Is negative kinetic energy metastable?

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. quantum mechanics leads meta-stability similar vacuum decay. field theory, is broken by resonances behave statistically, drifting towards infinite entropy as no thermal equilibrium exists. analytically numerically compute rate finding it slow in 4-derivative gravity, where have gravitational interactions only. theory ghost naively perturbation analogously what found early attempts tunnelling; we do not know true rate.