Why Aren't There Ghost Dinosaurs?

The Metaphysics of Hanging Around, Part 1.

Introduction

This is the first post in a small series I’m putting together about the nature of ghosts.

I believe in ghosts.

I think, in limited ways, I have experienced them.

Maybe you haven’t. Maybe you don’t.

It is very possible that you think the idea of ghosts is silly. Dumb. Something people invented because they like to scare themselves and entertain others around a campfire. Something people are willing to believe only because they’re scared of dying and want evidence of some existence of the hereafter. Maybe you’d like to believe in ghosts but simply can’t. Maybe you think it would be neat but, hey, everyone has a camera in their pocket now. Where’s the evidence?

I understand.

If that’s your position though, my hope is that this series might offer you a different way of thinking about the topic. One in which the idea of human spirits hanging around after physical death doesn’t seem quite so illogical. I’m going to try and explain ghostly behavior. To lay out a theory about why “ghostly phenomena” is what it is, and why ghosts (if they exist) do what they do. Why, for example, are they so obsessed with opening drawers? Why do our dearly departed seem so interested in flipping on lights? My opinion you see is that ghostly behavior is not random. It is not magic, in the sense that, for most people, “magic” equates with doesn’t follow any rules, and, doesn’t make any sense. I believe ghostly behavior has a logic to it, albeit an otherworldly one, and I think it is a logic which is sound enough that, once you understand it, will allow you to make (limited) accurate predictions about what ghosts will or won’t do next.

That’s my goal. To share this viewpoint on the spirit realm with you.

At the outset though, I must admit that I am not the most qualified person for such a task. There are paranormal investigators and mediums and priests who have dealt with spirits more often and in a much more direct manner than I have, and the only reason they are not writing this series instead of me is because most of them are not writers. I consider myself only to be collating and condensing their experiences into a unified whole. I hope to do a good job of it, but, that said, please understand that there will be a limit to my experience, and thus to my explanations. To that end, unfortunately, I must begin by being very silly. I’m sorry for this. Bear with me till the end and I’ll make it make sense. I promise.

Okay.

Let’s talk about The Loch Ness Monster.

Scottish Spookables

In 2005 I and a couple of friends took a trip to Europe. I’d been a few times before but neither of my companions had, and they were both eager to do all of the touristy things that Americans in Europe are wont to do. Unfortunately though, touristy things cost money, and we were college kids who’d just spent a great deal on plane tickets. So it was that I came to find myself hiding from the cops beneath a full moon, my body submerged in Loch Ness.

Urquhart Castle. A ruin sitting neatly beside the coast of Loch (Lake) Ness.

My buddy (let’s call him Matt) was big into his Scottish heritage you see. Still is. Goes to the local Highland Games, owns a kilt, has a set of bagpipes he never learned to play, the whole thing. Truth be told he’s more Native American than anything, as his father was a full-blooded Cherokee, but, when he finally met that man in his mid-twenties, my friend was dismayed to discover that the man who’d abandoned him as an infant was also the sort of man to have the word “Hate” tattooed on his right knuckles. As a result, despite his obvious Indian characteristics, Matt had grown up rejecting that part of himself and identifying far more with his mother’s vague, largely unspecified European background. As is often the case with Americans, this woman was a mongrel of mixed ethnicities but, somehow, it had been decided that the family was more or less Scottish and my friend, desperate for any sort of Identity to attach himself to, dove into that idea with abandon.

Now Matt, a nerd and possibly somewhat autistic, had been the only highschooler I’d ever known to be into genealogy. Genealogy as a discipline seems to be almost exclusively the domain of middle-aged women, a thing which seems to me, as an outsider, to be some sort of feminine coded attempt at grappling with morality. Matt though, by college, had amassed a whole folder of documents and birth certificates and grave rubbings, and had convinced himself that he had had an ancestor who had at some point taken up residence at Urquhart Castle. He had therefore told all of us before leaving that we simply had to go and see it, which we did, despite it being almost obscenely out of the way. I remember resenting him a bit on the train up from England, angry that he was making us come all this way. Personally, I believed most of his genealogical records closer to wish fulfillment than actual ancestral evidence, and so it seemed doubly stupid to be making the trip to see some castle whose connection to my friend was almost certainly imaginary. I ended up consoling myself by staring out the train window. Scotland was beautiful, after all. I told myself it would be fun to see more of it beyond just Edinburgh and Glasgow. Plus, I had been a lifelong fan of things like Unsolved Mysteries and the paranormal. I couldn’t rouse myself to get overly excited about the castle but, with time, the thought of actually seeing the famous Loch Ness began to feel like a treat.

Not that I believed in the monster, mind you.

