10 Most Compelling Pieces Of Evidence That Prove Ghosts Are Real
3. Their Prevalence In Popular Culture
Listen, we've all had fun with the Paranormal Activity jokes (they were fun right? Right??) and such, but the dominance over tales of horror and fright ghosts have should probably tell you something. Especially since they've been used to scare people in stories in pretty much every time period on record, from the stories of MR James right up until the shaky-cam antics of Micah and whatever the lass was called.
Where other great monsters in horror history have been used to express a contemporary fear - Dracula=syphilis, Frankenstein's monster=science overtaking religion, zombies=consumerism, the conservative right, basically anything you want - hauntings have remained part of popular culture simply as they are: scary, unexplained things.
Part of the reason that films like Paranormal Activity are so frightening is that it taps into some primal, core fear we all have within ourselves. That fear of the unknown, both of what happens after we die and also regarding what the heck ghosts are. Plus the found footage thing makes it look like home movies we're all familiar with. Stories of ghosts and ghouls are grounded in this way by having them affect fellow human beings, like us, but also because they have a grounding in human culture going back centuries.
The sort of scary stories shared around a campfire belong to an oral tradition (steady) that's been around for eons, and the appearances of ghosts within these stories down the years is rather telling. Like we told you at the start of this bit. Why would we continue to tell these stories - in books, films, TV, games, comics, even those campfire tales - if there wasn't something to them, a kernel of truth, which causes them to be popular and terrifying even now, when we've got most things figured out, when the structure of a ghost story is obvious even to a six-year-old on his first trip with the Cub Scouts?
We'll tell you why, dear reader: because ghosts are real. Or something like them, at least. Else whoever invented them should be receiving royalty cheques to the end of time for their creation.