4

Being A Good Person Makes You A Terrible Ghost

I feel like the moral of ghost stories is "GO WILD, KIDS, as the more people you murder now, the more superpowers you get in the afterlife." They posit a universe wherein bad people are rewarded for being terrible during their lives by Pokemoning into superpowered indestructible monsters. Meanwhile, good people can accomplish dick as ghosts. For a serial killer, death is like leveling up in a video game, while for a good person, it's being blindfolded in a windstorm.

Murderous ghosts can appear whenever their name is said three times, or interact with objects in the real world easily, like knives and fire! Good ghosts in ghost stories mostly get to show up in a dream and deliver the world's vaguest warning which only makes sense as you're actively being murdered. "Oh, my aunt's ghost said to 'beware of tubers,' so I always thought I was allergic to potatoes, but now that Nathan Yams is stabbing me to death, everything makes sense!"

If a good ghost isn't being used to warn someone about a bad ghost or person entering their life, they're presented as a victim whose spirit is being held hostage by a bad ghost. Either that or they're unable to cope with their unfinished business. If you listen to one hundred ghost stories in a row, you can't help but get the impression that good ghosts are totally lame, and if you want to have any fun in the after life, you better start racking up evil points right now. Now excuse me while I go rip a crucial page out of a library book and throw some Skittles at strangers.

3

You Get One Outfit For Eternity

One of my favorite classic ghost stories is the guy who picks up a pretty girl hitchhiking in a Halloween costume from the '50s, or the '30s, or whatever is about two decades prior to when the story is being told. Today it would be a pretty girl in JNCO jeans who probably won't shut the fuck up about Chumbawamba. Anyway, the girl says she wants to go home, but then she tells the guy to stop at a cemetery and runs out of the car, her pant legs flapping behind her in the wind as she sprints away.

2

There Are No Animal Ghosts

One of the few solid rules about ghosts is that they're created when someone has unfinished business at the time of their death. What unfinished business could a bear possibly have? I'm sure it probably wanted to poop on all of the trees in the forest, but was only able to get to about 40-50 percent of them. Personally, I don't think that's ghost material. Don't @ me.

Are there no animal ghosts because animals are simply a lot more efficient than humans and nothing is ever left undone? They came here to sniff some fire hydrants and ruin some shoes, and they all die happily knowing their goals have been met ten times over. I really hope that's the case. I really hope that dogs go into the afterlife knowing that their mission of inconveniencing the world in the cutest ways possible was completed.

I feel like the lack of ghost stories about animals is proof that animal ghosts don't exist, because I can't think of anything scarier than a ghost shark. Jaws is easy to avoid; you just don't go in water. But if Jaws was a ghost, I would never leave my house. There's no place to hide from Ghost Jaws. Can I trademark Jaws 5: Ghost Jaws? I'm going to consider this my trademark. Oh, they already made a movie named Ghost Shark? Forget Hostel and The Human Centipede, the horror genre has finally gone too far.

I love animals, but a lack of ghost animals is probably a good thing in the long run. Imagine how many ghost bugs there would be in this world if animal ghosts existed. So many spirit spiders would be out for revenge against me. Sorry I didn't let you guys bite me while you were alive. Get over it.

1

Ghosts Apparently Have Some Kind Of Lifespan

We only ever hear about ghosts from the last 100-150 years or so. How come there aren't any caveman ghosts? Did ghosts only become a thing in the 1800s? I suppose it's plausible that caveman ghosts are out haunting caves, and they're just really confused about where everybody else went.

I wonder if we only see recent ghosts because we can't take ghosts from too long ago seriously. Being haunted by a Roman ghost speaking ancient Latin would probably just be confusing. If I woke up and there was a guy in my bedroom wearing a toga and speaking gibberish at me, I would assume he was a lost drunken frat boy. I'd just put on some Lil Jon, pat his head, and put him to bed.

When ghosts get too old, they probably just get frustrated and go away. "I have to learn English to haunt them? Fuuuuuck that. Do you know how insanely hard that language is to learn? I have literally all the time in the world and I'm not going to do it. I'll happily fade into nothingness now." Or maybe it's all the newfangled technology scarring ghosts off. Snapchat would be terrifying to a caveman ghost. It's a tiny box that distorts our face so we look monstrous, and we love it! Poor caveman ghosts are probably more scared of us than we are of them. Honestly, we should all really be nicer to ghosts. It sounds like a rough afterlife in general.

You can follow Lydia on Twitter.

You can find plenty of ghost stories that inspired all kinds of assumptions about the afterlife or for some real world supernatural business try Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places and trust any house again!

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