January 26: Ghosts, Big Picture Science, Skeptics

...It was with great astonishment, and with a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked, he saw this bell begin to swing.  It swung so softly in the outset that it scarcely made a sound; but soon it rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house.

This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute, but it seemed an hour.  The bells ceased as they had begun, together.  They were succeeded by a clanking noise, deep down below; as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the wine-merchant's cellar.  Scrooge then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as dragging chains.

In the mornings, as I'm taking my shower around 4 a.m., I listen to my local Public Radio station.  At that hour, the station replays programs from the previous week.  I usually catch up on news, hear some interesting facts about language or cooking, and get a few laughs.  This morning, I listened to a show called Big Picture Science, which discusses, you guessed it, science.  It's not my favorite program in the world.  I actually prefer The Splendid Table (a great cooking show) on Fridays.

Well, this morning, Big Picture Science focused, among other things, on paranormal activity and ghosts.  I believe it was part of a segment called the "Skeptic Watch," or something like that.  Of course, since the hosts were interviewing scientists and physicists and other -ists, there were a whole lot of explanations being offered that had to do with magnetic fields and paint fumes and hysteria.  Not a single interviewee even entertained the possibility that ghosts and spirits and cold spots existed.

I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks...

I am very open to the possibility of hauntings.  Scientists, especially the ones on Big Picture Science, are just a little too smug about this topic.  Perhaps, being a poet and lover of literature and art, I'm more apt to accept things like poltergeists and phantoms.  There's a little too much in the world that science can't explain.  As a Christian, if I can't embrace the idea of spiritual/other-worldly explanations for certain phenomena, I might as well turn in my WWJD card.

The passage I quoted at the beginning of this post is Ebenezer Scrooge's first contact with the  spirit world.  Obviously, Scrooge has more in common with the skeptical scientists of Big Picture Science at the beginning of A Christmas Carol.  At the end of the book, however, when he's been redeemed, Scrooge runs around praising the spirit world and singing the glories of Christmas time.  He has let go of his skepticism and wholly accepted divine intervention.  Ghosts and spirits of Christmas--they are Scrooge's new reality.

They are Saint Marty's reality, as well, even if ghosts scare the crap out of him.