Spirits and ghosts fall into the same family as disgraces, entities, and other beings that are thought to be inhuman or possessing no typical life-signs. The common behaviors of spirits and ghosts include certain supernatural abilities; invisibility, temporal dislocation, endless stamina, etc; as well as certain behaviors; the most widely known being haunting. This separates them from demons and entities which are known to exhibit the behavior of contracting.
There is still much debate among scholars of the arcane and supernatural of the true nature of ghosts, spirits, and a host of other entities by identified by cultural names. For the past sixty years, the two most commonly used denominations are that of spirits and ghosts.
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Terminology
The eldest recognized terminology is that of a spirit but only by a handful of years. While the idea of the personal spirit, ancestral spirits, or spirits that embody portions of the surrounding world are contemporaries (and in some cases predate that of supernatural spirits), in this context the word spirit refers solely to the ethereal remnants of a deceased individual.
Ghosts, the more modern term, have in some cultures been interchangeable with Spirits. To distinguish between the remnant of an emotion and the remnant of an intellect the term ghost became favored, since many cultures used spirit to define another, often divine, aspect of sentient life.
Characteristics
Spirits Traditionally, a spirit is created unintentionally. Through a trauma in life, the deceased is either unable to forgive or is unable to be forgiven by a living person, thus creating a ‘trap’ for that deceased energy. A spirit can only be removed from contact with the living by an act of true forgiveness by the party(ies) involved. They may also be contained by various methods such as intentional possession and exorcism, which is much more common. Spirits are notoriously difficult to communicate with due to their unstable nature – many are even unaware of their own death and unintentionally alter the memories of all they come into contact with. A spirit is often thought of as a contagious illness because of their ability to overpower a population. Often non-lethal, a spirit can easily shift into several other forms, some of which are deadly. By far, the most feared of these forms is the famed ‘emotional’ form, when a spirit morphs into grotesque shapes that are thought to represent the emotion that left them lingering among the living. Those who have seen these horrible forms describe them as resembling large animals or insects infected with fungus, weeds, or boils.
Ghosts Ghosts are generally thought to be intentional beings, rather than accidental spirits. They are not emotional leftovers of the soul but a purposely distribution of intellect, able to act with a high level of sentience based on the origin host’s ideas, desires, and doubts. While some ghosts claim to be whole beings, others claim they are only part of a once living being that has mostly passed to another, unreachable place. Most ghosts are ambivalent toward the living, keeping to themselves and offering little if any interaction with material life. They are connected to the living world through totems or by other means, though the act of creating a ghost is now so rare little is known about their origins. Modern ghosts can be destroyed by the burning or otherwise decimation of an ‘anchoring object’, commonly a grave, a treasured object, or otherwise chosen thing. Older ghosts have much more vague intentions, are less likely to communicate, and most often hesitant to reveal themselves at all. While spirits cause such a level of disturbance they do not go unnoticed for long, no one knows how many ghosts share our living world in silence.
Ongoing Debate
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