Folklore Expert Answers Ghost Story Questions

I'm Professor Tok Thompson, professor of anthropology

at the University of Southern California.

Let's answer some questions from the internet.

This is Ghost Story Support.

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First up, I wonder if you know

what the oldest recorded ghost story is?

I would really like to know.

So we know that from the earliest writings,

especially back to ancient Babylonian times, Sumer, Ur,

some of the earliest stories people were writing down

were stories about ghosts.

So maybe 3,500 years ago, we have inscriptions

of what seemed to be even an exorcism ritual.

So not only did they have ghosts,

but they already had ritual specialists

that figured out how to get rid of ghosts.

Again, we know that as soon as writing pops up,

we've already got ghost stories,

and these are some of our earliest writings.

From Anna, @lesaenni, What counts as a ghost?

Ghosts aren't a scientific concept.

We've never established them as a scientific reality.

So how do you define something

that science doesn't even acknowledge existing?

The definition I like to use is that a ghost

is a spirit of a dead person who appears to the living.

So this weeds out a lot of things

that might be other spirits or other demons or ghouls

or things that might not be the spirit of a dead person.

On the other hand, it opens up a lot of possibilities.

One example is what if the dead person

appears to you in a dream?

Is that still a ghost?

Some people might say yes, some people might say no.

So again, these are sort of handy definitions,

and we like to see how far we can stretch these.

From @imranzomg.

How come we don't have ghosts now

that are, like, '90s dudes with backwards caps and [beeps]?

I've been studying those for a while,

and one of the places we really find millennial ghosts

is in the internet.

It's in the cyber world.

We have all these stories of haunted servers.

Minecraft has one of the most famous

supposed ghost stories on the internet.

So there are a tremendous amount of new ghost stories

and especially this idea of the cyber world.

Maybe this is where our afterlife is.

We have souls maybe trapped on a computer game

or on a server.

So I have all these sort of stories I've collected

of people getting text messages from the beyond

of their good friends.

The online ghosts are all the people

that spend all their social time

and their social communications online.

So when they die, this is where they haunt.

@urnonshowbizgf.

Why do people believe in ghosts?

I like to always offer the possibility

that, well, one, maybe they're real,

or other suggestions might be something like

this helps us deal with death.

If you believe in ghosts,

you probably believe in some sort of an afterlife.

Ghost stories are also a way of establishing ethics

as something more than just transactional.

The idea that you can be haunted

by your ethical failures if you make them.

There was a great scientific experiment a few years ago.

They had these students come in and do a test.

The only catch was that they could easily cheat on the test.

And the psychologist said,

Okay, you know, please don't cheat.

But they kept track of how many students did.

And one group, they also said that,

Oh, by the way, this room is supposed to be haunted.

The group that felt their room was haunted

were far less likely to cheat at the test.

Next question.

@ClearShakes.

One fun theory I've heard

why ghost stories became so big in the Victorian era

is that that's when home gas lighting became prevalent.

Everyone's getting carbon monoxide poisoning

and hallucinating.

It's possible.

We know that people did

when they're trying to contact the spirit world.

They do try to become intoxicated

with various drugs or gases or whatnot.

The Oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece,

we know that gases were coming out,

and that had something to do

with the participants' experience being gassed.

But there's some other reasons

that ghosts became really big during the Victorian era.

One of the biggest ones was that, you know,

this is after the Reformation.

You have the Protestant

versus the Catholic groups in Europe.

And in the Protestant groups,

you weren't supposed to believe in ghosts suddenly.

That was supposed to be an old Catholic superstition

that, you know, the Reformation was supposed to get rid of.

And one of the big problems is that people

kept seeing a lot of ghosts in the Victorian era.

What we have is this really interesting rise

of spiritualism, of seances,

of scientific inquiries into ghosts.

So maybe ghosts weren't supernatural;

maybe they were natural, you know,

maybe science could prove ghosts exist, you know?

Maybe electricity had something to do with ghosts,

like Frankenstein, or maybe X-rays.

Maybe we could take photographs of the spirit world.

So there was a heavy blend

of sort of Eastern mysticism and science.

