buddhist
Well-Known Member
Thoughts on this and on ghosts in general?
From my Buddhist understanding, some individuals who engaged in unvirtuous behavior or held wrong views can end up in the peta loka (hungry ghost realm).A possibility. A car wreck is something else I consider as other accounts of phantom hitchhikers seemed to be associated with areas where a wreck occurred. Exactly why someone would be reborn as a ghost, I hesitate to say. The Buddha teaches the ghost realm is a possible destination for rebirth and considers it a bad birth. The Buddha typically uses the adjective "hungry" in connection with ghosts. They are driven by desires that they can never fulfill. They are not considered evil; but, they can be dangerous.
In my understanding of samsaric cosmology, the continuum of life ranges from one "negative" end to the other "positive" end, with grades in between. The negative end being hellish realms of extremely low vibration, the other of extremely high vibration. A human might possess a middle-grade vibration (balanced, the middle-way being optimal for training for nibbana). Ghosts, animals, and demonic beings exist as and within realms of progressively lower energy vibrations. The lower the vibration, the slower they vibrate, and the colder they are ... I imagine that is the cause of certain haunted places feeling excessively cold. Conversely, devas and Brahmas with higher-grade vibrations, vibrate faster, and we perceive such vibrations as warmth or light (think halos or auras as often pictured around gurus, saints, angels, deities, etc.).
In persons who encounters sudden physical death, IMO certain kamma has not properly ripened yet (the kammic energy determining their physical lifespan has not been exhausted, having died before they were supposed to), so other kamma gain predominance (e.g. kamma associated with unwholesome behavior) which propels them to manifest in a slightly lower energy sphere/plane, with their unripened physical-lifespan-kammic-energy manifesting by providing them with an energy body similar to their former physical selves.
If such beings are made to understand and accept their physical death, their attachments to that unripened kamma exhausts itself, and they allow themselves to be properly reborn.