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Why we should quit jumping to supernatural conclusions
We didn't have any pets that could have accidentally stepped on it and there was no way our toddler would have been able to reach the door knob, find the remote and then climb back to bed. My husband and I exchanged glances and agreed that it was creepy.
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Why is it spooky situations often happen around children? (Shutterstock/-)
It happened one morning. I woke up and found that the TV in the living room was on.
I asked my husband if he had turned it on and he said no. The remote control was in its usual place on the table, dusty from being left untouched for days. We didn't have any pets that could have accidentally stepped on it and there was no way our toddler would have been able to reach the door knob, find the remote and then climb back to bed.
My husband and I exchanged glances and agreed that it was creepy.
It could be a ghost. Or, after a quick browse through the customer service forums, it could be a defective infrared sensor, or a conflict during firmware update, or a neighbor's remote control tuned in to the same frequency as ours.
Most people I know claim they had have experienced encounters with ghosts. This includes seeing figures in the darkness, waking up and feeling a crushing weight on one's chest, hearing footsteps and knocks on doors.
And why is it spooky situations often happen around children? I know way too many parents who believe that their child can sense the presence of supernatural beings.
Baby wailing non-stop during the night? Must have been disturbed by some evil spirit. Toddler seeing and talking to someone that no one else can see? Must have been a ghost.
But couldn't it be because their brains are still developing? Isn't it reasonable for children to learn to recognize patterns by associating them with familiar objects such as human faces? Is it possible that the shadow lurking in the corner is just our brain playing a trick on us?
After all, nobody seems to agree on the properties of a ghost. Can they communicate through language? Are they bound to a certain place? Can they walk through walls? If so, they are not made of matter, right? So nothing can stop them from traveling faster than the speed of light.
Then what the heck are they still doing on Earth if they could be light years away in some other galaxy? If I were a ghost, I would like to think that I would have better things to do than knock on furniture and scare humans.
The funny thing about scientifically illiterate people is that they love to point out how science cannot answer every problem in the universe, and therefore they turn a blind eye to the phenomena that science does explain.
You could say that ghost sightings are the result of the house walls keeping memories of a murder and trapping the spirits. But there are alternative explanations. For example, when exposed to low frequency sounds, people often experience a feeling of dread and the impression that they are being watched.
Many ghostly encounters can also be explained through the different stages of sleep. In Stage 1, people often experience hallucinations that include images accompanied by sounds such as footsteps and whispers. Familiar? Also, between Stage 1 and the REM stage of sleep, a combination of effects can happen, resulting in both hallucinations and paralysis. This can cause you to feel as if something demonic is sitting on your chest.
For more ghost-debunking explanations, I recommend Paranormality by Richard Wiseman and the classic, The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan.
Some people would swear on their life that their supernatural experiences were real. But when they can't present a single thread of scientific evidence, it's best to treat such claims the way one does when one hears a man claim that his child is the smartest kid on the planet. He may genuinely believe it, but you are under no obligation to view it as a fact.
After all, isn't it strange that we have all these advanced scientific instruments that can capture broader light spectrums than the light visible to the human eye, and yet none of them can reproduce ghost sightings? In the 21st century, when we have sent rovers to study the surface of Mars and figured out a way of measuring the age of the universe, is it really acceptable to turn to supernatural explanations?
To say that you don't know how something happens and therefore a supernatural being must cause it, is simply lazy. It teaches you to ignore centuries of scientific progress and to believe whatever you want to believe despite a lack of evidence to support your belief.
I hope that's not how we're raising our children.
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Annisa Ihsani is a writer, book nerd, and mother of one. She is the author of middle-grade novel "Teka-Teki Terakhir" (Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2014).