The other thing I think I could mention too

is the idea of the Gothic novel,

which was huge during the Victorian era.

And that's really talking about the fall of the aristocracy.

Charles Dickens wrote a lot about ghosts.

So this is a big deal in the Victorian era,

and they're becoming a big deal today as well

for different reasons.

@TakeThatDarwin.

Okay, I realize it's customary, if not mandatory,

for Christians to believe in demons and Satan,

but how did ghosts get in there?

When Christianity started off, one of its main core tenets

is that ghosts weren't supposed to happen.

You know, once you die,

eventually you're gonna go to the Day of Judgment.

So a lot of people were worshiping ancestors

and deifying ancestors,

and Christianity was saying, No, this doesn't happen.

Ghosts aren't real.

So this lasts for about 500 years.

And then [laughs] when it spreads into Northern Europe,

the Germanic peoples were very, very much into their ghosts.

And Pope Gregory I said, Look, you don't have to change

what people do.

You just have to Christianize it.

So by the time we get to the Middle Ages,

the church has shifted position.

If you see a ghost, you can go to your priest,

and you can say, Hey, priest, I saw a ghost.

And then the priest would say, Ah, yes, you know,

that's your grandfather, and he's stuck in purgatory,

and he needs help to bring him up the ranks of purgatory.

He needs me to pray for him.

Therefore, you need to pay me to pray for him.

So this idea of the sale of indulgences,

which is a big moneymaker for the church,

depended on ghosts now.

When Martin Luther started off the Reformation

with his complaints against the church,

the number one thing was the sale of indulgences.

And very connected to that, ghosts.

Martin Luther said, Look, Christians

aren't supposed to believe in ghosts.

The church shouldn't believe in ghosts.

You know, what are you doing believing in ghosts?

This ultimately led to the Protestant Reformation.

And so now you had the Catholic Church

that still believed in ghosts and exorcisms,

and the Protestant groups

largely denied the existence of ghosts.

That starts to change in the American experience

around the late 1880s

when you have these sort of newer religious movements,

the Third Great Awakening as it's sometimes called.

Southern Pentecostals, the so-called holy rollers,

actually tended to view the world

as comprised of demons, of devils,

and the devil's a very active force.

So this comes close,

but the idea now is going back to this older idea

that, oh no, there are no such things as ghosts.

It's only demons or devils trying to trick you.

Okay, Styling1998, Spirited Away.

What spirits in the movie are based off of real spirits

in Japanese folklore and Shintoism?

Not many.

Spirited Away which is a beautiful movie

about the spirit realm.

I think it really captures the look and feel

of traditional Japanese folklore.

The idea of the spirit world

is not that far away from the human world.

You can easily sort of wander into it by accident.

The idea that people can help out

spirits in the spirit world,

and sometimes people are necessary to help out spirits.

All of this is very, very traditional.

The actual figures, the actual characters themselves,

not so much based on actual Japanese folklore.

A friend of mine who's a scholar on Japanese folklore,

and he calls this the folkloresque.

You're making something really feel like folklore,

even if it's really not based on traditional folklore.

Another question coming in from EngineeringNo8660.

What cultures do you think

have the most ghost/spirit rich history?

A lot of surveys have indicated

that by far the majority of Taiwan believes in ghosts,

probably 90%, 95% of the population.

Which is to say, if you're in Taiwan

and you don't believe in ghosts,

you're kinda weird; you're kind of strange.

It's worked into the calendar.

You have Ghost Month in Taiwan.

You have the big celebrations for the ghosts.

In Japan, very similarly, this is the Obon Festival.

It's a bit like American Christmas.

Maybe you get days off;

you're supposed to go home with the family.

But the other thing is, it's not just your living family;

it's your ancestors.

Traditional families would set places out

and invite the ancestors to come in and enjoy a meal

and to return and greet their living relatives.

You have your wanted ghosts, like ancestor spirits,

and your unwanted ghosts,

the ones that tend to haunt us or cause trouble.

These work a little bit differently

from conflations of Buddhism and other traditions,

but we have several different types of ghosts.

Very often these ghosts are corporeal,

so you don't notice they're ghosts at first.

