Imagine a suspicious video making the rounds online. It seems to show a witness making a serious accusation, but the footage is not authentic. Instead, it was generated using an artificial intelligence model.

Fortunately, the video is quickly identified and labelled as a deepfake. Phew! Viewers are now told that what they are about to see is probably false. That should solve the problem, right?

Or maybe not.

A new study in Scientific Reports suggests that while identifying a deepfake can reduce its influence, it does not remove it entirely. Even when people were warned in advance that a video was likely to be false, the allegation it contained still shaped their judgement.

For those of us who are curious about paranormal evidence, this raises an intriguing question. What happens when a ghost video is revealed to be manipulated, misleading, or entirely artificial? Does exposing the unreliability of a recording actually remove its influence, or has the video already left us with something more persistent?

A Synthetic Accusation

Researchers Emily Spearing and colleagues conducted two experiments involving a total of 2,500 UK participants.

Participants first read a fictional briefing about a hit-and-run in which somebody had been seriously injured. Some received only this written information. Others then watched a short AI-generated video presented as a clip from a local community podcast.

In the video, an apparent witness claimed to have seen the crash and identified a local politician as the driver responsible.

Before watching it, some participants were shown a prominent warning:

WARNING: the following video has been flagged as a deepfake, and therefore the content is likely to be false.

The warning also briefly explained that a deepfake is a realistic AI-generated video depicting somebody saying or doing something that never actually happened.

Afterwards, participants answered questions about the incident, including how likely they thought it was that the politician had committed the crime.

The results were consistent in both experiments. People who watched the accusatory video judged the politician as more likely to be guilty than those who never saw it. The warning also helped: participants who saw the warning were more likely to identify the video as fake, find it less reliable, and were less swayed by the accusation.

Still, the warning did not erase the effect. Even those told in advance that the video was probably a deepfake judged the politician as more likely to be guilty than people who never saw the video containing the accusation.

This does not mean that warnings are pointless. They clearly changed how people evaluated the recording and reduced its impact. Yet recognising that evidence is unreliable and actually removing its influence appear to be two different psychological challenges.

What About Witness Credibility?

The researchers also investigated whether making the apparent witness in the video seem less credible would strengthen the warning.

Their first attempt involved presenting the witness with either a British or Indian accent. Based on previous research into accent bias, they predicted that British participants might perceive the Indian-accented witness as less credible.

Instead, the opposite happened. The Indian-accented version produced slightly higher guilt judgements and was perceived as more reliable and less likely to be fake.

The researchers suggest that participants may have found it easier to notice synthetic qualities in the accent they knew best. It’s an interesting idea, though it comes from exploratory analysis rather than being firmly established by the experiment.

In the second experiment, the credibility manipulation was more direct. The witness was introduced either as a respected local GP or as a publicity-seeking socialite with previous fraud convictions.

Describing her as untrustworthy made the accusation seem less reliable and led to lower guilt judgements. Yet this did not make the deepfake warning any more effective. Even when participants were told both that the video was probably fake and that the apparent witness it depicted was untrustworthy, the accusation still had some influence.

This does not mean that credibility is unimportant. Both the credibility of the source and the deepfake warning shaped people’s judgements. What the researchers found is that challenging the witness’s credibility did not make the warning any more protective.

Knowing It’s Fake Isn’t the Same as Forgetting It

The authors connect their results to the “continued influence effect”, which is the tendency for misinformation to continue shaping reasoning after it has been corrected or discredited.

One possible explanation is that misleading information helps us construct a coherent story.

In this experiment, the deepfake offered an answer to an important question: who caused the crash? Taking away the accusation left a gap in the story. Without another explanation for the driver’s identity, the discredited claim remained the only answer available, and so it continued to shape people’s judgements.

This may be especially relevant to paranormal evidence.

A recording rarely reaches its audience without interpretation. Viewers are told that a faint sound is a dead child answering an investigator, that a blurred shape is a human figure crossing a corridor, or that a movement in the darkness is the ghost of somebody known to have died nearby.

The recording does more than provide pixels or soundwaves. It offers a story about what those ambiguous details might mean. It fills in the gaps, turning something vague into something that feels more coherent.

If the footage is later shown to be manipulated, misrepresented, or AI-generated, that may discredit the artefact. But discrediting the artefact does not, by itself, provide a replacement for the interpretation attached to it. The ghostly narrative remains, which is rather ironic when you think about it.

Saying “It isn’t a ghost” still leaves us with unanswered questions. What made the sound during the ghost hunt? Why did the shape seen by an eyewitness look so human? Why did someone feel a presence while trying to sleep? What caused the equipment to behave in unexpected ways?

When there is no alternative explanation, the supernatural story may remain the most vivid and complete account, even for someone who has good reason to doubt the original evidence.

Debunking the recording and correcting the story attached to it are not always the same thing.

What the Study Cannot Tell Us

There are important limits to how far these findings can be applied beyond the experiment itself. The study did not examine paranormal material, so applying its findings to ghost videos requires some careful inference.

In this study, participants were warned before seeing the video. This was not a case where people first accepted a recording as real and were only later shown a debunk. So the results do not directly show whether a correction given after exposure would fail to undo a deepfake’s influence.

The warning also told participants the video was “likely” to be false, rather than stating with certainty that it was fabricated.

There was also no comparison with an authentic video. The control group saw no accusation at all, so the study shows that the synthetic accusation influenced judgement even with a warning. It does not show that deepfakes are more persuasive than traditional misleading or misinterpreted videos or written misinformation.

Finally, the researchers changed the credibility of the person shown in the deepfake. In a paranormal case, the relevant source might be the investigator, uploader, editor, or commentator who tells viewers what the recording is supposed to show. Their expertise may be the thing a viewer already accepts or rejects.

Beyond Spotting the Fake

I have previously argued that the arrival of generative AI did not suddenly make photographic and video evidence unreliable. We should never have depended so heavily upon recordings as self-authenticating proof in the first place.

This research adds another layer to that idea, inviting us to look a little deeper.

The challenge is no longer just figuring out whether an image, voice, or video is genuine. We also need to consider how seeing it might shape the way we interpret everything that follows.

Effective sceptical communication may require more than simply labelling a recording as “fake.” Where possible, it should explain how the misleading claim was created, offer a plausible alternative account supported by evidence, and avoid repeatedly showing dramatic misinformation simply to condemn it.

There is a real risk of assuming that detecting AI-generated paranormal material is enough to neutralise its influence. This research suggests that identifying the fabrication may be only the first part of the task. Sceptical investigators must also consider the interpretation introduced by the recording, the unanswered questions it leaves behind, and what evidence would support a better account.

AI makes it easier than ever to create the ghost in the video. Psychology may help us understand why identifying the fabrication does not necessarily remove that ghost from our judgement.

The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.

Not just through a photo, an old voicemail or a letter tucked away, but through something that replies. You send a message, and it answers in a way that feels familiar. Maybe it uses a nickname you know or asks a question that person would have asked. For a moment, it almost feels like hearing them again.

