Ghosts are everywhere ... if you know where to look

There’s no need to attend seances where, in artfully darkened rooms, fraudulent mediums spew ectoplasm and implore ghosts to levitate tables.

Ghostsdoexist. In vast numbers. I have seen many of them – and so, dear reader, have you. Picture: istock

Ghost. Noun. An apparition of a dead person that becomes manifest to the living.

For the final scene of his series The Ascent of Man, the late scientist and philosopher Jacob Bronowski chose a scene from the Final Solution. Auschwitz. Where the Nazis murdered over a million men, women and children. There Bronowski stood in the rain, amidst a vast pile of human ashes raked from the crematoria, to say that despite the ultimate inhumanity of the setting, where so many of his fellow Jews (plus Russians, Poles, Gypsies and the disabled) had been gassed, he remained optimistic for the future of humankind.

The gates leading to the Nazi Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.

I’ve stood where he stood and found it hard to agree. Decades later, I’m even less optimistic. And I left Auschwitz thinking that if ghosts existed, the air in that hellish place would have been thick with them. A million unquiet souls. And yet I saw none, felt none. Ghosts are not reported by visitors to death camps, those theme parks for horror.

We tend to think of ghosts in the singular, as with Hamlet’s dead dad appearing to him on the battlements at Elsinore, which I’ve also visited. Or in the ruins of English castles. Unquiet souls denied the luxury of resting in peace.

Belief in ghosts is widespread. It is often associated with the worship of ancestors and thus is central, for example, to Vietnamese culture. My young daughters tried to convince their sceptical father that they’d seen one in the hallway of our old house in Hawthorn.

We make jokes about ghosts, using laughter to assuage the fear of things that go bump in the night. But ghosts do exist. In vast numbers. I have seen many of them – and so, dear reader, have you.

There’s no need to attend seances where, in artfully darkened rooms, fraudulent mediums spew ectoplasm and implore ghosts to levitate tables. Instead, let movies be your medium – and in a séance-dark cinema, let the light from the bio box, emerging like ectoplasm, project ghosts onto the legendary silver screen.

For well over a century, films have given us ghosts. Countless, restless numbers of them. You watch them every time you stream something from the golden age of Hollywood or Pinewood, or from the sound stages in Paris, Rome or Italy. Some go back to the silent era – think of the ghosts of Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino and Mary Pickford. They’re ghosts that walked – and later talked – thanks to the supernatural powers of technology.

Charlie Chaplin.

Actors have been haunted by ghosts of themselves, too. As was the case when I sat beside an ancient Jimmy Stewart in the seance of a Sydney cinema. When, for the first time in half a lifetime, he watched himself acting with the glowing ghost of the late Grace Kelly in a revival of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. It was, a saddened Stewart told me, a painful experience. So it’s not only Jesus who could raise the dead. So could Hitchcock. Ghosts linger on every second DVD, ready to emerge from their graves like dozens, whole divisions of undead Draculas.

Each of us is haunted by our past, by the ghosts of our memories. But there is life after death. At least for movie actors.