As I understand it, roughly 1/3rd of fetuses never make it past the 1st term and through human history about 30% of children died before the age of 5. Given that this ignores the death rates of 2nd and 3rd term fetuses and we have already concluded that over 50% of humans died before age 5 in history, we would expect the median ghost sighting to be of children under 5 and a significant percentage of those would be fetuses - presuming the soul enters the human body at conception.
My understanding is that most ghost sightings follow the same general demographics of born humans in terms of age (feel free to correct me, if that is not the case). Based on this, the indication would be that ensoulment actually occurs at birth.
Conclusion: The soul does not enter the body at conception and likely enters it at or near to the time of birth.
Most ghosts sightings tend to be of adults, mostly who died of violent deaths.
As you said, in historical terms most people died either in miscarriage or during childhood.
Having said that, only about 100 billion homo sapiens have ever lived. And many of them have only lived since the agricultural revolution. Hence nobody sees ghosts of hunter gatherers, since they were a small % of people who lived.
This was always my main complaint against the concept of ‘we exist on earth to learn lessons’. When you consider how many people die in the womb or die before age 5, that is a pretty shitty way to 'learn lessons.
It looks like most homicide victims are male (perhaps around 75%). Assuming that to be true through history, and that violence in general being a cause of enghostment, then I think we would expect most ghosts to be male and probably a significant amount of them to be soldiers.
Your OP seems to be assuming that all humans who die become ghosts, or at least that ghosts are a representative sample. I do not think this is a safe assumption, even if you’re assuming (if only for the sake of argument) that ghosts of some sort do in fact exist.
I agree. If you assume ghosts exist, a common idea about them is they remain here in the world because they have unresolved issues from their lifetime. What unresolved issues is a fetus going to have? Not being born? If death alone was enough to cause a ghost, then everybody who died would become a ghost.
Here’s another ghost mystery: Why did Hamlet says that whatever lies after death was an “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns”? Hamlet knew that people could return from after death; he had seen and spoken to his father’s ghost in the first act.
In this context, “return” means “come back to life.” Hamlet’s father is still dead, even if he is a ghost. The significance of that line is that Hamlet’s paralyzed by indecision because he can’t figure out if revenging his father is a moral act or not, and he’s afraid for his immortal soul if he’s wrong. If death was a thing you could just come back from, like going to France, it wouldn’t be a big deal, but its permanent, and despite the occasional ghost siting, nobody really knows what it’s like over there. Nobody’s coming back with holiday snaps and long boring stories about waiting in line at Peter’s Gate.
Hamlet isn’t saying people who die don’t come back to life. He’s saying that what lies beyond death is a complete unknown; that we have no information about it because nobody has ever returned from after death.
I wrote an essay in high school English arguing that it definitely was not his father’s ghost. I referenced the Catholic catechism (due to the reference to purgatory), as well as those statements about no one coming back from death. I also referenced what his father asked him to do, which wouldn’t make sense for someone in purgatory.
The vast majority of miscarriages happen shortly after implantation. At that point they’re only a few cells, and hardly bigger than the period at the end of this sentence. We could be totally surrounded by embryotic ghosts and mistake them for dust motes.