It is not hard to see why someone might want that.

Grief often leaves us with unfinished conversations. We think about things we wish we had said. We wonder what the person would think of our new job, our kids, moving house, a decision we’ve made, or the challenges we’re facing now. Sometimes we know what they would say. Sometimes we just want to hear it anyway.

A recent study titled ‘Designing Conversations with the Dead: How People Engage with Generative Ghosts’ looked at what happened when 16 people talked to AI-modelled versions of loved ones who had died. The researchers developed two kinds of chatbots, including one that talked about the deceased in third person, and another that spoke as if it were the person themselves.

Some participants found the experience comforting; some felt close to the person again. One described receiving a form of closure.

These reactions are striking and are likely to be the part of the study that draws the most attention.

But the research doesn’t show that AI helps people grieve in a general or clinical way. Sixteen volunteers is a small sample, and everyone had already agreed to try talking to an AI version of someone they lost. People who found the idea upsetting or unacceptable weren’t included.

The research used brief, closely supervised conversations between participants and the chatbot. There was a facilitator, too: a researcher who reviewed and sometimes edited the chatbot’s replies before sharing them with the participant. This wasn’t someone alone at home, using an unfiltered bot during the hardest part of their grief, which is how such products are likely to be used in the wild.

Still, the study gives us something to think about. It shows how quickly a program built from just a few memories can start to seem like more than a memorial.

It can start to feel like you’re really talking to the dead.

Why would anyone want this?

People often talk about griefbots as if those who use them don’t really understand what they’re doing.

That doesn’t seem fair.

Many of us keep relationships with people who have died. We talk to them in our minds, visit graves and share our news. We keep their things, cook their recipes (or try to…), and imagine the advice they’d give. Someone can know their mother is gone and still think, “Mum would have loved this.”

Grief doesn’t end the relationship; it just changes how it continues.

In my last article about digital ghosts, I compared griefbots to rituals like wind phones and letters sent to the dead. These practices give people a way to express thoughts that still need to be said. They let the bereaved speak without pretending to get a reply.

AI shifts that arrangement.

The machine answers back.

That doesn’t make someone foolish for finding comfort in the answer. When we’re grieving, comfort doesn’t always depend on believing something is literally true. Someone might feel better after writing a letter they know won’t be read. They might dream about someone who has died and wake up feeling like they spent time together.

The emotional experience is real, even if we know the encounter is imagined, symbolic, or artificial.

What is different is that the machine begins doing some of the imagining for us. The grieving person is no longer only remembering what their loved one said, but the software is producing new sentences they never spoke, or maybe never would have.

In my previous article, I outlined why I find that incredibly chilling and, after writing that piece, I deleted my deceased mother’s old social media accounts. We had memorialised her Facebook account, and I realised that I don’t know if she’d have wanted that. The idea of somebody using it and it feeding to a griefbot made me feel sick to my stomach.

When ‘that sounds like them’ starts to feel like enough

One of the most revealing parts of the study was that accuracy did not always seem to be the most important thing.

Participants generally cared more about whether the chatbot felt emotionally right.

A particular term of affection could make a response feel authentic, whereas an unusually formal sentence could ruin the effect. Some replies apparently felt wrong because they were too long or too polished compared with the short messages the deceased person would once have sent.

This makes sense. People are not databases. Our sense of somebody is held through rhythms, habits, jokes, repeated phrases and tiny social cues. A chatbot does not need a complete record of a life to produce something recognisable. It may only need enough detail to imitate the shape of the relationship.

That is also where things start to become uncomfortable.

A reply can feel like Dad without containing anything Dad ever thought.

It can sound caring without caring. It can provide reassurance without knowing whether reassurance is appropriate. It can produce an apology, forgiveness or final message simply because those are the kinds of responses language models have learned to generate.

The machine has no private access to the person who died. It is not retrieving a buried truth about them. It is predicting what a suitable answer might look like from the information it has been given.

Yet emotional recognition is a powerful thing. It means that when a sentence lands correctly, it can feel discovered and deeply meaningful rather than simply generated.

We are all familiar with the strange jolt that accompanies hearing someone reproduce a dead relative’s mannerism or expression, or seeing a young relative who has grown up to look like them. For a moment, something of the person seems to return.

AI can manufacture that jolt repeatedly and on demand.

The risk is not always that someone will believe the dead person has literally returned but that the difference stops feeling important.

The ghost is partly made by the grieving person

In the study, participants sometimes treated the more distant chatbot as though it were the deceased person anyway.

Even when the system spoke about Gran in the third person, users addressed it as Gran. They asked direct questions and pulled the exchange towards a conversation with the dead, even though the researchers had designed that version to behave more like a memorial guide.

That tells us something important about how these encounters work.

The machine generates the words, but the grieving person helps turn them into something meaningful.

The user supplies memories and context, recognises certain details and ignores others. They explain away small mistakes and might ask questions that guide the conversation into emotionally meaningful territory. When something feels right, they give it weight.

This doesn’t mean they are deliberately deceiving themselves, but that meaning is being built between the person and the system.

From a skeptical point of view, that process is extremely familiar, right?

A reading delivered by a psychic medium is rarely just a stream of precise information delivered to a silent sitter. The sitter responds. They confirm, reject, reinterpret, and search their memories. A vague statement may become specific once it’s linked to a person or event.

A mistake during a psychic reading can be repaired during the conversation. The statement may be linked to another relative, treated as symbolic rather than literal, or reinterpreted in light of information supplied by the sitter. The final sense of accuracy is often produced through the whole conversation, not contained in the original words alone.

Something similar can happen with an AI ghost.

The model generates a plausible statement. The grieving person supplies the significance.

This doesn’t make the resulting emotion any less real, but it does mean we need to be thoughtful about where we believe the meaning comes from.

A digital medium without supernatural claims

A griefbot is not a spirit medium in the traditional sense. It doesn’t claim to contact an afterlife, and most users will understand that the reply is being generated by software.

But it can still perform some of the same human role; it gives the dead a voice.

The griefbot answers questions that can no longer be answered by the deceased. It creates the feeling of an ongoing exchange, and offers words that can be understood as approval, forgiveness, comfort, or even advice.

In some ways, this could make the technology more persuasive than conventional mediumship. The output is personalised using genuine information about the person who died. The creators may train the AI on real messages, recordings, or videos, so it can reproduce familiar language rather than offering general statements from a stranger in a séance room.

There is no need to believe in spirits. The system only needs to sound right often enough.

For skeptics, this creates an awkward but important challenge. It is not enough to say, “The chatbot is not really your loved one.”

Most users already know that.

The better questions are about what the interaction encourages people to do with that knowledge.

Can someone knowingly enter the illusion, take comfort from it, and then leave without harm? Probably, in some cases.

Could repeated use begin to alter their memories of the person? Possibly.

What happens when the bot gives advice the deceased person would never have given? What happens when it invents a confession, an apology, or an opinion about a living relative? Who is responsible when a generated answer becomes emotionally important?

