  We explore the possibility that theories with negative kinetic energy
(ghosts) can be meta-stable up to cosmologically long times. In classical
mechanics, ghosts undergo spontaneous lockdown rather than run-away if
weakly-coupled and non-resonant. Physical examples of this phenomenon are
shown. In quantum mechanics this leads to meta-stability similar to vacuum
decay. In classical field theory, lockdown is broken by resonances and ghosts
behave statistically, drifting towards infinite entropy as no thermal
equilibrium exists. We analytically and numerically compute the run-away rate
finding that it is cosmologically slow in 4-derivative gravity, where ghosts
have gravitational interactions only. In quantum field theory the ghost
run-away rate is naively infinite in perturbation theory, analogously to what
found in early attempts to compute vacuum tunnelling; we do not know the true
rate.
