When we moved into our house 7 years ago we quickly discovered the place came with a resident ghost. Specifically, we moved in with a very mellow poltergeist who was into loosening the screws on doorknobs a couple of turns and giving us tiny little cuts on our hands and arms. It occurred to us last night we haven’t noticed any such activity for several months and I fear the worst. Perhaps the reason the signs were so low-key is because he was getting old and was simply too tired to get up to any real mischief. Strangely, we miss him. (and yes, I totally assumed the ghost’s gender. I am a bad person.)
Which leads to the question: The absence of recordable, reproducible, and predictable evidence of ghosts has led many to conclude they do not exist. However, this has not stopped a lot of folks from becoming experts on the subject. Among such experts, or even aficionados, is there anything resembling a consensus about how long a spirit will endure in this world once it is brought into existence? Certainly, very powerful spirits may be immortal or at least not suffer a weakening ability to interact with the physical world, but more “common” ones, ostensibly the remnant of ordinary people or animals, may have a more limited effective duration. About how long is that?
If you want an answer from folklore, then the usual reason for a ghost is because the deceased had some sort of unfinished business. And the ghost lingers for as long as it takes for that unfinished business to be resolved, be it a week or a thousand years. So without knowing the exact circumstances of your ghost, it would be impossible to say.
It depends on the reason that a spirit chooses to linger in the vale. Ghosts are single-minded, and have a single regret or sorrow or desire for revenge that holds them in this world. Once that single purpose is somehow resolved, they no longer remain.[SUP]1[/SUP]
However, limiting and complicating that is the fact that ectoplasm itself has a half-life of approximately 37.3 years. So all ghosts fade with time until they are essentially undetectable whether or not their goals are realized.[SUP]2[/SUP]
It is not a factual subject, but I recall reading most long term ghost fade after a few hundred years. They are out numbered by short term ghosts though.
As this is GQ, I will give a fact-based answer. Ghosts live until someone moves into the house they are haunting who has not heard that there is a ghost in the house.
Ghosts are a prime example of confirmation bias. A few years ago a group of students in Edinburgh carried out a fairly scientific experiment. There are some famous haunted places in that city and many visitors on the conducted tours report sightings. This is what the students did:
They took some tourists to some different but similar places, without telling them, to see if anyone saw ghosts. There were roughly the same number of sightings as usual.
They told some tourists that the proper places were closed for safety reasons but took them there anyway. There were a few sightings but nowhere near as many as normal.
They assumed that the normal situation - tourists in the right place expecting and seeing ghosts was the third part of a double blind test.
They would have needed to do this a large number of times for true validity, but the results of their single experiment were fairly compelling: People tend to see ghosts if they expect to see them.
Ia I understand they are timeless and immortal souls in their ‘home’ realm - but do age as the soul progresses, and is renewed young again, but to a more evolved soul, when they live in mortal flesh they age as a person age as that is what they are. When they die they are usually frozen at the physical age of death, and enter the realm that we experience as ghosts, which is a realm that they died but didn’t accept their death so are frozen in our world but without a physical body (as we detach from it at the moment of passing).
So in a ‘ghost state’, as long as it takes for the ghost to accept it has died and goes to the light, to their ‘home’ realm of spirit, and possibly rentering a physical world.
Has anyone moved out of your house recently? You called the ghost a poltergeist and in the current legendarium, those are more likely to be connected to a person than to a place.
Has anyone aged out of teen-hood? Poltergeists are popularly considered to be powered by teenage frustration and angst.
With all due respect: consensus within an area of research, whether you as a scientist can stomach the subject being treated “scientifically” or not, is an objective consensus. I’m no physicist, but I understand string theory is a line (heh) of thought with no observable evidence to support it. Nevertheless, I have a feeling a related thread would not suffer the indignity of exorcism from the GQ page. I don’t mean to be a little bitch about it, but jeez, dude.
Nevertheless, I believe I have been able to divine a satisfactory answer through the false positives and other noise. I thank the teeming, er, dozen or so, for their input.
Dang, my now-18 y/o daughter was a bad cutter when she went to live with her mom full-time about a year ago, and remains to this day a general agent of chaos. This gives me something to think about.
