On a podcast recently where Jonathan Goldstein was being interviewed by some lady at NPR, she asked if he believed in ghosts and that made me want to write what I think about ghosts.

A lot of people seem to think that ghosts are just dead people who come to visit every now and again, or whom you just chance across, but who don’t want to give you a straight answer, if they want to talk to you at all. I don't believe in ghosts in that sense.

But I do think that ghosts exist in the sense of a generated thing attached to a place or a person that makes people act in a way that they wouldn’t otherwise, but which is empirically unobservable. Like a spontaneous collective hallucination. The fact that it's a hallucination doesn't make it any less real. (But the fact that it’s collective does seem to make it more real.)

Like think of a spooky old abandoned asylum or factory. There’s definitely something there that isn’t bricks or peeling plaster but which everyone agrees exists in a way that makes them not want to go inside. Same with old houses, and museum ships. That's the ghost.

Sometimes the ghost is benign. Newlands Church in the Lake District is definitely haunted by a benign ghost which sits with you in the pews and lends you an otherworldly sense of calm. Maybe God is a ghost. And sometimes I suspect the ghost doesn’t really care about the humans at all and you have to squint a bit to see it.

Maybe the ghost is Pullman’s Dust: the accumulated patina of human experience. Is an old camera haunted? Is an old chair? Is a ghost not just a single dead person, but everyone who’s ever gone before you?