The evidence for the existence of ghosts, among the living, is as wraithlike as the phenomenon it is supposed to corroborate. It is given only by episodes straightforwardly described as fleeting autostimulations of the brain, inadvertent and unilateral twitches of stray sensory doodads, perceptual wireworks puppet-tugging at unusually passive observers who are as indisposed to probe, challenge, or query an apparent apparition as they are positively inclined toward creative reinterpretation, confabulation. Kim the ghost had been successfully haunting a casino for years, where people were known to regularly hallucinate. This gave Kim opportunities to ask the living for favors when she was hungry.
Kim was long dead and most of the time was dead hungry. Ghosts need to eat too, but their meal options are extremely limited. While ghosts sometimes are in a position to manipulate things and stuff in the living world very very briefly—rattle a doorknob, turn the faucet off—they cannot reliably eat things that are objects in the living world, including dead bodies that exist in the living world. Instead, ghosts must wait for just when a living thing is in the process of dying, and at the right moment, as the dying thing is passing from one plane of existence to the next, the ghost acts. Should a ghost act too slowly, then the dying thing will simply dissipate into the void, but if the ghost gently disturbs the dying thing as it is passing, confusing it into feeling like it has a bit of unfinished business, the thing will assume ghostly form, then the ghost can eat it “alive”. Most ghosts either die of starvation or else conduct their dealings in hospitals or slaughterhouses, but Kim the ghost had found a way of making the casino work.
As part of what had become pretty standard procedure, Kim the ghost knelt down on the tacky carpet, cursing herself for being dead, cursed the many bodies milling around who could neither see nor hear her, cursed whatever gods or demons let there be hunger even after life. She shrieked her curses at the top of her ghost lungs. It was cathartic. Took the edge off starvation. Also helped whip up ectoplasm that could be used later for a-hauntin’.
Kim the ghost then, as usual, gently lowered her head to the carpet, tucked her chin to her breasts, scooped her hands behind her knees, flopped on her side into a curl, and inch-wormed her starving ghostly tuchis over to a row of slot machines just by the entrance to the buffet, moaning horribly all the way. Kim inched herself just beneath the stool of an elderly woman playing at a Ghostbuster-themed slot machine. The lady fit the profile: old, attention overloaded, inundated with noise, subject to select sensory deprivation, probably superstitious, ghost-y concepts primed, and with unexpected and limited exposure to the soon-to-be-hallucinated object. Kim summoned what ectoplasm she could in order to bring the lady into a state of veridical hallucination. She wheezed up at the lady: “Order the lobster! It’s fresh!”
The lady didn’t notice: ectoplasm wasted.
In life, Kim the ghost had been vegetarian, but it is especially difficult for ghosts to be vegetarian. Since the only food that ghosts can eat is ghost food, and ghost food becomes ghost food by being gently disturbed at the moment of its death, in order to eat a ghost fruit or a ghost vegetable, a ghost would need to know exactly when the fruit or vegetable dies. But an apple doesn’t die right when it’s plucked from a tree; it continues to live tree-free, processing oxygen as it ripens. So when does an apple die? When part of it starts to rot? When half of it is rotting? Is there any reliable way to tell when it’s about to happen? And how do you bestow unfinished business on an apple? Questions like these led most ghosts seamlessly into the consumption of ghost-flesh.
Among ghosts, there are two schools of thought regarding what happens when a ghostly creature is eaten by another. The Dissipationists believe that eating a ghost creature simply helps it along its path to final dissipation, accelerating its journey to oblivion, where it was headed anyway before you gently disturbed it. The Recurrentists believe that after a ghost dies it passes to yet another plane, an after-after-life, where it lives as a 2nd-order ghost, a ghost that haunts the world of 1st-order ghosts where Kim and others were. Given this picture, Recurrentists take “ghost” to be a relative term: one is not a ghost per se, but is a ghost relative to some plane of existence. One definition that gets used is: a being B that exists in plane of existence P2 is a ghost relative to some plane of existence P1 if and only if (1) B used to exist in P1 and came to exist in P2 after and because of dying in P1, and (2) B can perceive and interact with objects and events in P2 but normally cannot be perceived by normal beings in P1. Some Recurrentists believe that there is no final order of afterlife, but that there are infinitely many planes that one can travel through by means of an infinite sequence of deaths: P1 leads to P2 leads to P3 leads to P4…. Some of these Recurrentists use the word “hell” just to mean the unfortunate situation of forever being “eaten alive” by endless orders of ghosts: dying in plane P1, getting disturbed by ghosts in P2 so that they can eat you, thereby dying in P2, getting disturbed by ghosts in P3 so that they can eat you, thereby dying in P3…. But while there is overwhelming evidence for the existence of ghosts among the ghosts of any given plane, the evidence for the existence of higher-order ghosts, ghosts that are ghosts relative to that plane, is as wraithlike as the phenomenon it is supposed to corroborate.
At that point a sparrow hit a ceiling fan in the casino: jackpot. Kim ran to the little bird body twitching on the carpet. For a moment she felt pity for the bird; she didn’t want it to suffer. Her translucent hands were ready, cupped around the bird’s body even though she could not yet touch or feel it. A gambler accidentally stepped backwards onto the bird, and its body quickly filled Kim’s palm. She gently massaged the sparrow’s throat with her thumb, affectionately petting it, as though trying to wake it from a nap. She wept even as she forced its head from its body.
i dated a kim once