Ghosts 101

Stories of ghosts predate written history, and cultures around the world believe in one form of spirit or another. But why? If there's no currently accepted scientific proof that ghosts exists, then what are millions of people around the world claiming to see? Join Ben and Matt as they explore ghosts and the afterlife.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

They don't want you to read our book.: https://static.macmillan.com/static/fib/stuff-you-should-read/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to ghosts and government cover ups. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to. Now, let's
start with the story. It was a dark and stormy night.

(00:22):
As Matt Frederick walked down to the parking deck. He
heard a noise behind it. Oh, it steps or just
the wind. It's just He continued walking, and the footsteps
or the wind again. He turned this wall figure round

(00:43):
in the corner, a familiar figure perhaps. Matt ran to
the side of the corner, poked his head around to
find nothing there. Hey, everybody, welcome to the show. My
name is Matt, and uh, what was your name again?
I am Ben Okay, good, good, totally Ben Boland, not

(01:06):
possessed by any unearthly spirit of which I am aware, one,
human ish and really excited to talk about today's topic,
which I think. I think we'll be covering more specific
cases of this in the future, but today we're just
going to talk about ghosts. What is a ghost? Where

(01:28):
can you find one? Why do so many people believe
in them? Has there ever been any accepted proof or
is there any way that we could explain what is perceived?
As a ghostly phenomenon. Now we do know the ghosts
have been around since before the dawn of recorded history.
Oh wait, let me stop myself. Belief in ghost has

(01:48):
been around since that time, right, and since stories have
been written down, ghosts have been in those stories. Uh.
Like the epic of Gilgamesh, that was one of the
first times that or was the first time that a
ghost was spoken about, or the spirit of the underworld
or essentially the afterlife, and it was what was it
the I don't know if I'm saying right, but the

(02:11):
end could do I think is the name of the
ghost that Gilgamesh talks to. Um, it's kind of I
don't know, it's part of the underworld. Fascinating and and
just the idea that back in the day when stories
were written down, and I don't even know that year,
like two thousands something b c e. When it was
written down, people were thinking about that, thinking about the

(02:34):
underworld and what happens after you die, right, And we
know that this is some people will tell you that
the question of an afterlife is the driving question of
the human experience. You know, we've we've read a book
called The Denial of Death. Let me save you some
time because it's long. The thesis of this book is, uh,

(02:57):
that everything human beings do which is not survival oriented
is essentially a distraction from the inescapable truth that everybody
will die at some point. Uh. It's called fanatology, the
study of death. Think of like Fanos from The Avengers thinks, uh. Yeah,

(03:19):
and when we when we think about this, then we
immediately encounter one of the more skeptical explanations for ghosts, right,
And then one of those skeptical explanations would be that
people want to see ghosts or we want to have
evidence of an afterlife, that there's an enormous confirmation bias

(03:42):
so that we do not have to address the idea
of oblivion. Yeah, it's a very comforting thought that somehow,
in some way, whatever I am will continue to exist
after I at least my body ceases to exist once
we shuffle from the mortal coil. And know that this
belief is still prevalent in the modern day, wouldn't you say, oh, yeah, Well,

(04:06):
the best statistic that I have is from two thousand five,
and it comes from the article uh, how to ghost work?
That's actually on how stuffworks dot Com and it's it's
a gallop pole that stated. I think it was thirty
two of the respondents believe in ghosts, like straight up
believe in ghosts, and then another nineteen percent said well,
I'm not really sure, and then I think it was

(04:28):
a percent said no, no man, alright, so forty percent
basically Jonathan Strict lent Yeah, yeah, And I think, well,
is it too early to ask where you would lie
in there? Should we? Should we cover that later? Um?
You know what we can. I think it'll be nuanced,
So let's get to those a little bit later, if

(04:49):
that's okay, because there there are a couple of things
we can explore here. Those statistics are fascinating because that
means that just a little bit less than a third
of the people pulled said absolutely, yes, ghost are real.
You know, don't turn off the lights and say bloody
Mary because you know you just don't know. Don't poke

