A grave matter indeed

"I was a little dazed by this coincidence, but did not become terrified. It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive short cut of supernaturalism." -HP Lovecraft, The Temple

Something rather peculiar happened to me today. I'd been sitting on the couch, where I had begun a book of Lovecraft stories. After reading two of the short stories I stopped and got up. I always have the misfortune of being distracted from reading by my own thinking. Yesterday, it was during my reading of Horkheimer that I started thinking about the relation between pragmatism and Merleau-Ponty. Today, I had to put the storybook down because I started thinking about the supernatural.
There have been a few occasions in my life when I have felt a ghostly presence; what I want is to be able to account for these experiences without necessarily holding on to mind-body dualism. In other words, I started to ponder the possibility that ghostly manifestations might be explained by some sort of a trace (rather than a disembodied soul) - a kind of physical residue left behind in a place by a person who has lived there. But this is problematic in many ways, and I haven't really thought it through fully.

Nonetheless, I was puzzling this over while I walked into my bedroom. At that very moment, half a shelf of books went crashing to the floor. I was totally stunned, and my little heart began to pound! Although there are many things in my room which are precariously balanced, this bookshelf wasn't one of them.
Naturally, this occurrence instigated more frenzied theorising - surely I wouldn't want to claim that what felled the books was a phantom hand from beyond the grave. But the coincidence was remarkable: at the exact moment that I was considering occult forces, something happens to suggest their presence. Suddenly the spiders don't seem like such bad household companions after all...