It's late, it's dark and everyone's asleep when you're woken by the howling wind. Or maybe you're home alone ready to call it a night after a marathon of old movies. You turn off the TV and the house falls into silence, safe for the low creak of the floorboards as they settle.
You know you're alone. You checked all the doors. The windows are closed. But you can't shake the feeling that something is watching, and knowing that you're alone only makes your heart race faster as you resist running to your room and diving under the covers.
So you make your way through the dim lit house and all the scary movies, games, stories that frightened you as a child, flash through your mind. Well done brain, you always know the exact wrong moment to think about the exact wrong thing.
But you're a rational modern monkey, you dismiss the thought. It’s silly. Yet the crawling on the back of your neck won't go away.
Why is the thought of invisible spectres so scary? Why is it that we fear ghosts even when we know they don't exist? After all, this world would be much more interesting if they did. But no, you have to settle for boring reality. So where does this fear come from?
Fears are instinctual. You have no control over them, that's why they scare us. These days, fear is more likely to paralyze you when faced with a crowd of people, but once it was the difference between life and death.
It evolved with us, making sure, in a crude way, that our recklessness or curiosity doesn't kill us.
Fears of snakes, or heights, or even the dark, all have a purpose and a very real basis. Snakes are often poisonous, getting too close to an edge might result in a fall, the majority of predators are nocturnal, so being alert, or as it’s in many cases, running the hell away, ensures our survival.
So why is it that when we find ourselves in a spooky old house we dread encountering a ghostly apparition? How did that fear originate? Why? What in our subconscious mind makes us afraid of spirits of the dead?
Not all fears are rational. So who knows, maybe fearing ghosts is just one of those irrational drives with no real reason behind it. Or maybe there’s something more.
Truth is, even if you’re convinced in the fictionality of these creatures, you don't know for sure. In fact, you can't know that something doesn't exist, you can only be sure in your knowledge when it does.
We don't know what awaits us in a dark, empty house. Our imagination runs wild, conjuring all kinds of possibilities that we can’t really confirm and suddenly a shadow becomes an entity, and a noise turns into the monster that no doubt stalks us.
Fear is a way to keep alert and avoid risk, and in a situation where our environment and its components are shrouded, it is the most logical reaction. Because if there is indeed something dangerous, it’s best to approach it from the other end of a stick, or run like hell.
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