I don't believe in ghosts.

I wish I could. Nothing would give me more pleasure than to know that one of my dear departed -- my mother or father or sister or two brothers -- had tried to make contact with me from The Great Beyond, The Other Side, or whatever we want to call where dead people do or not exist. Wouldn't it be great to hear from anyone -- ANYONE -- from that side? To know that the divide between living and being dead is actually permeable? That messages could be sent from that side to this side? From the dead to the living?

So far as I can tell, it's never happened. Now, I know that there are legions of people who will differ with me, who will claim to have contacted -- or been contacted by -- their beloved deceased. But -- come on now -- nobody ever produces credible evidence, right?

We're all familiar with the accounts of pots and pans rattling in the kitchen or specters appearing in the hallway, all film and whiteness, but how many people whose judgment you trust has ever told you even one story of actually encountering a ghost?

Think about it.

Believe me, I do wish I could make contact with another dimension, in this case that of the dead, but I just can't come up with a single believable account. I close my eyes and try to conjure someone I've known who's died, but nothing comes up but memories of that person alive. I may even say a mantra -- a word supposed to calm oneself into another mental state ("Om" being the most popular) -- but still no one emerges from the afterlife.

Popular literature and movies love the idea of ghosts, as I do. What could be better than having people who have died coming back to (1) avenge old wrongs (2) ignite old love affairs (3) tell secrets that were buried with them (4) enlighten us about what awaits us (5) assure us that we will emerge, from death, into some afterlife?

Which does make me think that the idea of ghosts has more to do with you and me and our reluctance to accept death than it does with any real evidence. We, the living, you and me, just can't accept the fact that when we die we're really dead forever. Gone. Like we never existed.

Hence ghosts.

But why are they, especially in movies and popular literature, so often evil and threatening? Why not ghosts of loved ones lost who come back to comfort us? To let us know that we're loved and that whatever lies beyond will be okay, maybe even fun? I mean, come on, can't you imagine heaven as a place where you're absolutely ecstatic? Where every dream comes true and every romantic relationship is resolved and dissolved into a perfect blending of souls?

I think ghosts are our own inventions, a result of our unwillingness to believe that life ends as it ends and that's that. We HAVE to believe that we survive our deaths and try to make contact with the living. Otherwise, we face the stark fact of our own individual extinction. Ouch!

But here's the silver lining: We're humans, and we don't know squat. We want to believe this, we fear that, we imagine this or that -- but we do not have a clue. We're like those proverbial survivors of some kind of shipwreck, stranded on an island, trying to survive. We look up at the stars and hope to see a pattern. We stare out over the ocean and make up a story about how we got here. We lie awake at night and conjure schemes to get us out of here and to safety. But, in the meantime, we're here on this island, just trying to get by day to day, and to be civil to each other. When one of us dies, we dispose of the body but hope that something of that person isn't lost, although we can't really come up with a good story that convinces us all. Still we endure.

And in that endurance is what it means to be human. We don't know why we are the only species on earth capable of imagining our own deaths. We don't know why we may be the only species capable of real and self-less love. But we do have a sense that we're different from all the other species on the planet -- maybe in the universe -- and so it's hard for us to believe that when we die we're really gone forever.

So we invent ghosts. That part of us that lives on after us. But so many questions result from that invention that it's hard to accept. Why this ghost and not that one? What effect to they have on us? Are they just chain-rattlers? Can they harm us? Can they guide us to ultimate truths? Can you put your fist through one? Embrace one? Who determines who is haunted by which ghost? And what are you supposed to do if you think you're haunted?

I wish I could believe in ghosts, and in the stories I've heard about them, but I just can't. They all reek of human desperation: the need not to be extinguished, once and for all. I understand that need, and I share it. I don't want to disappear either.

But why not take comfort in the fact that if we can imagine something -- an afterlife -- it may just be possible? Hey, stranger things have happened, right?

We may not be the masters of the universe, but we may well be the imaginers of it. If we think it, it will come!