“In third grade we went on a field trip to this place called the Heritage Farmstead, which was like an old abandoned farm that had been restored and turned into a museum I think. We were walking around outside looking at all the old tools and machinery and stuff they used in the past and the tour guide was talking about the people that lived there in the 1800s. But I swear when I looked up at one of the buildings, I saw an old man staring out of the second floor window. He started to turn away and I grabbed my friend but by the time he looked, the old man was gone. The tour guide told us that no one lived in any of the buildings anymore, and when I asked, they said rarely anyone ever went inside except the occasional maintenance person. I’m almost sure I saw a ghost that day, the dude was really white and looked almost transparent. I was kind of freaked out, and even telling you now I get the shivers thinking about it.”

The informant has turned his experience into a memorate, an experience affected by social conditioning to fit the mold of a well known archetype. He is the only one to have seen the man, saying it was gone when his friend looked. Also, he describes the ghost as white and almost transparent, saying it was of an old man. While these all may have been true facts, it is probably that his experience was changed to fit the description of “ghost.”

Also, the conditions in which the experience occurred are prime for ghostly sightings. Old, abandoned farms are places where ghosts reside, liminal areas where the old inhabitants have left but the new have not yet come in. While it could have been a janitor or maintenance person, the informant chooses to believe that it was an encounter with the supernatural.