Six Ghost Stories

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Saga. Hey, Robert,
do you believe in ghosts? I believe in ghosts stories.
I've I've never had a supernatural experience. I have not

(00:26):
seen a ghost. I've I've spoken to many people who
claim to have seen him, or they seem something they
can't fully explain and turn to the ghost narrative. But yeah,
for my own part, I don't believe in ghosts, but
I believe in the power of ghost stories. Yeah, that's
I think that's a good position to take on this.
I don't know that I necessarily believe in ghosts. I

(00:47):
don't not believe in ghosts, if that makes sense, But
I'm open to the idea. And I do know too
people though, who are sort of into the whole amateur
ghost hunting thing and will like occasionally go to like
abandoned houses in middle of nowhere with what do you
call him, like E M F meters and stuff like
that and try to do like spirit photography. But uh,

(01:08):
it's never really struck me as something that that was
particularly interesting. One time I was with this guy who
this is one of the people who's into this, and
we're driving by the cemetery where like half of my
family is buried, and he was telling me about how
he had been like hanging out in that cemetery doing
ghost hunting in the middle of the night. It just
strikes me as a bit too radio shack from my

(01:29):
own like hanging out in the cemetery going to try
and see a ghost. I'm all in favor of that visit,
going on ghost tours, that sort of thing. I love it,
But in terms of like building some device and then
using it or perhaps misusing it to try and find
evidence of supernatural activity unless it's an actual proton pack,
I'm just not really on board. That would be great

(01:50):
if we could get an actual proton pack out of it.
I think a lot more people would be involved. But
you gotta go on licensed with it. That's true. Yeah,
But this particular episode, just so that you are all aware,
is not going to be one where we look at
ghost hunting and say, oh, well, this is all pseudoscience, right, Like,
we're not going to do that breakdown. I'm sure you've
probably heard or seen that many times before. Uh, this

(02:13):
is we're more interested in ghost stories in this episode,
and we're gonna look at ghost stories from around the
world and how they reflect the human condition. Uh So, Yeah,
there's lots of studies about e v P or infrasound
and how the ghost hunters have flawed methodologies and all
that stuff, Right, but that's not really what we're gonna

(02:34):
do in this particular episode. Yeah, we we decided to
look to each continent, and we realized that that's that's
a very broad system, and we're going to leave out
a lot of wonderful ghost stories and ghost traditions and
spirit belief systems. But we decided to just hit each
continent that has human habitation and pick out one particular

(02:55):
ghost story or ghost belief system that has some sort
of anthropological, psychological, or scientific basis for discussion. Right, and
why are we doing this, you may ask yourselves, This
seems like an unusual topic for stuff to blow your
mind a science podcast. Well, hey, it's October for us.
Maybe listening to this in January, but it is now

(03:17):
October for us in space and time. In every October,
we do episodes that are related to Halloween, and this
is one of them. Yeah, and by no means that
this episode stand outside of a lot of the topics
we cover, because, as we discuss in this episode, you're
gonna find links to episodes that we've covered dealing with
psychology and anthropology, belief systems, and just sort of the

(03:40):
tension that emerges in a post colonial world. Yeah. In fact,
we have an entire episode that Robert and I did
about Chinese ghost weddings that immediately sprang to mind here.
But people are probably wondering, well, what do you mean
by ghost story? That's a pretty broad, you know, thing
to talk about. Specifically, we're talking about fiction that either

(04:00):
includes a ghost or the characters in the stories belief
in ghosts. Sometimes, you know, ghost stories are used to
just be scary, right, but we're particularly interested in stories
that have ghosts in them here, not just any old
scary story. Yeah. I feel like a ghost story really
tells you something about the the storyteller or the storyteller's

(04:22):
culture as it relates to bereavement and death and loss
and what they think about the afterlife and just how
they deal with death on a day to day basis. Yeah.
I think I mentioned this in one of our other
October episodes that we've recorded this month. But to me,
horror stories in general are cautionary tales, and ultimately we

(04:42):
started passing them down to one another over the generations,
whether it was around a campfire or in a book,
right in these tomes of literature, because they teach us
something about the world and about surviving in it. And
so that's what I think I'm interested in finding out
here about all these very cultures from around the world
and what they've passed on and are trying to teach

(05:04):
one another. Yeah. Indeed, and now one more thought before
we actually began to get into the media the episode.
We recently had an episode Joe and I recently did
one on the Bicameral Mind, and I know that if
you recently listen to those episodes, you're gonna think to
that time after time in this because we're gonna talking
about like dead voices speaking to the living in this episode.

(05:27):
We're really not going to get into any bicameral Mind
theories regarding the subject matter, but certainly if connections occur
to you right into us, let us know on social media,
because there's there's plenty of of of room to compare
the two. Right, So we're gonna start off with Europe.
Why are we starting with Europe? Well, that is I

(05:47):
think the foundation for what most people listening to this
show have for their idea of a ghost story, and
it seems like a good place to sort of cement ourselves. Especially.
This is not going to be like a literary podcast
where we're going to walk through the sort of literary
history of ghost stories, but we'll give you like a
very very concise summary before each of these. I should

(06:07):
also say that the sort of the the European ghost
stinku manages to work its way into a lot of
these other ghost traditions that we're going to discuss. Yes,
it does, for sure, we we we will find it
on almost every continent, and we had to when we
were choosing what stories we were going to share with you,

(06:28):
we had to be very mindful of the sort of
European colonial aspect of ghost stories. So ghosts and hauntings
they actually appear in European literature as early as the
ancient Greeks. Now obviously this extends into Shakespeare with literature
and drama. We all know the ghost of Hamlet's father
that shows up in Hamlet for instance. Now here's an

(06:48):
interesting thing that I learned with relation to the Shakespeare stuff, though,
this is where we get the sheeted ghost from. So
the whole idea of somebody just wearing a sheet with
holes punched into it to like represent a ghost doesn't
directly come from Shakespeare, but it comes from dramatic presentations
of ghosts on the stage. The reason why was they
were originally depicted in armor. So these big suits of

(07:09):
armor would be like rigged up on police systems and
and like lowered onto the stage, and that was supposed
to invoke a ghost. But as you may imagine, armors
pretty heavy and that was difficult to pull off every night.
So they turned to what they referred to as spirit
drapery h and that was essentially putting the sheet over

(07:29):
somebody's head and they would go oh uh. Ghost stories
though then extended into Gothic literature, and the difference seems
to be whether or not the ghost stories themselves had
a contemporary setting. And this this seems to be fairly
important in the European sense of ghost stories. Now, the
golden age in literature of ghost stories really seems to

(07:52):
kick off in the eighteen hundreds. You've got po Sheridan Lafaneu,
who we've talked about on the show before, wrote Green Tea.
We have a whole episode on his concept of whether
or not green tea would make you see hallucinations or
ghosts uh, and lots of others, which leads us to
m R James, who I really want to talk about

(08:13):
here for a second because he's he's really considered the
master of the ghost story. And James lived from eighteen
sixty two to nineteen thirty six. He was a college provost.
He did not tell ghost stories for a living. In fact,
he studied medieval history in the Bible. But he is
now known best today as a teller of ghost stories
because what he would do is every Christmas Eve he

(08:35):
would compose a new ghost story and he would have
people come over, whether they were students or acquaintances, and
he would present them with a ghost story. And so
this is where we get his ghost stories of the
Antiquary from. And if you haven't read these, I really
recommend it. I think they hold up. It is my
new holiday tradition to read an m. R. James story
every Christmas. Oh yeah, this is this is one of

(08:56):
the big names and for sure. Yeah. So James wrote
an article for a magazine called The Bookman in December
nine and this was his official five point designation of
what you needed to have in your European slash English
ghost story. Okay, so these are the five things we're
looking for here to be a true ghost story. The

(09:18):
supernatural quality of the ghost can't be explained away with rationality. Okay,
so you can't. You can't have like a science or
pseudoscience kind of explanation. The second is that the ghost
story itself should inspire the reader with what he calls
pleasing terror. So he essentially means like that's sort of
like adrenaline high that you get when you go to
see a horror movie, right, like the the excitement of

(09:41):
the fight or flight response of being presented with a
horror story. The third is a ghost story should not
have gratuitous violence or sex in it, which I thought
was interesting, especially where most of our ghost stories go nowadays.
Now I have to say that one of my favorite
haunted house books that Richard Matheson's Hell Houses already already
it's broken too of these rules. Yeah, it's interesting, and

