The house in question is a hundred-year-old brownstone which our landlords bought and painstakingly refurbished. Apparently it had been a crack den for about a decade, and then had been abandoned for another ten years before John and Marie bought it. The ghost quickly made his presence known, rattling, slamming, talking... appearing.

"He's an old man," said Marie matter-of-factly. "He's basically friendly. And since we repainted and opened up this door" - she indicated doors leading to a small back garden — "we've hardly heard anything. Now, I'm not afraid to go the bathroom alone anymore." Her husband murmured unconvincingly that he didn't believe in ghosts, but I wasn't questioning it: When we'd first entered the apartment, my boyfriend had felt what he called "bad vibes" — which I impatiently dismissed as flummery in the face of affordable rents and original tiling.

Now, as we start moving in, I'm wincing at every gust of wind or rattling from the attic. I've never experienced a haunting; in fact, in college I lived for a year in a room where someone had allegedly hanged herself in the 1920s, and felt not so much as a chill. That said, I've heard enough stories not to dismiss them, most particularly my mother's tale of working as a housekeeper for an elderly lady with a perfectly-preserved Victorian nursery, that doesn't bear getting into. Maybe it's too bad that I just read Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Then too, as we speak, a normally pragmatic friend is having a horrible time with a small house he's rented down in his Georgia hometown. In the few months he's lived there, he's been unable to sleep due to the singing, the forces which he swears shake him awake, and his dog's terrified whimpering. It got so bad that he started crashing on friends' couches and even decided to look into the property's history. Now, he wishes he hadn't - it turns out his plot was once a KKK lynching site. He's staying with a friend until he can get his things out.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still excited at the upcoming move. Scariest case scenario, well, I'll just introduce myself and, I don't know, leave some kind of offering. But I've asked a friend to stay over that first night. And I'm seriously considering buying some sage — just in case.

Given the youth of most of its user-demographic, death probably isn't something Facebook has really had to deal with. But as the Times' Michelle Slatalla discovers, it can haunt those left behind. Someone might be dead and mourned,

...but on Facebook, people live on — indefinitely — because the profiles of dead users are not routinely deleted. The company confers “memorial” status on deceased users’ accounts, having learned after the Virginia Tech shootings that many survivors want to grieve online by, say, posting goodbye messages on the walls of deceased Facebook users.

Slatalla's friend Steve, never much of a Facebook user, inserts himself into her life through birthday notifications and his smiling picture long after his death from cancer. Because, unless you take special steps, requesting that Facebook delete an account (probably not any bereaved person's highest priority) there's no "death" status that suddenly goes into effect. Says an FB rep, "'Many people who have somebody they’re still mourning find it very comforting and feel it keeps them connected to a loved one.'”

In a way, it makes a certain kind of sense. To a large degree, Facebook acts as a sort of second memory, keeping you vaguely aware of people from your dim past and abreast of far-away friends. It certainly aids in remembering quotidian things - birthdays, spouse names, current jobs - and, for good or ill, keeps you uniquely connected to the past. While, undeniably, there's something a little macabre about an abandoned Facebook page - and something very lonely about an unvisited one - a well-visited, tended profile with regular pokes and messages could become a sort of cut-rate 21st century mausoleum, and there are worse things.

Friends To The End And Beyond [NY Times]

According to a recent Pew survey, 68% of Americans "either 'completely agree' or 'mostly agree' that angels (and demons) are active in this world." Colleen Hughes, editor of Angels on Earth told CBS News that she believes most people believe in angels "because too much stuff happens to us that we can't explain. There are coincidences that we're willing to chalk up to coincidence, and there's too much that we aren't, because we have this feeling that it was something else."

Tom Elliott believes in angels, though he's not sure that all angels are the winged, trumpeted variety. After promised tickets to a baseball game fell through, Elliot and his young son, who were attempting to carry on a family tradition shortly after the death of Elliott's father, found themselves out of luck until a stranger approached with two tickets. "He said, 'I've got 2 tickets for you here. I want your young son to see the game,' and he just handed us two tickets. And as we looked down at the tickets, he turned around and walked away. Before we could barely even say 'thank you.'"

Elliot and his son were able to see the game from the best seats in the house, and Elliot's son noted that one seat next to them was left empty; a sign, he believed, that his grandfather was with them. Was it an angel that delivered those tickets? Edward Grinnan, the editor of Guideposts, says it's all a matter of perception: "I mean, it's the interpretation of Tom and his son that really does matter. And to them, that man was an angel. He performed an angelic deed, if you will. And his actual origins I don't think are as relevant as the effect that that deed had on those two people."

As we saw in the comments of our Saturday Night Nostalgia post yesterday, several commenters were visited by "angels" who left gifts and holiday meals on their doorsteps. They didn't come from some otherworldly place, but from the same neighborhoods, same streets, same towns. Maybe it's easier to assign goodwill to "angels" when the world often makes it difficult for us to trust or see the goodness in one another, but you don't need wings and a halo to give someone a gift of kindness. You just have to have a heart.

Do Angels Exist? [CBS News]

An article by Joyce Wadler in today's Times answers some of these questions, along with an age-old one: when the lights are flicking on and off, and your kid's book is levitating above her head, and a celebrated makeup artist is appearing to you in the night, who you gonna call?

One "ghost cleaner" is Bonnie Vent, who says that what ghosts respond to is "communication." Unlike my train buddies, she believes remedies like holy water and sage have no effect. She charges $125 an hour to cleanse your house of ghosts, but you can visit her website [warning: Bonnie Vent's voice loudly identifies itself as that of a "spirit advocate," potentially embarrassing you at work] for free. The highlight of the site is this message from George Carlin [go to page 3], in which he informs Bonnie that he is not in hell, that "people are really stupid," and that she is "gathering clients." He makes no connection between the latter two points.

The Times article includes a lot of fun stories, including that of toddler Anna, who used to giggle when no one was around. One day Anna's mother heard her arguing with someone, and turned around to find the child's book floating above her head. Anna claimed to be "sharing" with Katie, a little ghost girl who Anna's mother later identified as having hair "like Marcia Brady." Then there's the ghost of makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin, who appeared to interior designer Guy Clark wearing "a blue cabana suit, blue shorts and a shirt, like what people wore in the ’60s." And there's a discussion of an "obese, overweight black shadow figure" that suggests that people's prejudices extend to the spirit world.

What's striking about the article as a whole, though, is the extent to which otherwise reasonable people believe in something pretty irrational. Part of this may be that, as Wadler says, "the believers tell a much better story" than the skeptics. Which are you? Have you ever seen a ghost? Have you ever seen the ghost of George Carlin?

Supernatural Cleaning Methods [NY Times]