Are ghosts real?

By Benjamin Radford June 18, 2021

Are ghosts real? Ghost hunters like to believe that ghosts exist, but
science and logic are the real ghost busters.

Are ghosts real? Thousands of people report ghostly encounters every year... but is there any science to back them
up? (Image credit: Getty)

If you believe in ghosts, you're not alone. Cultures all around the world believe
in spirits that survive death to live in another realm. In fact, ghosts are among
the most widely believed of paranormal phenomenon: Millions of people are
interested in ghosts, and thousands read ghost stories on Reddit every day. It's
more than mere entertainment; A 2019 Ipsos poll found that 46% of Americans
say they truly believe in ghosts. (The nation is discerning in its undead beliefs;
only 7% of respondents said they believe in vampires).
The idea that the dead remain with us in spirit is an ancient one, appearing 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. The belief offers many people comfort — who doesn't want to
believe that our beloved but deceased family members aren't looking out for
us, or with us in our times of need? 

People have tried to (or claimed to) communicate with spirits for ages; in
Victorian England, for example, it was fashionable for upper-crust ladies to
hold séances in their parlors after tea and crumpets with friends. Ghost clubs
dedicated to searching for ghostly evidence formed at prestigious universities,
including Cambridge and Oxford, and in 1882 the most prominent
organization, the Society for Psychical Research, was established. A woman
named Eleanor Sidgwick was an investigator (and later president) of that
group, and could be considered the original female ghostbuster. In America
during the late 1800s, many psychic mediums claimed to speak to the dead —
but were later exposed as frauds by skeptical investigators such as Harry
Houdini. PLAY SOUND
It wasn't until recently that ghost hunting became a widespread interest
around the world. Much of this is due to the hit Syfy cable TV series "Ghost
Hunters," which aired 230 episodes and found no good evidence for ghosts. 

The show spawned dozens of spinoffs and imitators, and it's not hard to see
why the show is 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. All you need is
some free time, a dark place, and maybe a few gadgets from an electronics
store. If you look long enough any unexplained light or noise might be
evidence of ghosts.

That vague criteria for ghostly happenings is part of the reason why myths
about the afterlife are more alive than ever.

THE SCIENCE AND LOGIC OF GHOSTS

One difficulty in scientifically evaluating ghosts is that a surprisingly wide
variety of phenomena are attributed to ghosts, from a door closing on its own,
to missing keys, to a cold area in a hallway, to a vision of a dead relative. 

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." 
Thus, many people who go on record as claiming to have had a ghostly
experience didn't necessarily see anything that most people would recognize
as a classic "ghost," and in fact they may have had completely different
experiences whose only common factor is that it could not be readily
explained. 
Personal experience is one thing, but scientific evidence is another matter.
Part of the difficulty in investigating ghosts is that there is not one universally
agreed-upon definition of what a ghost is. Some believe that they are spirits of
the dead who for whatever reason get "lost" on their way to The Other Side;
others claim that ghosts are instead telepathic entities projected into the world
from our minds.

Still others create their own special categories for different types of ghosts,
such as poltergeists, residual hauntings, intelligent spirits and shadow people.
Of course, it's all made up, like speculating on the different races
of fairies or 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 solid objects without
disturbing them, or they can slam doors shut and throw objects across the
room. According to logic and the laws of physics, it's one or the other. If
ghosts are human souls, why do they appear clothed and with (presumably
soulless) inanimate objects like hats, canes, and dresses — not to mention
the many reports of ghost trains, cars and carriages?

If ghosts are the spirits of those whose deaths were unavenged, 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? The
questions go on and on — just about any claim about ghosts raises logical
reasons to doubt it.
Ghost hunters use many creative (and dubious) methods to detect the spirits'
presences, often including psychics. Virtually all ghost hunters claim to be
scientific, and most give that appearance because they use high-tech
scientific equipment such as Geiger counters, Electromagnetic Field (EMF)
detectors, ion detectors, infrared cameras and sensitive microphones. Yet
none of this equipment has ever been shown to actually detect ghosts. For
centuries, people believed that flames turned blue in the presence of ghosts.
Today, few people accept that bit of lore, but it's likely that many of the signs
taken as evidence by today's ghost hunters will be seen as just as wrong and
antiquated centuries from now. 
Other researchers claim that the reason ghosts haven't been proven to exist is
that we simply don't have the right technology to find or detect the spirit world.
But this, too, can't be correct: Either ghosts exist and appear in our ordinary
physical world (and can therefore be detected and recorded in photographs,
film, video and audio recordings), 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 detected or
recorded, then all the photos, videos, audio and other recordings claimed to
be evidence of ghosts cannot be ghosts. With so many basic contradictory
theories — and so little science brought to bear on the topic — it's not
surprising that despite the efforts of thousands of ghost hunters on television
and elsewhere for decades, not a single piece of hard evidence of ghosts has
been found.

And, of course, with the recent development of "ghost apps" for smartphones,
it's easier than ever to create seemingly spooky images and share them on
social media, making separating fact from fiction even more difficult for ghost
researchers. 

WHY MANY BELIEVE

Most people who believe in ghosts do so because of some personal
experience; they grew up in a home where the existence of (friendly) spirits
was taken for granted, for example, or they had some unnerving experience
on a ghost tour or local haunt. However, many people believe that support for
the existence of ghosts can be found in no less a hard science than modern
physics. It is widely claimed that Albert Einstein suggested a scientific basis
for the reality of ghosts, based on the First Law of Thermodynamics: If energy
cannot be created or destroyed but only change form, what happens to our
body's energy when we die? Could that somehow be manifested as a ghost?

Carol Anne: Hello? What do you look like? Talk louder, I can't hear you! Poltergeist helped define a paranormal
culture in the United States.
It seems like a reasonable assumption — until you dig into the basic physics.
The answer is very simple, and not at all mysterious. After a person dies, the
energy in his or her body 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 we are left
unburied, or worms and bacteria if we are interred), and the plants that absorb
us. There is no bodily "energy" that survives death to be detected with popular
ghost-hunting devices.

Related: Top 10 most famous ghosts

While amateur ghost hunters like to imagine themselves on the cutting edge
of ghost research, they are really engaging in what folklorists call ostension or
legend tripping. It's basically a form of playacting in which people "act out" a
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 points out that ghost hunters themselves often 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."
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If ghosts are real, and are some sort of as-yet-unknown energy or entity, then
their existence will (like all other scientific discoveries) be discovered and
verified by scientists through controlled experiments — not by weekend ghost
hunters wandering around abandoned houses in the dark late at night with
cameras and flashlights.

In the end (and despite mountains of ambiguous photos, sounds, and videos)
the evidence for ghosts is no better today than it was a century ago. There are
two possible reasons for the failure of ghost hunters to find good evidence.
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 do not possess the scientific tools or
mindset to uncover any meaningful evidence. 
But ultimately, ghost hunting is not about the evidence at all (if it was, the
search would have been abandoned long ago). Instead, it's about having fun
with friends, telling stories, and the enjoyment of pretending to search the
edge of the unknown. After all, everyone loves a good ghost story.