I know no one knows because they didn't show it in the movie, but was anyone else curious as to where sam would of been when he wasn't with charlie? lol its been bugging me. Maybe he just hung out in the forest for five years :P
shareI'm only halfway through it, but I'm assuming it's all just a series of hallucinations. His brother just threw a baseball that hit him in the family jewels. Whether he's a ghost or a hallucination, that's pretty weird.
shareHis brother had yet to cross over. The "in between" reference is in between life and death. It's when a person dies but doesn't want to go to heaven yet. When Charlie sees Tess in the graveyard he assumes she's dead that's why he says "you're in between". He thought she was dead and had yet to cross over. At least that's how I took it. I could be wrong but that's the only way it would make sense in the movie.
shareI guess it's possible that ghosts don't have to exist continuously, as live people do. Think of it as a dashed line: between the dashes, the marks don't exist, and the line is only a mental construct. Thus it's conceivable that Sam only existed at dusk when his brother came to play catch with him. Between the time when Charlie goes home at night and the next evening they meet, one might suppose that Sam's ghost simply doesn't exist.
Sort of like the old question "if a tree falls in the forest, an no one hears it, does it make a sound?".