Do you believe in ghosts? A majority of Americans do. In a survey of 1,000 people, over 61% said they believed in ghosts. Earlier polls suggested fewer did, at around 41%. Years before that it was 42%. Even at its lowest, that’s still 136 million people. That’s a lot of folks believing in ghosts.
The remarkable thing here is that we have no evidence for the existence of ghosts. We never have. However, it’s a strongly held belief among many. Many people will even tell you that they’ve seen a ghost themselves, which is around 18% of the population. That works out to nearly 60 million people who believe they have seen a ghost with their own eyes.
Seeing isn’t always believing, of course. Human eyes play tricks on them all the time, with the help of the imagination. Pareidolia is the name for the phenomenon of seeing patterns in randomness. In much the same way you can see a face in the pattern of your wallpaper, you can see a ghost in the shadows of the corner of a room, or fingers reaching for your window when it’s just a tree branch.
Ghosts exist in pretty much every society that has ever lived. We have all written and told stories about spirits as far back as language goes. For some people, this is enough proof. Why would we talk about them for so long if they didn’t exist? On the other hand, stories about fairies, vampires, and dragons are just as old, and fewer people tend to believe in them.
Even though millions of people have claimed to see ghosts, research into that does tend to poke some holes into their stories. A pair of sociologists writing a book about hauntings and ghost sightings found that many of their participants admitted they hadn’t technically seen what they thought was a ghost. Instead, they had experienced something they couldn’t explain. That could be noises, something moving in the dark, or anything that seemed unusual.
Researching ghosts is a difficult thing to do from a scientific perspective. Do they have a physical form? How can they pass through walls and appear and disappear but also move objects and open and closed doors? While all of that is standard fare for a ghost, from a physics standpoint it’s very hard to reconcile. If they’re real, they’re violating a lot of laws that we tend to hold true.
How come some ghosts are reported to look like normal people, but others are monstrous, skeletal, or inhuman? If a ghost is the soul of a person, how come some of them have clothing? If a ghost is a being of energy, what’s holding it together? What powers it to keep going? Why are they affected by gravity? Many questions, not so many answers. Science has found no evidence ghosts exist.
The Psychology of Believing
For all the questions you can ask, science does have a few answers. They’re not the kind that most people who believe in ghosts are happy with, but they are attempts to explain ghostly phenomena. Some people are just psychologically more inclined to believe in ghosts than others. Basic personality traits leave you far more willing than others to believe and even convince yourself of the truth of certain “unexplained” phenomena being supernatural. If you’re generally a more fearful person or one who believes agency rather than chance has to be behind certain events or patterns, you’re more likely to believe in the supernatural.
This tendency to believe in and even see ghosts might be evolutionary. It can help explain why some people will never see a ghost and others will – because some people are more willing to believe a thing is a ghost while others would see it as something else entirely.
A fun way to test this is with a simple thought experiment. You’re home alone and you hear a noise in the attic. Would you go up and investigate or would fear keep you away? If you legitimately, honestly fear that there’s something in the attic, even if you think it’s a mugger or some rabid animal, you’re probably more likely to believe in ghosts.
This is part of a survival instinct that dates back millennia. If you’re out in the wild and you hear a noise, it could be a predator. The smart move is to flee in fear because fear keeps you alive. Is there a chance the sound was the wind, and you’d be fine? Of course. But if it was a real threat, and you chose not to run, you’d be dead. Fear is a survival tool.
Some people are very open to the idea of suggestion, it’s how human minds work. In an experiment in the ’90s, two groups of people toured the same house. The tour was exactly the same, but one group was told the house was haunted. Members in that group reported feeling eerie sensations and intense emotions, all because they were conditioned to expect it.
Science is, at its heart, impartial. It should be open to any phenomenon and then seek to explain it. So if 60 million people have seen a ghost, it certainly gives rise to the need for some kind of explanation. But 60 million people seeing a ghost does not mean ghosts exist. Other explanations could account for some of that phenomenon. Let’s take a look at some of the more popular ones.
The History of Ghosts
Part of the reason that the belief in ghosts is so pervasive is because ghosts are so pervasive. This is not a new idea. Mesopotamians believed in ghosts 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. They used to think diseases were caused by spirits and each disease had its own particular spirit cause.
The people back then wrote frequently about death and ghosts. They firmly believed death was not the end for man and that you had a spirit that survived beyond death. It was something you got from the god who died during man’s creation, so like a nice little bonus on top of mortal life.
Our oldest depiction of a ghost may be on a 3,500-year-old Babylonian tablet that seems to show someone leading a ghost back to the afterlife. So they were telling ghost stories not entirely dissimilar from ones you might hear around a campfire today, or at the very least watch on Shudder.
The ghost in the tablet is being led back to the afterlife by a companion because that was why the spirit was restless in the first place; it was lonely. This is a common theme in ghost stories even today, that a ghost will return because there is something that is causing it to be restless, some unfinished business. If you can solve that problem for the ghost, it can return to the afterlife and rest.
Ghost stories have appeared in all cultures throughout all times around the world. Many of the details can change from place to place, but the general theme of the spirit of the dead remains constant. So how does science account for so many ghost stories and sightings?