My childhood television program

I’m a fairly opened minded guy, so much so that my wife says that sometimes my brains fall out, but even I had been forced to conclude that Nessie, fun as the story might be, was simply imaginary. By 2005 that lake had been SCUBA dived, SONAR-ed, photographed, videoed, and mapped to within an inch of its life… and not a shred of evidence for the monster had come up. Any animal as big as Nessie was said to be would surely have been found already and so, much as I enjoyed the folklore, I was under no delusions about catching sight of the creature firsthand. In fact the locals in the town of Inverness (even the women, whom I otherwise found to be very forward) seemed to all hate talking about the creature and acted embarrassed when I brought it up. I get that I suppose. After a lifetime of being defined only by something not real, you might start wishing that your area could be known for almost anything else instead. I think maybe that’s a very European mindset though. In America if something is fake you lean into it. You go with the scam. Roswell, New Mexico? Point Pleasant, West Virginia? I suspect about as many of the people living in those places believe in Aliens and Mothmen as Inverness-ians believe in Nessie. Difference is the Americans don’t let that stop them from playing it up for tourists and selling knickknacks. The American has grown up since infancy in The Scam you see. Red, white, and blue. Rock, flag, and eagle.

We hitchhiked from Inverness to a little town called Kilmore and this took most of the rest of the day. By the time we arrived and settled into our hostel (some woman’s shed she’d put bunkbeds in) there were only a few hours of daylight left and so we hoofed it over to Castle Urquhart so my friend could connect with his ancestors before nightfall. To our dismay though, we found that, in the U.K., even centuries long abandoned castles still have gates and guards around them… gates and guards that want to charge you money to get in. My friend’s imaginary ancestral home had apparently become a tourist trap, and, whatever the price they were charging, it seemed to us, college kids rapidly running out of money in a foreign country, too much. We viewed the castle from the outside for a while and then went back to the hostel, annoyed, feeling rather defeated to have come so far for nothing.

I thought that was the end of it.

Those of us who come from intact homes with functioning families might have difficulty appreciating how strongly someone who grew up without those things can imprint on some vague aspect of their past that feels safe. An heirloom maybe. Perhaps a specific house or apartment they lived in as a child. Maybe just a hand-me-down coat. Children from broken homes often need something like that. Something real and tangible that gives them a connection. Makes them feel like they’re not just a total accident to the universe. As we lay there trying to go to sleep, I could look across at Matt and see the disappointment on his face, the sadness. I realized that, for him, bizarrely, this stupid castle was somehow really important. Like it anchored him. Allowed him to think about a time when he had relatives who didn’t fill their houses with drug paraphernalia. The fact that I believed his connection to The Castle to be tenuous at best didn’t really matter. For him it was real. For him, somehow, it mattered.

I sat up beneath the sheets and started to get dressed.

“What are you doing?” Matt whispered in the darkness.

“Come on,” I said to both he and our other friend, Stephen. “We’re going to go see the castle.”

… … …

The Scottish Countryside is still, to this day, exactly as you’d expect it to be if you’ve never been. Lush, green, and filled with a kind of misty “ancient-ness” that you don’t really get in America. America is ancient too of course, but, in a more evil kind of way. The folklore of Europe, its cryptids and magic and strange things which go bump in the night, is mostly stuff like fairies and elves and wood nymphs and pixies. Gnomes under toadstools. Pleasant stuff. The American landscape by contrast, conjures up fears of Sasquatch and Chupacabra and The Jersey Devil. Walking alone in the middle of the night in Scotland? The worst you can imagine is that maybe Rumpelstiltskin will jump out from behind a rock and challenge you to a riddle game. Doing the same under the pitch-black sky of outback Arizona? You feel like at any moment you might get taken. Like a silver disc from the heavens will silently float over you and envelop you brilliant light.

I dunno. Europe just has more peaceful vibes.

Even so, we were on our way to sneak into a castle and regardless of the peacefulness of your surroundings, anytime you’re doing something illegal your senses are heightened. For this reason, and maybe for this reason alone, the countryside felt more ominous to me than it ever had before in the U.K. Spookier, more full of foreboding. It was about one in the morning and no one was out at that hour but we reasoned that, even so, sticking to the road might get us seen and raise suspicions. As we drew closer to Urquhart therefore, we hopped some fences and made our way through the neighboring sheep pasture, approaching the walls through some of the tunnels the flocks had made within the bushes. A single flashlight between us, we kept stabbing our faces on branches and scratching up our arms and legs. Going to this extreme to not be noticed was probably unnecessary, but we were young and silly and it was fun. All of a sudden we emerged from the brambles right at the base of the castle walls. A quick scramble, a foot placed in each other’s hands to get a boost, an unsteady step here and there…

And success.