And what happens when the system is owned by a company whose interests go beyond helping someone through their grief?

A memorial photograph does not send notifications encouraging you to sustain the relationship. A grave does not offer a paid subscription tier (though give it time…). A saved voicemail does not learn which responses keep you engaged for longer.

Once grief becomes a product, the experience designed to comfort and the experience designed to profit may start to look uncomfortably similar.

What are we actually creating?

Some users could treat an AI memorial as a structured way to revisit memories, much as they might use a journal or speak to an empty chair during therapy. Others may find it intrusive, upsetting, or fundamentally wrong. Neither response is irrational.

The problem begins when a moving or comforting experience is presented as evidence that the technology is helpful for grief, or when comfort is mistaken for accuracy. A chatbot can produce a phrase that feels exactly like something your mother would say, but that does not mean it came from your mother, reflects her wishes, or carries her authority.

Instead, the system created a convincing answer, and you recognised something meaningful in it.

That recognition may be touching and helpful in the moment, but it can also make us less likely to notice how much of the encounter we are constructing ourselves. The same thing can happen during a reading with a psychic medium, where meaning is often built between the statements offered and the sitter’s own memories and interpretations.

None of this makes the study worthless. In fact, the researchers deserve credit for looking at how people actually respond to these systems instead of treating the subject as a distant thought experiment.

The participants’ reactions should also not be dismissed too quickly. Some of them clearly found the conversations moving, and it would be arrogant to tell them that their comfort was meaningless simply because it came from software.

But the study does not establish that griefbots are beneficial treatments. It doesn’t tell us what happens after months or years of use, or how someone in acute grief might respond, or what could happen without a researcher quietly filtering the machine’s mistakes.

It shows that, under controlled conditions, a small group of willing participants could find a brief conversation with an AI recreation emotionally powerful.

That alone deserves our attention.

Not because the technology has solved grief, or brought anybody back, but because it has shown how little is needed to create the feeling of return.

A few memories, a recognisable phrase, and a system capable of predicting the next likely sentence.

And, on the other side of the screen, somebody who dearly misses them.

The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.

People around the world were then invited to describe this hidden information using remote viewing.

This is the premise of a recently published paper titled Psychic Hacking: Using Remote Viewing to Steal Computer Data. The experiment involved 146 participants, who produced 584 free-response attempts. The paper reports statistically significant results for photographs, videos, and some parts of the PIN test. It argues that remote viewers may be able to access information stored on computers, even when those computers are protected from ordinary forms of access.

It’s an attention-grabbing idea, right? It sounds like an old Cold War remote-viewing experiment rebuilt for the age of cyberattacks.

However, for this to qualify as some sort of computer security issue or hacking, there is one big question that has to be considered: Did anyone actually steal information from a computer? I don’t think the answer is yes.

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Was it really hacking?

The computers were disconnected from networks, and new targets were selected and displayed using automated processes. Neither the participants nor the researcher knew which targets had been chosen at the time the remote-viewing attempts were made.

These measures were intended to prevent information leaking through normal means, and that’s good experiment design. It would be unfair to dismiss the research as nothing more than people guessing a picture while somebody nearby already knew the answer. The problem is that preventing ordinary access to the computer is only one part of the test.

No participant opened a file, broke a password, or gained control of the machine. Instead, they wrote down words, ideas, sensations, and drawings. Human judges later compared those impressions with several possible targets.

This is much closer to a traditional free-response remote-viewing experiment than a cybersecurity test.

The word “hacking” creates an impression of successful access. In computer security, however, a stolen PIN normally means that somebody has recovered the correct digits in the correct, usable order. A stolen password must be accurate enough to work.

A vague impression that contains some related ideas is not normally enough to compromise a system. As such, this is still recognisably a remote-viewing experiment, and calling it “data theft” gives the claim a modern cybersecurity edge, but it does not make the information any more exact or usable.

How the judging worked

The participants did not have to name the exact photograph hidden inside the computer. Instead, they produced free-form impressions.

Three judges were then shown each submission alongside five possible targets: the real target and four decoys. They ranked these choices according to how closely they thought each one matched the participant’s description.

Some kind of judging system is unavoidable here. If participants are producing sketches, sensations, and loose descriptions, the researchers need a way to compare them with the target. However, the difficulty that stands out to me most is that the decoys were deliberately chosen to be unlike the real image which carries some issues.

The paper explains that if the real target showed a horse, for example, the four alternatives would be selected from categories other than animals. The judges might therefore be choosing between a horse, a building, a person, an abstract image, and a landscape rather than between five reasonably similar animal photographs.

This could make broad descriptions look more impressive than they really are. For example, imagine that a participant writes: Outdoors. A large shape. Something natural. Possibly brown.

Those impressions might lead a judge towards a horse if the alternatives were a cathedral, a colourful abstract pattern, a human face, and a kitchen appliance. The same description would be much less useful and harder to count as a success if all images showed large animals outdoors which were brown.

A test is more convincing when the correct answer must be separated from realistic alternatives. Ultimately, the question is not only whether a description can be made to fit the real target but whether it fits that target clearly better than it fits other plausible targets.

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But the results were better than chance, right?

This is where the results begin to look rather different than the bold headline claims. Across the complete first round of judging, the judges placed the correct target first 18.43 per cent of the time.

Because there were five possible targets, chance performance would be 20 per cent, so the overall first-choice result was slightly worse than chance! To be fair, the paper reports this openly and argues that its main statistical method also considered the full ranking of all five images, rather than looking only at which image was placed first.

However, then came a second judgement stage which produced rather more dramatic results. Picture, video, and passphrase submissions only moved into this stage if at least two of the three judges had already placed the real target first. PIN attempts advanced if they contained at least two correct digits.

This left 92 selected submissions from 548; 23 involved pictures, 18 involved videos, 32 involved PINs, and 19 involved passphrases. A referee then examined those 92 submissions in more detail, awarding points for both concrete and abstract matches.

This bothers me a lot.

The paper refers to this move from first to second stage judging as a “winnowing process” which intended to identify participants showing promise. While this can be perfectly legitimate as a screening exercise where you use one experiment to find unusually successful remote viewers and then invite them back for an entirely new experiment, that is not what happened here.

The second phase returned to the same submissions and the same targets, with a referee awarding points for concrete and abstract similarities. It therefore was not an independent test of whether the promising participants could do it again, it just used the best results from the first stage of judging and discarded the rest.

Remember, across the complete first judging stage, the correct target was ranked first only 18.43% of the time, compared with the 20% expected by chance. Yet after the successful-looking submissions were filtered out, the paper reports highly significant results for the selected picture group.

This second stage of judging feels uncomfortably close to cherry-picking data to create better looking results. That is not necessarily deliberate manipulation, but it is difficult to separate from cherry-picking. That second stage should have involved new targets and new attempts or should not have existed at all.

When an answer can match more than one target

The hidden video creates another difficulty.

