Well, well, well. . . here we have a big article from the New York Times that touts ghosts, implicitly assumes that they exist and haunt houses, and tells readers how to live with them. Save for one barely noticeable caveat about naturalistic explanations for one “ghostly” phenomenon, you will find no doubt about ghosts, and nothing about investigations of whether they exist. (Ghosts, as you know, are taken to be the returned spirits of people who are dead.)
I’m not sure why the NYT keeps writing about these paranormal phenomena as if they are true, without giving the proper caveats. (e.g., “Note to reader: These are all anecdotal reports. Further scientific investigation has shown no evidence for the dead reappearing.”) It may be because younger folk, possibly the target demographic for the paper, is more credulous about these things. (See below.)
Click on the screenshot to read:
The article gives several anecdotal accounts that have the inhabitants of some houses think that their homes are haunted. I’ll give just one:
Lisa Asbury has lived in her home in Dunlap, Ill., for three years now. But the paranormal activity she’s observed began in her old home in 2018, following the death of her husband’s grandfather, and is identical to what she’s been experiencing now, she said. Ms. Asbury, 43, said that she’s seen objects fly off shelves, lights flash in multiple rooms and fan blades start turning suddenly. “I hear my name being called when I’m alone, phantom footsteps, our dogs barking while staring at nothing,” she added.
But nothing has felt aggressive, Ms. Asbury said. Just attention-seeking. “I believe our spirits to be family,” she said. “I get the feeling that we have different family members visit at different times.”
And though it was unsettling for a while, she’s figured out how to live within the ghostly milieu. “Usually if something occurs, we will acknowledge it out loud or just say hi to the spirit,” Ms. Asbury said.
Notice the advice, mentioned in the article’s title, about how to live with a ghost. Be friendly and maybe your ghost will be friendly too, like Casper:
There are many more examples, but that one will suffice. The paper explains the surprising ubiquity of the belief that one’s house is haunted.
Many Americans believe that their home is inhabited by someone or something that isn’t a living being. An October study from the Utah-based home security company Vivint found that nearly half of the thousand surveyed homeowners believed that their house was haunted. Another survey of 1,000 people by Real Estate Witch, an education platform for home buyers and sellers, found similar results, with 44 percent of respondents saying that they’ve lived in a haunted house.
Crikey! That’s a lot of credulous people. The believers tend to be younger, and the difference in belief between Gen Zers and baby boomers is substantial: almost twofold:
There are generational differences in who believes in ghosts. In the Vivint survey, 65 percent of Gen Zers (defined as people born between 1997 and 2012) who participated in the survey thought their home was haunted, while 35 percent of baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) surveyed thought the same.
Why so many? The paper gives several explanations:
Researchers attribute increasing belief in the supernatural to the rise of paranormal-related media, a decline in religious affiliation and the pandemic. With so many people believing that they live with ghosts, a new question arises: How does one live with ghosts? Are there ways to become comfortable with it, or certain actions to keep away from so as not to disturb it?
Note the implicit assumption that ghosts are real. Here are more explanations, with this one obvious: if ghosts were real, there would be some kind of afterlife:
Sharon Hill, the author of the 2017 book “Scientifical Americans: The Culture of Amateur Paranormal Researchers,” added that “many are no longer fearful of ghosts because we’ve been so habituated to them by the media.”
Haunted houses can also be “a way to connect to the past or a sense of enchantment in the everyday world,” Ms. Hill said. “We have a sense of wanting to find out for ourselves and be able to feel like we can reach beyond death. To know that ghosts exist would be very comforting to some people.”
More explanations:
Gen Z “might be searching for meaning in new places,” Ms. Hill said. “If the modern world they live in isn’t providing food for the soul, if capitalism is a system that drains us of personal enlightenment, it’s not hard to figure out that younger people will search elsewhere for that and find the idea of an alternate world — of ghosts, aliens, cryptids, et cetera — to be enticing to explore.”
The pandemic also played a role in society’s relationship with houses and ghosts.
The salience of death in our culture increased, igniting a desire for evidence of an afterlife for some people. “Think of all the sudden, and often not-sufficiently-ritually-mourned deaths during Covid. Many times people lost loved ones with no last contact, no funeral,” said Tok Thompson, a folklorist and professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California.
