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 Ipsos/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 Sidgwick 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.
Scientifically evaluating ghosts is problematic for several reasons, including that surprisingly diverse phenomena are attributed to ghosts. To one person a door closing on its own is a sign of a ghost, while for others it may be missing keys, a faint scent, a cold area in a home, or even a dream about a dead friend. When sociologists Dennis and Michele Waskul interviewed ghost experiencers for their 2016 book Ghostly Encounters: The Hauntings of Everyday Life (Temple University Press) they found that “many participants were not sure that they had encountered a ghost and remained uncertain that such phenomena were even possible, simply because they did not see something that approximated the conventional image of a ‘ghost.’ Instead, many of our respondents were simply convinced that they had experienced something uncanny — something inexplicable, extraordinary, mysterious, or eerie.” Because of this, many people claiming to have had a ghostly experience didn’t necessarily see anything that most people would recognize as a classic “ghost.” In fact they may have had totally different experiences whose only common factor is that it was not easily explained.
Ghost research is greatly complicated by the fact that there’s no consensus about what a ghost is—even among ghost hunters and “experts.” Some believe, for example, that ghosts are spirits of the dead who get “lost” on their way to “the other side”; others are sure that ghosts are instead telepathic entities projected into the world, or strong emotions somehow recorded and later “replayed” in the environment (often called “stone tape theory”). Still others create their own categories for different types of ghosts, such as poltergeists, residual hauntings, intelligent spirits and shadow people. It’s a fun exercise in fantasy, but of course it’s all made up, like speculating on different types of dragons; there are as many types of ghosts as you want there to be.
There are many contradictions inherent in ideas about ghosts. For example, are ghosts material or not? Either they can move through walls and solid objects without disturbing them, or they can slam doors shut and throw objects across a room. According to logic (not to mention the laws of physics), it’s one or the other. If ghosts are human souls, why do they appear clothed and with inanimate objects such as hats and dresses — not to mention the many reports of ghost trains, cars, and carriages? If instead ghosts are the result of unavenged deaths, why are there unsolved murders, since ghosts are said to communicate with psychic mediums, and should be able to identify their killers for the police. And so on — just about any claim about ghosts raises logical reasons to doubt it.
Ghost hunters use many creative (and dubious) methods to detect ghostly presences, including psychics. Most ghost hunters claim to be scientific and give that appearance because they use high-tech scientific equipment such as Geiger counters, Electromagnetic Field detectors, and infrared cameras. Yet none of this equipment has ever been shown to actually detect ghosts. Centuries ago people believed that flames turned blue in the presence of ghosts. Few people today believe that bit of ghostlore, but it’s likely that many of the signs taken as evidence by modern ghost hunters will be seen as just as silly and quaint centuries from now.
Many ghost hunters claim that ghosts haven’t been proven real because we don’t yet have the right technology to detect the spirit world. But this, too, can’t be true: Either ghosts exist and appear in our ordinary physical world and visible spectrum (and can therefore be detected and recorded in photographs, film, and video), or they don’t. If ghosts exist and can be scientifically detected or recorded, then we should find hard evidence of that—yet we don’t. If ghosts exist but cannot be scientifically recorded, then that means that all the photos, videos, audio and other recordings claimed to be ghosts are not in fact ghosts. With so many contradictions — and so little science brought to bear — it’s not surprising that despite the efforts of thousands of ghost hunters for decades, no hard evidence of ghosts has been found.
Much of the belief in ghosts comes not only from television shows but some personal experience. Maybe the person grew up in a home where the presence of a spirit was taken for granted. Maybe they had some unnerving experience on a ghost tour or at a local haunt. But still, they believe, science has offered a logical, physical rationale for ghosts. It is widely claimed that Albert Einstein himself proved the possibility of ghosts with his First Law of Thermodynamics: if energy cannot be created or destroyed but only change form, then what happens to our body’s energy when we die? Could that somehow reappear as a ghost?
The idea seems superficially reasonable—unless you understand basic physics. The answer is simple and not at all mysterious. After a person dies, the body’s energy goes where all organisms’ energy goes after death: into the environment. The energy is released in the form of heat, and the body is transferred into the animals that eat us (i.e., wild animals if unburied, or worms if we are interred, or heat if we’re cremated), and the plants that absorb us. There is no bodily “energy” that survives death.
While legions of amateur ghost hunters imagine (and portray) themselves as on the cutting edge of ghost research, they are engaging in what folklorists call ostension or legend tripping, a form of playacting in which people “act out” an existing narrative or legend, often involving ghosts or supernatural elements. In his book Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live (University Press of Mississippi, 2003) folklorist Bill Ellis notes that ghost hunters take the search seriously and “venture out to challenge supernatural beings, confront them in consciously dramatized form, then return to safety. … The stated purpose of such activities is not entertainment but a sincere effort to test and define boundaries of the ‘real’ world.” It’s a fun and fascinating hobby, but not investigation or research.
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.
For more on ghosts and ghost investigation see my award-winning book Investigating Ghosts: The Scientific Search for Spirits!