Ghosts are a little bit more alive

and fleshed out in a lot of East Asian traditions.

You can even have sex with a ghost and have ghost babies.

And so some people that are remarkable people,

people might say, Oh, yeah,

he's got a bit of ghost in him.

This idea that being close to the spirit world

and close to the ghost world

is also maybe what makes some people so very special.

This becomes a much bigger sort of cultural concern

in places like Taiwan and Japan

than we might see in places like America.

@NoctivagantPod, Are poltergeist and ghosts the same thing?

And if not, what's the difference?

How can you tell?

Poltergeist is a German word

that means literally noisy ghost.

The idea of the poltergeist experience

is when things are, you know, flying off the walls;

objects are moving.

So they're creating a lot of noise.

These are noisy ghosts.

But some people that believe in poltergeists and ghosts

would maintain that these are not ghosts,

that this is something else involved,

that they're not really ghosts; it's probably telekinesis.

@DJFreshUK.

Okay, well then how come

no one ever sees ghosts of animals?

The main reason that people don't see many ghosts

of animals in, say, America today,

it's largely an Abrahamic and largely Christian nation

where we have this idea that only people have souls.

A ghost is sort of your soul.

On the other hand, in societies that are non-Abrahamic,

Japan, you have animal ghosts.

Look at India; you have animal ghosts.

And if you look at Native American folklore,

you have a ton of animal ghosts.

And that goes to this fundamental thoughts,

very different thoughts about the soul.

And for Native American societies,

you know, does a bear have a soul?

Does a wolf have a soul?

Yeah, of course.

And so therefore, if you kill an animal

or even harvest plants, Native American tradition,

you have to, you know, say thank you.

You have to sort of say grace.

You have to pray for its spiritual journey.

You have to give it some sort of funerary ritual

or else, you know, something might go wrong,

and it might come back and haunt you.

This idea of being haunted by ghosts

really shaped a lot of Native American spiritual traditions.

@grace6569, Why do ghost stories

always talk about the lady in white?

Why not the lady in turquoise or the lady in burgundy?

Well, a lot of ghosts show up in night

and I think maybe white actually shows up better

in the middle of the night.

So it's a very sort of compelling imagery

if you see, you know,

the lady in white in the middle of the night.

We also find in many cultures,

especially sort of patrilineal and patriarchal cultures,

the idea of the failed bride becoming a ghost,

like the woman who never quite gets married,

abandoned at the altar and commits suicide,

this sort of thing.

And of course we represent unmarried women by wearing white.

So there's some very particular things about ladies in white

that have a long, long trajectory in European culture.

@dioscuri, I wonder if part of the reason

people tell ghost stories is that it's comforting to think

that horrible human suffering

leaves a spiritual scar in a place, rather than nature

and geography being utterly indifferent to human affairs.

I like to say that history is written by the victors,

but ghost stories are written by the victims.

One great example is called Duffy's Cut.

This was a valley in the East Coast.

Irish American laborers came in to work on a railroad.

They all died.

The local town said it was a cholera epidemic.

They buried them.

End of story, except for the next 100-plus years,

people kept seeing ghosts in this valley.

And so these stories kept going on

and going on and going on.

Finally, just a few years ago, people dug up the graves,

and they found out these people

hadn't died of cholera at all.

They'd been murdered.

So yeah, ghost stories do represent the sordid history,

the backside of history.

@thetoughestbean, Lincoln, and especially his wife,

believed in occultism.

I think they held a seance at the White House.

They held many.

This is sort of public knowledge.

It was mentioned in the newspapers.

They would've called it not occultism;

they would've called it spiritualism.

So this is kind of remarkable by today's standards.

Many, many people were believing

that the spirit world maybe was not so far away

and that the dead could actually be probably

pretty easily contacted.

So, yes, Lincoln and his wife

had several seances in the White House,

and this was completely acceptable during that time period.

@MIDNIGHTER, Why is the American South

so haunted all the time?

Like, why can't they just chill out for a sec?

Ghost stories come out very often of ethical failures.

So is the South still haunted by its slaveholding past?

Yes.

Okay.

I_Like_Languages.

A lot of Americans are obsessed with paranormal

and haunted locations.

