I *do* believe in spooks!

I ::heart:: kookery.
How To Create a Ghost:

Many researchers of the paranormal suspect that ghostly manifestations and poltergeist phenomena (objects flying through the air, unexplained footsteps and door slammings) are products of the human mind. To test that idea, a fascinating experiment was conducted in the early 1970s by the Toronto Society for Psychical Research (TSPR) to see if they could create a ghost. The idea was to assemble a group of people who would make up a completely fictional character and then, through seances, see if they could contact him and receive messages and other physical phenomena - perhaps even an apparition.

OK, I'll admit it: I *do* sorta believe in ghosts. Not that they're the souls of dead people or anything--just that they're manifestations of weird electrical energy. OK, I've said too much. This is more embarassing than admitting I liked that Nickelback song that came out a couple summers ago. (D'oh! I need to quit while I'm ahead.)

Another one of my obsessions: False memories and the myth of multiple personality disorder. There's a great review of two books on this very topic in the most recent issue of the NY Review of Books:The Trauma Trap.

If the origins of our mass delusion were complex, its dissipation in the mid-1990s is easily explained. Like the Salem witch hunt three centuries earlier, the sex panic had no internal brake that could prevent its accusations from racing beyond all bounds of credibility. The stirring motto "Believe the children" began to sound hollow when preschoolers who finally agreed that they must have been inappropriately touched went on to describe having been dropped into a pool of sharks or turned into a mouse.