(05:10):
a ethereal Hornet's nest. Well, yeah, it's oh man. I
can definitely say I've been there in my life where
I've really truly believed in ghosts when I was a
bit younger. I'm not going to talk about this right now.
It's just trying to identify with someone who would who
would say, yes, I believe in ghosts, and I wonder

(05:30):
if it has anything to do with belief in spiritual
afterlife like religious belief. Interesting, So what's the correlation? Yeah,
I would like I'd like to see those numbers, and
I I didn't. I couldn't find a great poll that
was comparing the two. Yeah, it's very tough to find
an accurate way of measuring this stuff because you know,
of course, somebody's spirituality, whether or not it's tied into

(05:53):
their beliefs in ghost or paranormal phenomenon, that belief in
that spiritual belief will always be a very personal thing.
So it's tough to get an objective measurement of someone's
subjective feelings. Even or even our ghost pole is just
ranking the people who openly identified as yes, believing in

(06:16):
ghosts or not, and we don't really know their motivations.
We'd like to think their motivation was telling the truth.
But I was thinking about this, Matt. It's completely possible
that nine of the people said I don't know, just
in case, and then it's also possible that the people
who said there were no ghosts were you know, terrified
that if they admit it, somebody's gonna look at this

(06:38):
pole and they're gonna know. I believe in ghosts, right, yeah,
or something like that. And we we covered the afterlife
and a couple of other ghostly topics in our video
series a while back, right, Yeah, we did. We we
talked about ghosts in the Law I think was one
of them, and what was the other one? Ghosts We

(06:58):
talked about post in law. We talked about whether or
not there was an afterlife, and various people believe in
life after death, yes, and what happens to the brain
at the moment of death. And well, let's let's go
a little wide wide here at the end. Yeah, let's
just talk about what exactly what do you call like

(07:20):
what happened? So? And then I say, let's talk about
what happens for me to say if I experienced something.
Oh wait, I think I saw a ghost. Okay, so
this is really high level stuff, so bear with me here.
But but it's anything from shadows to cold to flickering lights,
shapes and pictures like the orbs that you've heard about.

(07:41):
I'm sure, um, let's see the there's even sleep paralysis
or something called hypogogic trance, which is really interesting to me. Um.
These are all the different ways you would experience a ghost,
and several of them are easily explainable. But when you
get down to it, Uh, a couple of these things

(08:03):
are happening in your brain. Well, it's all happening in
your brain, right, But a lot of it just comes
down to your perception and the way your brain takes
in stimuli. Right. Yeah. And another one we should mention
before people start writing the emails is e v P
or the voice phenomenon. Uh. And I think that's a

(08:27):
great point, man, when we talk about the sensory information,
how our brains interpret that. Uh. Because I have a
proposition for the ghost stuff. Um. We we have a
couple of options here, and I'm going to make I'm
going to make three options, and I want to see
if you think if these can cover our basis on

(08:49):
the possibility of ghosts. Are you ready? All? Right? Number
one and the least exciting, it's all b s. There
is no ghostly afterlife, or if there is an afterlife,
there's no way that people are returning or leaving residue behind.
And everything from Gilgamesh to now is uh wishful thinking

(09:14):
or confirmation bias. That's one uh, and that would be
the most skeptical. Second, there's the other idea, the other
side of the spectrum. Ghost are real. Ghosts are real
there with us now because there is some sort of
sensory barrier between the living and the dead, uh, their
their perception problems or something. Um. But then in that idea,

(09:39):
ghosts would most definitely be real and we simply don't
have the means for most people to encounter them. Third option.
The third option is a little bit science fiction e E E. Ready.
It's the idea that ghosts or what we perceive to
be ghost may actually be symptomatic of another scientific phenomenon

(10:03):
that we have yet to understand. And this would mean,
for example, that maybe electro magnetic abnormalities in an environment
trigger sensations, you know, so they trigger that sensation of
maybe it's like nausea, or your your skin is tingling,
you feel like someone just stepped over your grave in

(10:25):
the future. Uh. Now, clearly, out of those three, um,
my money would be on number three because we do
have proof that what has been perceived as a paranormal
phenomenon before has been later found to be um some
sort of clear some sort of clearly explicable scientific phenomenon.

