They say that confession is good for the soul.  Although I've never found it to be good for my particular soul, I'm willing to give it another chance. 
     Whether that makes me an optimist or a slow learner - or even if there's a difference between the two - I can't say.
     What I can say (and what's the essence of my confession) is this: I'm a terrible ghostist.
     I realized it all over again a week ago on Halloween.
     I've been haunted by the fact ever since....

     A ghostist, of course, is the street term for those anti-social skeptics who just happen to be terribly prejudiced against ghosts.  I know I really shouldn't be one, but I just can't seem to help it.
     I hear chains rattling in the night and I immediately jump to the conclusion that it's a ghost that's to blame rather than a hell hound dragging its leash, say, or some foolish living person who doesn't know that Ohio prohibits these tire additions outside a blizzard emergency.
     A candle goes out in a crypt-cold breeze that goes on to scatter my possessions all over the house and I find myself reflexively muttering "Damn ghosts!" when my time might better be spent making notes to remember my wife's birthday on time next year.
     A strange, wispy creature appears on Christmas Eve and reveals what my future Christmases will be like if I don't do something nice for the crippled boy next door and I tremble in fear of a supernatural escapee from Dickens instead of realizing that this is what I get for washing down my Prozac with half a bottle of gin.
     The strangest thing is that I don't even believe in ghosts.
     But perhaps that's merely the mark of the worst sort of ghostist....

     I guess my real problem is that it's so hard for me to see that I have a problem at all.  Like most ghostists, I'm convinced my prejudice is firmly rooted in logic and reality.  Not many of us will admit that in this day and age, of course, but I think it's only by admitting it and examining the reasons behind beliefs like these that we may finally get beyond them.  Merely continuing to voice insincere support for the "life force-challenged" because it's the socially correct thing to do doesn't really help anyone in the end.
     Without further ado, then, here's my list of "reasons" for my ghostism, as well as my best attempts to counter them with objective truth.

     1)  I've never seen a ghost myself, therefore they don't exist.  (Yes, well, most people have never seen a Chinese Communist, either, but there are over 100 million of them.)

     2)  If I ever did think I saw a ghost, it's far more likely that I'm nuts or hallucinating than that someone's actually come back from the dead.  (Either the ghost you saw is real or it isn't.  If it's real, ghosts exist and popular opinion is right.  If you're merely nuts or prone to hallucinations, you're hardly in any shape to convince popular opinion that it's wrong.) 

     2)  Consciousness is impossible apart from the physical brain.  (Just look around you at the sort of consciousness that exists with the physical brain.  Can no brain at all really be that much less aware?) 

     3)  I have absolutely no memory of being a body-free consciousness  before birth.  Why should I believe that I might be a body-free consciousness after death?  (You can't recall where you leave the keys to the house half the time.  Does that mean you're homeless?)

     4)  Even if the consciousness of people might somehow survive the death of their body, why should their clothes survive, too?  If ghosts really exist, they all ought to be naked!  (Just because you're dead doesn't mean you lose all your morals.  Sure, you might go around scaring people to death - maybe even killing them with axes - but by nearly universal agreement, displaying a single naked penis is a far worse sin than creating a dozen mutilated bodies - at least on film.)

     5)  If ghosts exist, they ought to exist everywhere - not just in remote castles and abandoned old houses late at night.  What do they have to fear from appearing in Times Square at high noon?  They're already dead!  Not even New York cab drivers can do them worse harm than that.  (Many people consider a ride in a New York cab to be far worse than death.) 

     6)  The fact is, ghosts are said to inhabit remote castles and abandoned old houses at night because a) these stories personify the very real dangers you can run into in such places in the dark, and thus benefit us even if untrue, and b) if ghost stories were set in common, populated places, people would wonder why they never have seen any ghosts themselves and the benefits of these untrue stories would be lost as doubt eased aside gullibility.  (This is a classic case of blaming the victim.  First you refuse to admit ghosts into your mindset or world view, then you blame them for living in old, abandoned dumps.  You're disgusting!) 

     7)  Why are ghosts always such an odd mixture of power and powerlessness?  Why can they walk through walls but not open doors?  Why must they incompetently toy with their victims instead of just killing 'em quick?  Why would ghosts even want to kill the living and make them ghostly equals?   Because it makes for a more entertaining story - not a truer story or a more logical story.  (Ghosts do the best they can.  How dare you judge them until you've wandered the moors a mile in their shrouds!) 

