why are there unsolved murders, since ghosts are said to communicate with psychic mediums, and should be able to identify their killers for the police?

The questions go on and on — just about any claim about ghosts raises logical reasons to doubt it. Ghost hunters use many creative and dubious methods to detect the spirits' presences, often including psychics. Virtually all ghost hunters claim to be scientific, and most give that appearance because they use high-tech scientific equipment such as Geiger counters, Electromagnetic Field EMF detectors, ion detectors, infrared cameras and sensitive microphones.

Yet none of this equipment has ever been shown to actually detect ghosts. For centuries, people believed that flames turned blue in the presence of ghosts. Today, few people accept that bit of lore, but it's likely that many of the signs taken as evidence by today's ghost hunters will be seen as just as wrong and antiquated centuries from now.

Other researchers claim that the reason ghosts haven't been proven to exist is that we simply don't have the right technology to find or detect the spirit world. But this, too, can't be correct: Either ghosts exist and appear in our ordinary physical world and can therefore be detected and recorded in photographs, film, video and audio recordings , or they don't.

If ghosts exist and can be scientifically detected or recorded, then we should find hard evidence of that — yet we don't. If ghosts exist but cannot be scientifically detected or recorded, then all the photos, videos, audio and other recordings claimed to be evidence of ghosts cannot be ghosts. With so many basic contradictory theories — and so little science brought to bear on the topic — it's not surprising that despite the efforts of thousands of ghost hunters on television and elsewhere for decades, not a single piece of hard evidence of ghosts has been found.

And, of course, with the recent development of "ghost apps" for smartphones, it's easier than ever to create seemingly spooky images and share them on social media, making separating fact from fiction even more difficult for ghost researchers.

Most people who believe in ghosts do so because of some personal experience; they grew up in a home where the existence of friendly spirits was taken for granted, for example, or they had some unnerving experience on a ghost tour or local haunt. However, many people believe that support for the existence of ghosts can be found in no less a hard science than modern physics.

It is widely claimed that Albert Einstein suggested a scientific basis for the reality of ghosts, based on the First Law of Thermodynamics : If energy cannot be created or destroyed but only change form, what happens to our body's energy when we die? Could that somehow be manifested as a ghost? Ghosts exist within another dimension, so our supernatural roommates need conduits in order to make contact.

As depicted in Stranger Things , electricity is a great way for otherworldly beings to reveal their presence. If something smells a bit funky in your apartment, it may be more than your kitchen trash. One of the most common ways to identify the presence of a ghost is through scent. Ghostly smells will usually be somewhat familiar, such as perfume, cologne, or the distinctive aroma of tobacco from a cigar. Sometimes, however, these scents are a bit less pleasant: The smell of sulfur has also been connected to hauntings.

Have you heard thumping on the stairs, watched doors swing open, or noticed photographs suddenly askew? Unexplained physical shifts in your environment is another easy way to identify a haunting.

Poltergeist hauntings are said to be the rarest, as well as the most dramatic. These abrasive entities make their presence known in a very big way. Loud knocking sounds, rearranged furniture, or even mysterious flames have all been attributed to the presence of a poltergeist.

Hang clearing crystals in your doorways or windowsills; this sends a less aggressive message than burning sage and offers a calming energy that serves a paranormal olive-branch.

But when Beloved shows up in the flesh, Paul D is drawn to her sexually, too —and soon pain and pleasure layer like sediment; life and death and rebirth jangle together in the increasingly crowded house. The pleasures of the flesh, the sheer human joy of being alive in a body, are hard won experiences for these characters. It also demands: How can a person Beloved, Sethe sometimes be alive and dead at the same time?

What is a body? What is it for? And—a chillingly relevant question, this violent and plague-stained summer—who does our country ask to sacrifice their bodies, and for what? Here is another haunted mother. In The Barter, Bridget is a new mother who starts to suspect her house is haunted. Bridget is home with her baby, often trapped inside by the Texas heat. Like so many middle-class American mothers, Bridget was trained for another life altogether—she was an attorney and unsurprisingly, finds being a suburban stay-at-home mom to be somewhat understimulating—and now finds herself alienated from her clueless husband, and simultaneously overwhelmed by the awesome responsibility of caring for a new life and laid low by the sheer boredom of most of her actual daily tasks.

Bridget senses the ghost in the house all day long, and from the beginning she knows the ghost, as they often do, wants something from her. When this beloved only child falls ill, Rebecca is faced with a supernatural iteration of the choice all mothers remember Sethe? Bridget is struggling and Rebecca sees someone about to repeat her own mistakes.

Like in Beloved , the foundational trauma of America plays a role in the hauntings here—the book takes place in , just a year into the Civil War.

This book layers the voices of hundreds of ghosts stuck in the Bardo, or a kind of purgatory; often the ghosts deny that they are dead at all. Something about that moment just before puberty seems to be very much like birth, or death—such a vast transformation awaits, that bridge between worlds. Throughout the book, angels take on various forms and attempt to coax these lost souls along into the next realm. And he learned that science had a name for it: sleep paralysis.

This condition leaves someone feeling awake but paralyzed, or frozen in place. Sometimes, Dom hallucinated that creatures were walking or sitting on him.

Other times, he heard screaming. He only saw something that one time, as a teenager. Sleep paralysis happens when the brain messes up the process of falling asleep or waking. And you stop dreaming before you waken. A neuroscientist, he studies sleep paralysis at the University of Cambridge in England. He says this is why it happens: Our most vivid, lifelike dreams happen during a certain stage of sleep. In this stage, your eyes dart around under their closed lids. That could get dangerous!

Imagine flailing your arms and legs as you play dream basketball, only to whack your knuckles on the wall and tumble to the floor. Your brain usually turns this paralysis off before you wake up.

Have you ever felt your phone buzz, then checked to find there was no message? Have you heard someone calling your name when no one was there? Have you ever seen a face or figure in a dark shadow? These misperceptions also count as hallucinations, says David Smailes. He thinks that just about everyone has such experiences.

Most of us just ignore them. But some may turn to ghosts as the explanation. So when experiencing a hallucination, our first instinct is usually to believe it. The brain has a tough job. Information from the world bombards you as a mixed-up jumble of signals.

The eyes take in color. The ears take in sounds. The skin senses pressure. The brain works to make sense of this mess. This is called bottom-up processing. And the brain is very good at it. This is known as pareidolia Pear-eye-DOH-lee-ah. You experience it whenever you stare at clouds and see rabbits, ships or faces.

Or gaze at the moon and see a face. The brain also does top-down processing. It adds information to your perception of the world. Most of the time, there is way too much stuff coming in through the senses. Paying attention to all of it would overwhelm you.