I don't know why people get so wound up about this proof business. I'm as convinced as can be (yet not certain) that ghosts don't exist. I'll settle for that. It gives me a sort of "working certainty" that, for example, enables me to stay in big, old, creaky houses or walk through pitch-black graveyards on stormy nights without demur. Any evidence I've ever encountered (I don't seek it out) for ghosts has been flimsy, generally speaking someone's say-so or a grainy, indistinct photo that could easily have been faked. Mostly I only see blue tits flying around at a distance, but the other week I had one sitting in my hand, so I'm convinced blue tits really exist. One night in the early 1980s (I lived in Loughton, Essex) I went out just after midnight to get my cat in. I looked up and saw ball lightning, clear as anything. A glowing, fizzing electric-red ball as big as a football, floating slowly above the rooftops, heading for Epping Forest. I watched it for two or three minutes before losing sight of it. There was nobody else out and I didn't have a camera. When I looked it up I found that the existence of ball lightning is controversial. Well, not to me it isn't. Now maybe there's a tiny chance that it was some kind of nautical flare (50 miles inland and behaving in a very un-flarelike manner?) or a firework, or a hallucination (I don't take drugs and I was stone cold sober). So I'm not certain it was ball lightning. I neither can prove nor wish to prove that it was to anyone else, mainly because I can't even prove it to myself, but I'm still very happy about it and I don't keep my sighting a secret for fear of being thought a fool. I absolutely understand why a lot of people wouldn't believe me and I'm in no position to give 'em an argument. I don't think that anyone who thinks I'm deluded is a bigoted fool. I simply haven't satisfied their evidence-requirement threshold, and that's healthy. I like people who set the bar high in that regard. I won't be setting up a Ball Lightning Sect any time soon.