Spectral Density

In a couple of weeks ghouls, goblins, and other night critters will be wandering the streets in the USA and beyond. Halloween has Celtic origins but it was in the US that it took off in a big way, and the American style of celebrating it has spread in recent decades even to seemingly unlikely places such as Japan. The ghost costume – sometimes just a simple sheet and sometimes something elaborate – is always among the most popular, and it is the most classic. It is the costume most closely related to the origin of the holiday, after all, since Halloween was supposedly the night when the boundaries between the living and dead were at their most tenuous.

Halloween ghost costume from
California Costumes

I don’t recall a time when I believed in ghosts. I enjoyed ghost stories as a child as much as anyone, but it never occurred to me that they were any more real than werewolves or vampires. This wasn’t from any logic or insight beyond my years. I believed in the most astonishing things including about the manner in which presents appeared under a tree on December 25. Ghosts, however, weren’t in the mix. In all probability I simply had been told they weren’t real and believed that as readily as I believed other things my parents told me. By the time I was old enough to start considering such things on my own, I saw no reason to change my mind – about the ghosts, that is. I still could be creeped out by dark places, of course. People are hard-wired to be fearful of the dark, and for good reason. For tens of thousands of years very scary and very real predators lurked just beyond the light of the campfire – other people being the scariest predators of all. Along with these real threats, our ancestors worried about spirits. So do many of our contemporaries.

It is impossible to tell when humans started to believe in ghosts and in other types of afterlife since those beliefs predate civilization. They are part of the lore of every culture and belief in them continues to the current day. They are mentioned in the earliest writings from every continent. Whether in the West, Asia, or Mesoamerica one theme dominates: ghosts are especially apt to linger when they have unfinished business. Sometimes they visit the living in dreams and sometimes they manifest to people who are awake. Revealing a killer is a common reason to stick around, but sometimes the reason is pettier. Sometimes the ghosts are just annoyed with their families. In Mesopotamia illnesses were often blamed on ancestral ghosts, and shamans called Asipu (which means “scholar” but “shaman” describes better what they did) would be called in to placate them with charms and rites.

Ghosts are part of past and present literature. In the Roman comedy Mostellaria [Haunted] by Plautus from around 200 BCE, a well-to-do merchant returning from a journey is deterred from entering his own house when his son’s slave tells him the house is haunted by the ghost of a guest murdered by the previous owner. Actually, the slave wants to keep him away because the merchant’s son has been carousing inside with his buddies and with a courtesan he bought and freed, but the merchant accepts the ghost story without question. In the second century CE, Apuleius in The Golden Ass or the Transformations of Lucius tells of a widow who is told in a dream by her husband that the fellow now courting her in fact killed him; she blinds the suitor with a hair pin. In Elizabethan times Shakespeare has no trouble stretching the credulity of audiences with the ghost of Hamlet’s father advancing the plot or with Caesar’s ghost warning Brutus about Philippi. Shakespeare didn’t invent the latter encounter; he found an account of it in Plutarch.

Ghosts and hauntings are very much a part of American popular culture. They include the likes of Resurrection Mary, a vanishing hitchhiker who haunts Archer Avenue in Chicago, and the Greenbrier Ghost in West Virginia, whose testimony figured in a murder trial. Regarding the latter, the death of Edward Shue’s wife Zona in 1896 was originally ruled natural, but Zona’s mother Mary Jane said Zona’s ghost appeared to her and said she had been murdered. Mary Jane demanded an autopsy which revealed a broken neck. The defense introduced the ghost evidence in order to discredit the prosecution, but it turned out that the 19^th century West Virginia jury believed the ghost, and Shue was convicted. The White House is particularly ghost-infested. Abigail Adams turns up frequently according to various visitors, and during the Wilson Administration Dolley Madison was seen at least once. Mary Todd Lincoln heard Andrew Jackson cursing in the hallways. Abraham Lincoln has been spotted repeatedly including by Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands when she was a guest of FDR.

Every town has some house, hotel, or restaurant reputed to be haunted. Some people see ghosts almost everywhere. What brought all this to mind was a talk last week with a friend and former renter of an apartment in an old building (built 1850) that I once owned but no longer do. She told me there had been a ghostly woman in there with long black hair whom she and her mother placated with candles. This apparition never accosted me in the 40 years I conducted business in the building, but perhaps real estate bored her. The house where I live now, built in 1978, makes a lot of noise: it groans, creaks, and knocks as it expands here and contracts there with the weather and vagaries of the heating system. I’m accustomed to the sounds, but overnight guests often comment on them in the morning and say they thought I was walking around the house all night. (I don’t walk around the house all night.) “Don’t worry,” I tell them. “That’s just the troll who lives in the basement.” That doesn’t always evoke a smile, and more than once I’ve been given an alternative spectral explanation in response. The people who have said this to me so far without exception have been sane in a general way. They just believe in ghosts.

It is surprising (to skeptics at least) just how many modern folk do believe in them. According to a CBS News poll 48% of Americans believe in ghosts. A Huffington Post survey had similar results with 45% believing, 32% disbelieving, and 23% unsure. Counterintuitively, belief in ghosts rises with education. In a 2006 study by Bryan Farha at Oklahoma City University and Gary Steward Jr. of the University of Central Oklahoma (reported in the Skeptical Inquirer) education level was shown to be positively correlated with belief in the paranormal including ghosts. 23% of college freshman believed in the general gamut of the paranormal including astrology, clairvoyance, and ghosts (40% believed in haunted houses specifically, with 25% unsure), while 31% of seniors did, and 34% of graduate students did. The numbers are higher when you narrow the questions to ghosts alone. One might think that most of these students were not science-oriented in their studies, but science literacy seems to make little difference. A 2012 study (see Science Education is No Guarantee of Skepticism by Richard Walker, Steven J. Hoekstra, and Rodney J. Vogl) showed that the level of science education among undergraduate college students had a negligible impact on belief:

“We were interested in whether science test scores were correlated with paranormal beliefs. For each sample, we correlated the participant’s test score with their average belief score. Across all three samples, the correlation between test scores and beliefs was non-significant (CBU r(65)=-.136, p>.05; KWU r(69)=.107, p>.05; WSSU r(70)=.031, p>.05). In other words, there was no relationship between the level of science knowledge and skepticism regarding paranormal claims.”

The opinions of many of my fellow humans in this matter (as in so many others) baffle me as mine necessarily must baffle them. “You’re not open-minded,” is a charge I’ve heard from believers including personal friends. Perhaps not, though I like to think that if a long-haired specter like the one seen in my old building strikes up a conversation with me, I would be open to a change of view. Few of us are entirely rational in our beliefs, much as we like to pat ourselves on the back for being so. We believe and disbelieve what we must, mostly for reasons beyond evidence and logic. Why do so many people believe in ghosts? Christopher French, a psychology professor at the University of London, says (quoted in The Atlantic), “There is also the emotional motivation for these beliefs. The vast majority of us don’t like the idea of our own mortality. Even though we find the idea of ghosts and spirits scary, in a wider context, they provide evidence for the survival of the soul.”

There are some other advantages, I imagine, to being a believer this time of year. A movie such as Poltergeist must be a lot scarier. I watch flicks of that nature the way I do ones about Middle Earth: entertaining in its own way, but not remotely connected the real world. Haunted houses must be more fun to visit, too. (I like the one in Disneyland, though.) All, the same, I’ll stick with fearing threats from the living rather than from beyond the grave. If in the end it turns out I’m wrong, though, I’ll come back as a ghost to join the troll creeping around this house at night. Scaring overnight visitors sounds like fun.

White Stripes – Little Ghost