(10:05):
I think that there's an argument to be made that
might have been appropriate for James time, but you can
still make it work nowadays. Ghost stories this is the
last one should have a contemporary setting where the reader
can identify with the protagonist. So basically it needs to
be it can't be like a period piece, that is
what he's saying, because you won't necessarily identify with the

(10:26):
protagonist as quickly and put yourself in their position. So again,
I think you can probably manipulate that I've seen lots
of good ghost stories were still we're still watching a
lot and reading a lot of these these older ghost stories,
and we don't have any trouble exactly like Mr James
ghost stories. Yeah. Um, but let's step back and take
a look at James style and of himself. Okay, So

(10:46):
James wrote ghost stories that were usually set in a
small European town. His protagonist was almost always what would
be like some kind of gentleman's scholar, uh, and they
would discover some antique object and that would kick off
the lot to the ghost showing up. Uh. He also
thought it was really important to build atmosphere and have
like an accelerating pace or intensity to these stories. Dread

(11:10):
so this leads to his whole pleasing terror idea. The
characters in his stories were usually ordinary people, and the
reason why is he wanted us again to be able
to relate to who they are, especially when they're pulled
out of their calm environment by something that's ominous or malevolent. Right,
so again just being able to put yourself in the
shoes of the of the main characters. Now, after Mr James,

(11:33):
in the early twentieth century, English ghost stories began to
incorporate psychological aspects into them. So when you hear people
talk about psychological horror, this is when this kind of
kicked off. And I'm thinking here of some of our
favorites like Algernon Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson, both wonderful.
Hodgson wrote The night Lands. Yeah, yeah, Now today the

(11:54):
modern ghost tale, or what is sometimes referred to just
as weird fiction. The writer I think that is most
soociated with European ghost stories is probably Ramsey campbell Um.
So if you're not familiar with him, check out his work.
He doesn't exclusively write ghost stories. In fact, he started
off as a kind of Lovecraft homage guy. But but
he seems to have like taken up that mantle. So,

(12:17):
now that we've got that out of the way, what's
my pick for a great European ghost story that that
shows us something about ourselves. I'm gonna choose Daphne de
Mauriers Don't Look Now. And you may be familiar with
this because there was a movie that was made out
of it that stars Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie and

(12:37):
was directed by Nicholas Rogue. It's wonderful film as well.
I'm gonna be talking about both throughout this, but I
really feel like it's a It's a great example of
both the European ghost story and the psychological trend that
we started to see in the twentieth century. So you
may have not heard of Damria. She actually wrote in
a lot of different styles. She wasn't strictly a horror writer, say,

(13:00):
but her novels and short stories were adapted into horror
movies like Don't Look Now, and then Alfred Hitchcock's films
Rebecca and The Birds were both based cat Maria. I
was not I was not aware that The Birds was
based on a written work. Yeah, yeah, me either until
I sat down to do this research. So real quick
I'm gonna give you the summary of Don't Look Now.
Spoilers for Don't Look Now. It's about a husband and

(13:21):
wife who are visiting Venice after they have had a
young daughter who died. In the book, I believe she
died of meningitis. In the film, she is drowned in
a pond in their backyard. They go to Venice so
they can kind of shake this off, and they encounter
two twins, one of whom claims to be a seer,
and the seer tells them, oh, I can see your

(13:43):
daughter's ghost. She's right there with you. This is a
comforting thing. You should be happy now. The husband, John
begins seeing a hooded little girl and he starts following
her around Venice. There's some kind of sense that maybe
the sears around and maybe I'm somehow sensing the ghost
of my dead daughter. I'm going to go follow her. Later,
he sees his wife with these two twins, sisters, and

(14:05):
they're on their way back to their hotel in Venice
on a boat, and he thinks, well, wait a minute,
what's she doing. I saw her just leave for the
airport to go to England. Why are they coming back?
And he's like yelling at them, and they don't they
don't recognize him, they don't seem to hear him, and
he's kind of freaking out, like reality seems to be
falling apart for him. Uh. And one of the twins says, well, actually,

(14:30):
what you saw was a vision of the future. Now,
at the end of the story, he has killed there's
a this is kind of a random thing that there's
a serial killer running around the streets of Venice who
kills him. Uh. And in the I think it's in
both the short story and well definitely in the film
it is a murderous old dwarf woman. Uh. And she

(14:53):
murders him, and as he's dying, he realizes, oh, I
was actually seeing the future. My wife was coming back
in that future orientation to bury me. This was she
was coming back for my funeral because I've been murdered
here and so like, he sort of falls into this
situation where he's like, wait, am I a ghost or

(15:14):
have I been a ghost this whole time? Or am
I experiencing some kind of extrasensory perception type thing. Well,
I was not. I have not seen it or read it.
I was not expecting the funeral Dwarf to play Man.
You've got to see the movie. It's so good. I
really recommend the short story too, it's quite good. Now
I turned to our old buddy St. Joshi, who is
the go to expert on all things horror literature. He

(15:38):
has this awesome book, Unutterable Horror, that I use anytime
I'm looking for literary reference on the history of horror,
and St Josh he's right up on Daphne de Maurier
was about two pages long. He says Don't Look Now
is his favorite of her stories. But then, in typical
Joshi fashion, where he's kind of curmudgeon lee about writers,

(15:59):
he says her work is not to be entirely despised. Yeah,
that's really for him. Those are quite high marks. Yeah, um,
so I recommend it. But obviously, like I said, de
Morier's work kind of goes all over the place. So
if you're looking for horror stories, i'd recommend starting with
Don't Look Now. Okay, Well, how does it match up
with him R. James Rules for ghost stories? Yeah, this

(16:20):
is a good question. So let's take a look at
him or james rules and put them up against the
the Mourier story. Here so okay, Yes, the supernatural isn't
explained away with rationality at any point in the story.
In fact, the husband is constantly trying to say, there's
no supernatural events going on. I'm a rational man, I
don't believe in these things. And then at the end

(16:43):
comes around as he's dying and I guess turning into
a ghost. The story itself, just like uh m R
James prescribes, builds dread in a way that I would
describe as pleasing terror in his his words, the short
story itself is not gratuitous, but I do have to
mention and the film is infamous for the sex scene
between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. It is this famous,

(17:07):
infamous scene of the two of them having sex, and
four years people thought it was real. People thought it
was like not simulated, that they had actually had sex
in a hotel room in Nicholas. Rogue just shot that,
and in fact, uh, that's not true at all. Rogue
kind of like played around the idea over the years
of just keeping the press, you know, going with this

(17:29):
urban myth. But I'll also say there's a good bit
of fake blood in this movie too. You see a
lot of like, uh, nineteen seventies style fake blood, it's
like really viscous, you know that's that style. Okay, So
it's so it's This is an example though, where I
would say, like the sex and the violence still works
in a ghost story. Um, the supernatural isn't really explained

(17:52):
at any point. The setting at the time was contemporary Venice.
They didn't have it in any kind of period. Now
if you're watching it now, it's almost fifty years later.
Now here's what's interesting. When you look at it up
against m R James Tropes. John is just like one
of his characters, he's a man of rationality in the film,
he's an architect and he's written a book about geometry,
so he's very grounded in the whole idea of being

(18:15):
a rational man. And uh, just making sure that you know,
he is the patriarchal figure that's kind of trying to
hold everything together. Now at this point, I feel like
we we've established sort of the guidelines for a European
horror story, and we've talked about the the the qualities
of this particular story. What what does all of this

(18:35):
reveal about the human condition of Europeans. So I found
an article that was written by G. Whisker in and
it's about de Maurier's horror writing, and it was published
in the Journal of Gender Studies, and I think that
it does a really good job of explaining what she
was trying to do without being overt about it. Essentially,

(18:58):
Whisker argues that horror at its best intervenes in our
critical understanding of the political, social, sexual, and psychological world.
Now it allows us to explore fears and then we
can put them back away again, right, Like we can
take them out of the box, and we can put
them back away. We don't have to live with them.
And this is especially true if you're following the M. R.
James doctrine of ghost stories, right, yeah, especially the the

(19:22):
idea of like keeping it safe, I guess, right, Like,
like the way that he would write them kept them
contained within the world of the ghost story, so when
you were done with it didn't linger. Now, Okay. So
Whisker has an interesting argument about de Mourier, and the
argument goes that de Mourier was providing an entertaining way