(10:51):
Now I don't think that that makes this idea any
less ghostly or any any less important. That's interesting. Then
I wonder if there's another, like a fourth one. Yeah,
some kind of temporal distortion or uh time continuing problem

(11:13):
that causes it to occur, which may fall into the
third category, I suppose. But yeah, that's great, And that
third one is really broad. They're all broad categories because
essentially you've got number one, no such thing, Number two, yes,
straight out of a horror movie, coming like through your
eyes on the anniversary of their strangling or something. And
the third one we've got everything that could be you know,

(11:33):
science we don't understand. So these are broad categories. And
I love that you mentioned the temporal distortion, because since
we don't have any any devices that have successfully defined
or observed a non corporeal entity, which is really what
we're talking about, then we have to we have to

(11:58):
relegate ourselves at this point to a few philosophical things
that that are very important. And one of one of
these things I think is hugely important often gets ignored
when we talk about the possibility of ghosts. When I
said we, I mean, you know, society at large. One
thing we we ignore consistently is that the nature of

(12:19):
consciousness is still unexplained thousands of years. You know, we've
had the smartest people in human history trying to figure
out what makes something aware or self aware, you know,
and we've we've covered this. But one one thing that's
inherent to that idea, that inexplicable idea, is that the

(12:42):
more we try to define and explore and sort of
demarcate the boundaries of consciousness, uh, the more difficult the
problem becomes. We're you know, I think we said in
an earlier podcast, you know, I talked about how we're
still kind of in the dark ages, like future historians
are gonna look back and laugh at maybe laugh at

(13:03):
us not being able to find the souls of the
dead for so long. But the idea, the the idea
of for instance, uh, quantum entanglement, right become became sort
of pop si and it was like popular science fiction.
So people would throw it around in a very BuzzFeed
way at deja vu because I have quantum entanglements somehow

(13:26):
or um, you know, they would they would sort of
misuse or gloss over the idea, But it still is
possible that there are there There are things that we
have yet to adequately describe about consciousness, about the nature
of time and space itself. So is it possible then

(13:47):
if if we were to go back and just make
this purely a thought exercise, would we would we say
that when a person dies, a corpse is left behind. Right,
that's a physical residue of their existence. Right, So when
their brain stops firing electricity and the whole crazy train

(14:11):
network that is the human mind finally stops. Um, is
there a non physical residue left behind? I think it's
a very interesting question, and I hate to sound like
I'm himming or haying, but it's such an interesting question
that it stops me from saying that something like a
ghost doesn't exist. You know. Yeah, it's a scary thought

(14:33):
that there's nothing afterwards, and it's kind of the I
don't know, it's it's a weird thing because it becomes
the crux of your belief and everything else that one belief. Yeah,
all your eggs in one basket. Huh. I don't know.
It's hard for me. So all right, Well, I guess
we're here. Then so we're at this point, so you're
in the I don't know category officially if you had to,

(14:56):
if you had to respond to that pool, I I
you know, if I had too, if I had to
respond to the poll, what I would say, Man, you
don't get to say anything. You get to choose one. Huh. Yeah, Okay,
who am I in that thirty, that nineteen or the other.
I think I'm gonna have to go with the And
I hate to. I hate to do this, but there's

(15:18):
just not enough evidence. There's there's not enough stuff that
we can point to and replicate that proves the existence
of an afterlife. Yeah, and I I have some stories
about it, and I know you do too, So I'll
have to ask you, what do you think? Matt in
two thousand two, and prior I would have checked yes, uh.

