Earthbound human spirits tend to hang around (haunt) the places they were familiar with when they were living before they died. You or I can walk down the street to pick up the mail or get in the car to take a vacation, but most ghosts don’t seem to have the slightest desire to leave their little space.
The question of why some ghosts seem bound to particular locations is an enduring mystery that has never really been addressed, however, I suspect that there are really two major factors that play into the ghostly location question. The first may involve the “spiritual portals” discussed in chapter 5, and the second involves the distortion of time.
As you may recall from the discussion of spirit portals in chapter 5, everyone has a personal portal that attaches them to the spiritual world. To reiterate, this portal remains attached to you wherever you may go, a bit like an infinitely flexible pipe with one end attached to you and the other end anchored in Spirit. These portals may also work in reverse, anchoring a spirit to a particular earthly location, and the nature of that anchoring point might confine the spirit (I.e. ghost) to a particular area. Portals form because of intense emotional concentration, and the combination of a traumatic death, plus an intense desire to go to a place of comfort might create a portal anchored in that place. This is simply speculation on my part, as there is no specific evidence that this is the case.
The second, and possibly more important reason for persistent haunting of specific locations is the distortion of time as we understand it, combined with the fact that the vast majority of the souls bound to the transitional plane do not know that they have died. Indeed, most earthbound souls adamantly refuse to acknowledge their post-mortem state even when confronted with overwhelming evidence.
As I explained in chapters 6 and 7, the distortion of time, the fact that these souls do not know that they have died and the overriding memory of some tragic moment or emotion may keep some of them confined to the same spot or the same routine, forever reliving the same actions and suffering the same emotions over and over. Each spirit lives in its own individual time loop, and as a result, each spirit experiences its current environment in its own way. Some are aware of their current surroundings, while others “manufacture” their environment as they remember it when they were alive. Either way, none seem to be aware of the passing of time. Centuries may pass, but they have no awareness of it.
For Earthbound spirits (ghosts) haunting a property, every day is “Groundhog Day”. The spirit simply loops through the same events with the same emotions, in the same place and goes about its same routine, day after day. The spirit remains locked in this unthinking looping time trap, and therefore has no desire to do anything but continue the same routine. Under these circumstances, the spirit cannot evolve, which translates to “growing up” or making changes in its mental state. Living people change a little bit every day, and over a period of years, they may mature into an entirely different person than they were a few years ago. But ghosts never change. They always remain the same age, and they never learn anything. In order to begin to evolve, they have to cross over, leaving the transitional plane and entering into the light (i.e. The mainstream spiritual world).
People who die in traumatic circumstances often remain as ghosts in the place they died because the trauma of their death overrides all other memories. People who have become habituated to life in a prison or a mental institution might remain trapped in their place of confinement as ghosts, even if the building is later abandoned. Others who die without realizing their new condition might simply go to their old home and resume their regular routines.
Some ghosts apparently have more flexible time limitations than others and make minor adaptations to new circumstances. They might even form new memories if, say, someone moves into their old house, or a new appliance like a TV or a computer is brought into the home. They might even be able to do simple psychokinetic operations like turning the appliance on or off. They do this using the power of psychokinesis, which, along with other psi abilities, is enhanced once the container of the physical body is abandoned