Ghost Phenomena: What Are We Talking About?

First, a voice is heard in a hallway and the home is empty.

Then, the person who is present and hears it makes an assumption: disembodied voice in an empty home equals ghost!

But, when we hear a disembodied voice, can we make the jump that it is the soul of a dead person? It could also be radiowaves being heard audibly for some strange set of circumstances, perhaps a voice from the past replaying, perhaps something from another dimension.

A ghost could be a residual scene from the past, another dimensional being, an intelligent life form we can't see, our own psychic interaction...

Some of the concepts being bantered around in the field for phenomena include...

Other Dimensional: A being in another dimension rubbing up against ours and being briefly seen or heard.

Spirit: The soul of someone who has deceased in physical form.

Natural: Some set of conditions in the physical environment that spits out an anomalous sound or sight that we interpret as language or a figure.

Residual: Events, voices, sounds, smells from the past caught in a sort of recording loop and replaying.

PK: Psychokinesis--the ability to move objects using the human mind.

Human mind limitations: Perhaps we have some oddities in our brain wiring that makes it possible from time to time to see and hear things that aren't there, the same sort of "issues" that exist in those with schizophrenia, perhaps a disturbance in the temporal lobe.

Psychic: The receiving of information in the universe that allows us insight into a past life, a past situation, but this is done by a psychic means and not an active happening-now sort of situation.

Inadequate senses/poor perception: We encounter a glimpse of something in a dimly lit room that is misinterpreted because we have inadequate vision. Perhaps we think we hear something, but it's really misinterpretation with other sounds in the room.

The truth is, we have no way of knowing what ghostly phenomena is, but we can make assumptions based on what we encounter. With enough encounters, our correlations get a bit closer to the truth. It's an exciting field of study and one that continues to grow with lots of interesting and creative research. It's also entirely possible (and likely) that what we're dealing with is a combination of these things above and not all in just one category. Now, you can see how murky the water is when studying the paranormal.