(15:42):
From two thousand to until about two thousand six, I
would have said no um. And then from now from
two thousand six onward, I would say I don't know.
So your your opinion of this matter is sort of evolved.
It's uh, it's linked fourth the men really to myself? Okay, yeah,

(16:03):
what happened? What happened? It was again and it's strange.
And I was only speaking earlier about the correlation between
spiritual belief and belief in something like a ghost or
an afterlife, because it's kind of how it went with me.
UM believed hardcore and the afterlife when I was a
kid growing up. Then I completely threw it in the

(16:25):
trash and decided I need to learn everything, and I
don't believe in any of this. And then I kind
of got to a middle ground where once you start
learning enough, you realize that there's so many complexities that
who the heck am I to truly believe in something
as hardcore as there's something as absolute as no, there's
no such thing as this. Yeah, it's absolutes are often

(16:49):
tricky things for someone to juggle, right, because we very
very rarely live in absolutes in real life. Um, one
of the only absolutes, of course, being death. Right. Okay,
I'm gonna stop hitting that one so hard. Uh So,
let's let's take it in a different direction here. I'll

(17:09):
tell you some of the same things. It's very interesting
to me to know that your spiritual evolution, if you will,
or philosophical evolution, was so inextricably tied to this perception
or belief or in ghosts or not in ghosts. Uh.
When I was younger, I was a younger tyke. I

(17:31):
actually was an amateur ghost hunter. And you know these stories, right,
So I'm just right, you wouldn't expect it, maybe you would. Uh.
So I had all of the tools and my infrared sensors,
my E M F detectors, set up cameras and voice
recorders and things like that, went to strange places, um,

(17:55):
you know, allegedly haunted schools, abandoned hospitals, ridges with a
history of murder, the whole nine. And while I had
some great times, I never personally stumbled on a ghost.
Now it would be, of course, cartoonishly arrogant to say,
because I didn't find something a handful of times, it's

(18:18):
not true, that's weird. By that logic. Rhinoceroses are also
b s, right. But what what I did find was that, um,
some of the people I was working with wanted it
to be real, so much so that they would willfully
mistake something for something that it wasn't. But where where

(18:44):
my family comes from, there is a widespread traditional belief
in ghosts that actually clashed with Christianity. For a time,
and well, you know, the idea, the idea and a
lot of Christian cannon is that when a soul dies,
it is judged and it goes somewhere else, right, like

(19:05):
the ghost of the departed rarely hang out to nudge
your wigia board. But um, I guess it depends on
which Protestant version you ascribe yourself to. Sure, the Catholic
Church is always interested me in that regard the idea
of purgatory. Anyway, well we can talk about that way.

(19:26):
Oh yeah, yeah, Now you and I are dating ourselves
because the idea of limbo or purgatory was slowly phased out.
It's interesting we should talk about that in future episode
two one. One thing that always fascinated me was that
some of the people I know who do believe in ghosts,
or who did at one time uh drew a sharp

(19:47):
line between what they would say, we're ghosts uh and
demons or spirits and and the idea here for anyone
un familiar, is that a ghost is a human soul, right,
but a demon or a spirit is from somewhere else.
That idea is fascinating to me as well. I gotta

(20:11):
tell you the there there were a handful of experiences,
none of which, oddly enough, for during my ghost hunting phase, uh,
that I have yet to explain or understand. Um. One
of them that sticks out in my mind was that
I went to the Mark Twain house in Massachusetts. So

(20:31):
at one point in in this tour of this house,
I was getting hit with waves of deja vu, which
was a little bit strange for me at the time.
And then I started to see these bright kind of
yellowish orbs moving around the room and to on the
ceiling and stuff. I still haven't explained. I don't think

(20:54):
it was a ghost necessarily. I don't know what happened.
Maybe I had some bad lobster rolls or something. But
have you considered reincarnation? Have I considered reincarnations? Perhaps you're
remembering your past self. Ah, that's a that's a very
interesting idea, because another another angle to the ghost thing,

(21:17):
right is, um the idea that you are somehow encountering
a piece of you from somewhere else, which I think
is fantastic fodder for fiction. I didn't mean to interrupt. No, No,
that's it. That's the story. I'm glad you you didn't interrupt.
You brought it to a great book is about Peter
Out that's crazy, man. Did you have any experiences that

(21:39):
you could not explain? I haven't had anything like that.
I've been searching for an experience like that in my
entire life. And I will put myself in positions where
I think something might happen and nothing yet. So we'll see.
And another thing that we should mention at this point

(21:59):
is that we would love to hear your ghost stories.
We want to know about the local legends of your area.
We also want to know about your personal experiences right
to us. Tell us a ghost story and it just
might make it on the air. Yeah, and tell us
where you would fall on that pole um. Definitely your stories.

