Well, you seem to be misinterpreting what I said. Of course, I see elderly people downtown nowhere near the retirement home, too – there’s not like some rule that dictates the elderly only appear in proximity to a retirement home, nor is there a rule that the dead only appear in proximity to a cemetery. I’ve had experiences when I’ve lived in another neighborhood with no cemetery nearby. I’ve had experiences waiting for the bus, also nowhere near a cemetery. I’ve just had experiences more often since moving to this place. (My apartment building is the second from the cemetery wall, where my street dead-ends, so it’s maybe 100 feet away.)
Not all of the dead remain as ghosts, either. Some move on when they die, some stick around for a bit before moving on, some hang around for a really long time. It seems probable that there are some I’ll never notice even if they are still around.
As for why they hang around their mortal remains, there are probably as many answers to that as there are ghosts. They’re still people, with their own motivations (and sometimes emotional imbalances). The most recent one, as near as I can figure, was near her mortal remains because she had only recently passed away and was terribly upset and confused about why she was still here. This is a total guess on my part, but she may have just been following her body around trying to figure out WTF was going on. I can only WAG, though. They usually don’t tell me why they’re here. A lot of them don’t talk to me at all. I basically just “pass them on the street” so to speak.
I understand where you’re coming from. I hope you can understand where I’m coming from. I haven’t personally experienced an overwhelming lack of proof. There’s the old expression “I’ll believe it when I see it.” The point here is, I do see it. I also feel it in the tactile sense, feel in an emotional/empathetic sense, and hear it, depending on particular circumstances – it could be just one of those, or all four. I’ve even had spirits move things around the house, or break things. The more I practice opening up my perceptions, the more I notice, the more I have actively worked against basic phenomena like change blindness. Ten years ago, I sucked at this and basically never had experiences like this. Now… well, I’m still pretty bad at it (at least relative to several people I know, who have many of their own stories which also provides me with reason to believe it), but I experience it more often, because I’ve had ten-plus years of practice.
And… our science is still in its infancy. 40,000 years ago we understood that willow bark tea helped with pain relief, but we didn’t understand how, and didn’t find out about aspirin until thousands of years later. Right now, we understand that quantum entanglement exists, but we don’t understand how, and it will probably be a while before we do. This is the normal progression of human knowledge – we know that something IS well before we know HOW IT IS, and we may never discover why for a lot of things. I’m okay with acknowledging that we have limits to our knowledge. We’ll learn more in time, even if that time is thousands or millions of years.