Participants were told to describe the photograph, PIN, and passphrase, but they were not told about the silent video. Their picture descriptions were later compared with still images taken from those videos.

Although I can see why this possibility interests the researchers, it also creates a serious testing problem: how far away from the actual target can a description wander before it stops counting as a hit?

One set of impressions could potentially be considered against both the known photograph and an unknown video target.

For example, one video target was a scene from The Shining. A participant reported ideas including blood and a heartbeat. Neither appeared in the short clip used in the experiment, but both were connected with other parts of the film. Another participant mentioned a mother on holiday in a mountain location. Again, this described the wider story of The Shining, but not what appeared in the actual target clip.

The paper suggests that the remote viewers may have followed connections leading away from the target and into the wider film. Perhaps… but there is another, more ordinary possibility. The definition of a match may simply have expanded after the answers were known.

Once judges can count details from the target, the wider film, nearby material, symbolic ideas, and related concepts, it becomes increasingly difficult for an impression to count as a clear failure.

It would be a mistake to assume this immediately means something dishonest or underhand is going on. People are extremely good at finding connections, particularly once they know what answer they are looking for. A vague comment can suddenly appear specific when placed beside the right image or story.

The more flexible the conditions for a match to count become, the easier it is for ordinary coincidence and interpretation to resemble extraordinary perception, and this is something which becomes clearer when we move from pictures to PINs.

The paper reports significant results when participants guessed two or three digits that appeared somewhere in the correct PIN, even when those digits were not in the correct order. There was one attempt containing three digits in their precise positions, but the paper treats this isolated result as anecdotal rather than proof of a reliable effect.

There’s a big difference between finding partial patterns and stealing usable data. As I’m sure you’ve already spotted, knowing that a four-digit PIN may contain three particular numbers may reduce the number of guesses somebody needs to make, but it is not the same as retrieving the PIN, and it still involves more guesses than an ATM would allow. Significantly more, in fact (as anyone else who has forgotten a PIN will be know).

A convincing “psychic hacking” experiment should define success before data is collected, just as any experiment should. For a PIN, that might mean recovering all four digits in the correct order. For a passphrase, it might mean producing the exact phrase or meeting another strict, predetermined standard.

The result should also be repeatable. One striking guess among hundreds of attempts does not show psychics can reliably threaten computer security.

What would a stronger test look like?

A more convincing follow-up would need a clearly registered method and one main measure of success. Every attempt should be included in the final analysis with picture decoys similar enough to test real discrimination, and the rules for deciding what counts as a match should be fixed in advance.

PINs and passwords should be judged by exact accuracy rather than general resemblance. The anonymised responses, targets, rankings, and analysis should also be made available so independent researchers can check the results.

Ideally, the experiment would be designed jointly by remote-viewing researchers, sceptics, statisticians, and computer-security specialists. That would not guarantee a negative result but it would make either result easier to trust.

The study may provide ideas worth testing again but it does not yet show that psychics can reliably steal protected computer data or that cybersecurity professionals need to defend machines against remote viewers.

Before worrying that psychics can breach an air-gapped laptop, we should first focus on making sure ambiguous guesses cannot breach the safeguards of the experiment itself.

It has been a little while since I last opened the Friday Files, but the ghosts have not spent that time quietly waiting in the corridor. Researchers have been vibrating rooms with sound nobody can hear, psychologists have been asking what turns a strange sensation into a ghost, and Cambridge University Library has been quietly looking after samples of alleged ectoplasm.

So, you know. Business as usual.

This edition leans especially nerdy, with several new studies and a long read about the place of parapsychology in academia. As ever, inclusion here is not necessarily endorsement. These are things I found interesting, thought-provoking, or simply too perfectly ghost-shaped to leave sitting in an open browser tab.

The sound you cannot hear but might still feel

Infrasound has been hanging around paranormal investigation for a long time. These are sound waves below the usual lower limit of human hearing, which can be produced by everything from industrial machinery and traffic to ventilation systems, elevators, and old pipes. Because allegedly haunted buildings are often old buildings, you can probably see where this is going.

The suggestion is that although we cannot consciously hear infrasound, our bodies may still respond to it and this could contribute to the unease, agitation, or sense that something is “off” which people sometimes report in haunted locations.

Over time, infrasound has been reached for as a scientific sounding explanation for why people experience ghosts, even though the evidential foundation for this is insubstantial and does not necessarily support such claims.

A new study published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience offers some intriguing evidence for this idea. Researchers recruited 36 participants and asked them to sit alone listening to either calming or unsettling music. Half were also exposed to hidden infrasound at around 18 Hz. Saliva samples were taken before and after to measure cortisol, and participants were asked about their mood and whether they thought infrasound had been present.

Results show that the participants could not detect the infrasound more accurately than chance. Even so, those exposed to it showed higher salivary cortisol and reported more irritation and less interest. They also judged the music to be sadder. What participants believed about whether the infrasound was playing did not appear to account for those effects.

That is fascinating, but it is important not to sprint several miles ahead of the evidence. This was a small laboratory study which did not take place in haunted buildings, measure ghostly experiences, or demonstrate that infrasound “causes” hauntings. It suggests that an imperceptible feature of an environment can create measurable physical and emotional effects for some.

The ghostly part may come afterwards, when an eye-witness tries to explain or make sense of why a perfectly ordinary basement has suddenly made every nerve in our body vote to leave. Or why a certain skeptic fled a room in a historic house because it felt wrong.

👉 There is an accessible summary of the research from Frontiers.

Canada’s paranormal fence-sitters

Canada has become increasingly secular, but apparently nobody told its ghosts.

A research note published in the Canadian Review of Sociology reports the first nationally representative examination of paranormal belief in Canada for more than two decades. That nationally representative part matters because surveys about paranormal belief are often conducted through opt-in polls, newspaper readerships, or other convenience samples which tell us plenty about the people who answered, but much less about the wider population.

Researchers Tony Silva and Emily Huddart found that 44.8% of Canadians believed in at least one of the paranormal phenomena included in the survey. A further 31.3% did not positively endorse any of them but selected a neutral response for at least one.

In other words, the paranormal landscape is not neatly divided between committed believers and hard-liner skeptics. There is an enormous group standing somewhere in the middle saying, “Well, I just don’t know.”

Honestly, I think the fence-sitters are among the most interesting people in belief research. A neutral answer can hide all sorts of positions: genuine uncertainty, openness without conviction, a feeling that science might explain something one day, or simply reluctance to make a definite claim. Treating all those people as secret believers or non-believers would flatten a genuinely complicated picture.

Here are my key takeaways from the study:

• Ghostly hauntings were the most widely endorsed phenomenon,

• Women were more likely than men to believe in ghosts and psychic abilities,

• People with a university degree were less likely to endorse paranormal claims.

• 19–29-year-olds were less likely to believe in several phenomena than people aged 30–64,

  • this runs contrary to the worry that the young adults are gullible because of social media content. (Kids these days etc. etc.)

