Why We Love Ghost and Haunted House Stories

Take a moment and recall a time when you've been terrified out of your mind.

For most of us, that was a difficult thing to do. The majority of us go through our daily existences with little or no big excitement, leading lives of, as Thoreau put it, quiet desperation.

The good news is there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. It was this very fact that brought us the genre of fantasy fiction as a diversion from our daily lives. And chief among those stories with the power to encaptivate us is the True Ghost Stories.

The past is unreachable to us. No one can deny that. Nostalgia and memory are valuable commodities for social media. How else do you account for Facebook's "On This Day" feature? Every day we are forced to live in the now. This reverence for the past reflects a basic need to be remembered and appreciated. We want people to know that, as the fantasy writer Harlan Ellison once put it, "For a brief time I was here, and for a brief time I mattered."

Nowhere does that statement resonate more loudly than in made up or true ghost stories.

Ghosts, in our subconscious, are echoes from the past. They are spirits crying out to be remembered. They are photographs, snapshots of what once was. They are unfinished business. They are what haunts us.

And there's that word: haunt.

Why does it give us the shivers? What is it about the past that haunts us so? Why are we so attracted to chilling stories of poltergeists or unexplained phenomenon?

The answer to that question can be easily found in humanity's basic blueprint: We are mortal. The fear of death gnaws at us from the moment we realize our mortality. We want to matter in our relatively short time on this earth.

Ghost stories help us to exorcise our fears of death, and our fears of a vanishing past, through a release of that fear.

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear," the famous horror writer H.P. Lovecraft once wrote, "and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."

What a way to encapsulate everything about ghost stories that attract us so.

Pushing aside for one moment the often-told descriptions of near-death experiences, what do we really know about what happens after we die? The answer is: not much. On this point, atheists and believers are kinsmen of a kind, as neither can say with any certainty that there is some realm waiting for us after we depart this life. There may very well be such a realm, but until one is sent there and then returned with an accurate description that renders all previously-told tales banal, we can only deal with our lack of knowledge and understand regarding the afterlife.This is where the ghost story comes in.

The classic ghost story, for some, has the potential to be the most optimistic of all forms of literature. As science fiction predicts that there will be a tomorrow even if it's worse than today, ghost stories are predicated on the notion that life is never-ending; that love and heartache never die; that even grudges have a half-life long after their bearers have shuffled off the mortal coil.

So remember, next time you kick back with a good old tale of revenge from beyond the grave:You are indulging in one of the fundamental aspects of humanity andyou are dealing with a problem that your fellow humans have all had to deal with since the beginning of mortal consciousness.

And, you get to have a helluva fun time doing it!

Simon Murik

Author of True Ghost Stories and Hauntings: Chilling Stories of Poltergeists, Unexplained Phenomenon, and Haunted Houses

For getting more information about Haunted House Stories visit the website https://www.amazon.com/True-Ghost-Stories-Hauntings-Poltergeists-ebook/dp/B01CET6HD8/ref=sr_1_19?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1463799236&sr=1-19&keywords=true+ghost+stories*

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