The fictional kid in the movie, The Sixth Sense, saw dead people.  If I recall correctly, he interacted with some of them, while others were apparently either unaware of him or uninterested in interaction.  Even if I got that wrong, in the general run of ghostly encounters some involve interactions and some do not.

For the sake of discussion, let’s just set aside any such encounters where the lack of interaction is due to a lack of perception or a case of denial on the part of the unquestionably “alive” person involved.  Some people simply do not see dead people, and others would not admit it if they did.  While we’re setting things aside, let us also dispense with the category, “undead,” where the person involved is presumed dead, in that what we know as “life” has ceased, but the corpse continues to move around on its own.   Poltergeist activity is another more-or-less related (in some people’s minds) phenomenon I’d like to dispense with for now.  Okay?

When a “ghost” is perceived by a living person, and that person attempts unsuccessfully to interact with said ghost, I suppose it might, at least sometimes, be because he or she has encountered a deaf, blind, snobbish, or shy and retiring ghost.  It might also be the case that this is not a “ghost” or “spirit” at all, but rather an apparition or “psychic imprint.”  Apparitions are “ghosts” which either appear in one spot for brief periods of time, or appear in the same place on a number of separate occasions, are seen by a number of different people, but do not interact with the observers.  I have observed several of these in my lifetime.

Psychic imprints are similar to apparitions, but usually involve a sequence of events or actions, like a ghostly movie or spectral tape loop.  Every one that I have ever heard of has been associated with some violent or catastrophic event.  I witnessed one such event, a bloody knife fight, outside an old Rocky Mountain saloon.  At first, I was not aware that what I was seeing wasn’t actually occurring then and there.  Later on, I learned that I was far from the first person to have viewed that fight.  Both of the men involved had died of their wounds soon after the battle took place, and had been seen re-enacting the fight for close to a century.

I have read accounts of psychic imprints involving incidents such as military battles (The Charge of the Light Brigade is said to have generated one.); executions (Anne Boleyn’s beheading, for one); and disasters (Mary Summer Rain writes of a family killed in a house fire, in her book, Phantoms Afoot.).  I’m ready to stipulate that none of the “dead people” seen in apparitions or psychic imprints is alive, and I would suggest that they are not really dead people at all, but phantasms, ghostly and unreal, memories of some sort, imprinted on the place by the strong feelings involved in their creation.

Now we are coming down to the “dead people” whose true status I was questioning in my title.  These are “ghosts” of a specific type:  the wandering spirit or “discarnate entity.”  They can haunt places, but differ from psychic imprints in that their actions are not stereotyped and repetitive, and they interact with people.  They can also move from place to place, and some of them “haunt” or attach themselves to living people.  I do not consider them dead.  Their bodies died, but their essence, their consciousness, did not.  You may dispute this, but I think you’d have a hard time convincing me otherwise.

I know people who would not dispute my contention, because they have frequent interactions with discarnate entities.  My own encounters have been relatively infrequent, but they have been intense.  A bit over 2 decades ago, an entity attached itself to my son and me, going from one of us to the other so that for a few months we were taking turns being insane, until I released it.  Not long after that, I met and married a shaman, and we spent part of our honeymoon releasing entities as a team.  Interesting work, but not what I’d call fun by any stretch of the imagination.  Some of those spirits had experienced sudden death, and death for some of them had come too slowly – they had been tortured. 

We just happened to end up, for our honeymoon, in a town near the Mexican border, where a ring of human traffickers had imprisoned, tortured and murdered at least 23 young men.  For weeks, we were being guided from one crime scene to another so we could confront suffering, terrified, disoriented consciousnesses and persuade them to enter the Light.  On the evening of 9/11/01, we did somewhat the same kind of work, at a distance, linking victims of the Towers with relatives waiting outside the barricades, for their last good-byes.

You might — even I, in a particularly earthbound and materialistic mood, might — ascribe the foregoing experiences to a vivid imagination.  You might also dismiss another of my stories as fantasy, but I cannot.  I experienced it myself and remember it vividly.  I was, for a time, a discarnate entity, between incarnations.  I’d been raped and murdered, thrown into the sea still breathing, but unwilling to detach from an unwise passion that had led to my demise.  I attached myself to the object of that passion, and made of him a haunted man.  It’s not a particularly long story, but why should I write it down again when I’ve already done so?  It is here.

I would not call discarnate “ghosts” dead.  Lacking a living body, a meat vehicle, to run around in, doesn’t make one dead.  So, for me, the question of whether dead people are dead comes down to whether we are talking body or spirit.  Morticians and medical examiners see dead people all the time.  I have seen a few corpses, myself.  Seeing “ghosts” is not such a simple matter.