Is it the same in Europe?

What's Europe's relationship with the paranormal?

Europe's a big place, got a lot of different countries.

So there's actually a lot of sort of differences

in the different European traditions as well.

A good friend of mine actually did a recent survey

over in Iceland, trying to figure out, you know,

what level of Icelanders believed in ghosts.

And it was somewhere around the 60%,

60% to 65% of Icelanders.

This is pretty much like we see in the United States.

Very, very similar results,

depending on what survey you look at.

On the other hand, you can look at some countries in Europe

that don't have a lot of ghosts.

France does not report a lot of ghosts.

What France does report is a lot of saintly apparitions,

Marian apparitions where they see Mother Mary.

So are these ghosts?

They wouldn't say they're ghosts in France.

It's like, Oh, no, this is religion.

These are saints.

Because some people might not like that word, ghost.

Like, Oh, no, I don't believe in ghosts.

Anything strange ever happened to you?

Oh, my dead husband appeared to me one night.

That was lovely.

This sort of thing happens all the time.

So surveys can be very, very difficult

at figuring out what people actually really believe.

What I will say is we can see

that people report on these surveys

very, very differently in different European countries.

@AdamBroud, Why are houses

the ones that are always haunted?

Can other living spaces be haunted?

Can I buy a haunted tent?

Go on a little camping trip with my new ghost buddy?

Adventure in the woods,

and come back home to my little spooky pal

in our little spooky place?

Can I do that?

Please.

Yeah, the haunted house shows up a lot.

We live in houses sorta like we live in our bodies.

There's a lot of metaphors that sort of, you know,

associate your house and your body.

So maybe this is where we spend a lot of our time.

So this idea that, you know,

as your spirit leaves your body, [laughs] still lingers,

and very often it still lingers in the house.

It also brings back this idea

that these are sort of domestic ghosts, right?

If ghosts are often ethical failings,

then these are domestic failings, maybe abusive families

or, you know, family murders, stuff like this.

Okay. Reptilian_Overlord20.

I am so tired of the horror trope

of kids who talk to ghosts.

This pops up around the world, interestingly enough.

This could go back to these ideas

that maybe kids are more susceptible to ghostly influence.

Maybe they don't have a hearty adult soul, in a sense.

Some people say,

Well, kids just haven't learned not to see them.

As adults, maybe we learn to shut them out,

but kids haven't learned that yet.

And then, of course, there's also the idea

of kids having a very active imagination.

So kids talking to ghosts is a very, very common motif,

and I think it brings in a lot of different thoughts

about childhood and about, again,

the relationship between kids and the dead.

@cloakbrand, What is Dia de los Muertos about?

Do you celebrate this holiday with your family?

Yes, you celebrate this holiday with your family, ideally.

This is a very, very well-beloved festival

in Hispanic communities

that was brought into the Catholic calendar.

So now it's been moved slightly

to overlap with the Catholic days

of All Souls' Day and All Saints' Day.

So long ago, this is probably developed to move Samhain,

the Celtic Halloween, into the Christian fold.

So this is why those days are right at Samhain,

at the beginning of winter.

And then when they came to the Americas,

they put the Days of the Dead from Central America

on this same calendar.

So right now in, like, Los Angeles,

we have a lot of Hispanic traditions for Days of the Dead,

going on at the same time we have Halloween celebrations.

So modern America, Halloween is very often about spooks

and being scared,

and the Days of the Dead for Hispanic culture

is very, very much about the wanted dead.

There's this idea that, you know, you can keep coming back.

You set up a little altar, an ofrenda,

and very often with pictures of loved ones,

maybe things that they enjoyed,

and a lot of interesting symbolism like marigolds,

which had long been a symbol of the return of the dead

in ancient Aztec and Mayan culture.

So Days of the Dead is this wonderful blend

of these different motifs

from pre-colonial indigenous traditions

and also very, very contemporary in today's society.

There's a phrase that often goes with it:

That which is remembered lives.

So your afterlife depends on the people remembering you,

and that's what Days of the Dead is all about.

This is everything I got for today.

Hope you learned something,

and thank you for watching Ghost Support.

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