We were up over the wall.

We were in.

Overtime sheep will gnaw tunnels through dense brush.

As you might’ve surmised from the photograph earlier, The Castle itself was rather underwhelming. The U.K. is full of castles and, if you’re going to go to the trouble of seeing one, Urquhart shouldn’t be your top pick. Even so, seeing it under star light and being able to roam about it in silence on our own… it gave the place a kind of magic. I was suddenly aware of how old it was. I could almost hear the voices of the people who’d lived and worked within it centuries ago. Men and women speaking a language I could never understand and concerned with matters beyond my comprehension. Men and women unaware that the continent I hailed from even existed. If Matt was somehow distantly related to those voices… that was kind of cool. I looked over at him running his hands along one of the walls and I kind of got it. I could see why it mattered to him. Genealogical accuracy aside, in a very old place you really can connect with something. People leave their mark on the things they build. Touching them… it’s almost like they’re still there.

Then we had to run.

Stephen came bolting suddenly around the corner. He was violently shaking his head and drawing the flat of his hand back and forth across his neck as if to say, Kill it! Shut up! Shut the hell up! Matt and I froze and stared at him. “Po - lice,” Stephen mouthed silently as he pointed up over the stone walls. “Go. Now.”

I can only assume (makes sense, of course there would be) that the place had security cameras. Some poor security guard somewhere had seen a bunch of dumb Americans on the CCTV and done his job of calling the cops. They almost had us. They’d approached without lights or sirens and, if not for the weight of their vehicles moving upon the gravel giving them away, would have caught us. As it was though, Stephen had heard the cars and spotted them first and now, without consulting either of us, was throwing his leg over the wall and dropping down onto the steep hillside covered in brush beyond the castle.

We followed without thinking. Our bodies hugged tight against the soil as we snaked along through the grass trying to stay low and unseen. Soon enough Stephen had led us to the shoreline and, to our surprise, continued without missing a beat to go into the water. Long and skinny, Stephen crawled out into the lake without a sound and silently began to submerge himself even as Matt and I could hear the voices of the officers up in the castle behind us. Uncertain, we exchanged a brief glance before following our friend forward and in a few seconds all three of us were nose deep in Loch Ness. The torchlights of the officers were soon scanning the water.

They didn’t see us.

I don’t know how long we stayed there. Maybe an hour. The officers appeared to give up and leave after a short search but in our paranoia we feared they might simply be waiting for us in their cars at the top of the road. I was getting cold. I was shivering. My jeans were heavy and my sneakers, not designed for swimming, were constantly trying to slip from my feet, ever pulled down by the silty mud.

It was eerie.

Other than the gentle lapping of the waves there didn’t seem to be a sound, and each of us, sunk as far as we could into the waters, was just a face upturned toward the sky. The barest hint of a head floating without a body, lost in a black lake beneath a full moon. With time we started drifting apart and soon enough I wasn’t sure where either of my companions were. All was silent and above us loomed the ruins of a great castle backlit by a million stars. After a while my worries about the officers began to subside and, as they did so, the realization of where I was suddenly came over me like a wave. I was struck with a terror. The enormity of the depths all around me readily apparent. Every story I’d ever heard about the loch and its monster came flooding back and for a moment… only a moment… I knew it was behind me. I knew its serpentine body was there, coiling around me in the silent blackness of the abyss.

Irrational?

Yes.

And I knew that.

Nonetheless my heart pounded. I began to panic. My mind knew there was no way the monster existed in physical reality and yet my body didn’t believe it. My body felt it. That spine tingling sensation that comes over you in the darkness when you just know, somehow, somewhere, that a pair of eyes is watching you in the night. I was suddenly spooked out of my mind.

That’s when it hit me.

Nessie was a ghost.

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Ghost Science

Allow me to explain.

No. First, allow me to go on a tangent.

Why is it, exactly, like, from a technical perspective, that ghosts seem to be overwhelmingly dapper men and women from the Victorian period?

Hmm?

Because… it does seem that way, doesn’t it?

The old hotels with their “Lady in White.” The historic homes haunted by the specter of a gentleman in a bowler. Civil War veterans prowling the streets at 3 A.M. Great-great-grandma in her night gown, slowly rocking back and forth in the creaky antique chair.

I think it’s safe to say that, at least in the popular consciousness, that’s the sort of thing most people think about when you bring up ghosts and hauntings. For whatever reason, in popular culture, the spirits of people from the Industrial Era are by far and away the most likely to be found still hanging around.

But… that’s weird. Isn’t it?

You know, I mean, you think about it, History’s…