Do You Believe in Ghosts?

Recently this question has come up a couple times in my conversations. What I noticed was that I had a strong resistance to the term ghosts. I felt very different when the question was presented, “Do you believe in spirits?” I had to rephrase the question for me to answer it. This piqued my curiosity, as when I have resistance to something I want to explore what that means.

I looked up the definitions of both terms. Ghost: an apparition of a dead person which is believed to appear or become manifest to the living, typically as a nebulous image. I think using this verbiage my mind associated it with ghostly images from my childhood. I was raised in a Christian household and my mother had strong feelings of animosity toward Halloween filled with inferences of its evil nature. The ghost being one of the main symbols of the Holiday I still today carry this associations with ghosts as malevolent.

Spirit on the other hand was a very acceptable term that we used regularly. Spirit: the nonphysical part of a person which is the seat of emotions and character; the soul. This term felt much more comforting and warmer to me. When I think of spirit, I think of it as the essence of a person and perhaps that lends itself to a deeper way in which I feel connection and relatability to the word.

Ghost seems to be definitively associated with after life while spirit appears to have a higher fluidity of connection with life and death, oscillating between the two. I find myself resonating with the idea that spirit has an association with both life and death as I think there is an intrinsic relationship between the two. Life and death are fundamentally connected and even after separating my childhood nefarious associations with ghost I still gravitate toward what feels like to me as the more expansive and encompassing term, spirit.

So, do you believe in ghosts?