(19:44):
to interrogate gender representations, and that horror, being about power
relationships in society, was the perfect way for her to
do that. So women in horror, and at least until then,
had either been passive and vulnerable victims, or they are
depicted as fem fatales that threatened the boundaries of of
the home and of relationships. Okay, now, one claim about

(20:07):
horror is that the pleasure that we get it from it.
So the pleasurable terror of Mr James is when the
narrative provides closure and that the horror itself is destroyed
or contained again, so that the the idea that you
know you dispelled the horror before you go back out
into the real world. This re establishes the familiar for us,

(20:27):
and when the horror is disrupted, our security of self
in place can return. But female writers of horror are
unlikely to want to represent their own gender as being
either monstrous or somehow you know, naive, and they're not
gonna want to celebrate a return to a male empowered
status quo. So du Moier herself she wrote her stories

(20:50):
between World War One and World War Two. That's arguably
an error of conservative gender roles in England. Now and
Don't Look Now and other stories she seems to be
undermining the conservative vision of the role of the husband
and the father, and the story deconstructs this. Now, Whisker argues, actually,
if you've seen Rogues film, it is a feminist interpretation

(21:12):
of Little Red riding Hood and the reason why here
to give you an idea of the film. He uses
red in really powerful ways, and specifically a red macintosh
that both the daughter wears and then the dwarf wears
later on. So whenever you see the color red in
the film, it kind of fills you with dread. So
the story is purposely destabilizing. It makes you constantly uneasy.

(21:37):
It mis directs you away from the actual horror that's
going to come at the end of the film. For example,
when the story opens and we're very first introduced to
the old Lady twins, they're described jokingly by John as
male twins in drag who are definitely murderers. He's joking
around with his wife during dinner basically uh. And when

(21:58):
they meet the twins, they actually he introduced themselves. The
seer says, oh, hey, your daughter's ghost is sitting safely
between you, and John immediately feels as if he's immobilized
with terror, and he says, look, this is weird. Like
the idea that she's able to say that and see this,
even though I'm a rational man, I feel like this
is the end. There's no escape, there's no future. So

(22:19):
that gives you this idea of there's something cyclical going
on within this story and it's taking the power away
from him as the father. Now, Whisker implies that perhaps
the sisters themselves are the fates, and that the third
fate is missing because she's the little female dwarf at
the end who kills John. That I've seen this movie

(22:43):
probably I don't know five or six times and read
the story. Never occurred to me. But it's an interesting
interpretation for sure. So uh. Throughout the story, John reassures
his wife, Look, Venice is totally safe. You don't need
to be worried. Because she starts worrying about these killings
that are going on around the town. He says, look,
let's just stick to logic. I'm going to deny the supernatural.

(23:05):
It doesn't exist. He rejects her feminine intuition of her emotions,
and he tries to re establish his sort of paternal
fantasy of control, which honestly he probably lost a little
bit of when his daughter died, so when he sees
this little girl in the hood running around Venice, he
wants to rescue her. He wants to reattain that uh.

(23:26):
And instead of needing protection, the hooded girl turns out
to be the monster who ultimately kills him. So you
can see there, d'amurier is doing the psychological here. She's
taking pretty much all of m. R. James tropes, but
she's turning them against the James z and idea of
the ghost story to examine gender roles. So I thought
that was an interesting take on the European sub genre

(23:49):
of ghost story. You know, she's she's doing something different
with it. She's using horror to its ends to sort
of expose something about culture and society, uh and at
the same time fill you with pleasing to error, as
James would call it. It's it's interesting to to look
at this as European storytellers who are conscious of the
properties of their own ghost traditions and then utilizing those

(24:12):
for social commentary and sort of to make sense of
the world around them. And in some of these examples
we're gonna look at you have the same thing going
on in other parts of the world, as colonial Europeans
go to some new land, encounter some new mode of
spirit traditions, and then they're they're either taking it. At

(24:33):
the very worst, I guess they're they're taking those and
just exploiting them, using them to create new stories for amusement.
But in the better scenarios, I think they're they're trying
to understand what they've gotten themselves into, what's going on
in this collision of cultures. Yeah, we're going to see
that time and again throughout the rest of the episode.

(24:53):
That's why I wanted to put Europe up at the
top here so we can sort of see it's a
little conservative instagi but it it has its own rules
set essentially. Uh, it would be interesting to see how
Mr james idea of the ghost story plays out across
other cultures. Alright, Well, on that note, let's head on
to Asia. All right. So I'm imagining we've got like
a big map of the world, and our little plane

(25:15):
is following a dotted line from from Venice to where
Hong Kong. Well, you know when I first when we
first sort of agreed to the the the outline for
this episode, I thought, oh, well, you know, there's so
many wonderful Chinese ghost stories, or there's so many wonderful
Japanese ghost stories, or hey, Thailand has a as a
rich tradition of of hauntings and ghosts. But instead I

(25:38):
find that we are going to wind up in Mongolia.
Oh okay, okay, all right, and it will involve Chinese ghosts.
But we're in Mongolia. So we all have cultural perceptions
of haunted houses, right, and it's such we have our
own cultural haunted house attractions, haunted attractions as they're called,
that speak to these expectations. Here in Atlanta, we have

(25:59):
an amazing one in the form of nether World. When
I was a kid in a rural Tennessee, there was
a there was one called scare Mayor that we all
called prayer Mayor because it was that it was hosted
by a local church a house. It was like a
hell house, light like a lower budget, like they didn't
have a lot of they didn't have the budget for
a lot of really heavy uh you know, religious overtones

(26:21):
that they were there probably explain what that is to
our audience. Huh. So a hell house is a thing
that's unique here in America, I think to the Southeast too. Uh.
That is a version of a haunted house attraction, but
it's heavily religious based and the ideas that as you
go through the room you will see like what the
punishments of hell will be like if you continue to

(26:42):
commit sins and then at the end you're hopefully saved. Yeah.
There's a wonderful documentary about this called called Hell House. Yeah,
it's quite Yeah. So Prayer Mayor or Scare Mayor that
I went to. It was a lower budget, but at
the end you would exit into a tent and some
and this preacher would would preach it right right. Yeah,
So various cult oral expectations are playing into that as well. Uh,

(27:03):
you know, I I do want to point out the good.
I believe there are some some Buddhist oriented hell houses
of a of a kind that you'll find in Asia
as well. Have you have you seen that movie The
Houses that October Built. It's uh, it's an okay found
footage horror movie about people going around to various haunted

(27:24):
attractions trying to find the scariest one, and of course
whatever they find ends up being real. Are they just
traveling around in the US or it's in the US. Yeah,
they're in like a Winnebago. In fact, there's a sequel
coming out in like a month. Okay, Well, for for this, uh,
for this ghost story that we're about to get into,
I want you to uh to set aside your own

(27:45):
experiences with US haunted houses or even most Asian haunted houses,
because we are now going to ulan Bator, Mongolia, capital
of Mongolia. Okay, Now imagine yourself in Mongolia. You look
up at this bill board for a haunted attraction, and
it's illustrated with a pale face with bloody tears, and

(28:05):
the text reads as follows, though obviously in Mongolian instead
of English. Have you experienced ghosts from movies so far?
You have now the opportunity to experience them in person
by entering a scary haunted house. A family of Chinese
origins slaughtered each other for obscure reasons. They remain in
this haunted house while the house masters, who become ghostly corpses,

(28:27):
will serve you some tea that dead children will run
around you. That sounds great. I would definitely pay to
go do that. It does sound unique, Yeah, it sounds
it sounds rather different. It sounds better than another world
instead of like somebody with a fake chainsaws jumping owns Now,
there's are real chainsaws, don't have the chains on them. Okay,
good thing I didn't get my hand in there, alright.
So the really interesting thing here is this speaks to

(28:49):
a specifically Mongolian take on ghosts and hauntings, one in
which the ghosts of Chinese merchants, silken robed and long bearded,
haunt the places they buried their accumulated wealth, or near
where they bury their accumulated wealth, and they're they're haunting
the area seeking their gold or their belongings. They walk
in small steps and either speak in Chinese or with

(29:12):
a quote unquote funny Chinese accent. Okay, so you and
I have both spent time in China, but I haven't
been to Mongolia before, so I'm not quite sure what
the dialect sounds like they're yeah, or or more to
the point, what does a Chinese accent sound like a Mongolian.
That's that's something that's kind of beyond, perhaps beyond our
ability to really grasp. Yeah. Absolutely, Now this sounds like

