Ghosts and science

I already made Electric Fighter Thunderbird as a canon entry to my "Wolf universe" heroes. I already laid out his concept too. Thanks guys!

But now I'm itching again for a character concept. And now I'm looking at ghosts and Henshin Hero. Granted, we already have Danny Phantom for that, but it's rather "cartoony" on the side of things, so let's think of something else with regards to ghosts and science.

Is "ectoplasm" the usual science term for ghost entity? Is there a common description to it? Since I'm going for the angle that living creatures have ectoplasm and malicious ones become living monsters and turns the mortal bodies into "husks". Or maybe something else entirely? The "mortal bodies as shells for souls" is a theme.

It's because the main character fights rogue ghosts by wearing a Powered Armor - the catch is that its powered by ectoplasm itself, so the character becomes unconscious (but not truly a husk) as his soul enters the portable armor. I'm also thinking of a second heroine where she herself is a soul trapped in a similar Powered Armor suit.

I'm not exactly versed on parapsychology, but as far as I'm aware 'ectoplasm' is generally the substance by which ghosts manifest on the material plane, a kind of spectral phlebotinum that allows people without bodies to causally interact with the world. The actual ghost is just a loose spirit, composed of mental substance.

As far as I'm aware there's no mythological basis for living things having anything to do with ectoplasm, although there's plenty of kinds of 'life energy' that could easily be equivalent.

Your thing sounds fine, though.

Ah so ectoplasm is generally just a "material" for possession to move in the mortal plane?

As usual wikipedia lays out the goods better than me, but basically the idea of 'ectoplasm' was invented in the late victorian era as a prop for mediums.

The idea was that the mediums would extrude a sort of half-physical, half-spiritual substance from their own bodies (so I guess I was wrong about living things not having it), which the ghosts could 'wear' in order to be seen by and interact with the living.

Since then however in popular culture it's become more something that ghosts just spontaneously manifest whenever they want to interact with the world. Which sort of makes sense because there's a lot of cases of ghosts being visible and tangible even when there are no mediums around to vomit up bedsheets.

edited 24th Jan '13 11:27:22 AM by Kesteven