By Rich Hosek
I’m stealing the title of this post from Loyd Auerbach and Arnold Rudnick, who conducted a seminar by that name for writers, directors and producers some years ago. Loyd is a working parapsychologist and world-renown in the field. Arnold is my television writing partner, and the three of us have been collaborating on the Raney/Daye Investigations paranormal mystery book series. They are based on a teleplay we wrote a while back featuring Dr. Jennifer Daye, an anthropology professor and parapsychologist, and Nate Raney, a former San Francisco police detective.
I want to talk about my experience writing a ghost’s story—that is, the portion of a novel from the series dealing with a character who is dead, but whose consciousness survives and remains tied to the home she grew up in that now belongs to a new family. A lot of writers treat ghosts as regular people who just happen to be able to walk through walls. But since the Raney/Daye Investigation books are deeply rooted in the science of parapsychology, I wanted to explore what it means to be a ghost. There has to be more to it. They are not simply a translucent copy of a person.
In After Life, the second book of the series, a woman dies in the aftermath of a botched bank burglary. She manages to evade the police long enough to hide some of the cash and valuables taken from the safety deposit boxes, but is killed before she tells anyone where that hiding place is. Her partners in the scheme are her husband, Dale, and a disgruntled local cop, Liam. Dale ends up going to prison for 15 years, while Liam waits patiently for him to get out so they can find the missing loot.
The family who moves into Maureen and Dale’s old farmhouse have a son who can see and hear Maureen. At first his parents think she’s just an unusual imaginary friend. But then they discover that she was a real person, and reach out to Raney and Daye to help shed light on their unusual situation.
Dale and Liam are trying to figure out where Maureen left the loot when they get wind of the paranormal investigators who are helping the family deal with Danny’s new friend. Is it possible that it’s really the ghost of Maureen? And can she tell them where their treasure is?
If you find the premise of the story interesting, I urge you to pick up a copy of After Life through https://RaneyandDaye.com. But what I really want to talk about is the interesting challenge it presented to me as the primary writer of the novel, as parts of the story are told from the point of view of the ghost of Maureen Everly.
The movie Ghost, with Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg, handles this incredibly well. The newly dead Swayze has to learn what it means to be a ghost. How to interact with the physical world around him and most importantly, communicate through Whoopi to Demi about the circumstances of his death.
But it’s a movie, and there is only so much time to devote to how being a ghost works. You really can’t get inside the character’s head without some sort of a device like a voice over. In After Life, I have the chance to explore her thoughts and discover what her existence as a disembodied consciousness who lingers in her home is like. Unlike Swayze’s character, she has been dead for 15 years, and is lonely and confused. What does she see and hear? For that matter, how does she see and hear? She has no body, no sensory organs. No physical body at all. How does she move around?
Maureen is “present” in the house and elsewhere, but not physically. She doesn’t have a body that perceives time, for example, the same way she did when she was alive. As a living person, things like hunger and fatigue were indicators that time has passed. But without those physical needs, she is not anchored to the world the same way we are. A minute or an hour or a decade can pass for her and feel like the blink of an eye. She has to choose to pay attention to things around her for time to have any meaning. It’s like playing a video game in a virtual world that continues to exist and advance while you’re logged off.
Most tales about ghosts ignore these questions. They focus on the story and assume that a ghost can do certain things, interact with some people at will. But why only some people? And how?
One of the things I’ve learned from Loyd and his many books and appearances and his bi-weekly Q&A sessions on Facebook is that the psychic abilities that people can express while alive, are the same abilities possessed by a consciousness that survives death.
For example, astral projection. The ability to send your consciousness to a different location than your body. This is something Loyd has experienced himself. Sometimes, that projected consciousness can be perceived by others. A living ghost. Loyd was not actually at the party he projected himself to, but someone there was able to perceive him. Obviously, he wasn’t using his eyes, otherwise everyone would have been able to see him.
Maybe there is some part of our consciousness that can overlay itself onto the perceptions of a receptive person. This extra-sensory perception forms the basis for many psychic abilities. Why can’t it also explain how ghosts can make themselves seen to certain people?
Such is the relationship between Maureen and Danny, the ten year old boy whose family moves into the house and can see and hear Maureen.
Another phenomenon Loyd has written about is remote viewing. The ability to perceive things that are out of sight. It is distinct from astral projection, and was the object of study by our government as well as the Soviets during the cold war as a method of spying on our enemies from vast distances.
