I've been a fan of horror movies for as long as I can remember. There weren't many parental filters in the asylum I grew up in, so I was exposed to a fair amount of this stuff early on. As I grew into a teenager, it just got worse, and I would jump at the chance to watch anything that involved ghosts, goblins, or ghouls of some sort (never slasher movies though - it somehow sucks the fun out for me to watch something like that where, no matter how outlandish or unlikely, it was at least possible).
This has lead to one of my more interesting and ridiculous quirks - I don't believe in ghosts, but I'm afraid of them. I try to be as rational as possible when it comes to the world, and I think I'm fairly good at it. As I'm sure I've mentioned before, I used to obsess about this stuff, poring over whatever the library had on monsters, unsolved mysteries, and especially "real life" ghost stories. Over and over I came coming up with the same unfortunate conclusion - it was all hokum.
I'm not saying that everyone who has ever claimed to have seen a ghost is lying about it (although I'm sure there's a good percentage of them that are). I think the human mind is an interesting and often scary thing, and people will see and believe all sorts of things that defy rational thought. I once had a friend tell me that if I woke up every day and said to myself, "If there is a God, show me a sign", then I would eventually see something that made me believe. I didn't doubt him, and I'm sure that his intentions were pure, but at the same time, I think if I woke up and said to myself, "If Burt Reynolds is the finest actor to ever walk upon the Earth, show me a sign", eventually I would see something that would make me believe that too, Stroker Ace notwithstanding.
So when I talk to my daughter about ghosts (she brought it up), I tell her the absolute truth - I'll believe in ghosts when I catch one in my teeth. I watch Ghost Hunters and I Google for photographs and videos, and while they often pass along a fair case of the wiggums, never have I seen anything I would rate as evidence. It only gets worse now, when everybody who has a cell phone is carrying a camera (okay, everybody but me, since mine didn't survive the rinse cycle). And it's not like there are less dead people than before. I've known quite a few people in my life, and I can honestly say that more of them are now dead than ever before.
Nevertheless, ghosts scare the bejeesus out of me. I hate watching ghost movies, and naturally do it every chance I get. It's not the "jump out and yell boo" things that get to me either - those just make me mad. It's the genuinely creepy stuff that kills me. What's worse is the latest trend of taking a scary as $%*& j-horror flick (Japanese Horror, for those who have better things to do than look this stuff up), and turn it into a scary as $%&* American horror movie. The Grudge and The Ring scared the crap out of me. Although in those cases, I think I'm only afraid of ghosts with hair issues - apparently there is a dearth of conditioning products in the afterlife.
Even now, I have a game at home - Fatal Frame 2 - whose central premise is being trapped in a village of ghosts looking for your sibling (you're looking for your sibling - I haven't played, so I don't know what the ghosts are looking for). I really want to play this game, and I really don't. I know I'll love it, but I also know that it will mean that every time I have to turn off the lights when going to bed, I'm going to go up the stairs too fast afterwards. It also isn't going to help the whole "Go see what that noise was" situation we've discussed previously.
Still, I'm going to keep doing it. I'll keep looking for a good photo, or video, too. That's the problem with this stuff - it defies disproving. It's easy to prove that something is real. It's much harder to prove that something doesn't exist. Besides, as long as the kids continue to believe that I'm not afraid of anything, I'm good.
Suckers.
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