In February 2021, I was walking home alone along an unlit path when something strange happened. It was snowing, cold, and extremely dark. I had chosen to take this lonely route as a shortcut that led me from the university campus I worked on at the time to the suburbs of the city, but to do so I had to skirt a secluded field along that isolated path. I’ve never worried about the dark (an aspect of male privilege I’m very aware of), and the desire to get out of the snow and into the warm made me throw any lingering caution to the wind. Perhaps that was foolish of me though.
As I made my way along the path, my hand held up to keep the snow from hitting my eyes, I suddenly became aware of someone walking towards me only a step or two ahead. The moment I registered their shape, I leaped to the side with an exaggerated gesture and mumbled some apology for not looking where I was going. But when I turned to check on the person I had nearly stumbled into, I found the path was completely empty. No one was walking away from me. In fact, the freshly laid snow only showed my footprints and no others. I was alone.
As I don’t believe in ghosts, I quickly put the whole experience down to a trick of the mind produced by the snow, the dark, and an overly tired brain. But for the next few minutes, I could not shake the sense that I was being watched, or even followed. Of course, all these feelings melted away the moment I reached the next road where I was bathed in the muted glow of a streetlight.
The belief in ghosts is a funny thing. Despite there being no evidence to support their existence, ghosts have haunted humanity wherever they have settled across the planet. Every age and every culture has its own type of ghost and ghost stories, each shaped by its own peculiar context. And despite the rise of scientific thinking in the 20th and 21st centuries, the belief in unquiet spirits is still very much alive.
In 2020, a YouGov survey found that 46 percent of Americans believed in ghosts, while a 2021 poll found that 20 percent claimed to have personally encountered a spirit. Similarly, an older YouGov poll from 2014 found that one in three British people (34 percent) believed in ghosts.
It is not currently clear whether this number has risen over the last decade, but there is reason to think it probably has. Firstly, ghosts, hauntings, and the paranormal seem to be everywhere, in films, video games, podcasts, books, and so on. Anyone who uses Facebook or TikTok has likely seen stories of supposed hauntings or footage of vague wobbly specters caught on camera.
Beyond belief
It’s known that times of uncertainty can increase religiosity, a finding that has been extended to paranormal beliefs too. The thinking here is that stress causes people to desire ways to order and understand the world as a kind of coping mechanism. If this is true, then it would explain why more ghostly content was consumed during the COVID Pandemic.
There is also likely an evolutionary element to these types of beliefs. As Emeritus Professor Chris French of the Anomalistic Research Unit at Goldsmiths told IFLScience: “In terms of our evolution, our brains have evolved to keep us alive long enough to pass our genes on to the next generation, full stop. That’s it. Not to apprehend the truth with a capital T about the nature of the universe, you know, and in those terms, for most of our evolutionary history, there were real threats out there, from predators, from enemies, and so on and so forth.”
Basically, as our brains are hardwired to be constantly on the lookout for potential threats, it has produced certain cognitive biases. One of these, as French explained, is a bias “towards believing that when something happens in the world around us, it happens because someone or something with intentions towards us made it happen.”
I think a lot of the kind of biases that underlie our propensity towards paranormal beliefs can be explained in terms of those cognitive biases.
Emeritus Professor Chris French
Armed with this bias, unrelated events or random natural phenomena can become confused with the results of malevolent agency. For instance, a banging in the night can lead us to believe our homes are being invaded by a burglar or a ghost is terrorizing us. It’s the same cognitive bias that may have led people in the past to connect something like failing crops with the wrath of God or the work of witchcraft.
“I think a lot of the kind of biases that underlie our propensity towards paranormal beliefs can be explained in terms of those cognitive biases,” French added.
