I'm a Hardened Skeptic Who Sees Ghosts

Pull up a chair near the campfire; I've got some tales to tell.

I ain’t ‘fraid o’ no ghost.

In fact, I don’t even believe in them, at least not in the Ghost Busters sense.

I don’t believe the dead wander old houses knocking stuff off shelves just to freak us out. (Cats, maybe, but not dead people.) I don’t think every cold spot is evidence of a spirit. And despite what cable television has spent the last two decades trying to convince us of, an EMF detector or a “Spirit Box” has never once persuaded me that the ghost of a Civil War soldier is lurking in the pantry.

But I’ve seen some weird shit.

Enough weird shit that I’ve become deeply suspicious of anyone who claims to have all the answers. The older I get, the more comfortable I am living in the deep gray space between certainty and possibility.

Which is fortunate, because I’ve got some stories.

There’s a windstorm happening.

It’s something meteorologists call a “bombogenesis” — an explosive cyclone that rapidly intensifies around a dramatic drop in atmospheric pressure. I’m a trained Midwest storm spotter, so I understand the gist of it: low pressure, big wind.

I’ve just arrived home after dropping my kids off at school. I’m recovering from a cold, so I opt to crawl back into bed. My 1880s farmhouse rattles around its hinges. The attic door, which is in my bedroom, clatters as gusts seep in around the old window panes. Outside, golden pillars of maple leaves sail up, up into the sky, swirling into colorful chaos against a steely backdrop.

Despite the noise and energy of this storm, I manage to drift off, warm beneath my comforter.

But then I hear the door to my bedroom creak open. Footfalls from hard-soled shoes tap in measured strides across the floor. Peter must be sick, too, I think. Great He’ll blame me for getting him sick and forcing him to come home from work early.

I open my eyes, expecting to see my husband. Instead, I see a shadowy figure bending over the bedside table, as though it’s inspecting something. It has a human shape, but it’s like a vapor or storm cloud, a dark mass I can see through.

“Go away! You’re scaring me!” I yelp, coming fully awake.

And just like that, it dissipates. I go back to sleeping, relatively unperturbed by what was, undeniably, an event that ranks pretty high on the weird-o-meter.

It seems odd that I went back to sleep so easily after such an uncanny happening, so I begin telling myself I probably dreamed it. The next day, I tell my kids about my dream as I’m driving them to school.

My son Ian, then a high school senior, gets quiet. Finally he says, “I’d agree that you probably dreamed it.”

I nod. Yep, that makes sense. All a freaky dream brought on by some freaky weather. And Ian is my mini-me, so of course he’s a skeptic.

“But it’s weird,” Ian continues. “Two different people told me similar stories yesterday. Like, individually — neither one of them had heard the other person’s story. Both of them saw shadowy people as they were getting ready for school.”

* * * *

I’m a newly minted graduate of cosmetology school in the 1980s. (A terrible career choice, but that’s a story for another time.) I work at a salon, and because I’m the new kid, I get a lot of late shifts. For the last hour or two before closing, I’m usually holding down the fort alone. Most nights, that means washing and folding towels and babysitting the tanning bed.

It’s about a half hour before closing time, and I’m eager to get out of the empty salon. That’s when things get weird.

I look up from a stack of towels toward the front desk. A wicker display shelf filled with styling products partially blocks my view, but through the slats I can see a woman seated behind the counter, bent over the appointment book. I can’t make out much, but I can tell she’s wearing a floppy-brimmed blue hat.

There shouldn’t be anyone in the salon.

I stand and call out, “Can I help you?”

The woman is gone.

Then I hear an electronic hum.

A glow suddenly appears beneath the tanning room door.

How the hell did she get from the front desk to the tanning room without me seeing her?

I cross the salon and knock.

No answer.

“Ma’am?” I call through the door. “Do you have an appointment?”

Nothing.

Carefully, I crack the door open, hoping I’m not about to startle some poor naked—or nearly naked—woman.

The room is empty.

A few weeks later, I mention the experience to a coworker. She tells Linda, the salon owner, who promptly loses her little mind. That’s when I learn a few things.

First, Linda has been carrying on a long-term affair with Joe, the man who owns the building. Second, Joe’s wife recently died of cancer. Third, Joe and Linda have been arguing ever since because Joe refuses to take down a portrait hanging in his apartment above the salon.

The portrait is of his late wife. And in it, she’s wearing a floppy-brimmed blue hat.