(29:35):
a superstition that's loaded with cultural weight and perceptions of
other races and nationalities. Then you were absolutely correct. I
turned to a really insightful paper about it, this by
George dela Place out of Cambridge, and it was published
in the journal Inner Asia, titled Chinese Ghosts in Mongolian.
This is from two thousand ten. Now, dela Place describes

(29:57):
the haunted attraction. UH has these monster movie faces on
the wall. There's there's Russian furniture, as the Mongolians tend
to refer to it, of thoroughly non Mongolian home furnishings
influenced by European motifs. There's art on the walls that's UH,
you know, expressly Chinese. And then when the ghosts start

(30:19):
talking to the visitors to the Haunted Attraction through recordings
on headphones, they're speaking exclusively and untranslated Chinese, not Mongolian. Now,
one of the things you have to keep in mind
and processing all of this is UH, first of all,
the modern nature of Mongolia as a buffer state between

(30:40):
the Powers of Russia and the People's Republic of China,
despite its past status as as conquerors and kings of
both regions. The Mongolian Haunted House here that we're looking at,
it's defined by foreign influences You're not walking into a
haunted Mongolian house. You're walking into this this weird uh
you know, hybrid of Russia and Chinese influences. Yeah, Deela

(31:03):
place rights quote. Through the setting of this sitting room,
Chinese people appear as some sort of hyper foreigner whose
culture is imagined as a heterogeneous assemblage of typically non
Mongolian features Chinese language. Furthermore, perhaps one of the most
prominent items of Chinese culture to foreigners is seemingly meant

(31:25):
to be frightening in in and of itself to mongol ears. Okay, Now,
he notes that how this actually shook out is that
the the organizer of the haunted house essentially bought it
wholesale in China, and that's why the Chinese language is
there and it's untranslated. But it's believed that this ended
up working in its in its favor because again it

(31:46):
plays on an existing motif of Chinese ghosts. So they
bought a house and moved it to Mongolia. It's kind
of like here in the States, we have the haunted
attraction industry, and they have industry trade shows and you
can go by all these various set pieces. So essentially
the organizer bought a large portion of this as is

(32:08):
from somewhere in China, so it's not as as calculated
a move as as one might think, but it's still
again plays into an existing motif, and that again is
that is that you have these these Chinese ghosts in
Mongolian cities that have a quote notorious history of Chinese migration. Now,

(32:30):
this tradition emerges from a colonial past, yet also speaks
to the complications a mode of modern Mongolia and its
interactions with Chinese enterprise, and the ghosts are seen as
immigrant parasites, almost a sort of economic and cultural vampire.
All right, So we're immediately seeing how the culture of
Mongolia influences what their scare culture is essentially. Yeah, yeah,

(32:54):
I mean, and how their their past interactions with the
Chinese and areous racial racial stereotypes about about the Chinese,
how those factor into their haunt industry. And this this
is something that's not completely out of line with with
haunted attractions here in the States. There there have been
haunted attractions that have been criticized for leaning into racial

(33:16):
stereotypes as well. Yeah, I'm thinking of here in Georgio,
we have like haunted hair rides around Atlanta that you
can go do where you you know, you ride through
a corn field essentially, and again people with fake chainsaws
or maybe real chinsaws jump out of the corn at
you and spook you. So we have this idea of

(33:37):
the Chinese merchant ghost in Mongolia, and it's it's it's
excessively far and it's difficult to actually banish these ghosts,
in large part because the the basic idea here is
that they average Mongolian doesn't really understand how this how
the Chinese think, how the sort of stereotypical Chinese merchant thinks,

(33:58):
and therefore it's difficult to communicate with them, difficult to
try and banish them. Now you have variations on this
ghost story. For instance, you have ghosts of war, particularly
of the Mongolian struggle for independence in the twentieth century.
This would have been the Mongolian Revolution of ninety one,
in which the Soviet Red Army backed the overthrow of

(34:19):
the Russian White Guard. These were anti communist forces and
also into the Chinese occupation of Mongolia, which had been
going on since nineteen nineteen. Now, Mongolia remained a Soviet
satellite state until around nineteen so we're talking, so we're
so we're talking wandering ghost store soldiers here, a ghost general,
that sort of thing. But mostly it's Chinese merchant ghosts

(34:43):
that you hear ghost stories about in Mongolia. And I
think that's rather telling. It forces you to ask the question,
are the scars of economic colonial exploitation even more traumatic
than those of actual warfare, actual actual bloodshed, especially when
you consider to like the push and pull of capitalism
versus communism in that region. Yeah? Yeah, indeed. So I'm

(35:05):
gonna roll through just some examples of this kind of
ghost story of from Mongolia. Uh, and these are all
related in Della Places article. So there's the ghost of
a Chinese man who becomes rich transporting water via horse cart,
and one day he's knocked off his horse cart, he's injured,
and he dies, and he comes back to haunt his

(35:25):
former home in sorch of his search of his horse,
his cart, and his money. And this takes place in
the nineteen eighties. He goes around saying, where is my
water carrying horse cart? Have my two powerful pure bred
horse has been stolen and eaten? I know where I
have put my gold? Okay, So it's Ultimately it's like
about the money. Yeah, that's fascinating, and I wonder too

(35:47):
how much possess Yeah, I wonder how much too that
has to do then with um poverty in the region
as well, there's a definite economic factor. Del Plus argues.
This seems to be the case with the story that
I have from Africa that we'll talk about. Yeah, I
think we both found that in seeking on examples from
emory every continent, it was impossible to avoid like post

(36:10):
colonial trauma or anxiety. Alright, So another one, this is
from a a haunted courtyard in uh Ulan, Bator, and
this is haunted again by the ghost of a Chinese man.
This one, in particular, became rich running a restaurant in
the nineteen fifties, and it was said that when he died,
his soul took refuge in his money. Now, this individual

(36:32):
was supposedly fully integrated into Mongolian society, and so he
did not receive a proper Chinese funeral, thus the haunting.
In this particular ghost story, they tried a Buddhist ceremony
to drive the spirit away. It didn't work. The current
owner of the property he lost his temper. He throws
some coins out into the courtyard and he lambasts the
ghost with a racial slur. Yeah, and this causes the

(36:55):
ghost to leave. But then the owner has to do
this every night to keep the ghost away. And this
a story from around two thousand and three. And the
ghost in this scenario is just heard to say, hey,
my money, Hey my money. Wow. Yeah. I I don't
know that I've necessarily maybe I'm missing something here, audience,
But I can't think of a Western example of this

(37:15):
that's so heavily uh embedded in economics. Yeah, the economics
are kid here because Delpha's points out that this is
this is a typical scenario, not the ghost part, but
the business aspect of it. Here, during the Qing dynasty,
this is the last imperial dynasty of China ended in uh,

(37:36):
you would see Chinese owned businesses in Mongolia and it
involved a China based owner and a Chinese manager who
owned a stake in the in the business and spent
a large portion of his time on site in Mongolia. Seasonally.
They would often take a Mongolian name, and despite a
law against it, they might take a Mongolian wife and

(37:57):
start a family there, even if they had a family
back in line as well, and economically they had an
advantage over locals, and they operated a harsh credit policy
on the Mongolians. And when there were revolts against cheeing
occupat occupation, they often took their anger out in these
Chinese businesses and thieves that that hit these businesses. They

(38:17):
had a robin hood kind of charm among the locals. Okay,
So I'm I'm trying to understand this from our American
Western perspective. It sounds like what some people refer to
derisively here in America as a carpetbagger. So somebody who
is not from a region moves to that region and
then is like economically successful, but doesn't uh give that

(38:40):
money or or in some cases political influence back to
the community. They keep it for themselves or bring it
back to their home. Yeah. The idea here is that
even though this merchant, this overseer of the business would
have to a certain extent immerse themselves in the local culture,
they were still seen by others as to the parasite,

(39:00):
ascetic arm of of Chinese interests. So we're left with
this idea. This this really just ultimately gross stereotype that
Chinese people are so stingy, again a stereotype brought on
by economic policies of the time, that they came back
as ghosts even if there had been no violent tragedy,
which is generally the rule for Mongolian ghost traditions. It's

(39:24):
also a general practice for an elderly Mongolian man to
distribute his belongings among his children before he dies, though
they might have a prize possession that serves as a
quote unquote refuge thing that might need to be buried
to avoid haunting. So you have like a Mongolian grandfather,
he's tended to most of his estate and handed it

