In Shakespeare’s time, people believed in ghosts. To them, a ghost was the spirit of a dead person who, for one reason or other, needed help from a living person so his or her soul could be at peace. That was the case with Hamlet’s father’s ghost.

His ghost had a mighty good reason to be restless: He was murdered in his sleep (and thus without the last rites) by, of all people, his own brother. And then, adding insult to injury, his bro married his widow and became the new king.

The ghost was in purgatory, poor thang, and in order to get out and collect his $200, he wanted Hamlet to kill his murderer and thus – if you’re into sports metaphor – even the score.

Me, I don’t believe in ghosts – or any other paranormal phenomena. Not to say such things don’t exist – they may. Just is, until I see them subjected to evidence-based testing overseen by an unbiased expert, I’ll remain a skeptic.

No, I believe in physical causation, that our world is subject to the rules of physics. While we may never know what caused some strange event, that alone doesn’t mean the cause was supernatural or, ultimately, even mysterious.

For example, there’s the famous ghost ship the Mary Celeste. It was found floating adrift, shipshape, its cargo and crew’s personal belongings intact. The only things missing were the ship’s lifeboat and its entire crew.

What caused this oddity? I have no idea; nor does anyone else. But I’ll bet whatever it was, it was due to simple physics. It wasn’t sea monsters or fireballs from Alpha Centauri or any of that blather.

How about these other famous disappearances – Judge Crater and Jimmy Hoffa? They both seemed to have vanished into thin air, but did they? Of course not.

Judge Crater was a crooked Tammany politician, Jimmy Hoffa a crooked union official – pardon the redundancies.

So what happened to them? Could they have been abducted by aliens? Sure … provided the aliens were of the ilk Jimmy Breslin has adoringly paraded before us in Mobster Chic Ad Nauseum. You know the lot – those eponymous and usually alliterative goons who lend vivid color to psychopathology, e.g., Napolo “Knucks” Nicoletti, Carmine “Carl the Crowbar” Consentino, “Vice Grips Vinnie,” and so on.

So going back to my original point: Any event, no matter how bizarre or inexplicable, can easily be explained in earthly terms – IF we know its causes. The problem is the causes may always elude us, a la the Mary Celeste, Judge Crater and Jimmy Hoffa.

Gone, baby, gone

Which is why, when I reached for my phone the other morning and it wasn’t there, I thought nothing of it. Hey, over the years I’ve forgotten to put the phone back in its rightful place dozens of times. Besides, there’s a foolproof way to find a wayward phone: Hit the Headset Locator button on the base, and the errant phone will ring its headset off till you find it.

At least that’s the theory, because after I pushed that button I heard nada. Or more exactly, I heard half-nada, because while the upstairs phone rang loud and clear, the downstairs one was as silent as a tomb.

Or maybe it wasn’t silent, I thought. Maybe it was merely muffled, having slipped in a chair or couch cushion.

I went upstairs, removed the battery from the phone, then came downstairs and hit the locator button again.

Again, nada – this time total nada.

I took stock.

It was all a matter of logic, so if I approached finding it logically, I’d have to find it. After all, I spoke on it last night before I turned in. So in the intervening eight hours, it didn’t dematerialize, get stolen or run away to join the French Foreign Legion. Thus, it had to be in the house. But where?

Most likely it was in the living room, since that’s where it’s kept and that’s where I almost always use it. I started with the most likely place – the floor. I looked under all the furniture, using a flashlight, no less. Not there.

Next I looked in the furniture, tearing out all the cushions and digging deep into all its crevices. I came up with 63 cents in change, two dog toys, something that was either a raisin or a very old olive, and a mangled postcard sent from pre-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans.

All right, those were the most likely places it could be, and since it wasn’t there, it was time to check out less likely places … which I did.

I looked in the kitchen and the bathroom and the porch. Nuttin’.

Then it was upstairs.

I tore my bedroom apart, as well as the guest bedroom. No phone.

After that, it was on to the most unlikely places.

The kitchen and bathroom cabinets. The bookshelves. My bookbag and pack. The laundry hamper. And of course the car – including the glove compartment, console and trunk.

I repeated the entire drill each day for the next three days, and when that yielded no results, I looked in what any sensible person would think are the impossible places. I looked in the medicine cabinet, the stove, even the fridge (including the freezer compartment). At that point, I’d exhausted both my options and my patience, and when I found myself about to lift its cover and look in the toilet tank, I had to call it quits, regroup and consider the situation from only a logical perspective. I was going to quit being the Dope and start being Spock.

And as Spock, here’s what I concluded:

The phone was somewhere.

I’d searched high, low and in between for four straight days but still hadn’t found where that “somewhere” was.

If I kept searching, I still wouldn’t find that “somewhere.”

So the only smart thing to do, in terms of finding the phone versus losing my mind, was to quit searching. And that’s exactly what I did.

Half as many, just as good

And ya know, it’s no big deal, having only one phone when previously I had two.

First, if I wanted, I could shlep the phone upstairs at night so if someone called when I was in bed, I wouldn’t have to run downstairs to answer it. But why do that? Someone calls and I don’t answer the phone, they can leave a message and I’ll call them back. Or if they don’t leave a message, they probably had nothing to say anyway.

Second, if I’m in bed, most logically I should be either going to sleep or waking up, neither of which involves – or probably should involve – babbling on the phone.

Third, I never had an extension phone till about 10 years ago. So if I managed to get by fine without one for a cool 60 years or so, I can probably get by fine without one for another however many more years the Metropolitan Life Insurance charts say I have.

And finally, let’s get real: How many phone calls are important? Or even are beyond the trivial? I doubt that in my entire life I ever got 10 truly important calls.

The two-phone setup is like a lot of other things in my life; namely I don’t need that many.

I have too many books, too many clothes, too many pens and – with three dogs, two cats and a 13-year-old goldfish – I probably have too many pets.

Then again, if you’ve got the resources, knowledge and patience to take good care of them, six pets may be just the right number … if not too few.

On the other hand, if you don’t have those things, even one pet is far too many.