Questions about Ghosts

I want to believe in them. Is this a basic human longing, is the ghost the glimmer, or is it just me? A friend thought that houses behaved like tape recorders and echoed back the past, when your brain pressed play. Have I seen ghosts? I’ve hallucinated dead pets. My eyes have seen the hamster cage on the sideboard in the dining room and I have often seen Sally curled up in her cardboard box-bed at the bottom of the stairs. Is this my mind filling in the gaps? I’m seeing what I expect to see, what was so important that it is indelible, so let’s put it back in! And does this work in reverse, are there things present that we don’t see because they aren’t expected and shouldn’t be there? I’m reminded of the nightmare in Twin Peaks of Laura’s mother remembering what she forgot seeing in her daughter’s bedroom:

And so possibly there are ghosts and magic and Others all around us but that our narrowed minds refuse to conceive or believe in this age of Reason. We must not commit Reason Treason. I used to see auras in mirrors and still can if I concentrate, but I self-sciencely explain these as optical illusions. I am ever the reluctant atheist waiting to be disproved, always the Scully, never the Fox. Can’t see the magic in front of me so I have to write it instead.