Why Can Some See The Dead and Others Not?

[Luckers]

A. Pseudonym raised an interesting question which I thought deserved its own thread.

 

Regarding Ghosts.

 

When Mat is bringing Tuon and Selucia into that town in Altara, he sees ghosts, but the other don't and assume that his dodging of the ghosts is a sort of dance.

 

On another occasion, Ituralde is watching a column of Seanchan soldiers charging along a road and assumes that they have run down a group of peasants that they seemed not to see.

 

Why is it that the ghosts are not visible to everyone when they appear?

 

The tGS header highlights this issue.

 

Ravens and crows. Rats. Mists and clouds. Insects and corruption. Strange events and odd occurences The ordinary twisted and strange. Wonders. The dead are beginning to walk and some see them. Others do not, but more and more, we all fear the night. These have been our days. They rain upon us beneath a dead sky, crushing us with their fury, until as one, we beg, "Let it begin.

 

Curious. Is there something significant in those that do see/do not see the dead?

[DemandredFO]

There could be but I don't see it.  Mat has seem them(I'm not counting the Shiotan village), Ituralde, I think we've heard of Seanchan not sure, novices and accepted, a maid that Elayne belittles.

[FarShainMael]

The first thought that occurs to me is that Mat and Ituralde are both battle commanders. Not just fighters like Selucia or everyday soldiers, but war leaders. One significance that may attach to this is that they are responsible for the lives of those they command, so maybe the DO is trying to send them on a guilt trip like Rand's with the women who have died on his account. Not sure how this would apply to novices etc though.

 

Just a first thought.

 

 

[alannalynn]

I would think that it's a way to make the pattern be more unbalanced. The DO is coming, the world is in chaos-- would you be more fearful if everyone saw the ghosts or if you believed your next door neighbor is going wonky in the head and may start randomly killing people because only he sees them? I think the randomness of ghostys is part of how the pattern is unbalanced.

[Durinax]

because that is the way I, I mean the DO wants it. It could be that people who have a lot of luck see them because the pattern warps chance a tiny bit around them, so in this warping as the pattern gets weaker the warps are like divits in a piece of clothe, water will naturally gather in lower spots. I hope i am being clear here. . .

 

its just that a quote brought this to mind "to a good general luck is important"

[JakeBarnes]

In order to see the invisible people, you have to have watched a Thestral die.

[DemandredFO]

No, you have to have seen a Raken die. ;D

[alannalynn]

lmao! Yep, thestrals.

[MikeRiley]

Maybe you have to have seen the dead or heard of them in life. It would explain why some people can't see the ghosts and why Mat is seeing ancient ones. A thinning of barriers, the Dark One is also known as the Lord of the Grave but those souls are probably already spun back out. I would say they are just illusions drawn from memory.

[Dida]

Curious. Is there something significant in those that do see/do not see the dead?

 

  Might be only a correlation, that some humans see the walking dead and others do not.  Or might there be a cause & effect relationship in some way? 

 

 

  At first I was thinking along the lines of a prior Blood relationship, connecting those who see their distinct ancestors.  However, there is another case where Beonin saw one of her now dead Aes Sedai teacher's in Tar Valon--Turanine Merdagon who died forty years prior.  That would seem to knock off a Blood tie being absolutely necessary to view the walking dead.       

 

  Then I thought it might be species specific, meaning only the dead of one's own species might be seen. As in Loial experience being unable to see human dead walking near to Lord Algarin's manor house.  However, should not wolfbrothers be been able to see dead wolves walking/running too?  A Wolfbrother can already seen dead wolves in the Wolf Dream, of which Hopper is an example to Perrin.  Or are Wolves different from Humans in the same way as Ogier are, for purposes of the walking/run dead?  I cannot recall an example of either Wolves or Ogier dead walking in the physical world.... 

 

  One question I have to which I have is, if the human dead are walking in the physical world, does that mean those same human dead are no longer in the 3rd Constant/TAR or Wolf Dream for the time being?  Or do they exist in both places simultaneously, like a Aiel Dreamwalker is partially in the physical world & the  Dream world, except that the positions are reversed for the walking human dead?

 

  If the dead walk in So Harbor and attempt to get vengeance on the living who murdered them, should not a similar event be occurring in the White Tower?  Where the Black Ajah has ended up killing innocent Aes Sedai for roughly a thousand years now?  A good number of Aes Sedai Ghosts with vengeance on their minds? As in Sierin Vayu's Ghost searching for Chesmal Emry and a bunch of Red Ajah murders? 

 

[MikeRiley]

So Harbor, the ghost village that sucked in the peddler and Hinderstap might be considered special cases or bubbles of evil instead of the actual ghost phenomenon. Nowhere else do we really see the dead interacting with the living, and it appears as if the hauntings are residual, which would mean the ghost has no intelligence - it's just a sequence of events that are replayed, so to speak.

 

We see this outside.. that one city in The Gathering Storm, the name slips my mind at the moment. The ghosts walk in a procession every night at a certain time. In I think Algarin's Manor a servant screamed because she saw a dead taskmistress glaring at her, but this could also be a case of residual haunting and the task mistress was just glaring at somebody else who might be long dead themselves. Meaning, it wasn't at her but at that area she was in. If there were any ghosts walking through walls, that would also point towards this type.

 

 

[A. Pseudonym]

There doesn't seem to be any pattern or general rule which applies across the board.

 

A village in Shiota - the whole of Luca's circus saw it. It looked real.

The procession around the city in Arad Doman - the whole city saw it, minus Loial. It looked fairly unreal.

 

The road in Altara - only Mat saw it. Same with Ituralde for all I know. I don't think his men mentioned seeing the peasants getting run down.

 

In So Habor, I think it was mentioned that the Lord there feared the spirit of his dead wife and fled. So that is a point in favour of a personal link between witness and apparition.

 

It could be that these "ghosts" are not actual spirits but replaying sequences of the pattern, bubbles of evil causing something that happened previously to be ... seen again, warping the pattern to play back itself, with dire consequences for anyone in the immediate vicinity when it realigns.

 

I honestly have no idea. I don't think the ghosts are "real" though.

[mb]

This page talks about the ghosts::

http://linuxmafia.com/jordan/1_dark/1.6_beasties/1.6.3_ghosts.html