When you die, you stay behind. The living, and that includes everyone who is not physically dead, move on to their own rendezvous with pastscapes. This is the environment of ghosts, the recycled and recurring memories of events, experiences, activities, and habits. Here, the past is also the present and its future. A ghost is situated in a liminal position that is centered at a particular crossroads. But, there is only one perceived route. There is no “road not taken”. There is only the road taken back to an individual pastscape. A ghost cannot move on,(for whatever reason) and beyond the boundaries of its individual past. It can only go back to a particular multiple past. The past-present-future are symmetrical. A location may have multiple ghosts with multiple past experiences. In each of these situations, a variety of different structural ghost poses and personalities may be performed. In such an environment, an investigator needs to use “ghost relativity” in order to separate and analyze a particular situational personality and memory of the ghost for that particular location.

How is this accomplished? Ghost research is archaeological. You “dig down” to earth, and bring to the surface these past multiple worlds. In the excavation process, there is (hopefully) a re-initiation of the continuation of the “life cycle” beyond the liminal state. You, as investigator, achieve this through the extraction of the original context of the haunt drama, viewing the phenomena on the surface from the outside looking into the past. This is an insightful, and careful, excavation. The digging is an act of personal and collective remembering of what it was like to have lived. This is because the physical space that is now being excavated was once a space of experiences and activities that were different personal memories composed of individuals. So let us show a little respect and a relativity of understanding when we begin to “dig” into other people’s lives, and the continuation of their still living dramas.