Viral Ghost Echoes

Last night's entry got me thinking a lot about death and the afterlife (although to be completely fair it was a friend of mine's most recent art project that probably kick-started me into choosing that topic in the first place). Which in turn brought me back to part of an email I'd written to a (different) friend a few weeks ago about the nature of ghosts. Here is the passage in question:

"Airports that you visit with any sort of regularity are strange places. For me it is primarily because I have made such incredibly strong emotional impressions on myself in such places that I keep seeing little ghost-me's from the corners of my eye- for instance, me crumpled behind a pillar, weeping. It's like a tiny echo of despair that is going to vibrate in that spot for the rest of eternity, regardless of the fact that I was in a pretty damned good mood to be seeing Katie. Maybe that's what ghosts really are- not the spirits of people unable to move on, but solidified emotion. And that's why so many of them seem to be so sad, or so angry."

And that right there is another story-seed. Taken a step further, it could be a story about a person who has the power to dispel echoes- which brings up the physics question of what cancels out an echo? The part of my brain that retained some of what the wonderful Bernie Bates (my Physics 101 instructor) taught me is submitting that sound is a wave, and a wave can be canceled out by another wave of equal but opposite... waviness? Frequency? Whatever, you know what I mean... (yup, art major for a reason). Let's do a quick bit of research to either confirm or deny my suspicions, shall we?

Okay, screw it- research is taking too long and I want to go to bed. Let's take it for granted that I'm right, and we'll do the research later, if it ever gets beyond story-seed idea. So our purported hero/heroine is called upon to get rid of ghosts, but the only way s/he can do it is by creating an event that whips up an emotional frequency equal in intensity to but opposite in direction of the event that created the ghost. In other words, s/he would have to facilitate great joy, or hope, or something along those lines, in the same spot as the haunting... hmmm... Of course, if the ghost is someone's echo rather than their essence, what is the motivation for dispelling it? Maybe it grows... or infects others with its misery/rage... hmmm... viral ghost echoes...

And now that goes into my percolator for a while, and hopefully comes out as a full-on concept rather than just a device/seed... Do feel free to contribute your own thoughts on the subject (just so long as you hereby relinquish all rights and don't mind me straight up stealing your ideas... ;P)