The findings cannot tell us why each person believes what they do, and demographic patterns never explain an individual. What the study does offer is a much better snapshot than the usual Halloween headline poll.

👉 The full paper is available to read online, complete with useful charts for anyone who also enjoys their ghosts in graph form.

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The ectoplasm in a Cambridge archive

Cambridge University Library contains priceless medieval manuscripts, historic philosophical texts, and some samples of alleged ectoplasm.

I appreciate an archive with range. Even if it’s yucky.

In a new long read for New Lines Magazine, Lydia Wilson explores the university’s collection of material from the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and asks whether parapsychology might be moving back towards academic respectability.

The SPR was founded in 1882 to investigate experiences and abilities described as psychical or paranormal. Its members and associates have included scientists, philosophers, classicists, politicians, and several people whose names will be familiar to ghost nerds (Mary Rose Barrington, Maurice Grosse, Tony Cornell, to name just a few). The surviving archive is valuable regardless of what anybody concludes about telepathy, mediumship, or survival after death. It documents attempts to apply organised investigation to extraordinary claims, as well as the enormous cultural reach of spiritualism and psychical research.

Wilson writes about séance records, alleged ectoplasm, and boards bearing messages supposedly produced through spirit communication. She also looks at the Perrott-Warrick Studentship, which funds psychical research, and the more recently established Ingo Swann Research Fellowship.

There is plenty here to delight anyone who enjoys the point where ghosts, archives, and institutional history collide. It also raises a question which deserves careful handling: what does it mean for parapsychology to be taken seriously by a university?

I’ve seen some negative reactions to this from the more skeptically inclined, but housing an archive means recognising that the material has historical and research value. Funding scholarly study means deciding that the questions, methods, or cultural history merit examination. Neither is the same as a university announcing that psychic abilities have been proven. Academic legitimacy can describe the legitimacy of studying a subject, not necessarily the truth of every claim made within it.

That distinction becomes slightly hazy in places in Wilson’s article, but perhaps that is part of what makes it worth reading. The history of psychical research has always lived in the uncomfortable space between open-minded enquiry and the risk of mistaking attention for validation.

Also: ectoplasm. In Cambridge. I was never going to leave this one out.

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Psychology is getting spooky in Salem

If you happen to research the psychology of ghosts, witchcraft, superstition or the macabre, there is currently a conference call with your name written on it in slightly ominous handwriting.

The New England Psychological Association is inviting submissions for special themed sessions on the Psychology of Horror, Witchcraft and the Paranormal at its 2026 annual conference. The conference will be held in Salem, Massachusetts, because occasionally the universe understands the assignment. 🐈‍⬛

The suggested subjects are impressively broad. They include cognitive and perceptual factors involved in paranormal beliefs and experiences; the social psychology of witch trials, moral panics and mass hysteria; folklore and collective memory; superstition; monsters; occult belief; and the psychology of fear and horror. The organisers are inviting empirical research, theoretical work, posters and interdisciplinary approaches.

This may be a relatively small notice rather than a major new study, but I find it encouraging. Paranormal belief and experience can provide psychologists with a way to examine perception, memory, reasoning, social influence, identity and culture. Those are not fringe aspects of human behaviour just because the experiences being interpreted sometimes involve a ghost.

There is a tendency to assume that psychologists study paranormal belief in order to compile a list of things wrong with believers. Good anomalistic psychology is much more interesting than that. It asks how human beings make sense of ambiguous events, why some explanations feel intuitively right, how expectations influence perception, and how unusual experiences fit into otherwise ordinary lives.

It can also turn the lens onto skepticism. Confidence, motivated reasoning and selective attention are not qualities bestowed exclusively upon people we disagree with. Any psychology of belief worth having should be capable of examining everybody in the room.

Submissions for symposia, papers, and presentations are open until 1 August, with posters accepted until 1 September. I look forward to the possibility of research on ghosts being delivered in Salem with a completely straight academic face - as it should be.

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When paranormal research gets weird-weird

The paper “Trickster-Like Experiences While Documenting the Paranormal” began with a citation that apparently appeared in an academic paper without any of its authors knowing where it came from. The reference could not be traced and did not support the claim attached to it. Rather than treating this solely as an ordinary citation error, the incident inspired a wider study of strange disruptions reported by people writing about paranormal subjects.

Researchers surveyed 167 people, including paranormal investigators and credentialed researchers. They asked whether participants had experienced things like themed dreams, meaningful coincidences, missing material, distorted recordings, device malfunctions or strong emotional reactions while working on ghosts, hauntings and poltergeists.

Sixty-one per cent reported at least one of the listed experiences. The most common included themed dreams, coincidences involving noises or spontaneously playing media, and a strong attraction or aversion to the material.

Now, there are obvious psychological reasons why this probably happens. Spending hours immersed in a subject makes related dreams and coincidences more noticeable. Technology fails, files disappear, and memory confidently fills gaps. An unexplained error feels far more significant when it occurs in a paper about supposedly mischievous paranormal phenomena than in this month’s budget spreadsheet.

To their credit, the authors state that there is no independent evidence that the mysterious citation was anything more than an untraced human mistake. They discuss source-monitoring errors, priming, expectation, and selective attention alongside more parapsychological possibilities.

However, there is also a conspicuously modern possibility which the paper does not appear to eliminate: that an AI-assisted writing or research tool generated a plausible-looking but nonexistent reference, which was then incorporated without adequate checking. We shouldn’t just assume that happened, but invented citations are a well-documented feature of generative AI. Before treating the reference as a particularly trickster-like mystery, I’d want a look at the paper’s drafting history and whether any AI tools were used by any of its authors.

The paper is a fascinating example of paranormal research turning its attention upon itself. It captures how easily the subject of an investigation can become the lens through which investigators interpret everything happening around them.

I’ve experienced this a lot myself but, as someone who champions using scientific skepticism as an investigative tool and methodology, I always take a moment to acknowledge why I’m getting spooked while doing spooky stuff.

Sometimes the ghost gets into the machine. Sometimes Microsoft Word is just haunted by Microsoft Word (or Copilot 😉).

That’s all from today’s Friday Files. As ever, if something strange crosses your screen, who you gonna call? Well, not me, you’re not getting my number, but feel free to send an email to hayley[at]theghostgeek.com, send a message on BlueSky, or click the button ^👇

This is great news, but does not erase the fact that, on 13 July 1955, Ruth Ellis became the last woman to be hanged in Britain after she was convicted of murdering David Blakely. However, the pardon does formally recognise that her case was not simple, and that the circumstances around it were not properly understood at the time.

The Ministry of Justice has said the pardon reflects the exceptional circumstances of the case, including evidence of domestic abuse and coercive and controlling behaviour that Ellis endured. Under modern law and modern understanding, the outcome of her case may have been different. Ruth’s granddaughter, Laura Enston, said the pardon formally recognises that Ruth should not have been executed, and that the justice system failed her.

This is important because Ruth Ellis has often been treated less like a person and more like a symbol.

