No Stupid Questions

How come they are always from some far-off time period? You'd think someone would have encountered a ghost of someone who died a week prior by now.

Well, I'm not going to play the "it depends on the writer" card.

But it kinda does apply, even among people conveying their real life experiences. And, to forestall arguments, it doesn't matter if it is objectively real or not, assuming they aren't lying, they're relating their lived experience. Whether that is a delusion or hallucination is irrelevant to this matter.

See, if you start off with the assumption that ghosts either exist, or are a form of shared delusion, then some things can be taken from that.

First, that anyone seeing a ghost is a minority because seeing them isn't a common occurrence. Second, that regardless of anything else, the first ghost seen isn't random. Third, that if a ghost can communicate at all (which is not a part of all reports about ghosts), it has limited time to do so.

With those probabilities in mind, if you see a ghost, chances are that it is there for a reason, that you seeing it is for a reason, and that it has to use its time with you to achieve a very specific goal.

Why would the racist ghosts start off saying "now, I'm racist, but hear me out"?

It's that simple. Unless a ghost is haunting only a given grouping of people, there's no benefit to expressing their racism at all. If they are haunting a race, then there's still no need to outright say it; they're acting on their racism and don't care if anyone understands their motivations.

The ghost bartender in The Shining was racist

Either way......never seen a racist ghost. Which I think has to be statistically impossible.

Hetty Woodstone ("Ghosts") hated the Irish.

I used to have a theory that ghosts weren't spirits of the dead, but a momentary overlap of realities on loop at a certain place and what was seen was a glimpse of that reality. This only works of time is a singular experience happening all at once. I am not smart.

Because alcohol has no gender.

They are not corporeal so why would they care what your body looks like? To them it is just some envelope holding you, right? Your soul I don't think would have race, or sex, those are embodied things, skin tone being the most superficial of all.

I expect its mostly just because its unpleasant and taboo. People don't want to write nor watch that.

That said, they do show up occasionally in more adult-oriented movies. The Shining is an example that immediately comes to mind.

Relevant Brennan Lee Mulligan sketch

It is pretty racist, why do they always refuse black sheets 🙄

I like to think they observe and change with the times. Kind of grow in death.

I think the joke of the ghost costume as a white sheet has been lost.

The ones that would stick around would likely be very racist. Consider that you don't even need to stay in earth, you can just travel the universe. Or just travel the world. You don't have gravity to help you, but passing thru solid matter isn't a problem either. You could check out the core, Iceland, Botswana, Jordan, Kentucky, whatever. So if they stay in Kentucky, they're gonna be super racist. But evidently not...

Mostly because when you're writing a fictional story, you need to remove everything that isn't necessary for the plot. Is your story about racism? Then your ghost being racist makes sense. Otherwise unless it's a gag it slows down the plot.

If we wanna get REALLY picky though...

Most ghosts probably aren't speaking modern English either. A LOT changes in 200 years, how much slang rose and fell in that time? How much did accents change?

The concept of time was massively different too. Keep in mind before trains visiting a state could be weeks not hours. Could explain why ghosts are so patient though.

There's also just vast differences in priorities, imagine a life where water is a constant mental calculation like your battery life on a phone. If they're old enough that was the norm.