What's that thing following you?

Okay, when I said I would post more pics on Wednesday, I meant this Wednesday. Really.

Sorry about that. I know you've been waiting with bated breath to see...well, what's to see?

Most--not all, but I'd guess an easy 99%--of pictures purporting to be of ghostly activity are of orbs. Like the one to the right of this cat. Yeah, the white, round, splotchy looking thing.

Orbs are tricky. There're always questions, so it's easier to trust pictures taken by people you know, who don't mind being asked: what was the weather like? Was there dust on your camera lens? Did someone spit at you?

In this case, this picture was taken by my friend who hosted the investigation last week. She gets lots of pictures, and one reason I trust her pictures is they don't always show activity. Or they show it in a different spot in the next frame (dust on the camera lens will result in an "orb" showing up in the same part of the picture every time--I've done it myself).

So, what's an orb? Generally an orb is accepted as evidence of spirit activity. Mostly it's assumed the spirit in question is a ghost, although a lot of researchers don't rule out other spirit activity as well--I tend to view it as a visible anomaly in the energy of an area. You can get lots of orbs on film (or in digital pics) at places like old cemeteries, especially at night, but of course the challenge is ruling out mist, dust, reflected light, and so forth. In the picture here, the brightness of the object in the room on the left led a couple of researchers to suggest it had been caught in motion.

In Emerald Ecstasy, one of the characters is a ghost. (In Dreamwalk, several are.) When the heroine finds him, though, it's because he appears to her as a person. Not a mist, not a whisp of light in the corner of her eye--a full person.

That happens, too. I've friends who tell stories of trying to talk to a person who faded away after just a few seconds. I've seen a couple of pictures (pre-photoshop days, folks) that simply could not be explained away. I've taken a couple myself that have orbs in them, but the truth is I'm not all that sensitive--I have an active imagination, but ghosts don't come up and talk to me (thank goodness!), and I rarely see anything with my physical eyes that can't be explained.

But pictures...the camera catches things we don't see, and since I'm inveterately curious about the world around us--seen and unseen--I'm grateful I get to see pictures that suggest a deeper reality.