(39:45):
off getting ready for death. But say he had a
favorite soup bowl that he used, Well, that might be
a thing. You know, it has no real value particularly,
but it's valuable enough to him that his his ghost
might haunt it, and you have to deal with that.
And idea here is that they saw the Chinese, that
the kind of people that their soul would get caught
up in virtually everything they owned, all their possessions, all

(40:08):
their money that they were. They view them as that materialistic.
And of course you also have to think in all
of this about like the just cultural differences between the
Mongolian and the Chinese. The Mongolians traditionally had a nomadic culture,
uh that they would move around, they would be able
to pick up and go, whereas the Chinese culture was
more set in one place. So thinking back to m

(40:30):
R James's rules, it seems like they're adhering to at
least one of them in that there's like an antique object,
right that seems to be the like center point for
the ghost, and somebody discovering this object or touching it
or whatever triggers the plot of the haunting. Yeah, but
I think the Mongolian version here is that, yes, that's

(40:51):
the way it should work in a traditional Mongolian ghost story.
But they're saying that these Chinese merchants, they are so
greedy that that they're they're ghost. It just caught gets
caught up in every material thing that they own and
every shred of their money. So Double Place sums it
up as follows. Quote. Chinese ghosts are frightening because they
bridge a collective memory of past colonial exploitation and a

(41:14):
present concern about migration. They picture present day Chinese migrants
not as new businessmen but merely as returning colonial merchants
as current instances of an ongoing parasitic relationship. That is
very interesting. Yeah, I know, you know, Asian ghost stories

(41:34):
have become more popular over here in the last fifteen years,
maybe you know obviously Ringo or Jewan stuff like that,
but I can't think of any Chinese examples off the
top of my head, and I wonder, oh, well, there
was there was one that came out a fe years
back that I keep meaning to watch titled h was
it called Riga Mortis. Oh, I've seen Riga Mortis. It's

(41:57):
a Cantonese language film. That's yeah, that's a cool movie. Um,
I don't remember necessarily at having this economic aspect. Oh no,
I don't think that it necessarily did. Yeah, yeah, I
mean really for it would be I guess it would
be interesting and probably uncomfortable to watch a Mongolian horror

(42:20):
movie based around like a kind of an obscene stereotype
like this, Yeah, totally. I mean, it would be interesting
from a sort of anthropological standpoint. But uh, this is
what definitely a case where the ghost story reveals a
lot of unpleasant things about a relationship between two people's Well,

(42:42):
why don't we take a break and when we get back,
we can take our little dotted line airplane to Malawi
in Africa and explore something similar. Alright, we're back, We've
hit Europe and we've hit Asia. What's next Africa? And
I was excited because I anticipated that there was just

(43:02):
going to be this like plethora of great African ghost
stories available, right uh, And I had the hardest time
finding anything. What's interesting is that despite Africa having a
rich mythological folklore as well as many different belief systems
about the afterlife, almost all the ghost stories per se

(43:23):
that are available are post colonial. So to me, this
meant that there is still some kind of Eurocentric thing
that's being worked off of the same literary system, going
back to our European example and Mr James there, and
I was looking for something to be a little different
than that. So there's lots of ghost stories that are
in South Africa, for instance, but I couldn't find any

(43:45):
that we're from before Dutch or British colonization. So then
I considered, well, maybe I should turn to the Middle
East instead. There's a rich ghost story tradition there that
goes back to a thousand and one nights, but one
real life story kept coming up over and over again
in my search, and so I decided to have this
be the one that I shared. This is from two

(44:06):
thousand five. In Malawi, it was widely reported that the
then president bingu Wa muth Rika had fled his three
hundred room palace because he believed that it was haunted. Now,
two journalists quoted his religious advisor, Reverend Milani and Tonga,

(44:26):
as saying that muther Rika had summoned religious leaders there
specifically to exercise evil spirits. A third journalist reported that
muther Rika had sensed invisible rodents crawling all over him
at night. So when this came out publicly, muth Rika
was not happy about it, and he totally denied it
and he said, I have not seen any ghosts yet.

(44:48):
I have never in my life been afraid of ghosts.
It's important a note here too. He is Roman Catholic,
was Roman Catholic, so he had this strange maybe not
strange if you're from Malawi, but he was integrating Roman
Catholic religious beliefs with the sort of traditional cultural beliefs
from that area. Oh yeah, and this this is this

(45:09):
a trend we see time and time again. Yeah, so
police officials actually arrested two of these journalists and they
drove them three miles to a police station and then
charged them with a statute that made it illegal to
ridicule the president. Uh. This obviously recalled a less democratic
past for that nation, really worried people about what his

(45:31):
relationship with the freedom of the press was going to be.
The nation's top prosecutor at the time said that the
stories that they had written were too irresponsible to ignore
and that he was going to pursue a criminal conviction
that would place them in prison for up to two years. Now,
it sounds like what ended up happening was they were
released on bail shortly afterwards. So I think this was

(45:52):
kind of like a warning shot for the press in Malawi. Now.
It turns out though Malawi has a history of ghost
stories in its state houses. So the first head of State,
Hastings Kamuzu Banda, said that he was regularly visited by
mysterious dwarves at the san Jica Palace. Yeah, what is

(46:14):
up with these ghost dwarves? Uh and his successor, Buck
Kelly Muluzi also suspected that there were spirits there. So
the former press officer for one of those administrations said, look,
no one could sleep at that presidential residence, so we
we ended up moving to another one. So I'm reading this,
I'm going, what's going on here? This is an article

(46:35):
in the New York Times from two thousand five, something
strange is up. According to the then editor of Malawi's newspaper,
which is called The Chronicle, ghosts and spirits are understood
to be a part of everyday reality in Malawi and
it was not a taboo subject. And he was surprised
that the president reacted this way. That when The New
York Times reported it, they said, in many parts of

(46:58):
Sub Saharan Africa tried aditional superstitions coexist seamlessly with modern sensibilities.
Now I found an example of one. This isn't a
ghost per se, but I thought this was worth noting
because it's especially upsetting. So I couldn't find anything about ghosts.
But it turns out that in Malawi, albinos are a
valuable commodity for their body parts. Uh They're often trafficked

(47:21):
across borders for use in witchcraft rituals. So basically the
idea is that the body parts of albinos are said
to bring riches, success, power or sexual conquest. Uh. And
the mutilated bodies of albinos are found later on, without
their hands, their feet, their breasts, their genitals, their skin,
sometimes their eyes or their hair. So this is real

(47:43):
life horror going on home, but it's something that's broadly understood. Now.
The ghost thing is interesting. Was this simply about saving
face because muther Rika didn't like that he looked scared
to a global audience. The country Information Minister actually claimed
that the president was totally unaware of the arrests of

(48:05):
these journalists before they happened. He wasn't responsible for them necessarily.
Then Tonga reversed and said, oh no, no, no, I
all those quotes about me saying that the president was
worried about spirits being in his palace, that that's not
true at all. He doesn't believe in charms. So there's
clearly some kind of spin doctoring going on here. So

(48:26):
what's up with this haunted building? First of all, like,
why have three presidents in Malawi UH supposedly seen ghosts there? Well,
it turns out that it is a one hundred million
dollar mansion that was erected in Malawi under Banda. That's
the first president while his nation was undergoing appalling poverty.
This place has three hundred rooms, two helipads, a game

(48:49):
park in a banquet room for six hundred people. His
successor called it obscene opulence. And when the government you know,
got ahold of it later on, they said, maybe you
should just turn this into a five star hotel, Like
it just looks really bad when the leader of the
country lives here. When muther Rika was elected, the place
was in total disrepair. So he had it renovated and

(49:11):
then he moved in and said, look, it's actually going
to cut costs if I live here rather than this
other palace in this other city. Now what I'm wondering
here maybe these ghost stories that are going on and
again these are real stories. This isn't this is an
m R James telling a story of a learned gentleman.
This is the actual president of a nation who seems

(49:33):
to be seeing ghosts in his home. Uh, maybe there
are manifestations of the presidential guilt over living in such
opulence while the citizenry goes poor. So I did a
little bit more digging to learn about muther Rika. He
passed away in in and the Guardians obituary starts off
by saying he went from being one of Africa's most

(49:55):
respected leaders to a repressive despot in just two years.
So it seems like and that was right. So two
thousand five was towards the beginning of his time and
power there. So it seems like this is a guy
He had previously been a loans officer at the World Bank.
Then he became a dictator afterwards, and when the global

(50:15):
recession reached Malawi in two thousand ten, he actually responded violently.
He curtailed civil liberties. Protesters of his presidency were shot
dead by the police there, and he was criticized for
purchasing a thirteen million dollar private jet for himself just
before this. So he died in two thousand twelve from

(50:35):
a heart attack. Couldn't find a ton more about this.
I would love it if our listeners who out there
no way more about Malawi than we do, could chime in.
But it seems to me from Afar looking at this,
that there's some kind of again post colonial guilt, right
like he seemed Mutherrika seemed to be this guy who
had traveled around the world and had a Western education
and came back and was successful and rich and powerful,

(50:59):
and yet the people were still poor, and we're upset
at him for these choices he made, living in this
huge mansion, buying this private jet, all this stuff, and
they reacted to it poorly. But maybe his subconscious was
also reacting to it poorly, and also his predecessors. Clearly
they all had the same weird ghost guilt going on.

