First They Came For The Vampires

First it was proving vampires are a mathematical impossibility. Now they're going for the ghosts and zombies. Those evil scientist types are debunking the most cherished part of many people's delusional beliefs just in time to take all the fun out of Halloween! Evil, bad, evil scientists! (Actually, it is all part of the same paper written by the same authors).

Using science and math, Efthimiou explains why it is ghosts can't walk among us while also gliding through walls, like Patrick Swayze in the movie "Ghost." That violates Newton's law of action and reaction. If ghosts walk, their feet apply force to the floor, but if they go through walls they are without substance, the professor says.

"So which is it? Are ghosts material or material-less?" he asks.

Zombies and vampires fare even worse under Efthimiou's skeptical microscope.

Efthimiou looked at the most prominent child-turned-zombie case that zombie aficionados cite: the 1989 case of a Haitian 17-year-old who was declared dead and then rose from the grave a day after the funeral and was considered a zombie. The boy, who never died but was paralyzed and could not communicate, had been poisoned with toxins from a relative of the deadly Japanese pufferfish, later research showed.

Now we here at Blue Crab Boulevard take great exception to having our paranormal investigations disproven by a bunch of scientists. We have a subsidiary, Professor Gaius' Parnormality Research Academy and Coffee Shop®, that is the number one paranormal research somewhere, we're sure of it. Those hardworking folks have documented case after case of ghostly apparitions! Ships, pubs and more pubs. But we do wish people would stop mispronouncing paranormal. It is not supposed to be pronounced 'abnormal'. 

The paper is actually quite well written and can be accessed directly here. It will, of course, make no difference to the true believers out there. But then, many of the true believers in ghosts and zombies and UFOs have now moved on to another pseudoscience altogether: 9/11 conspiracy theories.