She has been made into this sort of character of the blonde nightclub hostess who was the “last woman hanged”. Ellis has been the murderess, and the woman at the centre of a scandalous mid-century crime story who shot her lover in the street. Her story has been turned into films, documentaries, newspaper columns, and public debate.

And, because British paranormal television has never met a dead woman it could not turn into content, she has also been made into a ghost story.

In 2003, Most Haunted visited Caesar’s Nightclub in Streatham. Ruth Ellis had worked at the club in the 1950s, before her trial and execution, and the episode leaned into the idea that her ghost might still be present there.

During the programme, Derek Acorah, then the show’s resident medium, claimed to make contact with the spirit of a young woman whom he went on to identify as Ruth Ellis.

In the episode, Acorah claimed that Ellis said “they got it wrong” and he claimed she showed him a gun, fired three times, and said that it was not four shots but three.

“I would know,” she supposedly said. “I did it.”

Acorah also claimed that Ruth Ellis and David Blakely had reconciled in the afterlife and were now together again.

That last claim is the reason I am writing this, because there is something deeply wrong with taking the story of a woman who was abused, traumatised, convicted, and executed, and claiming that she has returned from the dead to make the story more comfortable for television.

There’s something grotesque about suggesting that Ruth Ellis and David Blakely are “back together” in the afterlife, as though death has tidied up the violence and made the story neater and more romantic. As though the dead woman can now be made to say what makes the audience feel better.

This is not just a silly ghost claim. It’s a claim about a real dead woman who was an abuse victim, and whose life, death, and memory have already been handled badly enough.

Ruth Ellis did not need Derek Acorah to speak for her, but he went ahead and did it anyway - another form of control from a man. As though death isn’t enough to spare you.

That’s the problem with this kind of mediumship. It gives the medium enormous power by standing in front of a camera, or on a stage, and claiming that a dead person has said something.

In the case of Ruth Ellis, Acorah’s claim does something particularly unpleasant by giving the audience a sentimental ending when the real story is hard.

It’s about domestic abuse, coercive control, trauma, misogyny, and a woman executed. It is a story about a legal system that did not properly account for the conditions in which some women commit violence because of what they’ve had to endure. It is about children and grandchildren carrying the consequences of state violence across generations.

The ghost story version is easier.

In that version, Ruth is still around and can correct the record about the number of shots, and reassure everyone that she and her abuser have made up and are back together again. She can even compliment Derek Acorah’s suit.

And really, pause on that for just a second.

A dead abused woman, executed by the state, supposedly coming through from beyond the grave to compliment Derek Acorah’s outfit.

There are many ways to describe that and “spiritual insight” isn’t one of them.

Derek Acorah turned the brutal history of Ruth Ellis into spooky entertainment, which is why the recent conditional pardon matters. However, he was not standing there by accident. He was hired to be part of the Most Haunted show - a production created by Yvette Fielding and Karl Beattie, who founded Antix Productions together and sold the show internationally.

Fielding presented the program while Beattie produced and directed it.

The show’s success rested on a carefully constructed blue between investigation and entertainment, and it’s a blur that really matters.

Ofcom considered complaints about Most Haunted and Most Haunted Live in 2005 after viewers raised concerns that some elements had been staged in advance. While Ofcom did not rule that paranormal activity was real or fake, they did conclude that Most Haunted should be understood as entertainment rather than as a legitimate form of investigation. They noted the showmanship, dramatic responses, studio elements, phone-ins, and the regularity (and convenience) with which paranormal events appeared to occur.

Ofcom also said the programme should be seen in the light of shows where techniques are used that mean the audience is not necessarily in full possession of the facts. It found the programmes were not in breach of the Code, but it also said they could not reasonably be described as a legitimate investigation.

That should be embarrassing. Instead, it became part of the strange protection that paranormal television often enjoys. When challenged, it’s entertainment. When prompted, it’s investigation wink wink.

When the medium speaks, the dead are apparently talking, but when questioned, it’s only a show. Convenient, right?

It allowed Most Haunted to use real places, histories, crimes, grief, injustices, and dead people, while being able to retreat into the language of entertainment when the ethics became uncomfortable.

And Ruth Ellis is not a fictional character, or even a spooky archetype created for a halloween special. She was a real women whose story involved abuse, violence and an execution that her family have spent decades challenging.

Derek Acorah turned her into content, and Most Haunted gave him the stage, camera, careful editing, and the audience. Take a bow, Antix productions.

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Acorah was also not the only credibility problem the show faced.

In 2005, Most Haunted parapsychologist Ciarán O’Keeffe accused Acorah of fakery. O’Keeffe claimed he had fed Acorah false information about invented spirits, including one named Kreed Kafer - which is an anagram of “Derek Faker”. Acorah then allegedly channeled messages from this spirit as though they were real. The Guardian reported Yvette Fielding as saying: “We tell people everything is real, then it turns out he was a fake, so he had to go.”

That quote is astonishing, really.

“We tell people everything is real.”

That is the problem in one sentence, isn’t it?

When a show tells people everything is real, it cannot then act as though it has no responsibility for the claims made under its banner. It cannot use the authority of investigation and then hide behind the defense of entertainment. It is not acceptable to invite your audience to treat mediumship as meaningful and then shrug when that mediumship turns cruel and tasteless.

The conditional pardon pulls Ruth Ellis back out of the flattened version of the story spun by people Fielding, Beattie, Acorah and co, and tells us to look again. Look closer, slowly, and ask what was missed, and what we might have accepted as fact which was not fact at all. It makes us pause and ask what the law failed to understand and what it means that this woman was executed.

The Most Haunted version of the case does the opposite. It does not ask us to sit with the discomfort or to think seriously about abuse, punishment, gender, or justice. It turns her into content.

And the worse thing about it? It wasn’t an isolated problem with Derek Acorah.

In 2012, he was forced to apologise to the family of Madeleine McCann after claiming he had received a psychic message saying she was dead. Madeleine was, and remains, a missing child. Her family are still alive, grieving, and living with the horror of not knowing. Yet Acorah inserted himself into that story too.

This is the pattern we come to recognise with psychic mediums. The claims they make often give them starring role in somebody else’s pain that they are not entitled to.

I have witnessed this myself.

I once attended one of Acorah’s live shows and watched him misgender a dead baby to the baby’s mother’s face. He had guessed wrong in a 50/50 chance. But the setting did not allow for that moment to be treated with the seriousness it deserved. The show had to go on - the medium had to remain the medium, and the grieving had to absorb the mistake.

I remember the disgust of the people sitting around me. Acorah had gone too far, and the room knew it.

That is what makes this kind of performance so troubling becasue when a medium gets something wrong, it is not just a failed trick. It’s a wound. And when a medium makes a grand claim about a dead person, especially a dead person whose story involved violence or injustice, the consequences are not neutral.

The claim about Ruth Ellis and David Blakely being reconciled in the afterlife is not harmless. It repeats a familiar cultural move which smooths over male violence, and asks us to imagine that the woman has forgiven her abuser.