(51:21):
And of course, one of the things about a ghost story,
even like this, of course, is that it becomes the
property of all those who tell it. It becomes the
property of of outsiders looking in as well as the
local residents and the people that that that lived and
perhaps suffered under him. So it can be a way
to to understand or better understand what has happened. Yeah,

(51:41):
now my understanding is you encountered somewhat of a similar
thing when you looked at Australia's ghost stories. Certainly, when
it comes to that the the idea of like two
different cultural traditions coming together and creating kind of a
hybrid belief system, which is certainly what I was expecting,
uh from US Astralia, because you obviously have a rich

(52:03):
Aboriginal tradition that involves spirit realm and spirits walking among us.
And then you have the European traditions that are brought
there with the colonial influence, uh and the you know,
the the Western Australians. So it seems like, I mean,
it's we we have a lot of fiction out there,
some cinematic where we see, uh, these traditional values of

(52:25):
the Aboriginal people kind of melding with European expectations, or
it's Europeans telling stories about Aboriginal spiritualism. Okay, so there's
certainly Australian ghost stories, but it looks like you've got
a book here that you turn to. So there's actual
research on this tradition, right. There are two authors in particular,

(52:47):
Kim Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs that came up a
couple of times. They wrote a book titled Uncanny Australia,
Sacredness and Identity and a post Colonial Nation. Uh. It's
really really excellent book. Check it out if you want
to explore more on this topic. But I was reading
an article they wrote titled the post Colonial ghost Story,

(53:07):
in which the authors point out that one encounters a
form of of postcolonial racism in Australia and which Aboriginal
people are seen as lacking in some areas, uh you know,
such as uh wealth and access to various uh you know,
properties of the modern society. But then they're also seen

(53:28):
is is having too much in other areas. In other words,
they have they have certain rights pertaining to sacred lands
that sometimes rubs the uh you know, the the western
modern Australia the wrong way. Right. Yeah, Well, we have
a similar thing here in the States with the Native people.
Is here their sacred lands and then oh jeez, with

(53:50):
the whole history of those people being relegated to reservations
or places that aren't actually their homes. Yeah, I think it.
It matches up with a lot of of surviving tensions
between native peoples and colonial powers. And Gelder and Jacobs
say the following about it. Quote in this climate, Aborigines
certainly continue to receive sympathy for what they do not

(54:13):
have good health, adequate housing and so on. And yet
at the same time they draw resentment from white Australians
because they seem to be claiming more than their quote
fair share. Still there's this expected exchange of beliefs and superstitions.
The Europeans, for their part, incorporated bits of local feklore
folklore into their own stories and of course borrowed and

(54:33):
westernized aspects of it for their own fiction. Meanwhile, is
Philip A. Clark writes in his two thousand seven folklore
paper Indigenous Spirit and Ghost Folklore of Settled Australia. Modern
Aboriginal people are in many cases less familiar with the
complex creation myths of their people, but cling to hybrid
beliefs that sprang up in the wake of colonialism. And

(54:56):
it's this fits with what we've talked about before on
the show, uh, involving cargo cults, the idea that you
you ultimately have to find some sort of hybrid creation
of culture in many cases in order to survive culturally.
Like you you you were just going to be plowed
over by these intimidating colonial forces in many cases unless

(55:20):
you find this common ground, uh, this kind of cultural
survival tactic. Yeah, I'm thinking back on our episode about
the Serpent and the Rainbow, and uh, the whole idea
that like certain kinds of voodoo cultures are an integration
of local mysticism with like Roman Catholicism. For instance. Okay, now,

(55:40):
out of these hybrid beliefs that the hybrid ghost stories
that emerge. Uh Guelder and Jacobs argue in their book
that these Australian ghost stories are not so much about possession,
such as the owning or acquiring of a haunted house
or a haunted object, but they're about dispossession. Now specifically,
some of the Aboriginal motifs that are that are still

(56:02):
represented in these hyper belief systems. You have this idea
that there are just a lot of spirits and that
one kind of lives uh among them. Many of these
spirits have have humanoid qualities to them, and there are
also traditions of like little people and sourcers, shape shifters, uh, etcetera.
Uh Now. Clark writes that the Aboriginal people also believe

(56:26):
that there was a powerful element of the human spirit
that for most individuals lay dormant in them throughout their lives,
and this was called the prupy and belief in this
still lingers to this day, sometimes as an opponent, potent
aspect of the self that may be called upon as
a living spirit or helper in order to you know,
protect yourself or attack someone. Now agopa, however, is the

(56:48):
spirit of its deceased person and operates much like a
ghost in other traditions. A goopa, while disruptive, will eventually
quote come to rest with the old people. And these
are differ and from the sort of evil spirits, the
bad spirits kind of demons that exist in Aboriginal belief
systems as well. Okay, so there's a complex afterlife, believe them. Yeah,

(57:10):
but they do have something that is a lot like
the Western ghost and therefore melds well with the colonial
ideas of what a ghost should be now and and
for that reason, belief and goopa press persists, and Clark
points out that massacre sites and missions are frequent haunts. Uh.
This is they'll love this as a dog owner, that

(57:32):
dogs can often see these spirits when we cannot, and
you can see them too, perhaps if you get right
behind your dog and you stare through the space between
the dogs ears. Okay, yeah, this actually came up in
multiple cultures, the idea because you get the dogs who
just kind of stare off into space weirdly and you're

(57:52):
not quite sure what they're looking at. Yeah, and multiple
cultures the idea is that, oh, well, they can see
the dead. Yeah, clearly they're they're seeing something that is
hidden from us. Now, even today, when a goopa is
spotted the Aboriginal community, they have to discuss the revalence
of the sighting, what does it mean, why is it occurring,
and particularly how is it linked to any recent conflict

(58:14):
or tension concerning local Aboriginal affairs. Now, so this is
this is rather important here, I think, because essentially you're
seeing um the idea that sightings, ghost sightings lead to
community discussions. Uh so you might have a ghost that
props that pops up because of a suicide, because of

(58:36):
a death that is somehow connected to drug addiction. So
you have you have deaths that are occurring due to
societal problems within the Aboriginal community. And then if the
ghost decided, then the community must discuss the problem. So
it becomes a reason to have these important discussions about
real world issues. So it's sort of a manifestation of

(58:58):
the communities unconscious, right, and like these are maybe societal
things that they need to discuss, but they don't realize
they need to discuss them until this person dies and
then their spirit starts haunting, right. Yeah, and you know
when you get into you can also get into the
whole question of well what are people Are the people
actually seeing something are they just making it up as

(59:20):
some sort of psychological affair. I mean, there there's so
many different interpretations of what could be happening. A call
back to our Will of the Whisp episode from a
year two ago, there are some who think that the
initial group of sighting could be connected to some sort
of Will of the Whisp phenomenon, but you know, it
could be any number of things. It could be hallucination,

(59:41):
trick of the eye, whatever it is, something something strikes
an individual as being ghostly, and then they can connect
it to some sort of tragic event in the community
and then bring it forward as a discussion. Wow. So
this is actually like an extension of what I was
talking about earlier with just horror stories in general, that
they're ref flective of cultural issues. But they're taking it

(01:00:02):
a step further and saying like, Okay, this is reflective
of issues that we're dealing with. Now we need to
address those issues as a group. Now. I know we
have a number of Australian Australian listeners, we have some
some Kiwi listeners, as well. So I would love to
hear from you. If you have specific ghost stories that
you think reveal something about about culture in your neck

