tapping the air in front of them) on their backs using a robotic arm. One study claims to have reproduced a sense of “ghostly” presence in a lab by introducing unpredictability. Subjects, blindfolded and ear-plugged, were attached to a robot that reproduced their hand movements (e.g.
Still, it was hard to “disbelieve” something I could sense almost tangibly. Maybe my ghost was a subconscious idiom to express what many new moms feel they can’t: misery. Why weren’t more new moms jumping from rooftops, or putting their heads in ovens? My brain was uncomfortably awash with post-pregnancy neurochemicals responding in exaggeration to mundane stimuli: a baby’s face, a baby’s cry. I lay awake at night after putting Gabriel back to sleep thinking with genuine amazement that women everywhere do this all the time. I tried to rationalize away the ghost as a manifestation of my anxiety as a new mom. It took every ounce of reason and self-reassurance to return Gabriel softly to bed and close the door, feeling all the while someone was watching us. Petrified, I felt a maternal sixth sense alerting me to danger. My eyes scoured the contours of darkness for shapes, silhouettes.
Then, the sensation descended – not as a possibility, but an absolute certainty, the way you know it’s raining because you are suddenly wet: there was a young man standing next to me. In fact, survey data shows that while 18 percent of Americans say they’ve seen or been in the presence of a ghost, 29 percent say they have felt in touch with someone who has died.Ī lightning storm lit up the sky while I sat bleary-eyed in Gabriel’s pitch-black bedroom, breastfeeding him in the armchair at some unknown hour. ‘Feeling’ someone in the room is such a common occurrence in ghost sightings that it has a clinical name: “ feeling of presence,” or FP. To be exact, I ‘felt’ the ghost rather than saw him. Ruling out psychosis, or the existence of actual ghosts, how do we explain ghostly sightings?
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