Oct 28 2006 Gareth Rogers, South Wales Echo
Most people think of ghosts as phantom beings who rise from the ground to scare the living.
But a scientific search for an explanation has challenged the traditional image of ghouls as apparitions of dead people or white spirits.
Opinions of what really lurks behind ghosts, however, remains divided.
University of Glamorgan psychology lecturer Janet Pitman said science dismisses the traditional theory that ghosts are people who have moved into the afterlife.
'This is all based on a cultural opinion of what people expect to see,' she said. 'Whenever people have visions of ghosts they are always fully clothed. I would be surprised if their clothes had an afterlife too.'
Although Andy Mercer, of the Institute of Paranormal Research, says paranormal experts general accept it as a possibility.
'This theory says ghosts are souls who have lived and died on this earth,' he said.
'It says that their intelligence, personalities and emotions on earth have survived the death process.'
However, the study of the paranormal has come up with other theories to explain ghost sightings.
One such theory is called the stone tape theory, which claims the magnetic pull of old buildings can trap sounds of past events.
Andy said: 'There is a possibility that buildings, rocks or earth are able to absorb energy from living beings who inhabit them.
'Later, under certain conditions, that energy or signal can be replayed, rather like a video tape.
'Most typical hauntings have a very emotion-laden scene, like a murder.
'It is this scene that has somehow become imprinted or recorded in the environment.'
A third theory is that the human concept of time is not as stable as people believe it to be, with past events becoming stuck in time and replay themselves in the afterlife.
'When people cross over to the other side they have a life review that follows everything they did,' Andy said.
'Their spirits travel along a smooth timeline until they hit a pothole.
'They become stuck in that pothole until they are removed by someone on earth.'
But from a scientific point of view, there is only one theory with any evidence - the idea that ghosts are just figments of a person's imagination, however real they might seem.
'We prefer to look at what experiences people have and how it affects their mind,' Janet said.
'Things like hallucination and illusion tend to explain most sightings.'
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