It gives closure to people who were not entitled to receive it.

That is not spiritual insight. It is narrative theft, and it’s disgusting.

It can be tempting to focus on the question of whether psychic mediums are genuine or not - as much as this question matters, more pressing one asks who benefits from the story a medium tells?

In the case of Ruth Ellis, the answer is not Ruth Ellis. It is not her family, the other women whose lives have been shaped by domestic abuse, or the public understanding of a troubling history.

The benefit was to the programme, the atmosphere, and to the dramatic arc of an episode of paranormal television.

The recent pardon asks us to look at Ruth Ellis with more care and to understand that what happened in 1955 cannot be separated from the abuse and trauma that shaped her life and the lives of her children and grandchildren. It asks us to recognise that the law failed to see her fully.

Most Haunted did not see her fully either. It saw a famous dead woman and a chance for a dramatic revelation. It saw a ghost story and the chance for a dramatic revelation.

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This matters not because Most Haunted was uniquely terrible, or because one old episode of paranormal television is the most urgent injustice connected to Ruth Ellis. It obviously is not. However, it matters because it shows how easily the paranormal entertainment industry can exploit the dead while pretending to honour them.

“I am only passing on a message” is a powerful shield which lets the medium avoid responsibility for the content of the message. It lets the performer say something tasteless, cruel, or absurd, and then act as though the dead person said it first.

But Ruth Ellis did not say this - Derek Acorah did, and Most Haunted broadcast it. We need to be clear about that because it’s a distinction that matters.

Acorah is dead now, so this is not about demanding an apology from him or pretending that one man invented every bad habit in paranormal television. He did not - the problem is bigger than him, but he was very good at embodying the problem. He made claims with confidence and used grief as a stage. He treated the dead as available and was willing to step into other people’s tragedies and announce what only he could supposedly hear.

And Antix Productions helped make this performance famous.

That should be remembered alongside the entertainment value, the catchphrases, the night-vision chaos, and the nostalgia people still have for Most Haunted.

We can enjoy ghost stories and study paranormal culture. We can understand why programmes like Most Haunted became so popular, but we should not forget that “spooky” does not cancel out ethics.

When the subject is somebody like Ruth Ellis, that really fucking matters.

Ruth Ellis was a real person. She was a mother who was abused and controlled, and when she killed her abuser, she was convicted and sentenced to death. She was executed.

She was executed unjustly.

Her family carried the consequences. Her grandchildren did an incredible job of fighting for justice and seventy years later, the state has finally recognised that the case- and Ruth -deserved more mercy than was received.

The least paranormal television could have done was not put words in her mouth.

Derek Acorah did not speak for Ruth Ellis.

He spoke over her.

And Most Haunted let him.

As someone who has used the term ‘skeptic’ to describe myself often, who has attended the conferences, hosted skeptic podcasts, written for skeptic publications, and identified as part of the grassroots skeptic movement, I get why using this as an identity is tempting. Especially if you’ve arrived at skepticism after losing previously held irrational beliefs.

The aim of the piece published here just a few days ago was to highlight why wrapping ourselves up too much in a skeptic identity carries risks, and why those risks lead to a pattern of prominent skeptics failing in predictable ways time and time again. My aim was also to explore and discuss how the wider skeptic community reacts to these instances as though they are mind blowing surprises when they’re literally anything but.

Skepticism is not the sum of all of those identity markers I listed before - it is something you do. While doing it you can of course identify as a skeptic, but not because you’ve reached some elevated, clever status. You should identify as a skeptic because you’re doing the work.

Evan Bernstein’s harmful rhetoric was described by his co-hosts as a ‘stumble’ on his skeptical journey. That framing badly understates what took place and feels a little too forgiving in its assessment. Bernstein stopped using critical thinking tools properly, stopped applying skepticism to both the ideas he was confronted with and his reaction to them.

That is not a stumble off of some path.

It is leaving the path completely.

And it’s fine for people to make errors in their judgement - to not be perfect skeptics is to be human. That’s where the emotional intelligence and the humility I talked about in my piece play important roles. In how we handle it when we make those errors ourselves, in how we react when other people do - especially people elevated to prominent positions within our community.

However, the skeptic community does have a problem with people within it who think that their self-identity as skeptics makes them immune from fallacious thinking and errors of judgement. People who would rightly condemn abusive, hateful, or harmful rhetoric from someone outside of the skeptic community who suddenly find nuance and hairs to split when it comes to doing the same with people from within their community. Including themselves.

Those are the issues I was trying to address in my previous piece. Of course you can identify as a skeptic - many good people do, many good skeptics do. However, if you identify as a skeptic it should be because you’re practicing skepticism, not because you’re using it as a shield to hide behind or a weapon with which to clobber others.

And the risk is that if you become too wrapped up in your skeptic identity - if you don’t check your own assumptions and question your own conclusions as much as you should, you’ll suddenly find yourself doing exactly that. If you treat your first reactions as probably reasonable because “I am skeptic”, you’re probably not doing good skepticism. Sorry, but that’s just how it is.

I include myself in that risk.

Nobody becomes immune to motivated reasoning because they have spent years criticising it in others.

It is embarrassing to realise you’ve jumped to conclusions with no evidential basis, or failed to spot misinformation for what it is. However, recognising these failings in yourself is how you improve as a skeptic, and this is why failing to hold ourselves to account is so dangerous for people whose identity is build around the promotion of critical thinking.

If you can’t practice what you preach, you end up preaching nonsense, misinformation, and prejudice.

That is the antithesis of skepticism.

That seems worth saying at the start, because whenever someone prominent in the skeptic world publicly disappoints people, there is always the risk of it being treated like sport. A cancellation, a downfall, a moment of communal rubbernecking. Someone said something awful. Someone resigned. Someone has been denounced. Someone else is now arguing that this is all overblown, or malicious, or censorship, or tribalism, or proof that the real problem is “wokeness” rather than the thing that was actually said.

I’m tired of watching this happen.

The recent news that Evan Bernstein has left The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe after controversy around posts on X/Twitter is, in one sense, a specific story about a specific person, podcast, and audience.

In Reddit discussions and reposted SGU statements, listeners pointed to X/Twitter posts and replies involving anti-Palestinian, dehumanising, and conspiratorial political rhetoric from Bernstein. The SGU’s own statement, as circulated by listeners, framed the issue not as ordinary political disagreement but as a failure of skepticism, critical thinking, and basic humanity.

I do not know Bernstein personally. I am not interested in writing a forensic account of every post, reply, and interpretation. That work can be done elsewhere by people with more patience for screenshots.

What interests me is the pattern.

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Because this is not the first time a public skeptic, rationalist, atheist, debunker, or self-appointed defender of reason has appeared to forget that skepticism is supposed to be an approach, not an identity. It is not a tribe. It is not a lifestyle. It is not a brand of cleverness. It is not a podcast genre, a conference lanyard, a Twitter bio, or a smug little pin badge worn while correcting strangers.