Some are Hoaxes
In 1848, Maggie and Kate Fox, who were just 14 and 11, tricked their mother and a neighbor into thinking a ghost was banging on the walls. They faked the sound by cracking their knuckles or toes. But they didn’t admit that for 40 years.
After the prank, the neighbor told others what had happened. Word spread and others were interested. Even after the Fox family left the home, locals investigated after a rumor that a traveling salesman had died in the house. They searched it and found what they thought were bones and hair in the basement.
The girls were invited elsewhere to see if they could communicate with the dead. They managed to perform their feat in front of a massive crowd of 400 and no one could find evidence of a hoax.
The sisters continued to perform these seances into adulthood and are generally credited with starting the spiritualism movement in the United States. All of it was fake.
Taking a page from the Fox sisters’ book, the Amityville Horror was a hoax made up in the 1970s to help a man get off on a murder charge. In 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr killed his parents and four siblings. His insanity defense was predicated on voices having told him to do the murders. He claimed it was a demon. Of course, at other times he said it was a mob hit. Or that his sister did it. He laughed off stories of anything supernatural. He changed stories like people change socks.
After the murders, the Lutz family bought the house, and that was what The Amityville Horror was based on. That family claimed the house was haunted, they endured paranormal terrors, and the resulting book and film made the story infamous.
Everyone in Amityville knows the story is a hoax, made up first to get away with murder and later to sell books. DeFeo’s lawyer, William Weber, later admitted to making the whole story up with the Lutzes over a few bottles of wine. It was to sell books. He said the same in an interview with People magazine in 1979.
Two different hoaxes. One started an entire pseudo-religious movement, and the other has remained one of the most famous ghost stories of the modern era. Just goes to show you that people are more than willing to believe.
But what about non-hoaxes?
Sleep Paralysis
Sleep paralysis is becoming more and more well-known these days. There are even horror movies based on it that take a few liberties with the science behind it. People with sleep paralysis can wake up and be totally unable to move. They can’t even speak or scream. But they may feel a weight on their chest, and possibly even see something sitting there. A ghost, a demon, some nightmare creature. Imagine how terrifying that would be. This is entirely real as that person understands it.
About one in five people can experience sleep paralysis. It happens during the transition between REM sleep and wakefulness. In REM sleep you have vivid, realistic dreams. But, to stop you from acting them out, your brain paralyzes your body. Sleep paralysis messes up the transition. Essentially, you are awake but still in your dream state and that makes nightmares come to life.
Some sleep paralysis hallucinations are fully multi-sensory. You see, hear, and even feel them as though they are real. You may not have any way to tell they aren’t real until you wake up. And that could be where many ghost sightings come from, a state where everything seems real but your mind created it.
Does Toxic Mold Cause Ghosts?
Another recent theory about hauntings is more about the house than any evil spirits within. Most haunted houses are older houses. Older houses tend to be more likely to suffer from things like black mold, especially in the walls where it can’t be seen. Some have suggested that this kind of toxic mold is the cause of the haunting.
It’s known that some kinds of mold and fungus can cause serious psychological problems including hallucinations. In an old building with a mold problem, and poor circulation, a person could be breathing in those toxic spores and suffering psychological effects as a result.
This isn’t to say that if you have a mold problem, you’re going to see a specter with bleeding eyes running down the hall at you. But you might be more inclined to hear a creak or a thump and become anxious and paranoid that there’s some creeping thing in the darkness. If you see a shadow move the wrong way, you might be glad to believe that it’s paranormal rather than perfectly natural.
What About Infrasound?
Like mold, infrasound is another one of those Insidious, hidden things that might be playing tricks on your mind. Infrasound is a sort of blanket term for any sound that is below the frequency that humans normally hear.
In experiments, people subjected to infrasound have experienced a range of negative emotions. This includes anxiety, fear, revulsion, and extreme sorrow. It can also give you the chills. Because the sound is so low frequently, you don’t even know you’re hearing it.
In the 1980s, an engineer named Vic Tandy was working in a lab that his coworkers had begun to suspect was haunted. One night, well working alone, he suddenly got the feeling he was being watched. He broke out in a cold sweat and the hair on the back of his neck stood up. From the corner of his eye he saw a shape moving towards him but when he turned to look nothing was there.
The next day, by chance, he discovered that a newly installed fan in the lab was producing extremely low-frequency sound waves at 19hz. The same frequency would later be found in the haunted basement of a pub where people claimed to have seen the ghost of a gray lady.
The resonant frequency of the human body is about 19hz. It can cause your chest to vibrate giving you the feeling of breathing difficulties leading to cold sweats and a panicked feeling. It can vibrate your eyes to cause visual distortions such as gray shapes moving toward you.
Of course mold, infrasound, hoaxes, and sleep paralysis probably don’t count for all instances of hauntings and ghosts that people have reported. But they do account for some, and if those are scientific explanations for a few, there are probably scientific explanations for a few more.
Does that mean ghosts don’t exist at all? No, but it does mean not every ghost is real.