Doo-tee-doo, walking across the street thinking about 3/4 inch galvanized lag screws, piano drops on your head.
You’re dazed. You look around and see a bloody smudge under a piano and it’s wearing your shoes! Being a Doper with a reasonably good IQ it seeps in that you’ve died, you’re a ghost, and if that brightly lit tunnel appearing a few feet away means what you think it means, you’re intellectual perspective on religion was wrong, wrong, wrong. Things start coming back to you. You remember the Spiritual Order Of Things and realize the tunnel is always going to be there for you. You can resist it for a couple centuries with ease, after that it will take a bit more effort until you finally are driven into it and move on to what lies ahead.
Meanwhile, WOOOOO! yer a ghostie! You’re not bound by physical laws in any meaningful way but your range of travel is limited to about 10 miles of the place you died. You can’t see or communicate with any other ghosts–it’s just your disembodied mind in a world with which your interaction is extremely limited. You can be sensed by others but it requires great effort and is exhausting because you have to seize control of their mind and bridge the link between the senses and the soul. By similar means you can read the thoughts of others.
So in this case, can you affect any physical object? Can you affect any electrical, magnetic, or possibly radiation fields? Or is minor mental influence all you have?
It’s all mental as far as I know. Maybe with a hundred years, no distractions and a desire to do so you could focus mental energy and effect a minor electromagnetic field. Perhaps enough to roll a b-b or flicker a fluorescent light or something, but you’re not throwing any chairs.
Can you smell? I’m assuming you can “see” images and “hear” sounds, and if so, I would probably go to the nearest high school or college and practice for a few years on my mental skills by flooding minds with answers to questions on exams. Basically become a known entity to students there…after my legend builds and my skills develop, start taking control of people to do my bidding. What I would have them do, I have no idea. I’m sure I could find some way to amuse myself with a personal army.
Ex- coworker. This guy was a complete sociopath and narcissist. He hated everyone then eventually everyone hated him. Real mean spirited guy. Loved seeing people fail it literally brought a smile to his face. He still harasses people from work via email and doesn’t even work with us any more.
He happens to be a really religous Christian so it would be a pleasure to haunt his house and throw plates at him and harass him in his sleep.
Considering I only have a range of 10 miles from scene of accident, I really won’t be able to have much impact on many people I knew in life. So for want of something better to do and the unfulfilled desire to make the world a better place, I am going to scare the crap out of and guilt trip bad drivers by giving them Faces of Death visions of themselves and their loved ones.
Put me near a major highway and I think in 200 years, I’ll be able to perfect my technique to the point that I can convince a significant number of people to opt out of driving altogether in a few short, but memorable miles. Should be great for the environment.
I’d haunt the next GOP Presidential candidate-tho I’d be more the Buddha’s Ghost than anything harmful-just try at each opportunity to reach him and get him to change his ways…actually I’d probably haunt Obama instead, since he’s not a totally lost cause.
My father. Then once I scare him to death, I’ll move on to haunt the band room in my old high school until that gets boring. Everyone always said there was a band ghost, and I want to prove them right
BTW, haunting is far-fetched enough without imposing all these artifical limitations (like range, no ability to make wooOOoo noises :(). I don’t know anybody within 10 miles of where I live and drive now, so I’d just have to go down the tunnel in that case.
10 miles gives me all of Ann Arbor, and much of Ypsilanti. I would hang out at bars music venues and such when they had live music. I don’t know if I’d bother trying to get the living to sense me. Seems too much work to bother with, as described.
Although maybe I’d see if I could get someone to bump this thread…
Why can’t I travel more than 10 miles? I wanted to go exploring the world. I’d enjoy messing with people a bit, but I really would hate to be tied to the same place for years upon years.
I’d do what I could to contact my loved ones and let them know I was OK, if at all possible. As an atheist in a family of Christians, I’d want to assure them I wasn’t in Hell (not in an “I told you so” way, in a “Please don’t worry” sort of way).
After that I’d probably try to briefly haunt a buddy of mine who’s played little tricks on me over the years. Nothing too mean-spirited, I don’t really want to scare him, just irritate him slightly and hopefully be amusing.
I wouldn’t hang around too long. I’d be too curious about What Comes Next. Plus, 10 miles isn’t too much around here. I couldn’t even go see Mom except maybe when she’s at work, and that strikes me as a bit mean.
