Ghostly Orbs

My family came to visit this past week and we went up to Estes Park, CO and took a tour of the Stanley Hotel. From what I’d heard, the hotel was famous because it was the backdrop for the movie The Shining with Jack Nicholson and was really excited to see it. Sadly, one of the first things we learned on the tour was that this wasn’t true at all, so I was began preparing myself for disappointment. (It was, however, the hotel that Lloyd and Harry visit in Dumb and Dumber, which helped a little.)

As the tour continued, we realized that it was more an opportunity for our tour guide to talk about how haunted the hotel is. Even more frightening than a haunted hotel was that everyone else on the tour believed it! We would enter a room, and our guide would say some slight variation of the following: “This is the billiard room. This is the room that F.O. Stanley likes the most. He still comes by to visit occasionally. If you take a picture of that bench, sometimes you’ll see a ghostly orb in the picture” (cameras flash like crazy at an empty bench) “and that’s him.” People looked eagerly at their digital picture, but sadly didn’t see anything strange at all. One woman was so determined to find something mystical that she exclaimed that she found a ghostly orb in a picture and showed it to the guide. But even he clearly didn’t see it because he just said “oh, look at that” in a bored voice before moving on with his tour. A lot of the tour was about the TV time the hotel has gotten on those haunted house and psychic TV shows. The majority of the people with us knew exactly what he was talking about because they apparently watch the shows religiously.

Which made me wonder: my whole family, including my parents who are ministers, all thought that these stories were ridiculous and largely made up. The tour gave us a lot of jokes to use later, but we didn’t believe anything that was said. But isn’t believing in ghosts a lot like believing in God? Both ideas are based on faith, and both are ways to explain the unexplainable. So how can my parents whose careers are based on people believing what can’t be proven make fun of these people? What makes one idea more valid than the other? I’m sure that more people believe in God than ghosts, but the majority isn’t necessarily right. Religion reflects on the bigger picture more than ghosts—after all, God created the earth; the most a ghost can do is rearrange furniture and turn into an incandescent floating ball.

I’ve had instances in my life where I truly believe that I’ve seen God at work, but I’m sure the people on the tour would say the same about a ghostly encounter. And I’m sure both experiences could be explained away through real, hard evidence. But does that make the experience less real? Can religious people really make fun of those who believe in ghosts without seeming hypocritical? Shouldn’t both groups be equally applauded (or deplored, depending on your views) just for having the faith to believe? Is it enough to believe in something, even if it’s not the same thing?