(01:00:24):
of the woods, let us know. I would love to
hear from you. So let's take one more break, and
when we get back, we're going to head over to
South America. Alright, So we're turning to South America now, uh,
and then we'll end with North America, which is probably
what you and I are most familiar with and most
of our audience is most familiar with. So would you

(01:00:46):
find in South America? Is it pretty common in terms
of are are we finding yet another example of the
post colonial uh influence on ghosts? There is, there's definitely
a post colonial influence, But this tradition I think is
more revealing about pre colonial um beliefs in this case
because it concerns a particular native people. So for this one,

(01:01:09):
I turned to a really captivating paper titled Three Days
for Weeping Dreams, Emotions and Death in the Peruvian Amazon
by Glenn Shephard, published a two thousand two in Medical
Anthropology Quarterly. And this is one of those you know,
this is one of those papers. But we read a
lot of different academic papers for this show, and this

(01:01:30):
is one of those that managed to weave together a
personal story with anthropological commentary, uh in a way that
just really worked. Yeah, that's pretty rare in the stuff
that we read, but I'm thinking of like ethnographies tend
to have more allowance for like a subjective narrative to
be inserted among their observations. So it's certainly far less

(01:01:53):
common and say, you know, archaeological paper, but but this
one just has really captivated me as it really stood
apart from from even other excellent papers I've said. So.
Shephard worked among the Matsa Genka of Peru in the
late nineteen eighties. Now the Matsagenka they're an indigenous people
of the Amazon Basin jungle regions of southeastern Peru, and

(01:02:18):
his paper kicks off with an account of a local
woman who suffered uterine bleeding, which was said to have
begun one day quote when she heard an unknown voice
calling to her while she was working alone in the
family garden. Pain and nightmares followed, and in it he
ended up convincing her to hey, let me bring you
in for medical treatment. So he took her on this

(01:02:40):
long journey they encountered numerous complications, so travel delays. Her
being unaccustomed to modern medical exams, even encountered a problem
where they ran into a traveling medicine Ginka shaman, and
this perved stressful for as well because he was from
another group and was therefore considered something of a warlock

(01:03:00):
like they were. There was this ingrain um suspicion of
shamans from other groups of the same people. So I'm
imagining she like sensed a lot of just kind of
bad energy in general with this journey. Yeah, and you
know she's she's quite ill and h and ends up
ends up dying now, but but it ends up. He

(01:03:20):
uses this as a way to to further analyze what's
going on with the Metsa Genka people and uh and
what their beliefs reveal about their about their their customs
and their view of death and bereavement. Now, the bat
Metsagenka believe in spirits, and there are two varieties of
note and they both have simple similar wording. So on

(01:03:43):
one hand you have the Kama Guarini, these are the
bringers of death. Now, these are evil spirits, essentially demons
that seduce and or sexually assault matsagenka people resulting in
illness or death. H Shepherd writes that the medicine geeker
are generally a sex positive bunch, but they frown upon

(01:04:05):
what they see as deviant sexuality or obsessive sexuality, and
uh the kama guarini may may punish this, and they're
defined by perversions of diet, sexuality and social behavior. So
in this story of the the young woman who was suffering, uh,
the ideas that she they thought that she had been
attacked by a kama guarini. Now the second variety is

(01:04:30):
a comet serie, which means dead person. And these are
more traditional ghosts in some respects. These are the spirits
of the dead, and I think it's it's very telling
given how they view them. So like the demon that
we described already, the bringer of death. Uh, these ghosts
smell bad there and they're frightful. So if you dream

(01:04:50):
about one, it's a total nightmare. You're gonna wake up
with aches and you can and you can blame any
existing aches on that ghost. Dream man. Maybe that's been
going on with me lately. Well, I thought it was
just like a bara metric pressure change, but it might
be ghost dreams. Well, you might need to take some
of the psychoactive and medicinal plants that they used to
dispel these dreams. Especially, we have these dreams about a

(01:05:14):
deceased loved one now seeing a ghost while awake. For them,
it's a serious health scare. So you have this scenario
where they're these demonic entities out there and there after you,
and if they get you, it's gonna make you physically ill,
and then you may die. And then when an individual dies,
they will typically come back as a ghost. And and

(01:05:36):
that ghost is also a frightful thing that can make
you sick, that can bring on physical illness and death
and essentially kind of leach your soul out of you.
So there's this whole taxonomy going on here of these
various types of ghosts and how they're leading to other
ghost creation. Yeah, yeah, essentially. Now, Shepherd says that the

(01:05:58):
Comet series here serves as a way to dehumanize the dead. Quote,
the dead person is no longer a beloved spouse, a relative,
a human companion with a name, and when a social
identity immediately upon death, they become common siri dead person
ghost belonging to the ranks of demons and dreadful spirits

(01:06:18):
that are the ultimate cause of illness and death. Ghosts,
for the mats A Ginka are not anonymous spirits from
bygone generations, and a ghost only visits the people at
knew in life. Uh So they are alone, they are needy,
they are awful, and there to be shunned and avoided
so that they might travel on to the next life.
So this is very different from other cultures where they

(01:06:40):
revere they're dead. Right. So it's an interesting twist because
generally the motif with ghosts and bereavement here in Western
society is the living are losing it. We're crying, we're weeping,
we're expressing our emotions, and then here comes the stoic
ghosts that wanders in and keeps us out. But it's

(01:07:01):
the reverse for for for the in this tradition, the
the ghost is this needy, emotional thing and the humans
are the ones that are going to react stoically, like
there is this intense cultural pressure to not let your
emotions out in the in the face of death. Okay, okay,
So this is very tied into that analysis of don't

(01:07:24):
look now, the idea of like reintaining maintaining your rationality,
maintaining your self control, and not allowing yourself to fall
into the emotional. Yeah, like the emotion alone is is
going to make you sick, Shepherd says. Quote. Just as
happiness is synonymous with health, so is sadness synonymous with illness.
Sadness represents a condition in which the soul turns away

(01:07:45):
in contemplation, disassociating itself from the rest of the physical
and social body. Now, another interesting telling thing about the
mats and Ginka here is that the dead. Uh, we're
not traditionally buried. Uh, not at least not until missionaries
came along. And we're really insistent on the fact that

(01:08:05):
the dead should be buried. And the idea here is that, well,
the ground that's that's full of flames and foul vapors
and demons and illnesses. The only thing that should be
buried there are stillborn children, deformed children, and second born
twins because they are essentially doppelgangers. Police. Wow. Okay, So

(01:08:25):
instead they practiced an exposure burial in which the dead
were left among the buttress roots of large trees. And
if you were old and dying, well you might just
take it on yourself to walk out into the wilds
all alone and find some tree roots to die among.
So this is kind of like sky burial, which we've
talked about before. Yeah, the elements and would essentially consume you.

(01:08:47):
Uh and and this is also interesting because the shepherd
says that the exposure burial served to chart their soul's
journey into the afterlife based on the body state of decay.
So you could look at the dead body of of
of one of your people and you could say, okay,
well this body is really decaying. It's it's a safe
body to be around because the the ghost is far away.

(01:09:10):
But if the body is fresh, the body hasn't decayed
all that much, Well, this is dangerous because that means
they're near, they're still more seemingly alive. And it's just
so it's really interesting to look at that in terms
of a culture's bereavement tactic, Like it's such a stoic um,
you know, shields up way of dealing with death, Like, no,
the dead person is a dangerous ghost now and I

(01:09:33):
can't feel anything because that will endanger me. Yeah, so
once you die in that culture, you're sort of shunned
until you've been dead for a while, and it's okay
to think about you or experience emotion related to you
because your spirit is so far away. Yeah, exactly. Wow. Yeah.
So I'll link to that full paper in the landing
page of this episode of Stuff to Bring Your Mind

(01:09:54):
dot Com because the whole paper is super interesting and
it also gets into medicine, ginka notions of the soul
as well. Okay, Well, for our last ghost story, we're
gonna end where we reside here in North America. As
you would imagine, the North American ghost story tradition is
heavily tied into the European tradition, right. So North American

(01:10:15):
ghost story writers like Henry James in eight ninety eight,
or po or Washington Irving, they came out of that
same tradition. And then the early nineteen hundreds we had
pulp magazines that just helped spread ghost stories further. By
nineteen fifty nine we got our own version of the
psychological ghost story with Shirley Jackson's classic The Haunting of

(01:10:38):
Hill House. But today I want to bring you right
smack to here in seventeen Uh. This is interesting because
it's both podcast related and it's a little bit of
a meta take on the ghost story. And it's probably
what most stuff to blow your mind listeners would expect
from us in terms of our taking a look at