At the same time, there are emotional reasons for such beliefs. For one thing, ghosts are extremely entertaining. Even for skeptics, the subject is fascinating and fun. Who doesn’t like a good story? But then there are those who believe in ghosts and the afterlife as part of a broader worldview. Very few of us can say we do not fear death or the death of our loved ones, and the idea that we somehow “continue” after bodily death, which is the foundation for the world’s major religions, is a powerful source of comfort for many people.
“I personally don’t believe in supernatural stuff at all,” French said, “but I’ve no objection to other people believing that stuff, if it’s a positive thing in their lives…. [I]t’s fair as long as you’re not imposing your belief system on other people, or anything like that, then fine, believe whatever you like.”
Tricks of the mind
The above factors may explain why people believe in ghosts, but ghostly experiences are not limited to believers alone. As with my own brush with the weird on that cold February night, sometimes our brains can play tricks on us.
There are two important psychological factors that contribute to someone having a ghostly experience. These are context and prior belief. If you’re told a place, like an old castle or stately home, is haunted when you visit it, then you are more likely to interpret noises, drafts, cold spots, or other mundane stimuli with paranormal courses. Under normal circumstances, you probably wouldn’t have noticed such things, but being told there are ghosts present makes them more significant.
There has been some clever research into this effect. In 1997, Rense Lange and James Houran asked participants to explore an old movie theater and to notice any cognitive, emotional, physiological, psychic, or spiritual reactions they had to the space. Half of the participants were told the theater was simply under renovation, while the other half were told it was haunted. As you can probably guess, those who were told the theater was haunted reported significantly more experiences in each category than those in the control group.
Similarly, if someone believes in ghosts already, then they are more likely to have some kind of ghostly experience while moving through a supposedly haunted location when compared to a skeptic. This too has been demonstrated empirically.
“So those two factors, I think, are really, really important, but then there’s all kinds of other factors that can come into play as well,” French added. “[O]ne common reason for people developing a belief that maybe their house is haunted is if they were, for example, suffering from episodes of sleep paralysis.”
Sleep paralysis is a disturbing but relatively common experience that haunts people across the world. A form of parasomnia, the terrifying sleep phenomenon usually involves someone waking up to find they cannot move while “something” else is looming over them.
You’re likely to either think […] something weird and supernatural really is happening, or I’m going crazy. And out of those two, you probably prefer the idea that something really is happening.
Emeritus Professor Chris French
This hallucinatory entity has historically manifested in various forms, from being a witch (the hag) in Western European countries, vampires in Central and Eastern Europe, the monstrous Pisadeira in Brazil, or malevolent shamans within Inuit cultures. Whatever shape your mind gives it, the experience is deeply unsettling for people, even those who understand it is all in their minds.
“[I]f you’re somebody who’s never heard of these explanations and it’s happening to you, you’re likely to either think […] something weird and supernatural really is happening, or I’m going crazy. And out of those two, you probably prefer the idea that something really is happening.”
And when something strange does occur to us, it can sometimes be tempting to limit our efforts to explain it to what we know we know. An object in our homes moves, for instance, we may put it down to the actions of a paranormal visitor if we reach the limits of our understanding, but to accommodate that explanation we have to address the fact that there has not been any convincing scientific evidence for these entities despite decades of committed research.
“[J]ust because we can’t think of an explanation doesn’t mean there isn’t one,” French added.
There is a wonderful case that illustrates this. A retired postman, Rodney Holbrook, kept finding that someone would tidy his shed workbench overnight if he left tools and objects out of place. This experience went on for some time until he set up a camera to see if he could capture the entity responsible. In a turn of events that few would have predicted, Holbrook did indeed capture the presence of his mysterious visitor, but it was less paranormal and more adorable – a small mouse had taken it upon itself to tidy up.
“If you’d have put that forward as a possible skeptical explanation, most people would have laughed at you, quite understandably, because it sounds so ridiculously implausible,” French told us. “Just so happens that it’s true.”
Sometimes, it seems, reality is far stranger than anything we can imagine with our ghost stories, all we need is an open mind.
