“So you hunt ghosts, then?” I asked.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” he replied.
“That is,” I admitted, “refreshingly frank for a person running a business called ‘GhostAway’.”
He laughed. “It’s not exactly my usual spiel, no, but I’m not going to lie to an old friend.”
“So it’s a hoax?” I looked around the lavishly appointed office, before adding “A well-paying hoax?”
“Well-paying, yes. Hoax, no. It’s a matter of semantics.”

“So you ‘hunt’ ‘ghosts’, then?” I repeated, this time making the quotes in the air with my hands.
“‘Yes’,” he smiled. “Mass curves spacetime, right? It creates spheres that decay with distance. The phenomena has a lot of parallels: magnetism, sound, you get the idea. The theory goes that any type of energy creates a corresponding spherical disturbance, and that these distortions are present in all dimensions.”
“Bubbles in the aether.”
“Bubbles in the aether, right. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that events of high emotional significance are in a sense emotionally ‘massive’. Emotion is a form of energy, or at least a manifestation of one. Emotions cause bubbles. Usually just small ones, but sometimes…”
“Sometimes not,” I supplied.
“Sometimes not. I’m sure you’ve felt it before. Memories tied to a certain place, or smell, or time of year. Memories that are hard to get away from; memories that have gravity.”
“Ghosts are memories with gravity?”
“Yes. So much gravity that they have an effect on other people.”
“Okay, so let’s say I buy that ghosts are a manifestation of curved spacetime, how exactly would you go about hunting something like that?”
“Panel-beating.”