Are There Clocks in the Afterlife?

We frequently think of there being no time, once we've passed from the physical world. Ghosts sometimes seem blissfully unaware of the passage of time, walking through walls where there once was a door, or strolling two feet below the earth because the paths they once knew have been covered over by years of change. 

And yet, I also know there are such things as "timed" hauntings. By that, I mean the kind of haunting that occurs at the same time, whether the it be on a regular date, a regular day, or even a regular hour of the clock. We had one at our house.

During my younger years I started keeping the erratic hours of the teen student: late nights, late mornings if possible (usually not), with naps whenever I could grab them. Staying up that late taught me that the house I lived in had a sort of "haunted routine." It would start at ten-thirty every night. I could have set my watch to it. The activities usually announced themselves with the sound of furniture shifting in whatever room I was NOT in. When I was in the sun porch, I would hear a chair move in the kitchen. If I was in the kitchen, something would scrape or knock in the dining room or the sun porch. But it was always at that same time.

Afterwards, there would be a literal string of noises, sometimes in the same room as I was, but just as often in a different room. I would be treated to what sounded like a number of people passing through and around the rooms on the first floor, including the one where I was seated and trying desperately to ignore the noise. There was also a sense of not being alone; it was like being present at a small dinner party and also being ignored. Sometimes those dinner party guests could get downright rowdy: the occasional loud bang that shook the windows in the sun porch but somehow failed to disturb the rest of my family sleeping upstairs were a shock to the system and always left me wide-eyed with my heart pounding.

And then,also like clock-work, everything stopped at one in the morning. Without fail. And without further disturbance. Well-trained dinner guests, I suppose.

But I'm not the only one to talk about that sort of thing. I knew a fellow once who lived in a slightly haunted apartment in Chicago. I say "slightly" because the haunting consisted of one thing only. Every night at ten PM his bedroom door would close itself. He noticed this happening night after night at the same time, so one night he decided to experiment, and made sure that his bedroom door was already closed at the appointed time. He wasn't disappointed. At ten o-clock sharp, the door opened itself, and then shut again. Apparently, his nightly door-closer was not to be deterred.

There are ghosts that turn up on anniversaries: battles, murders, suicides. Ghost story books are filled with tales of clock-work ghosts.

So if eternity is outside of time, and the afterlife is expanded beyond calendars, minutes, and hours, how do these revenants know when to show up for their appointed hauntings?