. . . Many experts also attribute a decline in religious belief to fostering a belief in the paranormal. A 2021 Pew Research Center survey found that nearly 30 percent of Americans were religiously unaffiliated, 10 percentage points higher than a decade ago.
Why can’t they just become adherents to naturalism instead of to spiritualism manifested as belief in the paranormal?
One note of interest:
Most states don’t mention paranormal activity in real estate disclosure laws, but New York and New Jersey have explicit requirements surrounding it. In New Jersey, sellers, if asked, must disclose known information about any potential poltergeists. In New York, a court can rescind a sale if the seller has bolstered the reputation of the home being haunted and takes advantage of a buyer’s ignorance of that notoriety.
The article adds that having a reputation of being haunted can actually boost the value of a home.
The article gives only one naturalistic alternative to the paranormal mentioned in the entire article:
Quarantine and remote work meant more time at home, which meant more time to notice strange sounds or movements. Some paranormal investigators reported increased calls concerning hauntings.
“People weren’t normally around all the time to notice the normal noises of a house as it heats up from the sun during the day and then cools in the afternoon. With everyone inside, there was even less noise outside to drown out the typical sounds,” Ms. Hill, the author, said.
But of course the phenomena recounted in the anecdotes, including ouija-board stuff and dogs mysteriously appearing outside, aren’t explained by houses heating up and cooling down.
And that’s it for alternative explanations. And the article’s last paragraph serves to buttress the notion that ghosts are real:
Karla Olivares, a financial consultant living in San Antonio, Texas, said that growing up in a house she believed was haunted has made her more accepting of the unexplainable happenings that have occurred in other places she’s lived or visited.
“When I feel something now, I acknowledge it. It’s also made me become more spiritual myself,” Ms. Olivares, 27, said. “Now, I feel that it’s all around me, and I won’t get surprised if I feel something again.”
Well, what can you expect of a paper where an Anglican priest touts God in her weekly Sunday column? Both ghosts and gods are paranormal phenomena, and the NYT has a history of touting stuff like tarot cards, reincarnation and astrology.
FYI, the author of the piece is identified this way:
Anna Kodé is a reporter for the Real Estate section of The Times. She writes about design trends, housing issues and the relationship between identity and home.
There’s no mention of her being conversant with scientific investigation of the paranormal.
h/t: John
I now live in a retirement home. Funny how few ghosts are here! (n=0).
Believing is easier than thinking, thus so many more believers than thinkers.
Ghosts are like gods, non existent.
People want to feel special and unique, especially in this age of social media. Believing that they have a special haunted house allows them to do just that. Remember Andy Warhol’s “In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes“.
Yes particularly young millennials like the writer Ms. Kode.
I have to remind myself too that many folks in her demographic see the world ironically: from her pov it is both adorable and ridiculous that some people believe a ghost lives in their house. This ironic stance allows the writer and her readers to both participate in and make fun of the belief at the same time, without ever having to either claim or deny that the ghost is real.
> Yes particularly young millennials like the writer Ms. Kode.
Careful. You’re misnaming Anna Kodé. That’s a microaggression.
(Wow, I’m just now realizing that Poe’s Law applies to the New Left: Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article.)
Well, the Woke mantra that we must accept everyone’s narratives must encourage credulity.
So stupid. Even dumber is how in New Jersey one is required to disclose ghosts in real estate contracts when asked. Ugh. I doubt that this sort of woo will ever go away, and it’s annoying that the NYT is implicitly promoting this nonsense by not issuing a disclaimer. (I don’t subscribe so didn’t read the article itself, only what Jerry posted here. My apologies if I misrepresented something.)
I would chalk it up to Halloween. It’s probably there in part to get into the “spirit” of the holiday.
There’s a practical reason for realtors to disclose that a house is reputedly haunted: it could effect resale value. Same if a particularly gruesome murder took place recently and it’s well known.
I recently came across an article from a few years back bewailing the disturbing increase in students who refused to say anyone was wrong. Teachers and professors were finding that a line no one is supposed to cross was hard if not impossible to conjure up.The writer’s specific focus was on moral wrongs, but the same I think could apply to factual beliefs. It was always “not for me to say.” If someone thought it was okay to steal or that the moon was made of green cheese, that was their truth and judgement was bad. So is skepticism. They’re mean and controlling.
