Most people have considered at one time or another, what becomes of us after we die. Are there pearly gates? Purgatory? Planets that have nothing but shrimp? No one really knows. The fact that different people who have been brought back from the brink give different accounts alludes to it being a different experience for different people. Take that thought a step further and ponder your soul. In Traditional Chinese Medicine you have two souls, one is Hun, the ethereal aspect, when the body dies, Hun return to heaven. The other aspect is called Po and when the body dies, Po dissolves with it. Often the soul is put in a God’s hands, just adhere to your chosen God’s laws, usually just being a genuinely good person plays a huge role across the board in every religion, and your soul is fine. Seems easy, doesn’t it?
When it comes to near death experiences, similarities in the experience are often explained by science while anomalies are dismissed, yet it seems like it’s always a personal experience based on variables too impossible to consider them all. Not only is the experience itself personal, how the effects of it manifest vary as well. Are you more connected to your body or to your soul? How would you feel if your soul could be ejected from your body and another could just walk right in, taking your body and displacing your soul? As far as I know, the “walk in phenomenon” isn’t even accepted by any hard science. Ahhh...that is why we write.
Today I was pondering the concept of “Walk-Ins.” It’s a concept that I think would be a great premise for a horror story. The concept has been around for a long, long time, it was first popularized in 1979 in Ruth Montgomery’s book, Strangers Among Us. The basic concept is that a person triggered by a traumatic event or a shock or even just experiencing troubling times can be replaced by a new soul. The big question that comes to most peoples’ minds right away is, what about memories? In most versions of the theory, they stay with the walk-in only without attachment or emotion regarding them. You would know who your mother is, for example, but you wouldn’t know her at all.
My second thought was, “Hold the phone, what in blazes happens to my soul if some wayfaring body thief decides to give it the boot?” In all honesty, I didn’t find many who subscribe to the theory claiming to know, that wouldn’t be very mysterious, would it? The concept of walk-ins isn’t a terribly popular one, yet the concept is really engaging as a premise for a story where the variables are created by the writer. A writer could set the parameters and make up the rules for how it could work as well as for how it could all go terribly, terribly wrong.
In some scenarios I read about, the people were convinced that they had made an arrangement previous to being born that they would be a walk in. None specify with whom they made the deal. They also don’t specify if the person whose soul is getting the sack makes any kind of prior arrangement. You can probably tell I cling a little tenaciously to the idea that I have a soul and don’t like the idea of it getting the boot. It wouldn’t be a cakewalk for the walk in either though, having no social training at all. No formidable school years overcome, no familial associations, nothing. No programming or socialization whatsoever.
In some of the accounts I came across, the walk in will have different tastes, skills and abilities, so “the body,” who could be a cousin or brother or mother to someone, would suddenly change. They might suddenly know how to play the piano or be good at math when they never were before. The ways a writer could play with the idea are infinite. From what I’ve seen thus far, the ejected soul usually gets the short end of the stick, maybe some clever writer can come up with a story where it’s at least fair?
