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 This is an "It Just Bugs Me" entry. This area of the wiki is more friendly to the idea of conversation in the article itself, due to the highly subjective content. The regular entry on this topic is in the main wiki. Ghosts
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Our Ghosts Are Different
- Why is it that in almost any work in which ghosts exist, people are surprised to encounter said ghosts. If a significant number of the deceased come back as ghosts, shouldn't they just be an accepted fact of life?
- That would depend on the statistics involved. If, say, only one in ten million dead came back us ghosts, it wouldn't be very likely that it has happened to anyone you know.
- But the usual qualifier for becoming a ghost is having Unfinished Business. If everyone who had unfinished business when they died became a ghost, there would be a heck of a lot of ghosts floating around.
- Maybe it's a matter of stubbornness and the importance of the Unfinished Business. If your unfinished business was, say, mowing the lawn, that probably wouldn't be enough to turn you into a ghost. Even if it was something important, maybe after death, material things seem less important, so it's only people who are really, really fixated on an issue that remain as ghosts.
- Because they don't really believe ghosts exist. There have been numerous accounts of ghosts, but you'd still be shocked if one suddenly appeared to you.
- Why is it that non-flying ghosts are intangible to everything except the floor? Doesn't seem like there would be a difference.
- Really any supernatural being that has intangibility, but not flight, as a power does this. See Required Secondary Powers. It's probably by choice though. The ghost doesn't want to fall through the floor, so s/he doesn't, or it's psychological in that they don't think they should fall through, so they don't. Or they do have flight, and the footsteps are mimed (i.e. they don't actually touch the floor, but they make the movement a living human does).
- If they are intanglible, gravity can't affect them, and falling through the floor does not occur to them.
- If they weren't affected by gravity but couldn't fly, then the Earth would move around the sun without them and they'd be floating in space.
- Ghosts are shadows of their living selves. They cannot manipulate objects, nor are they affected by objects around them, but they can mime the things they did in life. So if they walked through a doorway in the past, they can pass through the door now, even though that door is closed. They can walk right through objects like furniture placed across their path, or walls that have been newly erected, if those things weren't there when they were alive. They can even walk up stairways that have been demolished.
- In a setting where ghosts are former humans and visible to everyone, why do they make no attempt to continue their old lives? For example, why doesn't the spirit of a dead college student continue taking classes until graduation? After all, just because you're separated from your physical body doesn't mean that you shouldn't be treated as a person. Is there some sort of Prime Directive that all ghosts instinctively follow?
- They don't need (and cannot have) anything they can buy, they often can become/always are invisible, they can't do all that much anyway etc. etc. Besides, there's usually Unfinished Business to take care of.
- If you die naked in a universe with Jacob Marley Apparel, is your ghost stuck being nude for eternity?
- Yes. Stardust provides a prime example of this.
- Why are all ghosts encountered in fiction from fairly recent history? That is, usually no earlier than one or two hundred years ago — maybe The Middle Ages at the most. Why aren't there ghosts of people from the Stone Age floating around? I mean, you're stuck as a ghost for eternity, right?
- Everything Fades. Alternately, we're back to Unfinished Business. If you haven't got it sorted out after five or six centuries of haunting, chances are you never will. Might as well just give up and go to your eternal rest.
- Not all, The Sixth Sense has Weirdness Censor built into every ghost, so they very often don't notice or care that their unfinished business can't be done. See the ghosts from two centuries ago hanging in the school.
- That ghosts do a very poor job pursuing their Ghostly Goals, and can never just tell their "helpers" what's up.
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