It’s basically tolerance run amok. Somehow (coddling? postmodernism? individualism? neuroticism?) the idea that there’s right and wrong was itself deemed wrong. It’s all good. People are allowed to believe and do what they want. The dividing line between personal preferences and actual facts is blurred and nary a discouraging word is heard.
Grow up in an atmosphere like that and believing in ghosts is easy. You’re less likely to challenge yourself and your peers are less likely to challenge your personal truth. So if there has indeed been this shift in what’s covered under the mantle of Tolerance, that could also be a factor.
I try to politely tell people when they are wrong (at least when I consider the issue not to be a lost cause). I do it more face-to-face, but also do it online. I have seen significant push-back from a few people IRL, usually those who appear to be the most overconfident. That type of reaction can discourage many other people from correcting others; sometimes it’s just not worth risking the reaction.
Ask these younger people if it’s wrong to call people wrong.
Get ready for a stream of uptalking and sentences mainly composed of the words/terms “like”, “you know”, “er”, “I feel”…
I’m GenX and my elders used to say we couldn’t communicate properly, but the 25 and under crowd has taken it to an entirely new level.
I’m beginning to think this is the best way to tell someone they’re wrong:
Why is it Gen Zers are so gullible? Sorry, credulous (that sounds nicer).
Perhaps because they’ve grown up with all those terrible ghost hunter programs as well as the internet & social media where conspiracy theories and distrust of everything is rampant Porn, cat videos, shopping, and conspiracy theories pretty much sums up online life. I suppose if you are a Furry who buys new fetish gear for you and your ghost sex partner, your whole life is the internet.
Something weird and unnatural in your house. It’s called a teenager.
Now matter how strange or how loud the noise, I can guarantee it’s the cats. Always.
Out of all the fascinating things ghosts could be doing, there they are, hanging out in homes of the credulous, shuffling shoes and clothes and glassware about, making odd noises. They need to take some inspiration from Stephen King and get out of their ruts.
Maybe it’s the Holy Ghost. The author mentions the decline in religious beliefs. It could be that the people are not recognizing the Trinity member because they have eschewed religion. Poor souls. I think we should pump up the religiosity of the US population to get them believing in the orthodox superstition. Go to church. Pray and be normal. Believe that Christ died to save you. Don’t ask silly questions. And above all, don’t leave the bloody church.
“Show time!” to quote Beetlejuice. And that’s about as serious as I can get when it comes to ghosts.
I don’t think that this is a new phenomenon, or a Gen-Z phenomenon, particularly: the Victorians, for example, were great believers in spirits.
I think it’s just that *everything*, no matter how trivial or ridiculous, is now a subject for comment. What we have now is the collision between – as Linguist mentioned above – “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” and (my guess) space needing filling in the NYT pages; we’re all familiar with the local paper, or local TV news on a slow day – popping in filler stories of no particular news value.
Try shouting the most famous stage direction in all Anglophone drama: “[EXEUNT GHOST]”.
So maybe Patrick Swayze will come back to help Demi Moore throw another clay pot?
Chrissake, there’s no end to people’s gullibility.
Ever find yourself in a conversation with someone who believes in this stuff, and 1) for one reason or another you need to pull your punches (perhaps this person is a dear friend and you don’t want to embarrass them in front of others) 2) still feel the need to put pressure on these ridiculous beliefs? I’ve seen this pulled off once or twice.
On one occasion, at a party I overheard a man talking about how he was 100% sure the house he grew up in was haunted…strange noises on the piano, random markings in the attic and whatnot. I like to challenge these beliefs and was weighing how to do that politely, when a woman interjected.
She said “you know, I always wondered about what these ghosts do with all of their time when not haunting people…you’d think one of them would become a virtuoso pianist, or a great artist, or solve some difficult equation. You know, instead of hearing random banging on the piano as you described, you’d hear Bach. Or instead of those markings, you see some beautiful drawing or a mathematical equation.”
Her tone was lighthearted enough not to seem sarcastic, and yet she had put into people’s minds the absurdity of some sentient, immaterial entity sort of just hanging around the house for years on end, and then once in while deciding to bang on pots and pans or move a chair 6 inches to the left!
