Why Do We See Dead People?

Humans have always sensed the ghosts of loved ones. It’s only in the last century that we convinced ourselves this was a problem

- PATRICIA PEARSON

IN THE late spring of 2015, my brother-in-law paid a visit to my sister’s grave, in a lush meadow cemetery amid the Gatineau Hills of southern Quebec. My sister had been dead, at this point, for seven years, and the couple had been separated for twelve. Doug sat in the grass among planted geraniums for half an hour or so, musing about the rise and fall of their marriage. He told Katharine, or her grave, that he was sorry for the part he had played in the dissolution. Then, plucking up and tossing a handful of grass, desultory, he began his two-and-a-half-hour motorcycle journey back to Montreal.

“The landscape is open there, with a big wide sky, but it was overcast and had started to rain — just barely, but it made me a bit nervous,” Doug later told me. Even fit riders in their fifties experience the occasional lapse in confidence. “It wasn’t until I was maybe halfway home that I felt her presence.”

“The sense wasn’t physical at first,” he went on, “just this really nice, strong awareness of her. And then I had the distinct sensation of her arms around me and her leaning in close against my back. It was tactile and fantastic. I felt warm. I was completely calm and happy, smiling from ear to ear. That hardly ever happens to me.” His nervousness about the rain ebbed, and it occurred to him that Katharine was there to keep him safe on behalf of their two sons. She — her presence, her spirit — rode behind him for twenty minutes or so. “What I know is that it did not feel at all like a product of my imagination,” he said. “It felt external to me. It felt real.”