Letters To The Editor: "Media Profiling Against Ghosts?"

Dear Editor,

Whenever you hear about a haunted house or a cursed hotel or a possessed antique knick-knack, there's a pretty slim chance that it's going to be good news. And that's exactly my point: If it's on the news, it's not good news. And I'd like to set the record straight.

I've been dead for over 400 years, and every single time I hear a report about a haunting, it's always a smear campaign against the Non-Living. I can't even walk down a busy street anymore without getting all kinds of dirty looks and horrified screams. You only read about the times people woke up covered in scratch marks or when blood started dripping down their walls. What about that time my Living people woke up and found a nice batch of fresh cookies in the oven? Or when my neighbors waxed their car and Gregory stayed out there all day scaring away pigeons from landing on their car? I'll bet I'd be correct in assuming you never heard about those.

You know how there's all kinds of good, honest people out there, who just go on living their lives day by day, never harming a fly and keeping to themselves? You never hear about those people on the news. Ever. But then you never stop hearing about the people that make a night out of robbing liquor stores, beating up old people, and jacking cars. They're the one's breaking out of the mold of society's standards, so they're the ones who get all the attention and recognition. Same goes for us living-impaired folks.

Not all of us are out to make you leave your house or murder your loved ones. When you die, and you draw the short straw of spending eternity in the void of Purgatory, your personality doesn't die along with you. You're still you, just not in a corporeal sense. If you were a shy introverted person in the before-life, then you'll have no problem quietly sharing a house with the Living. You just have to find the right place. Find a host family who likes to watch the same TV shows as you, goes to bed at the same time as you, and doesn't have parental blocks on their internet access. (Trust me, when you have an infinite number of hours to kill until the end of time and you think you've seen it all, you'll need all the deepest, darkest recesses of the internet to keep you entertained before you kill yourself from boredom. You know, if you could.)

Now if you preferred to spend your before-life putting people's heads in toilets, starting bar fights, and throwing kittens, then the tight grip of death isn't going to let you stop trying to make up for your own inadequacies just because you stopped having a body. Just because you no longer have a penis doesn't mean you can just let yourself and everyone in your 10th grade gym class forget how small and inefficient it was. Remember that girl who wouldn't go to Prom with you and caused you to start drinking uncontrollably and drive a gratuitously huge truck and workout to the point that you don't even remember what a neck looks like, so now every person you come in contact with is forced to notice you? People like you are the people who become the ghosts you see on the news and reality television. The ones who can't just relax and be happy. You can't just hang out it the attic peacefully. You have to make your presence known and kick shit around and make noise. You're the reason the rest of us are getting such a bad rap.

So what does all this have to do with you, the dear Living readers of this publication? What am I trying to accomplish? I'm just trying to shed some light on what the large majority of us ghosts go through. For the most part, we're polite, and we try our best to stay out of your way. Most of you already live with one or more of our kind, and you've never noticed us and you never will. We're not all evil, revenge-driven spirits. So if we accidentally brush against you and you feel a chill, or we try to help save you some money on your electric bill by shutting doors for you that you left open, PLEASE don't feel the need to call every news station, housecall-making clergyman, or group of frat boy rejects with a night-vision camera crew and a permit from the Travel Channel. Nobody's going to believe you on the evening news, your reenactment on "Ghost Adventures" is going to have terrible dialogue and subpar acting and be damn near unwatchable, and considering we all missed the Heaven and Hell exits on the highway of the after-life, most of us have let our religious beliefs fall by the wayside, so all an exorcism is going to do for you is get holy water all over your bedroom. And nobody wants a wet bed.

Sincerly,
Thaddeus Billingsly,
Professor of Necromanthropology
and
Press Secretary for the NAASP (National Association for the Advancement of Spectral People)

P.S. You know when you're watching a TV show, and all of a sudden the commercials come on and they're ear-shatteringly loud? That's just one of us hanging out with you. Ghosts are really into advertising for some reason, and we love to hear them. Every day is like the Super Bowl to us, and we don't want to miss a single one. Plus, we figure you're probably not paying attention to them anyway. Our bad.