Ghosts at your waist

My informant is an American from New York, whose family originally came from Poland 100 years ago. His grandfather was a baker and his grandmother was a peasant girl.

“It was back to the time when I was at Oxford University in England. The library there is about 800 years old. All these very serious professors, scientists and scholars they all studied there, but the library has its own ghosts. It’s interesting that everybody says that ghosts were like floating “ooo ooo ooo”, you know, appeared like that, but they only come up to your waist. These were short. One scientist figured it out was he said that as the world gets older, the ground shifts, and there is more stuff piled down, and the level of the ground is actually higher now than it was in 1200, so he’s walking like on his ground. He’s walking at his time period. Isn’t that interesting? It’s like a snapshot, a photograph from thousand years ago. It’s just a guess from the scientists. Well people who saw them said they can’t see their feet. You could believe it or not, I don’t know!”

I think there’s a very interesting relationship between science and these mysterious phenomenon. Since science started with bunch of people with strong curiosity to those strange phenomenon that hasn’t be explained at that time, and then after they have used series of experiments to prove their hypothesis right in their way, they become a sort of authority to many people nowadays. However, there are still so many strange things in the world now that could not be explained with a solidified answer that majority people could agree with. It’s like what been implied in Akira Kurosawa’s movie “Rashomon” (1950) that the same event could be phrased in totally different ways by the people who have actually involved in it, and there is no way to prove the fidelity of their words and thus there is no truth at all.