I once asked a credulous person that if ghosts are so insubstantial that they can pass through walls, etc, how in the world do they knock things over? I did not get a response. She just looked at me with pity.
That’s related to one of my primary arguments against mind-body dualism (the idea that a conscious soul can direct the physical brain); there is no physical mechanism in the brain that acts like a ‘soul radio’, translating the soul’s ‘signals’ into physical actions.
Obviously, you aren’t aware of this theory put forward by Descartes:
Spinoza demolished this conjecture, saying among other things:
Here’s something else worth considering:
If an “immaterial soul” can manipulate matter within the material body it inhabits — lift a finger, scratch an ear, make fart noises in an armpit — why would it be restricted from manipulating matter external to the body, i.e. telekinesis? Why *wouldn’t* it be able to, say, make a spatula fly across the kitchen?
The answer, of course, is that dualism is a joke. All arguments in its favor, historic or contemporary, consist almost entirely of frantic, nonsensical hand-waving.
That person must have a poor imagination, or not read the right stories.
The general theory is that ghosts are insubstantial by default, but they can manifest with effort. The amount of effort involved depends on both the strength and skill of the ghost. The Casper comics play with this – he’s insubstantial normally, but can be substantial if he concentrates on being so (they aren’t strict about this, but it tends to work that way).
This is why they bang on pianos occasionally rather than playing symphonies. It takes a huge amount of effort to do that banging, fine-grained playing for a long time is out of the question for the average ghost. That would be like trying to do a painting using a gym weight you can barely lift.
And being a ghost is depressing. After all, you’re dead. It’s not conducive to solving deep problems – and remember, you can’t even use a pencil and paper, or go get a book, much less use a computer (again, the manifestation effort to do it renders all that out of the question).
Right that makes sense, why didn’t I think of that? “Manifestation effort”…nothing ad hoc about that, seems like an air-tight scientific explanation. Thanks for clearing it up.
Another question then…why no extinct hominin ghosts? What with several million years of human like creatures on the planet, you’d think we’d see the occasional ghost homo habilis or neanderthalensis roaming around their old stomping grounds…
Glad to help. It’s just a matter of having read the relevant literature. You’re absolutely correct that the field of ghost studies could be made more rigorous, but there’s many obviously difficulties. For example, to answer your question, the scant data on ghost age seems to indicate there’s a weakening of attachment over time. It’s conjectured there’s a half-life, with unclear variables involved (there’s some connection to the type of death which produces the ghost), but seems to be order of magnitude of decades. At that time scale, nobody has been able to do a longitudinal study. That is, if you had a group of ghosts, after some decades, the idea is half that group would be gone (where they go is beyond this discussion). Thus it’s a pretty safe bet a 1000-year old ghost is not likely, though of course there could always be an exceptional outlier. But 10,000, 100,000 years is of such low probability that such a ghost would have long departed. Even if by some miracle one was found, by that point they’d be in such a bad mental state that they’d never be able to manifest as anything coherent.
If any here have the correspondence of Spinoza, you will find an amusing exchange of letters between Spinoza and Hugo Boxel, an Amsterdam city official, on the subject of ghosts. 350 years later, public figures still disgrace themselves with such nonsense.
Every time there is a ‘Ghost Watch’ type program on TV where people mill around in a dark house at night I find myself shouting “Turn on the damn lights!”
Of course it would make poor television. It’s much harder to frighten people in the light. It’s much harder to be frightened in the light.
When I hear of ghosts wailing or talking, calling a name, I think how the hell does that happen without a medium, mechanism to do so. I would have thought you would need something like a larynx, a way to move air. The same for moving objects, how do you move objects when you can go through walls.
My conclusion: ghosts reside in the human brain and while there they can do anything. So living with ones brain is the object of the exercise, not ghosts.
Realization: what an amazing tool of biology is the larynx. Basic sign lauguage should be taught to children… and for laughs, some individuals (just some) should have been born mute.
Sean Carroll says that there is no room in physics for ghosts – no mode of action for them.