So, shouldn’t a ghost be able to do something similar? See things without the use of their eyes? They don’t have the distractions of a living person’s senses to interfere with trying to view something at a distance, so it seems likely that a ghost would be really good at being able to “see” and “hear” without eyes and ears.
In the story, I additionally wonder if she somehow piggybacks her perceptions on Danny’s senses by way of the unique link they share. Her environment seems sharper when he’s around. Several times Danny has to tell people who are trying to communicate with Maureen through him that he doesn’t need to tell her what they’re saying as she can hear them just fine, but is that because he’s in the room as well?
At one point during an interview Loyd was conducting during the investigation that inspired the story of After Life, the ghost confessed that she had hitched a ride with Loyd and his crew on their way to interview the boy who could see her. During the drive, they had conversations about topics unrelated to the investigation and that didn’t come up during their time with the family. The ghost was able to convey, through the boy, her knowledge of what they had talked about. I used a version of this incident in the novel to show Maureen discovering the extent of her abilities. How she combines elements of remote viewing and telepathy to gain intelligence on the people coming to see Danny.
A key part of the story is that Maureen can’t remember where she hid millions in cash and valuables. Which brings up a different issue.
One of the things that bothered me about ghosts is the concept of memory. Memories are what define us. We are the sum total of our experiences, stored as patterns in our brain—the mysteries of which have yet to be fully explained. But there is some sort of physical mechanism. A network of neurons. As a computer programmer, I can make an analogy to electronic memory. Bits that represent on or off and group together to form numbers and characters and images and sounds.
But when you’re dead, there is no brain. No physical analogue to a computer. When you destroy a computer chip, the data it stored is gone. So how does a ghost remember? How do they have a sense of themselves?
Part of this can be explained by the concept of the survival of consciousness. When we’re alive, that consciousness is imprinted—for lack of a better word—onto our brains providing a physical interface to our bodies. Think of it as a broadcast television signal. Radio waves that move through the air from one antenna to another. When they are received by a TV, you can see and hear the program they represent. But even if your TV is off, they still exist.
Then consider recording those signals for later playback. This, Loyd explains, is what differentiates a ghost from a haunting. Many people use the terms interchangeably, but parapsychologists see them as two distinct phenomena. A ghost is an entity that we can interact with. A haunting, on the other hand, is more like a recording. An event that is psychically imprinted on a location like a house or the parapet of a castle. If the conditions are right, we can perceive it. But we can’t interact with the characters in that scene, just like we can’t have a conversation with Humphrey Bogart while we’re watching Casablanca.
So it occurred to me to use the notion that places can be haunted to serve as a surrogate memory for her. As she wanders from room to room in her old house, eventually ventures outside and meets people from her past, she collects more of these psychic memories attached to physical things, allowing her to reassemble her disembodied consciousness. Much like how when we might visit a place that brings back memories. Unlike Patrick Swayze in Ghost, who is recently deceased and thus in much closer to those memories that make up his sense of self, Maureen has had fifteen years of isolation, of just hanging around and losing little bits of herself.
I don’t go into detail in the book about this aspect of it, but it was important to me that I have a believable mechanism that explained Maureen’s situation and comported with what I’ve learned from Loyd about ghosts and the survival of consciousness. He plays an integral role in reviewing the paranormal aspect of the Raney/Daye Investigation novels, and although he allows me a little literary license from time to time, he does hold me accountable, letting me know if a ghost really would say that.
In many ways, it is Maureen who experiences the most growth in the story—even though she is dead. There are many theories as to why, if ghosts exist, the world isn’t overflowing with billions of disembodied spirits. It’s a big Universe. It may be that not all consciousnesses stay on this world. They, like radio waves, spread out into the cosmos. Or it may be, like in the case of the ghost Loyd investigated, that they are afraid to leave, worried about where the next stage of their existence will be—heaven or hell? Or perhaps, like Maureen, there is unfinished business. For her, it’s not really the recovery of the lost bank loot, but bonding with Danny to fulfill her lost opportunity to be a mother.
In that way, she is like any other character. She may not have the physical needs and motives of the living, but her dreams and desire, all built upon the memories created during her life—and death—are just as important and necessary to her as they were when she was alive.
So, to answer the question I posed at the beginning of this post, “Would a ghost say that?” the answer is, “Would Maureen say that?” One of Loyd’s favorite aphorisms is “Ghosts are people, too.” Remember that the next time you read—or write—a ghost story, and you may be able to better see inside that character, rather than through them.
