Frightening or friendly, ghosts keep lurking in the shadows.

Byline: BOB KEEFER The Register-Guard

WITH HALLOWEEN just around the corner, we just couldn't help wondering: Why do people love ghosts so much?

Ghosts, after all, are scary, vexing, threatening and annoying creatures, at least by reputation. Not the kind of folks you'd want to invite to your next dinner party, if you had a choice. And who would want them around for a long weekend at a remote mountain cabin?

But ghosts and ghost stories continue to sustain people - even people who claim not to believe in anything about them.

To find out more about ghosts, we called up four local people with what you might call a professional interest in ghosts and ghostliness: An author who teaches ghost-story writing; an artist who illustrates creepy stories; a psychologist who debunks tales from the beyond; and a psychic who says the ghosts she's encountered are as friendly as Caspar.

What is it, we asked them all, about ghosts?

"It's fun to be scared," says Eugene author Elizabeth Engstrom, who teaches a weekend ghost-story writing workshop each year at Siltcoos Lake near Florence.

"None of us are practiced at life. Every day is a brand-new challenge. Most of us spend our lives in some sort of terror as we confront those daily challenges."

A good ghost story allows us to be scared within limits, Engstrom says.

"This is a ghost story. I can be really scared here. I know I have done this before, and I can survive that movie."

The best of Engstrom's students' ghost stories were published last year in "Dead on Demand," a $14.95 paperback available through Triple Tree Publishing (go to www.TripleTreePub.com).

What makes a good ghost story, she says, is the same thing that makes a good story of any kind.

"A good ghost story is one that has good suspense and sympathetic characters and a realism or reality to it that the reader can dive into," she says.

"Everybody likes to be a little bit afraid. Fear is kind of hot. And it reminds adults of when they were sitting around the campfire as children getting scared, or watching the fright night movie on Saturday night."

Not everybody gets ghosts.

At the other end of the spectrum, Ray Hyman is pretty much clueless about why people like ghosts so much. Hyman, a retired professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, is nationally known as a debunker of psychic phenomena. He sits on the executive board of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, or CSICOP - pronounced "Psy-cop."

In fact, he doesn't much like ghost stories.

"I don't enjoy them because I've always seen them as so far removed from reality," Hyman says.

"My only interest in the whole issue is, I am fascinated by people who believe in them. I wonder how they can believe things I don't find believable at all. I encounter these people all the time. How can people come to believe things that aren't so?"

Hyman is not oblivious to the fact that he's unusual. Throughout history and around the world, he admits, people have believed in ghosts and spirits of some kind. He thinks the belief may even have an evolutionary basis.

"Cultures have long had shamans or medicine men," he says. "And anyone who didn't follow the medicine man would be isolated and couldn't survive alone. As a result, the people who survived through evolution were people who believed."

So where does that leave someone like himself?

"We are actually mutants of some sort," he says with a laugh. "There might be something wrong with us."

Eugene artist Alan Clark has made a living off people's belief in ghosts, illustrating ghost stories and science fiction. A Southerner who moved to Eugene five years ago, Clark flat out enjoys creepiness. A mobile of mummified animals - a possum, a couple of cats and a bat among them - hangs in his home studio.

"People like to be excited and to have a little anxiety in their lives," Clark says. "It spices things up. We go after safe scares. There are real world frights we want to avoid. Car accidents. Disease. We have seen what those things can do. But the unknown can be a delicious sort of scare."

Clark offers the idea of a roller coaster. We know the car won't go off the track - will it? - and so we can safely be terrified by the violent, exciting ride.

"You know it's frightening, but it's meant to be safe," he says. "You know it has run for years at a time and people have not been hurt on it. And yet there is always the possibility that it might leave the rails."

Children are especially drawn to ghost stories, Clark says. That's because children are very hungry to understand the deeper issues of life and death and the real dangers they will face as they grow up.

"They have only heard rumors of the bad things in life," he says. "Often, they have not seen them yet. And so they want to test themselves. They don't know anyone who's actually been killed by the ghost, but they want to see how they do."

Despite his profession, Clark is not what you'd call a true believer.

"That sort of falls under the category of UFOs and ESP," he says. "I am not going to be so arrogant as to decide it doesn't exist, but I have no evidence in my life that it does. What is haunted is not the world itself but people's minds. We carry our own ghosts around with us."

Then there's Kosmic Karen. Karen - her real name is Styles Rich - is a Yellow Pages psychic from the Eugene phone book. She used to be the KDUK radio psychic with her own show. Now she's on KVAL-TV.

Ghosts, Karen says, are benign creatures with an undeserved reputation for being scary.

"They are not out there to hurt us," she insists. "We always have that desire for some kind of after-death communication. Ghosts offer an opportunity to speak with someone who has passed. The unattainable is somehow attainable. It's great to believe that."

Ghosts do have an unfortunate reputation, she admits.

"People are just plain-old not informed. TV and books and stupid music videos have made people believe that ghosts are scary," Karen says, laughing. "That's right up there with `A cat will sit on your chest and suck your breath.' '

In reality, she says, ghosts often give us a welcome second chance to say things that were left too late unsaid.

"Also, they give us a chance to know that a loved one is all right," she says. "For those of us still here, it makes the idea of our own mortality not as threatening."

Features reporter Bob Keefer can be reached by phone at 338-2325 and by e-mail at [e-mail].

CAPTION(S):

Elizabeth Engstrom leads a workshop on ghost-story writing. THOMAS BOYD / The Register-Guard Alan Clark specializes in illustrating ghost stories and science fiction.