The following ghost story was told to my informant by a friend of his. It is the story of when his friend was a ghost.

“I was asking him if he knew any good Irish ghost stories and he said “oh you mean like when I was a ghost” and I said “oh yeah well that sounds interesting, tell me” and so he was in the university and he had just decided to go home one weekend up in Donegal which is a ways away from Dublin, and so he was hitching, hitch hiking across, and he got this ride uh with this uh guy on a motorcycle, but they got into a wreck and he got thrown off the motorcycle and hit his head and went unconscious for a little while. Ya know, he woke up, everything was fine and he didn’t really say anything about it and he hitched the rest of the way home and he showed up at home and his sister ran up to the door and she was all worried and she said “you’re okay, you’re alive!” and he’s like “uh yeah why” and she said “well because uh, ya know I came down earlier and there was this vision of you just standing at the front porch but you, you weren’t talking, you weren’t saying anything, and then you disappeared. And then he figured out when she had seen that was when he had been knocked unconscious.”

In western tradition, this instance would be explained as an out of body experience–one can attribute the difference in definition to the fact that to be a ghost in Western tradition, you have to be dead. However in Irish tradition, the ghost, or “tannasg” can also mean apparition. Thus like the individual in this story, you can exist as a ghost while still being alive.