There’s a TV show called “The Haunting Of” in which a medium helps a celebrity deal with a haunting from their past by acting as interpreter for the ghost (someone in my family watches it). It’s quite nice the way the host (and medium) patches up all the misunderstandings between the ghost and the celeb, and yet curious that whenever ghosts are heard from their issues are so petty. They never address religion (Pray to Jesus you sinner!), or identify a murderer, or tell us the meaning of life, etc.
Have long enjoyed this supposition by the scientist Gustav Eckstein:
Ghosts
If the dying have an odor,
perhaps the departed do, too.
Those who have seen a ghost
know it is an edgeless affair.
The same can be said for a smell.
Lucretius once described a ghost
as infinitely fine particles
infinitely divided. That’s a smell.
One can shine a flashlight
right through a ghost
as easily as through a smell.
A ghost settles down into a corner
of the room and merges with it.
(A smell of high molecular weight.)
But most ghosts, as everyone knows,
ascend. (Smells of low molecular weight.)
It is not the good who shall rise
on Judgment Day, but the fragrant.
“if ghosts were real, there would be some kind of afterlife”
It would seem so. And yet, there’s no accounting for what people will believe or not believe. E.g., as a pantheist I don’t believe in a personal afterlife; but I do, based on personal experience, believe in ghosts.
Science, of course, is always evolving, and I would never exclude the possibility of a satisfactory naturalistic explanation for my spectral experience. But until I encounter such an explanation, I have no problem going along with what Keats called “negative capability”—i.e., the ability to “accept uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Or, as Wiki puts it, “the ability to perceive and recognize truths beyond the reach of consecutive reasoning.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_capability)
“Science, of course, is always evolving, and I would never exclude the possibility of a satisfactory naturalistic explanation for my spectral experience.”
But shouldn’t this be your null hypothesis…the naturalistic explanation? Ghosts seems to defy the basic laws of physics as we understand them…being completely immaterial but having an effect on immaterial things. Several commentators have pointed this out; as in, there seems to be no coherent way of describing how ghosts actually could mechanistically do the things the are claimed to do. It would also involve a “dualist” conception of the mind, which seems completely ruled out by modern science.
So you seem to have your reasoning backwards. Whatever you saw, no matter how weird it was, should be assumed to have a naturalistic explanation. A “theory of ghosts” would have to offer a model that better fits the data than modern physics. It should produce predictions, and it should be rigorous enough that others looking at the same data would arrive at the same conclusion. In other words, no different than describing the behavior of electrons, quarks, viruses, geological processes, or any other aspect of nature.
It would also have to be falsifiable in order to be taken seriously. And I think on this latter part, the falsifiability criterion, that you ghost hypothesis would fall flat. What could possibly falsify your belief in ghosts…you should at least be able to come up with some fact patterns that in principle would not fit the ghost hypothesis.
Thanks, Joe, for the polite and thoughtful reply. I understand your reasoning. Gary
“Whatever you saw, no matter how weird it was, should be assumed to have a naturalistic explanation.”
To clarify: yes, I always look first for a naturalistic explanation. It’s only when one is not forthcoming that I entertain the possibility of a paranormal event. Even then, I allow for the possibility that there might be a naturalistic explanation that I haven’t considered. So it might be more accurate to say that I have no resistance to the idea of ghosts.
“capitalism is a system that drains us of personal enlightenment”
It is funny how they reflexively blame capitalism for everything. As if picking turnips on a collective farm is fulfilling and enlightening.
Here is my unsolicited ghost story. Some here know that I was a student of military archaeology. In connection with that, I had access to a place with fantastic haunting potential.
A cave, where there are ancient pictographs and and remnants of habitation starting in 1500 BCE are common. In the 17th century, the Spanish conquerors threw rebelling natives into the cave in large numbers.
One of the primary features of the cave is that a couple of hundred feet in, there is a vertical lava tube about 40 feet across, which goes about 150 feet straight down. A natural oubliette.
During the WW2 Pacific campaign, the Japanese used the cave as an underground field hospital and shelter for hundreds of people. Towards the end of the battle, the Americans drove tanks right up to the cave entrance and blasted away, which brought much of the natural ceiling down on those inside.
The cave is avoided by the natives, because it is believed to be haunted. The trees at the entrance to the cave are believed to be haunted as well. Nobody lives anywhere near it. It is a strenuous jungle trek to get there, and a technical climbing exercise to explore it.
