being willing to accept the existence of the soul, which Alessa also wasn’t sold on quite yet.
As expected, there was also plenty of scientific skepticism. Carbon monoxide poisoning, air pressure changes, and mistakes interpreting peripheral vision were all cited as rational explanations behind what one might interpret as a ghost sighting, but none of these rationalizations seemed to hit the mark in Alessa’s case. Alessa remembered that she had cited many of these same arguments herself in debates with friends over the years, an irony that was not lost on her.
There was also some discussion of a phenomenon called infrasound, sound waves emanating at a low enough frequency that they’re inaudible to humans but still detectable in other ways. There were experiments where people reported seeing things and feeling uneasiness and even sorrow when exposed to sound at these frequencies. However, in those experiments 20% of the tested population was affected by the presence of infrasound, which meant that if there was some sort of infrasound source affecting her house, at least a handful of her housemates should have experienced something similar. As far as Alessa knew, no one else had, so that didn’t seem like the culprit.
Other theories hypothesized that ghosts were projections of the viewer’s own emotions, some sort of low-level telepathy that resulted from stress. Alessa thought this theory might have some merit, especially given the recent loss of her parents and her difficulty coping with the experience. However, that didn’t explain why her emotions might take the form of a guy from the early 1900s. Shouldn’t it be her parents she was seeing if in fact her stress over their death was the root of all this?
Yet another set of theories considered the possibility of a time warp. In these cases, by some unknown process the fabric of time was momentarily folded in such a way that someone in the present either got a glimpse of a person from the past, or – in the case of what was called a “time slip” – was fully transported into the past for a few moments. Besides the usual lost soul hypothesis, this theory seemed probably the closest of everything Alessa had read. However, in most reported instances, the person in the past had noticed the person from the present as well, which had not been the case with Alessa’s ghost. And even if this theory was correct, Alessa didn’t understand how it was possible or why it was happening to her, in this house, with this ghost.
Alessa closed her laptop lid in frustration, snapping it a little harder than she’d meant to. All in all, she was disappointed with what she’d been able to turn up. There was practically nothing she came across that she didn’t already know, and none of the various theories seemed to quite match her experiences. Most of the information online seemed like it was written by either lunatics or dedicated skeptics, neither of whom she trusted for a reliable opinion.
Most troubling was the fact that she wasn’t able to find anything related to the emotional disturbance that had accompanied her recent encounters. There were occasional stories about feeling sorrow or loneliness when bumping into a spirit, but nothing to the degree of what she had experienced, and certainly no inexplicable sense of allure in addition to the sadness and pain and fear. She had truly expected to find something that might help explain what was going on, or at least accounts from other people who had experienced similar sensations. Instead, her search had left Alessa feeling more alone than ever.
Glancing at the pile of textbooks on her desk, Alessa remembered the slowly accumulating mountain of reading that she had yet to tackle. She didn’t even want to try to calculate the number of pages she had due in the next week. Alessa weighed the possibility of powering through some text tonight, but the thought of delving into
Dawne Prochilo, Dingbat Publishing, Kate Tate