(22:22):
And if you're if you want to check out this
website that we stumbled upon while we were don't do
our research for this, uh it is. It's really great.
You can look at pictures and you basically get to vote.
It's all about voting today, but you get to vote
on whether or not you think the picture is real, faked,
or you're just you're not sure. It's called Science of

(22:43):
Ghosts dot WordPress dot com and it's just pictures where
you can basically look at the newest ghost pictures. Some
of them are obviously fake. It's just worn here right
now now for everybody who hasn't already noticed this. Uh,
that is our go to guy for figuring out if

(23:05):
a photo is faked. Often because you have you have
the professional ability to check out the photo itself and
look at it with a much more educated eye than
the average guy. It is weird that I can say, yes,
I can professionally check out your photos. Uh. The worst thing.
The bad thing about this is that the technology and

(23:27):
software is getting so powerful that it's becoming difficult to tell.
So you're saying it's easier to make a fake photograph
that looks more genuine it is. So it's this weird thing.
If you're trying to discern whether or not something is real,
perhaps a UFO photograph or video or a ghost there's

(23:48):
there's so many things you have to bring into it,
not just what the image looks like and some of
the standard things like if you're looking at the let's
say the compression or something like that, it's it's you
can replicate that now, I can you can replicate it
so easily. The distortion and a photograph m it's it's

(24:09):
pretty crazy, man. There's another question I want to ask
the listeners man, which is, if you believe in ghosts,
then why do you think there's been no universally accepted
proof of ghost or contact from the afterlife? And I
think this is a very good question. It's one that

(24:30):
we touched on in our video part of our video
series on ghost What is the idea that there's such
an anomaly here? Because again, we cannot emphasize this enough.
For the entirety of human history, people have believed in
ghost for the entirety of human history, there has been

(24:52):
no universally accepted Well, that's not true. Since the dawn
of the scientific age, there's been no universally accepted proof
of uh an afterlife. I would be very excited to
learn about this um and I would also I don't
you know, it's strange to think about it in such
a high level situation, but if there were some universally

(25:17):
accepted proof of ghostly activity, barring aliens met it would
be the most significant innovation in the modern age. Their discovery. Rather,
it's probably a better word, huh, because it's it's already there.
If it's there, I don't mean to ask. You have
so many questions. But I was just thinking about my

(25:39):
favorite ghost films of all time, because you know, that's
my other expertise. And man, I was really trying to
nail down what my favorite one is, and I figured
out what it is. Don't say ghost, it's Gearmobile, Toro's
the Devil's Backbone. That's my favorite one. It's like, hands down,
my favorite ghost story. Oh, that is an amazing one.

(26:03):
On favorite ghost story, Man, I don't know, Matt, that's
that's a very good question. My favorite ghost story in
general or film? I would say film, but in my
head and that's just a story on film. Yeah, okay,
I'm gonna need some time to think that way over.

(26:23):
How about you listening? What do you think? What's your
what's your all time favorite? You should let me know
because I don't know. I wanna watch more ghost movies.
I realized that I've only seen a handful and we
may just read your recommendations on the air. Uh, it's
a matter of fact. If it could well happen, man,

(26:43):
we could have hundreds of people right in and all
named the same film, in which case we might have
to do a show just on that so we're going
to head out. We hope that you have enjoyed our
look at some of the high points in the debate
around the afterlife and the essential dilemma of ghosts. So

(27:04):
right in, tell us what you think about your favorite
ghost films or paranormal experiences, and tell us if you
think ghosts are real or not real and why. You
can find Matt n Ile on Facebook and Twitter, where
we are conspiracy Stuff. Something tells me that for this
episode you may want to send us an email directly.

(27:24):
Our address is conspiracy at Discovery dot com. For more
on this topic another unexplained phenomenon, visit test tube dot
com slash conspiracy stuff. You can also get in touch
on Twitter at the handle at conspiracy Stuff.