SLOW

If ghosts are restless souls with unfinished business and a tendency to haunt the living, perchance to get some assistance to cross over to the next plane, then their time as a ghost should be measurable: the time difference between physical death and moving on, from the perspective of any of us regular earthbound humans.

Ghosts are supposed to finish their business, somehow, and then disappear (completely). Seeing as there are billions of dead people, many more than are currently alive, and this amount of dead people would cause a hell of a ruckus if they were all spooking around, we should be able to assume that not all people that die become ghosts, or that everyone eventually moves on.

I've never heard of anybody complaining about seeing the ghosts of San or Romans or any other person from antiquity.

Which leads to the question: where, and who, is the oldest ghost? How long has this ghost been hanging around? Is there hope for it to move on? Does it have malicious intent or merely an incredibly obstinate nature?

I don't believe in ghosts in this conventional sense. Death is the end and my friend. I think when a ghost is perceived it's far more likely to be a shared thought between two (or more) people. A ghostly outline might be seen and some physical sensations experienced, like a particular smell or a sound, but this does not have to mean that it comes from someone that died some time ago and is unable to leave this planet. A spiritual (astral) visit from a fellow living person seems far more likely, whether it's a personal visit or simply a visit to a particular place.