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I used to watch Unsolved Mysteries a lot when I was a younger lad, usually in feverish anticipation of their next segment about ghosts (the stories about things I found boring at the time, like rapists and kidnappers that had continually evaded justice, were like violent kicks to the groin of the part of my brain that enjoyed television). The vast majority of ghosts that they showed were old-timey, like a Confederate soldier, who stayed in one very specific area, like a section of a beach or a short section of a forest path.

But what happens when a whole bunch of condos get built on that part of the beach? Or when the forest is knocked down to make room for a subdivision? Ghost dude comes out one night to walk his path and is all, “WTF? Where’d my trees go? I’ve done this literally thousands of times, I know I didn’t take the wrong way here.” I’d imagine it would be very jarring. Of course, that is operating under the assumption that ghosts are sentient beings, which is almost has to be the case. If they’re not, why are they haunting anything in the first place?

If they are aware of their surroundings, though, “life” would have to be equally interesting and frustrating. Interesting in the sense that you could watch the world grow and change around you, frustrating because you’d be trapped in a very small portion of it. And of course, the overwhelming realization that everyone you have ever cared about has been dead and gone for a very long time and you’re all alone in the world because ghosts don’t really have social relationships with the living. Except in Beetlejuice.