     8)  Life's a pain in the ass.  Why aren't ghosts happy to be free of their mortal bodies and the need to eat, drink, shit, and punch a time clock?  Why aren't they happy to be able to go wherever they wanna go, and do whatever they wanna do?  Because they exist merely as ideas serving the psychological needs of the living!  (There are a lot of things ghosts regret not being able to do.  Hanging up on telemarketers who call during dinner is just one of them.)

     9)  If ghosts walk the earth because they died horribly and unjustly and seek revenge, then those who died the most horribly and unjustly ought to comprise the majority of ghosts we hear about.  But they don't!  When was the last time you heard of an Indian ghost terrorizing cowboys - or Neanderthal ghosts haunting modern man?  Yet these weren't merely individuals who died horribly and unjustly  - they represent whole cultures and hominid classes done dirty by history a thousand times over!  Until their angry dead souls get to wander the earth seeking revenge, why should the Victorian nanny who accidentally fell to her death while fleeing a lecherous earl?  (Maybe the ghosts which wander the earth aren't the ones who suffered the most grievous injustices while alive - maybe they're merely the winners of some sort of after-life lottery.  After all, what would they do with a million dollar prize?) 

     9B)  You'd think that at least ONE of those tens of thousands of people who died when The Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be haunting the U.S. Air Force, wouldn't you??  (Japanese culture is one of the oldest, wisest in the world.  Even the youngest infants who were part of it in 1945 realize they were just getting what they deserved for the attack on Pearl Harbor.)

     9C)  And you'd think that at least ONE of the millions who died in the Holocaust would be haunting those aged Nazis hiding in South America instead of relying on us poor, limited humans to hunt them down and bring them to justice!  (No, I wouldn't.  People learn by doing.  If supernatural forces always stepped in and did our job us, we'd never learn anything and end up perpetual children.)

     10)  Isn't it interesting that our ghosts never seem to be Hitlers or Einsteins?  They're common people because a) most of us are common people, and we like to think that we, too, might get a chance to come back and right wrongs, while the thought that people who did a lot of good or evil while alive might come back just rubs salt in our wounded pride, and b) if we say we saw Einstein's ghost, someone might ask us for some genuine insight he might have which we could never make up, but if we say Aunt Gertrude came back, well, nobody expects us to say she revealed a unified theory that ties together the four basic forces of nature in one nice, neat quadratic equation.  (The Hitlers can't come back because they're in hell.  The Einsteins can't come back because they gave so much while here, they're now enjoying a well-deserved a vacation.)

     11) How come you never hear about ghost germs seeking revenge against the makers of antibiotics?  Ghost trees seeking revenge against foresters?  Ghost gerbils wandering the earth until they find that kid who forgot to feed 'em?  A ghost brontosaurus really pissed at us mammals for supplanting his kind?  Why aren't farmers haunted by ghost cows or scientists by the ghosts of monkeys that die in medical research?  The fact that only humans need apply for the job of ghost is just a reflection of age-old speciesism - it has nothing to do with reality as it's understood today by biologists or ethicists.  (Stephen King had that ghost dog, didn't he?  He even had a ghost car!  Ha!  You just can't score a single point, can you?) 

     12)  Well over 90% of all the species that have ever lived on this planet are now extinct.  Those that remain have survived by being better adapted to conditions on this planet.  If the dead can still influence life on this planet, it rather mucks up this evolutionary process, doesn't it?  "Survival of the fittest" collapses as a process if ghosthood in effect extends survival to the unfit.  Unfortunately for you ghost believers, the hard reality is life is for the living - period.  (Al Gore is more dead than alive, and yet he might actually be our next president.  So much for your theory of the way things evolve!) 
 

     Well, this first attempt to exorcise the ghostism from my life doesn't seem to have worked quite as well as my previous attempts to rid myself of my racism and sexism.  I'm still cringing inside when I imagine my daughter calling me up to tell  me that she has just been impregnated by a fellow who happens to be dead.  
     Alas, I'm afraid I have to leave it at that for now.
     My wife is spinning her head and spewing pea soup again, so I better go find out what that's all about.
     Hmmm - is it possible that I forgot our anniversary again?
     If so, I'm afraid that ghosts will be the least of my problems!
     Better call a priest and pray for me....