* * * *

I’ve had other experiences. I frequently saw what I thought looked like a little boy in Victorian-era clothing in my apartment when I was in my mid-twenties and worked at a dog boarding kennel. I later learned the kennel was supposedly home to a child ghost named Joshua (according to a psychic who’d done a seance), and the common wisdom was that Joshua had “followed me home.”

After my brother’s high school best friend died in a horrific car crash while racing on a rural backroad, I swore I saw him stroll under the glow of our farm’s mercury vapor light, wave at me cheerily, and then vanish into the dark.

And still, I don’t believe in ghosts.

I’m 100% OK with the possibility that my brain made up the creepy stuff I experienced.

Maybe something environmental played a role. Buildings that are reportedly haunted have roughly five to six times more mold spores floating around, for instance. Researchers have discovered that mold exposure is associated with neurological symptoms.

But what about things I’ve seen outdoors, like my brother’s dead friend? Atmospheric changes and infrasound can cause anxiety and even hallucinations. The U.S. Air Force experimented with 15 human volunteers and learned that the resonant frequency of our eyeballs is about 19 Hz. The researchers suggested that sounds matching that frequency could cause people to see things in their periphery that they perceive as paranormal.

Ghost hunters often talk about ghosts as “energy.” But that’s a distortion of Einstein’s law of the conservation of energy and mass. Einstein proved that all energy in the universe is constant — neither created nor destroyed, only changed. Ghost aficionados would have you believe that because our energy isn’t destroyed, that means it’s hanging around, conscious and hellbent on taking human form.

It’s a fun idea, but it’s not scientifically sound.

I may not believe in ghosts, but I do believe in possibilities.

I’m not a scientist, but I have a mind naturally wired for two things — a sense of wonder and a healthy skepticism.

I see death as a natural and inevitable process, as much a part of life as birth. When we die, the organic structures that form our bodies begin to break down and energy is directed into a simple metabolic process — decomposition. In the absence of interference with that process (such as embalming, coffin burials, and cremation), we quickly become food for other organisms and could even contribute to the food ecosystem as organic compost.

But we humans naturally wonder about the consciousness that animates us. After all, we’re not just our bodies, we’re our minds. Everything we love (or don’t love) about the people we share our word with stems from how those people think and behave, not just how we interact with their physical bodies.

The morning after the love of my life died in late 2022…

I found myself standing in my bathroom, of all places, dripping after a shower. Grief overwhelmed me. I stood there wrapped in a towel, sobbing. My path forward had always included John, but now the entire landscape had shifted before me into something barren and alien.

That’s when I felt it.

I can only describe the feeling as being wrapped in an energy embrace. It wasn’t a physical touch so much as a full-body feeling of being held in some sort of protective stasis, if only for a moment. And it felt undeniably like John’s hug. I have never doubted for a moment that he somehow found a way to say goodbye to me that morning.

Might there be scientific explanations for what I felt? Of course. But my explanation gives me comfort, and it’s what I’ve chosen to believe.

I won’t ask you to believe it. After all, I can’t prove that the happening truly was a hug from beyond.

Maybe ghosts are worlds colliding.

I love to entertain the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) when I think of what we commonly perceive as ghosts.

To massively simplify what I don’t truly understand (because I’m not a quantum physicist), the MWI theorizes that every time a particle makes a “decision” or can exist in different states, the universe splits into different versions for each possible outcome.

Imagine you flip a coin. In one world, the coin lands heads, and in another world, it lands tails. Both of these worlds exist at the same time, but we only experience one version. According to the MWI, every possible outcome of an event causes a new version of our universe to spring to life in which one of those outcomes happened.

So in other universes, John didn’t die. And maybe that version of John was able to break through and give me an energy hug somehow. How would he have experienced me on the “other side”? Maybe to him, I was the ghost, inexplicably grieving.

Or maybe, when conditions are just right — like when there’s a massive windstorm caused by rapidly lowering barometric pressure — we get a glimpse across the threshold into other universes. Maybe the shadowy figure I saw by my bedside table years ago was a glimmer from another plane of existence that, just for a moment, found a way to intersect our own.

You can come along with me and speculate. Or not. I’m not here to convert you because I don’t hold any firm beliefs, just a collection of possibilities.

I won’t insist that the numbers you see on an EMF detector mean a ghost is nearby. I won’t try to convince you that the bump you heard in the night was Brigit the housemaid, murdered on this property in the 1800s. I won’t even claim that the weird stuff I saw in my twenties was paranormal.

I didn’t go to MSU. I don’t Make Shit Up.

But I do like the sound of “maybe.” I like the idea of “possible.” And I’m keeping my mind wide open.

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Peace & love,

Karen