Ghosts are everywhere—yet nowhere. Cultures all around the world believe in spirits that survive death to dwell in another realm. In fact, ghosts are among the most widely believed of paranormal phenomena: Millions of people are interested in ghosts, and a 2019 IPOs/YouGov poll found that 45% of Americans say that ghosts “definitely or probably exist.”
The idea that the dead remain with us in spirit is ancient, and appears in countless stories from the Bible to Macbeth. It even spawned a folklore genre: ghost stories. Belief in ghosts is part of a larger web of related paranormal beliefs, including near-death experience, life after death, and spirit communication. Such beliefs offer many people comfort — who doesn’t want to believe that our departed loved ones are looking out for us, or with us in times of need?
Many people have tried to—or claimed to—communicate with spirits over the centuries; in Victorian England, for example, it was fashionable for upper-crust ladies to hold séances in their parlors after tea with friends. So-called “Ghost Clubs” dedicated to searching for ghostly evidence formed at prestigious universities including
Cambridge and Oxford, and in 1882 the most prominent such organization, the Society for Psychical Research, was established. Eleanor Sedgwick was an investigator (and later president) of that group, and could be considered the world’s first female ghostbuster. Meanwhile, across the pond, during the late 1800s, many American psychics claimed to speak to the dead — and were exposed as frauds by skeptical investigators such as Harry Price and Harry Houdini.
Despite these early, sporadic spirit investigation attempts, it wasn’t until recently that ghost hunting became a widespread interest around the world. Much of this is due to the popular TV series Ghost Hunters, which ended thirteen seasons without finding good evidence for ghosts.
The show spawned dozens of spinoffs and imitators, and it’s not hard to see why the show was so popular: the premise is that anyone can look for ghosts. The two original stars were ordinary guys (plumbers, in fact) who decided to look for evidence of spirits. Their message: You don’t need to be an egghead scientist—or even have any training in science or investigation—to look for ghosts:
All you need is some free time, a dark place, and a few cameras and gadgets. If you look long enough (and your threshold of evidence is low enough) any “unexplained” light or noise could be evidence of ghosts.
In the end, it doesn’t matter what all the scientists, skeptics, and ghost hunters think. If ghosts are real, and are some sort of as-yet-unknown energy, then their existence will (like all other scientific findings) sooner or later be discovered and verified by scientists through controlled experiments — not by weekend ghost hunters wandering around abandoned houses late at night with cameras and flashlights.
Despite mountains of ambiguous photos, sounds, and videos, the evidence for ghosts is no better today than it was a year ago, a decade ago, or a century ago. There are two possible reasons for the failure of ghost hunters to find good evidence of their quarry. The first is that ghosts don’t exist, and that reports of ghosts can be explained by psychology, misperceptions, mistakes, and hoaxes.
The second option is that ghosts do exist, but that ghost hunters are simply incompetent and need to bring more scientific rigor to the search, because what they’ve done so far has clearly failed. Ghost hunting is not really about the evidence (if it was, the search would have been abandoned long ago). Instead, it’s about having fun with friends, telling spooky stories, and the enjoyment of pretending they’re searching the edge of the unknown. After all, everyone loves a good ghost story.
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