Friday, January 17, 2014

This Is Not a Ghost Story


 
I honestly can't recall my first encounter with paranormal activity or why I am so overly anxious to damage shreds of blogger and writer credibility that I might have garnered with my whopping one post.  The first half of my life thus far, I had witnessed oddities, not apparitions.  As a child, there was one day I stepped outside our house for a trip to the airport and a tiny bird landed on my shoe and started confusingly tugging at the shoelace.  It stayed on my foot even as I lightly moved. My family enjoyed the splendor of it for a few minutes, but flights typically run on schedule, so we had to carefully "shoe" it off. Was I a ghost? No, I was a seven or eight year old girl. Couldn't the robin see me though? Did it not have as much instinct as its peers? At this age, I was thumbing through Dr. Doolittle and talking to the animals enough as it was. I didn't need to take this teen-aged bird to the airport on my shoe. It already had wings. Fly birdie! Fly!

Ghost stories often begin with oddities and with too many coincidences. Who hasn't experienced those? People have inklings, senses, and feelings for things. Regardless of what, politically, we might be persuaded to assume, people are actually quite brilliant. Or, maybe they are not...but that is for you to decide and perhaps the onset of a potential blog entitled "How Stupid Smart People Can Be".

As a teen, my friends used to play games with me of hide and go seek with objects.  I could pick up on their nonverbal cues enough not to have to search, but rather directly pluck the tiny object out from, say, under a bookcase after guessing what room it was in. I wouldn't be able to do this today. Yes, teenagers are magical, or as some describe it self assuredly indestructible.  Back then, it was truly mysterious. Now, it is decidedly nonverbal clues. This gives me more credibility. Also, you can't spend all day playing hide and seek as an adult. It's a shame.

We have to take some of the spookiness away for a moment; it is stifling. Many paranormal or shall we call them unexplainable occurrences are not even scary they are just weird. I don't know why people don't share them openly more often because they frequently share other things that are weird; like pictures of die-hard fans sporting belly paintings and wigs at football games.
 
Whatever the cause, there seems to be a reason that we don't relish in this unexplained phenomena, at least not in first person. Even as I wrote these paragraphs, I mulled over a few dreams and ghost stories I've had, totally abandoned my computer for a half-day, and got goosebumps while simultaneously promising to myself those stories shall remain unaddressed. Here is where I'll give an honorable mention to dream sequences. They are better left alone, which is true of ghosts themselves if I've learned anything from superstition, U.S. pop culture, and legend.

For now, if we're in the mood for a good ghost story, we will just have to catch up on episodes of Ancient Aliens or an occasional round of Celebrity Ghost Stories, so that we can sit back with a discerning eye and jab all of their characters as soon as they are finished laying it all out on the line.
 
 
 
 
 

 

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