(01:10:58):
ghost stories and sort of a scientific approach. Well, yeah,
we tend to look at things like, all right, what's
going on with hallucination? What's going on here with uh,
with the nature of human memory? Yeah. So, Carrie Poppy
is the podcast host of a show called Oh No,
Ross and Carry. I had not heard of it until
discovering this story, but their podcast sounds like it would

(01:11:21):
be something that our listeners would like. Probably some of
you listen to it already. They explore fringe science, spirituality,
and claims of the paranormal in our world. Uh. Now,
Carrie Poppy, she gave a ted talk at the beginning
of Seen. She talks about how when she was twenty
five years old, she felt like someone was watching her

(01:11:42):
in her home and this kept getting worse, and she
felt a pressure in her chest and it got so
worse over time that she eventually felt physical pain from it.
And over the course of a week, it got worse
and it worse, and she thought maybe something was haunting her.
So she eventually started hearing whooshing sounds like auditory sounds

(01:12:04):
of whooshing going like sort of through her. So she
turns to this forum of skeptics online and she types
into them. She says, Hey, I'm experiencing this. What do
you guys think is going on? One of them says,
have you ever heard of carbon monoxide poisoning? And this
is essentially when you have a gas leak, carbon monoxide
leaks into your home. All the symptoms of carbon monoxide

(01:12:27):
poisoning were similar to what she was experiencing. So she
calls her gas company. They come out and they find,
sure enough, she's got a gas leak and it would
have killed her pretty soon if she hadn't addressed it.
So in her TED talk, Carrie Poppy talks about how
this incident led her to become an investigator, both in

(01:12:47):
journalism and in the paranormal. So now she goes undercover
and investigates stuff like exorcisms and fringe groups, and this
is all part of that Oh No, Ross and Carry podcast.
And in this talk she says, ten times out of ten,
every time I've investigated something, paranormal science wins and saves
the day. Uh. And she basically breaks it down. She says, look,

(01:13:10):
there's two types of truth. There's outer truth, which is
basically scientific truth that's objective, it has evidence. And she
says there's also inner truth and this is more art
oriented and personal. Now, she thinks here in the United
States and in North America, we tend to make a
mistake and we we conflate the two things, and we

(01:13:31):
make other people defend their belief systems, their truths based
on other standards. Right, So, for instance, like maybe we
make a scientist defend their ideas based on our personal
beliefs or vice versa. Maybe we interrogate somebody's personal beliefs,
whether it be about religion or ghosts, and we interrogate
them on some kind of scientific standing. Uh So about

(01:13:54):
realizing that these these are two worlds that don't really
necessarily touch exactly. Yeah, And so she says, when we
have scientific explanations, we know literally when to give up
the ghost. That like in her case, for instance, she
found out what the scientific explanation was for carbon monoxide
poisoning and that she was like, Okay, there's no longer

(01:14:17):
any issue of me thinking there's a ghost here and
anybody else I tell this story too, is probably not
going to say to me, yeah, but there might still
be a ghost there, you know, like it's been well explained.
We're gonna quote give up the ghost and move on
to the rational scientific side. And she discusses groups that
test the paranormal and prove that the paranormal is in

(01:14:39):
fact other things with evidence, right, these skeptic groups. She
sees this as actually being motivated to help people's lives
for the better. So we've talked about many instance of
things like this on the show before, whether it's exorcisms
or alien abductions, things like that. If you look at
it and you're able to ground it in some kind
of scientific evidence, then maybe you can help the victims

(01:15:02):
of things like this come to terms with it, right exactly.
You have to be accepting though on a certain level. Right,
you can't just approach them completely, Uh, I don't know, dismissively.
So Carrie Poppy, she says, look, every time I investigate
one of these things, I hope I'll be proven wrong.
I hope that there's ghosts out there. But then she asks, look,

(01:15:25):
when you are investigating these things, are talking to other
people who have claims like this, respect these people enough
to test their claims rather than just immediately blowing them off.
She says that through her search for what's out there,
trying to investigate the paranormal, that helps us understand what's

(01:15:46):
inside us. So I thought that was a really poignant
way to kind of wrap up all of these ghost
stories that we've been looking at here that inherently whether
the ghost is real, whether you're reading a story that
was written by m R. James, you're experiencing something in
your culture in China or South America, or you're here
in America and you're on this metal level where you're like,

(01:16:07):
ghosts can't possibly be real. We have to figure out
what's going on here. Yeah, Ultimately it's about the human condition. Yeah, yeah,
I mean, what what is this? What is what? What
are we trying to, uh to communicate or how is
the ghost story serving as sort of a pressure valve,
uh for some sort of cultural angst? Yeah, exactly. So,

(01:16:30):
just to fill out Poppies story, I want to throw
out a few ideas as to what might be going
on scientifically when we're looking at ghost sightings here. So,
first of all, from scientific American hallucinations are very common
when human beings are grieving. In fact, there's a study
that shows over eight percent of elderly people said that
they experienced hallucinations associated with their dead partner at least

(01:16:53):
one month after bereavement. So that seems very common and
not like something that I've heard about on a regular basis. Yeah,
we've covered hallucinations on the show here before, and hallucinations occur.
I mean, our our experience of reality is in many
ways and an hallucination in and of itself. Yeah. So
then I also looked at an article by Mental Philoss
and they said that Canadian neuroscientist Michael Persinger has actually

(01:17:17):
argued that electromagnetic fields maybe stimulating our temporal lobes and
that this can potentially cause us to feel like there's
a presence in a room. So if there's something that's
generating this particular kind of electromagnetic field, that may explain
what the phenomena is. Other hypotheses are things like infrasound.
Those are sounds that are so little that we can't

(01:17:39):
hear them. So these sounds cause us physiological discomfort, panic,
changes in our heart rate, and our blood pressure. All
of these things are associated with hauntings. There's an engineer
named vict Pandy who wrote about this in a paper
about a room that he worked in that felt haunted,
and he eventually discovered it was actually home to a

(01:18:02):
nineteen Hurts standing wave that was coming from a fan
in the room and that that was what was causing
him to experience these symptoms. If you look at Poppy's story,
then in a doctor named W. H. Wilmer published a
paper in the American Journal of Ophthalmology about a family
who was experiencing a haunting and it turned out that

(01:18:24):
they had a faulty furnace and that it was filling
their home with carbon monoxide, which was causing them both
oral and visual hallucinations. So all of this is to say,
like we I think now, like you get to North
America and maybe globally as like we've become more globalized,
we're at this point point where our ghost stories are
starting to be analyzed from this perspective like what what

(01:18:48):
are we actually experiencing? But then what does the experience
tell us about ourselves? Like placing the ghost narrative on
top of it, what what what's going on inside? Uh?
And I would just if carry Poppy is listening I
would say, sounds like she's going to be the perfect
victim in a story, for a classic Mr. James style

(01:19:09):
ghost story, because she's the learned, gentlewoman who who's rational, right,
and then eventually she's gonna stumble across some antique object.
It's gonna unleash ghosts like crazy, and she's not gonna
have an explanation for it. And then the murderous dwarf
is gonna come for and it's over exactly. So there
you go. We covered six continents. There were certainly were

(01:19:30):
not able to get to every fabulous ghost story in
the world, but we hit a few high points that
were I feel like, help to illuminate what's going on
in our ghost stories, what they're saying about the human experience,
and even uh and even getting into some of the
science of what could actually be going on to cause
some of these disturbances. Yeah. So, if you are from

(01:19:50):
any of these regions that we covered and you're like, guys,
you totally missed this cool ghost story fact about my
my area, please connect with us on social on media.
We're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on tumbler, we're
on Instagram. We've also got our Facebook discussion module. Where
are the community around Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
having awesome conversations every day based on our episodes are

(01:20:12):
just based on things they think that will be interesting
to fans of the show. Yeah, a great place to
share your own ghost stories or if you want to
if you want to talk about by Cameral Mind and
how that play you think that could play into various
ghost stories. That's a great place for those discussions as well.
In the meantime, heading over to stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com, that's where we'll find all the podcast
episodes going all the way back to the very beginning.

(01:20:32):
You'll find uh blogs and videos as well, and you'll
find links to those various social media accounts. And if
you want to get in touch with us the old
fashioned way, just hit us with an email at below
the mind and how Stuff Works dot com. We're more

(01:20:55):
on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how
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