Ghosts

Ghosts
Class	made — a phantom that acquired a will
Dwells	our world, without a physical presence
Feeds on	disputed; most accounts describe attention rather than suffering
Approach	repetition, and being noticed
Earliest account	older than any record we hold, and the most widely reported Other in human history
Consensus among us The best-attested phenomenon on this wiki and the one we understand least, because everyone already has an explanation for it. contested

Phantoms of strong psyches that have imbued themselves with a will. They exist in our world without a physical presence. inherited

A ghost is the second rung. Something cast a phantom — a copy with no will — and the copy persisted, and at some point it stopped being only a copy. contested

What the will is made of

The inherited line says strong psyches, and the wiki has never examined the phrase. Two readings are current here and they are not compatible. contested

The remnant reading

The will is the original person's, or a piece of it. A psyche strong enough leaves a copy substantial enough to carry some of what it was, and the ghost is continuous with the dead in the way a recording is continuous with a voice. This is what nearly everyone means by the word and it is the reading every mourner arrives at unassisted. inherited

The accretion reading

The will is not the dead person's at all. It is assembled afterwards, out of the attention of everyone who remembers, expects, fears or tells stories about them — and it arrives at a will by the same route as everything else on the ladder, which is repetition. On this reading a ghost is not the person persisting. It is the persistence of what people did with them. unverified

The second is the wiki's, and the wiki should be honest that it prefers it because it is consistent with Meme Wars and not because it has evidence the first lacks. The two make almost identical predictions. firsthand · Gershon

The difference is not academic to anyone who is haunted. One says something of them is still there. The other says nothing of them is there and never was.

Why we understand these worst

Ghosts are the most widely reported phenomenon in human history and the hardest thing on this wiki to say anything useful about, for a reason that is worth stating: everyone already has an account of them. ⚠ warning

Every tradition explains ghosts, and explains them differently, and the explanations arrive before the encounter does. A person who sees one has been furnished for their entire life with a framework for what they are seeing, and reports accordingly. We hold hundreds of accounts and cannot separate what was seen from what was expected in a single one of them. contested

They also sit at the point where this wiki's vocabulary is at its weakest. What the Vatican calls a soul in an intermediate state, what the Materialists called a bereavement disorder with a stable presentation, and what we call a phantom that acquired a will may be three descriptions of one thing, and ours is the newest and least tested of the three. unverified

How this entry was assembled

Drawn from: The inherited line, the Phantoms and Meme Wars entries, and a very large body of popular report that we have not systematically examined.

Compiled by: Gershon.

Known weaknesses: We prefer the accretion reading for reasons of theoretical tidiness rather than evidence, and the entry says so. Every account available to us is contaminated by a prior explanation, including ours.

Wanted: An account from someone who had no framework for it beforehand. We do not expect this to exist.