New York – A small team of scientists has done the impossible; demonstrating for the first time in human history the factual existence of an immortal soul and a continuation of conscious existence beyond death. This discovery should be world-changing and paradigm-shifting. Whole new avenues of science and technology should be opening; new fields of human inquiry burgeoning with potential for a greater understanding of ourselves and our universe.

Should be.

Instead, what has emerged as a result of this incredible discovery may be the most depraved and wasteful abuse ever perpetrated by scientific minds corrupted by monetary concerns.

I am referring, of course, to the Ghostbusters.

[image error]Should our first contact with the Other Side have been an act of violent aggression?

It has been said that only the dead have seen the end of war. While that may be so, we can now be perfectly certain they have not seen the end of exploitation. While the people of New York continue to find sordid entertainment in the novel distraction of a team of spook-catching spiritual exterminators, this journalist cannot help but wonder how many of them have given the matter any deeper consideration.

Francine Kirkpatrick, 48, is one citizen with reason to question the actions of the ‘boys in grey’. She accuses the Ghostbusters of assaulting and unlawfully imprisoning the spirit of her mother, Joanne, who passed away in 1976. After the death, Ms. Kirkpatrick sold her mother’s Brooklyn apartment and was unaware of the subsequent years of haunting experienced by the new owners. The spiritual presence in the apartment prompted the residents (who declined to be interviewed) to contact the Ghostbusters. The quartet of erstwhile scientists undertook the job of removing the ghost of Joanne Kirkpatrick, a process that involved attacking her with a stream of focused protons, injuring and weakening her coherent energy before ensnaring her inside a muon trap for transportation to a containment grid, a kind of purgatory-like indefinite detention facility. The apartment in question was destroyed.

And what crime had the soul of this departed woman committed to warrant such brutal and severe punishment? Rattling crockery and opening and closing some doors? Public nuisance, at best. Would we blithely accept so savage a response if the perpetrator possessed a corporeal body? Of course we wouldn’t – such actions as undertaken by the Ghostbusters would rightly be regarded as an abuse of civil rights being carried out by individuals who have no authority to be issuing or enforcing any kind of sentence.

[image error]Respect for the dead?

The people of the world now know that there is, indeed, life after death. But coming fast on the heels of that revelation, through the contemptuous, profit-driven abuses carried out by the Ghostbusters, is the disquieting realisation that all of the rights we enjoy as citizens of a free nation cease to exist at the moment of our body’s demise. And, beyond that, rather than seek a greater understanding of the spiritual world, the corporeal one has instead opted to attack and exploit it. As, perhaps, should have been expected.

Francine Kirkpatrick has petitioned the city and state to compel Venkman, Stantz, Spengler and Zeddemore to immediately release her imprisoned mother from confinement, but her enquiries have been consistently rebuffed. A direct appeal to Peter Venkman, ostensible ‘leader’ of the Ghostbusters, only resulted in sneering jokes from the scientist and an inappropriate sexual approach to the understandably upset Francine. Her next course will be to file civil suit for the freedom of her mother’s spirit, a case that, if heard, may set judicial precedent for the recognition of the inalienable human rights of a disembodied soul.

[image error]Have we literally outlawed the spirits of the deceased?

I encourage the reader to consider how they would feel if it were the spirit of their deceased loved one, shot with a destructive particle beam and encased in a cage of pure energy beneath a dilapidated firehouse. Or perhaps consider if it were you, killed and wandering the Earth, confused and hurt by your death and not knowing where to turn. Is a savage attack and imprisonment without trial by a gang of unscrupulous mad scientists really the best we can do for our honoured dead?

A day will come when the Ghostbusters are regarded as the monsters they are, listed alongside the likes of Josef Mengele, Reinhard Heydrich and the perpetrators of the Tuskagee experiment.

Venkman, Stantz, Spengler and Zeddemore have all declined to be interviewed.