Obviously, I went there as often as possible. One night, I rappelled to the bottom of the oubliette. The area is strewn with Japanese medical supplies, military equipment, bottles and cans that once contained rations, and lots of human bones.
A little after midnight I sat down and turned off my lights. I sat quietly and quite alone for an hour or so, open to whatever presented itself.
Of course, there was nothing at all.
Not there, or anywhere else. Another cave, modified into a fortification, had the remains of a bunch of little kids in the farthest chamber from the entrance, with pieces of American grenades scattered among the bones. It was emotional and chilling to me, but only because of the story told by the evidence there.
If our folklore about ghosts were accurate, a bunch of places I have spent time in should have grim grinning ghosts zooming around constantly. It would be cool.
But it is just not the case.
When I was in my teens and 20s, I had a job mowing the grass in the town cemetery. A lot of people would ask me, in all seriousness, if I wasn’t afraid of ghosts. I told them that I never saw any evidence of ghosts. Later, I managed a movie theater, a job that often required me to work late at night, alone. Again, people asked me if I wasn’t afraid to be there with ghosts. I told them I never had any spooky experience in my decades of working there.
On the other hand, some of the theater’s cleaning people (one a teenage girl, the other a woman in her sixties) told me that they felt someone watching them when they were there alone. Another manager told me that she occasionally glimpsed a man in a top hat or a young girl out of the corner of her eye when she was there alone. . . but they vanished if she looked at them directly.
Maybe ghosts don’t like me.
Didn’t work in a movie theater, but pretty sure I heard a ghost in one once. It was during a screening of “Battlefield Earth”, and someone (or something?) kept howling “Booo!”
“oubliette” Now, that was an interesting (and Halloween apropos) google rabbit hole. Thanks for the learnings.
Didn’t Don Marquis publish the definitive comment on ghosts, written for him by archy the cockroach:
boss people ask you
if i believe in ghosts
i assure you i do not
believe in ghosts and
if you had known as many
as i have you would not
believe in them either
I figure the unusually large numbers of ghost-believers is sampling error. Probably 90% of people that get asked ignore the question because it asked about ghosts and they figure “why waste time with such nonsense.” So, when they finally get to a 1000 person sample size, 9000 people already ignored them, and only half believe.
I submit that a majority of Americans probably believe in ghosts. Rather than poking fun (which I admit to myself) it might be more fruitful to actually understand from where this gullibility (my opinion is ghosts do not and never have existed and the reasons are evident) comes.
Surely the fact that some 90% of Americans believe in God, the majority are relatively ignorant of science, and a significant minority deny evolution on religious grounds, and live their lives believing we are somehow surrounded by an invisible world populated by souls, God(s), angels, and an entire hierarchy of invisible entities have a lot to do with it. A situation I do not see changing
I’d say the “ghosts aren’t real” crowd will forever be outnumbered by their opposites.
One of the five questions I get that are guaranteed to set me off is , “Is it haunted?” I tell them no, and if anyone had a haunted house, it ought to be me, since something like 900 were killed or wounded on or near my yard, 9 July 1755, in the Battle of Braddock’s Field.
I keep waiting to hear about a haunted suburban ranch somewhere.
Meanwhile, under the Principle of Ill Winds, this kind of stuff motivated Netflix to pay an extraordinary sum for the rights to a script about exorcism recently, and the film was shot and recently wrapped here in a variety of locations around Pittsburgh, including one scene at Schwixon. Setup, shooting and breakdown covered an entire week, and of course there was a payment for that.
I’m afraid all this just reminds me of an old joke:
The famous ghost-hunter is in town. Theatre packed out every night. His first question is always the same: “Anyone here believe in ghosts?’ All the hands go up, of course. That’s why they’ve come along.
“Has anyone here seen a ghost?” Nearly all the hands stay up. “Anyone touched a ghost?” Quite a few stay up. Then the light-hearted question: “Anyone had sex with a ghost?”
One night, to his surprise, one hand stays up. “Come down, sir, come down. This is astonishing. Tell me, sir, where exactly did you have sex with a ghost?”
The guy looks puzzled, but then the penny drops: “Oh, sorry, I thought you said a goat”.
My neighbor has a goat. He’ll love that.