What if ghosts are real

What else could explain sudden cold spots, disembodied voices and footsteps, floating orbs appearing in photographs and the sensation that someone is touching your shoulder when no one is there? In fact, according to a Gallop poll, 37 percent of people surveyed believe that houses can be haunted. Main Content Don't Be Afraid Well, Maybe a Little Click here to sign up for Scary Good Offers.

For centuries, people believed that flames turned blue in the presence of ghosts. Today, few people accept that bit of lore, but it's likely that many of the signs taken as evidence by today's ghost hunters will be seen as just as wrong and antiquated centuries from now. Other researchers claim that the reason ghosts haven't been proven to exist is that we simply don't have the right technology to find or detect the spirit world.

But this, too, can't be correct: Either ghosts exist and appear in our ordinary physical world and can therefore be detected and recorded in photographs, film, video and audio recordings , or they don't. If ghosts exist and can be scientifically detected or recorded, then we should find hard evidence of that — yet we don't. If ghosts exist but cannot be scientifically detected or recorded, then all the photos, videos, audio and other recordings claimed to be evidence of ghosts cannot be ghosts.

With so many basic contradictory theories — and so little science brought to bear on the topic — it's not surprising that despite the efforts of thousands of ghost hunters on television and elsewhere for decades, not a single piece of hard evidence of ghosts has been found. And, of course, with the recent development of "ghost apps" for smartphones, it's easier than ever to create seemingly spooky images and share them on social media, making separating fact from fiction even more difficult for ghost researchers.

Most people who believe in ghosts do so because of some personal experience; they grew up in a home where the existence of friendly spirits was taken for granted, for example, or they had some unnerving experience on a ghost tour or local haunt.

However, many people believe that support for the existence of ghosts can be found in no less a hard science than modern physics. It is widely claimed that Albert Einstein suggested a scientific basis for the reality of ghosts, based on the First Law of Thermodynamics : If energy cannot be created or destroyed but only change form, what happens to our body's energy when we die? Could that somehow be manifested as a ghost?

It seems like a reasonable assumption — until you dig into the basic physics. The answer is very simple, and not at all mysterious. After a person dies, the energy in his or her body goes where all organisms' energy goes after death: into the environment. The energy is released in the form of heat, and the body is transferred into the animals that eat us i. There is no bodily "energy" that survives death to be detected with popular ghost-hunting devices.

Related: Top 10 most famous ghosts. While amateur ghost hunters like to imagine themselves on the cutting edge of ghost research, they are really engaging in what folklorists call ostension or legend tripping. It's basically a form of playacting in which people "act out" a legend, often involving ghosts or supernatural elements.

In his book " Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live " University Press of Mississippi, folklorist Bill Ellis points out that ghost hunters themselves often take the search seriously and "venture out to challenge supernatural beings, confront them in consciously dramatized form, then return to safety.

The stated purpose of such activities is not entertainment but a sincere effort to test and define boundaries of the 'real' world. If ghosts are real, and are some sort of as-yet-unknown energy or entity, then their existence will like all other scientific discoveries be discovered and verified by scientists through controlled experiments — not by weekend ghost hunters wandering around abandoned houses in the dark late at night with cameras and flashlights.

Then a few weeks later I discovered an image of a man in the background of a photo I took with my own iPhone. Recent surveys have shown that a significant portion of the population believes in ghosts, leading some scholars to conclude that we are witnessing a revival of paranormal beliefs in Western society. A Harris poll from last year found that 42 percent of Americans say they believe in ghosts.

The percentage is similar in the United Kingdom, where 52 percent of respondents indicated that they believed in ghosts in a recent poll. In the U. While the terms spirit and ghost are related and even interchangeable in some languages, the word ghost in English tends to refer to the soul or spirit of a deceased person that can appear to the living.

In A Natural History of Ghosts , Roger Clarke discusses nine varieties of ghosts identified by Peter Underwood, who has studied ghost stories for decades. It seems that belief in ghosts is even more widespread in much of Asia, where ghosts are characterized as neutral and can be appeased through rituals or angered if provoked as opposed to our scarier depictions of ghosts in the West , according to Justin McDaniel, a professor of religious studies and director of the Penn Ghost Project at the University of Pennsylvania.

In China, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Thailand, the seventh month of the lunar calendar which falls in August this year ushers in the Hungry Ghost Festival , when it is believed that ghosts of the deceased are temporarily released from the lower realm to visit the living.

In Taiwan, some people believe that the presence of wandering ghosts during Ghost Month can cause accidents to the living. At least one study has shown that people avoid risky behaviors during this time, including those in bodies of water, reducing the number of deaths by drowning.

In places like Japan where secularism is very strong, the belief in ghosts is still high. Even hypermodern and liberal Scandinavia has a high percentage of people believing in ghosts.