Are ghosts real? There might be no officially instantiated answer to this question. What we do know is that since recorded history began there have been stories passed on about ghostly figures appearing out of thin air, of bumps in the night, and other ghostly encounters. Even the Holy Bible has references to ghosts. Can all of these experiences and all of these stories be of false origin? We'll present to you evidence for and against their existence and then derive a probability matrix that will give you an inclination to whether they exist or not.

Most of us know someone who claims to have had a ghostly experience or we have had an experience ourselves. A rapping on a wall, a cold spot out of the blue, the hair on one's neck standing up, voices coming from just beyond sight, or a vapor that seemed to appear out of nowhere and then disappear just as quickly; these are just some types of experiences we have all heard. Some can be explained but many cannot. Does it necessarily mean there is a ghost around? Well, no, not exactly. Many people tend to immediately believe in a ghostly encounter because it is easier than finding the truth, to perform a scientific investigation which would either explain the situation or not.

There has been a surge in ghost hunting lately as TAPS, with their show on the Sci Fi Channel, has led the way in bringing the work of ghost hunting into the mainstream. There have even been ghost sightings making front page news at times. Does this mean that ghosts are real? Maybe. No definitive proof exists and there might never be that proof until we ourselves become ghosts to walk this earth after we have passed on. However, there are so many things that cannot be explained by conventional science, by evidence. Sometimes the paranormal is the norm. How else can there be an explanation for whispers picked up on audio, images and apparitions floating through video, and objects moving without being touched?
Let us form our probability matrix.


Please observe the following contentions:

Top Tier: 70%

1) Ever since our upbringing we've been conditioned by our education system to think skeptically about ghosts. We learn Math, Science, Language Arts/English, History and a wide variety of other topics to broaden our understanding of our world and to help us become productive and healthy citizens in the societies we live. We learn to separate fact from fiction and accept evidence as a rule. In our many years of schooling we subconsciously learn to reject fringe topics such as ghosts when we are inside the classroom, and learn to assimilate the knowledge of Algebra, Calculus, Grammar, Literature, American History, Chemistry and Physics into the basis of our world understanding. Drawing from this conclusion, we can conjecture that we are conditioned against believing in ghosts. Despite all these influences, according to to the Harris Interactive Study Group, 51% of all adults beyond the age of 18 believe in the existence of ghosts; by personal belief, wish, experience, research or a combination of these factors. Therefore, we see that the existence of ghosts is not so far fetched, and we tend to have life experiences outside of our education that exert tendencies on our psychology and belief systems to believe ghosts are real. We can count the personal experience factor as one for ghosts being real.

2) Throughout history, billions of people have died so, where are all the ghosts? Why don't we see ghosts running around everywhere? We can consider this factor counting against the possibility of ghosts existing.

3) Science has yet to record and chronicle less than 1 percent of truthful universal law. Therefore, we can axiomatically deduce that because ghosts seem to exist in the consciousness of humankind, and because science has not yet chronicled the afterlife into officiated evidence, ghosts must exist because there is so much more to reality than what science has given us so far. We count factor #3 in the top tier favoring the existence of ghosts.

4) Lastly, religions exert an enormous amount of positive influence on people believing in ghosts. We count religions as a top tier disproving factor of our poll logic in point #1, thus being unfavorable towards the existence of ghosts.

Second Tier: 30%

1) Media Influence (before 1991 - for Harris Interactive Survey accuracy). We consider media influence to exist as an important factor favoring the existence of ghosts.

There exists today, since the early 1990s a great diffusion of ghost media saturated across the world, as interest increases and as more questions are asked in our minds. Media exposure has always been a self-fulfilling proposition. As goes the media, so goes the population. In 1900, ghosts were reported and permeated thoughout newspapers, they were accepted as fact by reporters and their readers. That exposure was diminished until the internet exploded. Newspapers in the latter half of the 20th Century would have been laughed at if, say Time Magazine depicted a ghost report on their front cover. Our survey at Harris Interactive however, is dated in 1991, before the popularity of the internet and the increasing presence of our ghost media. Therefore, we deduce that because of the lack of ghost exposure to the general population over the age of eighteen in 1991 when our survey was taken, the 51% of those who believe in ghosts had no other inclination than the experience of the human condition in their lifetimes to believe in ghosts. Thus we see that for reasons above, that ghosts should exist albeit on a less significant order of responsibility than our first tier already established.


Conclusion

Science is still finding answers to humankind's questions. Whether or not science finds answers to the questions of otherworldly significance is anyone's guess. What we do know is that there are definitely some things on this earth that we truly have no answer for. Are ghosts real? That depends on whom the experience happens to. But, we calculate our certainty to be 65% in favor of the existence of ghosts (70%)(.5) + (30%) = 65%.

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