It also suggests that ghosts are either dependent upon the expectations of the percipient, the "echoes" you posited, or very modest.

One of the best attested folk ghosts of the US is Abraham Lincoln's funeral train. Roughly 1/4 of all Americans then alive turned out to pay their respects as Lincoln's body was driven round the nation and many people today claim to have encountered the ghost train following its original route. A lot vividly describe the low-slung flatbed car with Lincoln coffin on it. And that's strange because the train never looked like that. What it did have was a very distinctive front with a unique cowcatcher that is never noted by modern viewers. Odd, eh?







This seems to me to be an argument in favour of hoax or "expectation" phantoms. At the least it suggests that the viewer plays an active role in the ghost's appearance.







The research goes back at least to the 1970s with Tom Graves' "Needles of Stone". Graves argued that the water in tiny microstreams beneath haunted places (and stone circles) carried ley energies that enabled ghost encounters. Others have offered scientific explanations such as water-caused vibrations shifting objects or generating pizzoelectric charges.







When I say nothing happened I mean nothing. Shep's brother was quite large.