Dwain Northey (Gen X)

With Halloween a week away, I find myself doing what apparently passes for seasonal entertainment: watching television shows about ghosts, haunted houses, paranormal investigators, and people who willingly spend the night in buildings where something supposedly wants them dead. Apparently, nothing says festive autumn entertainment quite like watching grown adults scare the living hell out of themselves in an abandoned asylum.

But as I watch these shows, I keep coming back to the same question: Why is it that the spirit world apparently operates almost exclusively after dark?

Seriously. Have you ever watched Ghost Hunters or any of the countless other paranormal investigation shows and noticed that nobody seems interested in investigating a haunting at two o’clock on a sunny Tuesday afternoon? No, they have to wait until midnight, turn off every light in the building, grab their flashlights, and start whispering into the darkness like they’re afraid of waking up the very things they’re supposedly there to find.

Apparently, the dead have office hours, and those hours begin after sunset.

I understand the entertainment value. A shadow moving across a dark hallway is considerably more dramatic than a shadow moving across a brightly lit room. A mysterious noise in the middle of the night makes for compelling television, while the same noise at lunchtime probably gets blamed on the plumbing. And let’s be honest, watching someone scream because a door creaked in a dark basement is considerably more entertaining than watching them investigate the same basement with the lights on and a sandwich in their hand.

But if we’re going to entertain the possibility that some form of consciousness survives physical death, why would it be restricted to the nighttime shift?

Does sunlight interfere with the afterlife? Are spirits allergic to daylight? Is there some supernatural equivalent of a union contract that prohibits paranormal activity before dusk?

And if ghosts can supposedly walk through walls, move objects, and communicate with the living, why should the position of the sun have any bearing on their ability to do so? We’re talking about entities that have allegedly escaped the fundamental rules of biology, yet apparently remain subject to the lighting preferences of a theatrical production.

Maybe the dead simply understand atmosphere better than the living.

My son once made a comment while we were watching one of these shows that has stuck with me because it was both hilarious and entirely reasonable. The investigators were exploring an allegedly haunted orphanage, supposedly inhabited by the spirits of children who had died there.

My son’s question was simple: “Why are they doing it at night? Are these kids supposed to be in bed?”

I laughed, but the more I thought about it, the more I appreciated the logic.

Apparently, even in death, children are expected to observe a bedtime. Maybe the paranormal investigators should come back during recess. Bring a few toys, leave the lights on, and see whether anyone wants to play. It might be a more productive investigation than wandering around a dark hallway asking, “Is there anybody here who wants to communicate with us?”

And if a ghostly child actually answers, perhaps the next question should be whether they have finished their homework.

The same ridiculous logic applies when these shows investigate battlefields and places associated with mass casualties. Take Gettysburg, for example. One of the bloodiest battles in American history, fought primarily during daylight hours over several days in July 1863. Thousands of men were killed in the fields, woods, and surrounding countryside.

Yet when paranormal investigators visit these historic battlefields, they inevitably seem to prefer the middle of the night.

Why?

If the theory is that people who die under traumatic circumstances leave behind some kind of spiritual imprint, why would that imprint be more active at midnight than at noon? The men who died at Gettysburg were fighting in the daylight. They weren’t stumbling around in the dark, wondering where the battle had gone. They were dealing with musket fire, artillery, smoke, and the general unpleasantness of nineteenth-century warfare while the sun was shining.

The same question applies to Lexington and Concord, Antietam, Waterloo, and countless other battlefields. Before modern warfare made nighttime operations more practical and sophisticated, many major battles were fought primarily during daylight because commanders needed to see what the hell they were doing.

So, if the spirits of fallen soldiers are still wandering those fields, are they waiting until dark to resume their duties? Does a ghostly Union soldier punch out at sunset and return to his position after midnight? Does a Confederate soldier have to wait until the paranormal investigators arrive before he can reenact the battle?

And what happens when daylight saving time begins? Do the ghosts adjust their schedules, or is that another one of those things nobody thought to ask during the investigation?

I realize that the usual explanation is that darkness makes paranormal activity easier to detect, or that spirits are more active when the environment is quiet. But those explanations seem to confuse the conditions under which people believe they experience something with the conditions under which something supernatural would actually have to exist.

Maybe people hear more unexplained noises at night because there are fewer ordinary noises competing for their attention. Maybe a dark hallway makes an ordinary shadow look sinister. Maybe our brains, which are remarkably good at recognizing patterns, occasionally find faces, figures, and movement where none exist.

And maybe, just maybe, television producers have figured out that a dark building, a night-vision camera, and someone whispering, “Did you hear that?” are more likely to hold an audience than six hours of paranormal investigators walking around a perfectly ordinary building in broad daylight.

I’m not claiming to know what happens after death. I don’t have any secret knowledge of the afterlife, and I’m not going to pretend I can definitively rule out every possibility simply because I haven’t personally encountered a ghost. The universe is a remarkably strange place, and human understanding of it remains incomplete.

But there’s a difference between acknowledging that we don’t know everything and accepting every bit of supernatural mythology without asking a few obvious questions.

If there’s another side, why should it be dark? If spirits can communicate with us, why do they apparently prefer abandoned buildings at midnight? And if a battlefield is haunted because of the violence that occurred there, why should the hour of the haunting matter?

Perhaps the dead aren’t any more active at night. Perhaps the living are simply more frightened of the dark.

Which brings us back to Halloween, the one time of year when we collectively decorate our houses with skeletons, buy miniature candy bars, and celebrate our fascination with things that go bump in the night.

I suspect the real mystery isn’t whether ghosts exist. It’s why, in a world full of unanswered questions, we’ve decided that the supernatural apparently needs a dramatic lighting department.

If I ever find myself on one of these paranormal investigations, I’m making one request: let’s go during the day.

Open the curtains. Turn on the lights. Maybe bring a picnic lunch.

And if we encounter a spirit, I have a few questions I’d like answered.

First, why do you only show up at night?

Second, if you died on a battlefield in broad daylight, what exactly have you been doing all afternoon?

And third, if you’re going to spend eternity wandering around an abandoned building, wouldn’t you eventually get bored?

After all, eternity is a pretty long time to spend waiting for somebody to turn off the lights.

Happy Halloween. Keep the porch light on. Apparently, the dead are waiting for us to turn it off.