No one and nothing where the figure had been!

Regular readers may recall that my acquaintance (MA) who gets microsleep with REM  experiences once saw a ghost on a train some 6 years ago. Well, it’s happened again but with a very different ghost.

MA was riding on a train when a man in a uniform approached and leaned over. It was obviously the guard wanting to inspect MA’s ticket. At that point MA had the odd feeling that usually accompanied the end of a MWR experience. Suddenly the guard had completely vanished! There was no gradual fading just gone in an instant with no one and nothing where the figure had been! So, a ghost then!

What was interesting about this ghost was that it was an expected encounter. By that I mean that it is obviously normal to see a guard on a train and for them to act in that way. With misperceived ghosts (see here) our brains show us things they expect to see when they cannot really see something properly. So expectation is clearly going to be a common aspect of misperception ghosts. With MWRs, however, we are dealing with hallucination. As this inc incident shows, there was no one and nothing there, the ghost was a pure invention of MA’s brain.

So does expectation play a part in hallucinatory ghosts as well as the misperception variety? I'm wondering about ghost sightings at locations where the witness is aware of previous sightings. If misperception or hallucinators is causing such sightings then expectation may play a part in their content.