As you know, my husband is a ghost hunter with Wichita Paranormal Research Society. As a result, there’s a lot of talk of ghosts, ghost hunting, and such in my house.
I found it interesting, the other day, that when my daughter was playing Barbies with her friends that they wound up playing “Ghost Hunters.” I listened to them a bit, and of course, they got very squirrelly, running around, (one of the girl’s dolls was the ghosts) playing chase, and generally squealing in giddy childhood delight.
Which made me giggle, because all I could think to myself was the way children are–they react to what they see and hear around them. If you talk about, say racing and Nascar, they’ll get excited about those things as a child, and as an adult. I grew up in a sports oriented home (I was not an athlete, but everyone else was), and there’s a lot of talk about sports, stats and general television yelling when football games are on.
And my daughter plays ghost hunting with her friends, because that’s what she sees.
It makes me wonder if when she grows up, if she’ll be the scientist, or the spiritualist. To believe in ghosts, you have to have a certain amount of faith that they’re there. But the scientist part of it, you have to be able to prove, beyond any doubt that what your evidence shows is real, and not some kind of manipulation.
Are ghost hunters there yet? That they can prove, without the shadow of a doubt that images on film, voices on recorders, and general experiences are real? Not even close. They work very hard to prove their evidence is real.
One of my husband’s favorite sayings is “When in doubt, throw it out.” For him, it has to be clear cut and unable to be ripped apart by a skeptic. When putting together presentations for the general public, and playing audio clips, for example, he sits across the room from the computer and listens to the audio. It may sound great in headphones, but if he can’t hear it from six feet away, then what’s the point? Because you can’t plug a room full of people into headphones.
(Okay, well, you can, but that takes a lot of equipment…
And with children, it’s especially difficult, because in certain phases of their lives they’re more prone to having paranormal experiences. Young children, (under, say five,) are more open to the idea of ghosts, and usually aren’t afraid. They will say things like “Grandma’s standing in the corner, smiling.” When Grandma’s been passed away for fifteen years.
I remember a particular case with my daughter, where she started screaming in the car that we had to wave goodbye to “the invisible guy” on the porch. We couldn’t leave until we waved goodbye to him. And this happened a few months after my grandfather had passed away.
As children age, when their hormones start running amuck, girls especially, are more prone to having paranormal activities happen to them. Even things like telekinesis–things moving on their own, flying off walls, etc–is a somewhat common occurrence with teenage girls. And many psychics got started doing medium work when they were teens, they just didn’t learn how to ignore it.
Most of us do learn to ignore it. I’ve even had experiences as a child and teen. I used to see shadow people all the time. They’d scare the crap out of me, and I’d go running down the hall and slam my bedroom door shut, just to get by them. (And why were they always hanging out in the bathroom doorway? A question for another time). To this day, I can’t see them, or hear them, most of the time, anyway. But I can feel the energy, it tingles on my skin.
So it makes me curious who my daughter will be–will she be one able to see and hear dead people, or will she remain the scientist who wants to capture the evidence. Currently, I have no idea–she flip flops. I’m really interested to see who she turns out to be.
Candice Gilmer writes paranormal romance and contemporary romance for Lyrical Press and Samhain. Her website contains lots of excerpts including from her Immortal Knights Templar Series, Moonlight and Shadows, now available from Lyrical Press. And she’s just starting to figure out Word Press, so bare with her…
