What a ghost really is

A rationally-based explanation at last!

On the basis of my own observations I came the conclusion that a ghost is an elemental created, generally unawarely, by a person at the time of death. Contrary to popular belief, my own indications are that ghosts are NEVER actual earthbound consciousnesses ('spirits of people who've died'). In fact the moronic and pointless behaviours of supposed ghosts really rule out any realistic possibility that they're actual consciousnesses anyway. Indeed, generally any 'behaviour' of a supposed ghost is strictly not behaviour of the ghost itself, but of impressions that one is picking up from memories stored in that elemental.

So, when you see a supposed ghost of a white-robed woman imperiously coming down the stairs carrying her priceless china set on a tray, and then almost at the bottom, looks up towards you, shrieks, dropping the priceless china set, which shatters deafeningly on the floor as she flees back upstairs with further shrieks (or it could often be just the visuals without sound), that apparition is NOT the ghost itself, which is much less precisely located. What that apparition is, is a memory stored in that ghost, which you've unwittingly connected with.

That particular apparition would normally be a more or less faithful memory, and in this case the ghost holding that memory would NOT have been left by that woman but by whoever was in front of her at the bottom of the stairs at that point and had that particular viewpoint of the incident. It could be that the latter person was actually her prospective murderer, wielding a lethal weapon, for example, or indeed a prankster holding out a whacking big spider or, shall we say, 'exposing his person' invitingly to her perhaps! But there might have been several people at roughly that position, and ghosts left by any or all of those at their respective deaths could cause people to see a similar apparition of that woman take fright rather spectacularly at the bottom of the stairs.

An interesting point here, as can be deduced from the last paragraph, is that a ghost (singular) can involve the manifestation of visual images or/and voices of more than one person, or/and indeed memory impressions of any past event, including war scenes, riots, Satanistic orgies, and so on.

A real ghost experience held up to proper scrutiny
Indeed, I've experienced this myself, where, ascending the upper slope of the mountain called Rois-bheinn in the Scottish Highlands, I could hear the distant voices of two people talking together back down in the col that I'd ascended from — the voices always stopping when I turned round to look for anyone there. I experienced that on visits over a fair number of years, and somebody else reported to me the same phenomenon in exactly the same place and situation.

My own inner inquiry pointed to the voices as being within a memory contained in a ghost, which had been unwittingly created by one person who died probably sometime in the 1900s, before the 1980s (when I started visiting Rois-bheinn). That person had become so emotionally attached to that particular spot that when (s)he died this elemental was left there, containing a memory of that person with partner somewhere in that col, talking together as they were having a lunch stop.* Some people may well also receive other faint memory impressions that the particular 'ghost' elemental is carrying.

Although it always sounded as though the voices were behind me, down in the col, my understanding is that sounds 'heard' from a ghost are really being heard only in one's mindspace; they wouldn't occur physically. They could still be heard by a number of sufficiently 'sensitive' people who happened to be unawarely connected to the particular ghost at that point, and that could convince them that the sounds were 'real' and physically 'out there'.

Note that there's nothing intrinsically scary about genuine ghosts themselves. My best understanding is that in the odd situations where supposed ghosts are acting in frightening or indeed genuinely threatening ways, they're actually elementals deliberately programmed by 'dark' practitioners of one sort or another. Certain of those elementals could be hijacked 'ghosts', but generally they wouldn't be ghosts at all, and indeed generally a hijacked ghost's ghost origin would be a non-scary aspect of its make-up.

However, a small minority of genuine, unmodified ghosts would cause people to feel fear, terror or other emotions, including grief, sadness, loneliness, depression, supposed joy, ecstasy, triumph, pride, and so on. In such cases those emotions are still just memory recordings, so a feeling of menace or terror from them does NOT signify any genuine threat in the present time.

On the other hand, if any strong emotions at all are involved, it's still best policy to get well clear of the 'ghost' all the same, because one can't be sure that it isn't a maliciously created elemental instead, which in some cases could attach to a susceptible person and cause them life-wrecking trouble.