Do ghosts really exist?

Contributed by Chesmir Chew (guest contributor)

Ghosts do exist in this world, do you believe that? I reckon the answer to most people will be affirmative. Otherwise, there won’t be any religion and superstition. But do ghosts really exist? I doubt, and so do many people. It is because most people have never seen them before.

When I was a kid, I like to play with Michael, a friend of childhood, at the “padang” (field) 1km from my home. Once, when we were “lepaking” (sitting and killing time) at the padang, as usual, we sit at the top of the slide when we were waiting for other friends to join us. We talked a lot since we always had funny things to tell.

All of a sudden, Michael stared at me grimly and screamed out in great fear. He then slid down the bottom and rushed away from the padang. At that time, I had totally no idea what was happening. But from the expression on his face, I could tell something horrible had just happened. So I followed him and went away from the padang. When we were quite a distance from the padang, with heavy pant I asked him what was going on. He panted, “A transparent white shadow was behind me just now.” Suddenly I felt my backbone chilly. It was like “something” was really behind me…

This incident had not been recalled since I lost contact with Michael.

Several years later, I join the basketball team and was chosen as Selangor state player to participate in a nation-wide basketball tournament. Besides, it was an honor that all the state players were arranged to stay at the hostel provided by Malaysia Basketball Association (MABA) for the one-month intensive training camp. I was so excited because not only accommodation and meals were provided, but also pocket money was given! However, it was only a few days time, a series of strange things had happened in my room.

It was hard to tell what was going on, but my two roommates and I just couldn’t sleep well, we always felt like being pressed by something at night and we could hardly move or turn over our body. Sometimes we were awakened by certain noise, also sometimes we heard someone knocking the door. But the thing is whenever we woke up to check where the noise came from, the sound would fade out. Many times we woke up to open the door and we always saw nothing but the dark and foggy corridor. The sound was not loud, but it was clear enough to be heard. The next day, when we asked the players staying next door about the sound, they would say they heard nothing. “Perhaps we were too tired, so that it caused illusion”, we thought. Little by little, we were tired of investigating the source of the noise, and we managed to ignore it because we were really too tired with our training.

In a blink of an eye, one-month training camp was over and we went to Sarawak for the basketball tournament. At that time, coaches and players from each state were arranged to stay in a classroom so that we could communicate with each other more easily.

One night, our coach asked us about how was our life at MABA. While most players look satisfied with their room, my roommates and I started to complain. “We always felt uncomfortable at night.” “We also heard weird noise.” “Someone knocked our door at night but we saw nothing when we opened the door.”

For a few seconds, our coach was silent. Then he took a deep breath and said, “Well, that is nothing, just ignore it.” We thought he would be extremely surprised after hearing our complaints, but instead, he sounded like he was aware of everything happened in our room since the beginning. Looking at our frustrated faces, he told us the story.

A few years ago, the room that we used to stay at MABA was lodged by a national player suffered from gigantism. One night, he was asleep and was not awake in the morning. He passed away. It took our coach and the coach of national team a few hours to move his body into the coffin, and send to the nearby funeral parlor. Since then, a series of strange things started to happen in the room. Of course, several priests and Taoists were invited to solve the problem, but it didn’t seem to have difference. Most players were still arranged to stay in that room even though the problem remained unsolved. Perhaps it was not harmful to people, and most people could be able to ignore it when they were used to it.

Whenever I told people about the strange things that happened to me in the past, most of them would say without hesitating that I had run into ghost. But why would they so sure that it was ghost instead of other thing? Is it because they were told that most strange things come from ghost or they have seen ghosts before?

I believe most people have never seen the REAL ghost. How would one know ghosts are the souls of human bodies? What about the animal bodies, the insect bodies, or the bacteria and virus bodies? They have no soul in their body? Ok, can anyone prove that there is soul in our body and we will become spirits when we die? No. They believe the existence of ghosts because there are too many strange things happen on earth. Even scientists can hardly prove why they happen or how they happen. That is the reason why religions were established and our honorable God exists.

The theologists, people who study about God and Evils, would explain anything that can’t be substantially proved by the scientists. Hence, people have their faith in certain religion so that they have reliance. When one is confident, he becomes stronger. In other words, the reliance makes people stronger.

Consequently, ghosts and religions come from human cultures. Each culture explains their ghost and religion. One could understand certain culture by realizing the religion(s) in which the majority of the clan believes. For example, most Chinese believe in Buddhism and Taoism. One may understand Chinese culture by reading the legend stories in Buddhism and Taoism. In this case, religions are meaningful to human cultures but I would say it is not necessary for one to be too superstitious to certain religion.

To me, I believe there are secrets that are yet to be discovered by human technology in the universe. The so-called weird things happen on earth would perhaps be one of the phenomenons in nature.

When strange incidents happened, they could be explained as haunted incidents or natural phenomenons. However, the word “ghost”, in fact, does not appear in scientific dictionaries. What religions explained to people may be right, but it is known that they are just partially right since none of the religions showed the evidence which could be able to prove that they are totally right.

To date, the topic whether ghosts exist or not still appears to be debatable to human since both science and religion could only theoretically infer strange incidents as haunted incidents or a natural phenomenon. Unless there are persuasive evidences to prove that the incidents are haunted or they are just natural phenomenons, otherwise, this topic would always be a mystery.