We’ve all heard the story of the haunted house at the end of the street or the spot on the other side of the county where once a year a car is said to reenact the macabre car crash that claimed the lives of those involved. These residual hauntings are often attributed to the same phenomenon as other ghostly encounters and said to be burned memories in space that call back to times of great emotion. But then it seems there is a growing wealth of accounts suggesting hauntings are not related to specific places alone, but to objects and occasions as well.
One of the key examples of this is the haunting of cars – partially because they are large, but also because they are mobile as well. A car that crashes and results in the death of the occupants can be haunted in two ways. Either the location of the crash can become haunted with the events involved being reenacted over and over again on the same night or nights sharing some quality with the one when the accident happened, or the car itself can be used again and then resold only to later start displaying odd behaviors such as people appearing in the rear view mirror who are not really there.
So if both seem to be valid, why make a distinction suggesting it is the object itself rather than the space occupying it that is haunted? Is it simply a matter of semantics to keep the whole space and location argument separate when it comes to hauntings? One of the benefits of having objects be haunted rather than the space in which it occurred allows for us to begin to examine the traits these objects must possess before they can become entangled with a paranormal entity. And if hauntings were strictly space oriented, this would cause problems with new hauntings as no Earthly location occupies the exact same space more than once. That is to say, the Earth rotates around the sun, moving away from any given point in space, and then the sun in turn travels around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. Even the Galaxy moves, suggesting the Earth would have to travel from one end of the universe to the next and back again, or the whole universe would have to move backwards before one point in space was ever truly visited more than once.
So why do these strange paranormal entities find themselves connected so deeply with specific places? One of the answers may lie in the perceptions people have with these locations. If people connect a person and a location in a direct and very real way in consciousness, then they may actually be providing the ghost with the necessary means of manifesting again and again. But what about spontaneous hauntings? Perhaps the perception itself isn’t what is necessary for a manifestation, but rather what is required is a state indirectly related to this perception that could be triggered by other means, such as a dream or extrasensory connection with a location by sensitive individuals.
Of course there is another theory that would seem to have an eerie conclusion to go along with it. If ghosts truly are partially residing within a realm at the other end of a cosmic veil at the periphery of our reality, then this suggests that our planet itself may have something roughly analogous to a ghost corresponding to it on the other end.