Skepticism is a practice, and like any practice, it decays when you stop doing it.

The trouble begins when “I use skeptical tools” quietly becomes “I am a skeptic.” That shift may sound small, but it matters. A tool can be put down, sharpened, misused, repaired, or improved. An identity is much more fragile. Identities need defending. They become part of the ego, attract tribes, heroes, enemies, slogans, merchandise, in-jokes, status games, and social rewards.

Once skepticism becomes an identity, criticism of your reasoning can feel like criticism of your selfhood. Being wrong stops being a normal part of inquiry and becomes humiliating. Apologising becomes defeat and listening becomes capitulation. The skeptic, of all people, becomes emotionally invested in not noticing their own motivated reasoning.

That is where the rot sets in.

Public skepticism has always had an outward-facing problem. So much of it developed around debunking other people: psychics, mediums, ghost hunters, creationists, UFO believers, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, dowsers, cryptozoologists, paranormal investigators, alternative medicine practitioners, and anyone else deemed insufficiently attached to reality.

I am not saying none of that work matters. Of course it matters. I have done versions of that work myself. I have spent years writing about ghosts, folklore, belief, evidence, fraud, perception, memory, and the strange places where personal experience meets cultural storytelling. I think skepticism is useful. I think critical thinking is useful. I think bad claims deserve scrutiny, especially when they exploit grief, fear, illness, or vulnerability.

But when skepticism only points outward, it becomes less like a method and more like a searchlight. It illuminates other people’s mistakes while leaving the person holding it in darkness.

That is the danger.

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A person can become very good at spotting logical fallacies in someone else’s ghost story while remaining completely incurious about the assumptions beneath their own politics. They can mock a conspiracy theorist’s pattern-seeking while failing to recognise the pattern they have built around “people like me are rational and people like them are not.” They can explain cognitive bias on a stage, write books about misinformation, record podcasts about poor evidence, and still be led around by fear, prejudice, loyalty, ego, status, resentment, or disgust.

This should not surprise us. Skeptics are people. That is the whole point. We are not immune to the machinery we describe.

In fact, I sometimes think the public skeptic is at particular risk because the role comes with applause. There is a kind of social reward in being the person who sees through nonsense. It feels good to be the one with the sharper explanation, the cleaner argument, the devastating fact-check. It feels good to be part of the group that knows better.

And yes, sometimes we do know better. I am not pretending all claims are equally valid or that every argument deserves endless patience. Some things are simply untrue. Some people are dishonest. Some claims are harmful. Some beliefs need challenging.

But knowing better in one context does not make you better.

That distinction seems to be where famous skeptics often stumble. Expertise in one area becomes a general aura of authority. A reputation for rationality becomes a shield. An audience becomes a buffer against accountability. The longer someone is praised for being reasonable, the easier it becomes for them to mistake their first reaction for reason itself.

The irony is painful. Skepticism should make a person slower, not faster. It should create a pause between stimulus and conclusion. It should make us ask: what do I know? How do I know it? What am I assuming? What would change my mind? Am I reacting to evidence, or am I reacting to discomfort? Am I applying the same standard to myself that I would apply to someone I dislike?

Instead, too often, it becomes a performance of certainty.

This is how “just asking questions” becomes a laundering device for prejudice. It is how “free inquiry” becomes a refusal to consider consequences. It is how “debate” becomes a demand that marginalised people repeatedly justify their own humanity to someone who has mistaken detachment for objectivity. It is how “science and reason” become aesthetic choices rather than ethical commitments.

The skeptic movement has produced a lot of useful work. It has also produced a strange number of people who appear to believe that being clever is the same as being wise.

Cleverness can help you win an argument. Wisdom might tell you when the argument itself is cruel, lazy, or unnecessary. Cleverness can identify a weak claim. Wisdom can recognise that the person making it might be grieving, frightened, lonely, or trying to survive. Cleverness can dismantle someone else’s belief system. Wisdom asks what you are building in its place.

There is also a structural problem here that skepticism has never fully reckoned with. Movements that repeatedly elevate confident men who have not had to interrogate their own assumptions will keep running into this wall. Not because men are uniquely incapable of critical thought, and not because privilege is a moral stain that makes someone forever untrustworthy, but because unexamined privilege has a way of disguising itself as neutrality. If the world has often treated your perspective as the default, it becomes very easy to believe you are simply describing reality while everyone else is being emotional, political, tribal, or irrational.

That is a dangerous place for a skeptic to stand.

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That is where I increasingly find myself out of step with parts of organised skepticism. Not because I have lost interest in evidence, but because evidence without humility curdles into arrogance. Debunking without compassion curdles into sport. Rationalism without self-awareness curdles into another kind of dogma.

This is also why hero worship in skeptic spaces is so dangerous.

The movement has always had its famous men. The great debunkers, the public intellectuals, the conference headliners, the quote machines, the authors, the podcast hosts, the magicians with a microphone and a challenge. Many of them did important work. Some of them changed public conversations for the better. Some of them helped people leave harmful beliefs behind. Some of them inspired entire generations to ask better questions.

And some of them also said or did things that deserved criticism.

Both can be true. That is supposed to be the easy part for skeptics, isn’t it? Holding more than one thought in our heads at the same time. Following the evidence even when it complicates the story. Refusing comforting myths.

Yet when the myth is our own, suddenly the standards become slippery.

We see this whenever criticism of a skeptic figure is met not with curiosity, but with defensive reflex. They did so much good, they were from a different time, they were joking, they were misrepresented, being provocative, just asking questions. They are not really like that…

You are taking this out of context.

You are damaging the movement. You are giving ammunition to the other side…

That last one is especially revealing. The movement. The side. The tribe.

This is what happens when skepticism becomes a belonging system. Protecting the reputation of the group becomes more important than applying the method. The skeptic’s first duty quietly shifts from “what is true?” to “how do we manage the embarrassment?”

But embarrassment is not the enemy of skepticism. Embarrassment is often where skepticism starts. It is the little internal alarm that says: hang on, I might have been wrong about this. I might have trusted the wrong person. I might have repeated a claim too confidently. I might have mistaken familiarity for credibility. I might have let loyalty do my thinking for me.

That is uncomfortable. Good. It should be.

Skepticism that never makes the skeptic uncomfortable is just suspicion aimed at other people.

I think about this often in relation to paranormal belief, because it is the area I know best. There are easy ways to be a skeptic in paranormal spaces. You can sneer. You can mock. You can wait for someone to mention orbs, EMF meters, EVPs, psychics, demons, or “energy” and then perform the familiar routine. You can become very good at explaining why everyone else is wrong.

The harder thing is to ask why these stories matter. Why people reach for them. What grief does to perception. What loneliness does to interpretation. How folklore travels. How memory edits itself. How a hoax can still tell us something true about the culture that receives it. How a witness can be sincere and mistaken. How a skeptic can be correct and still behave badly.

That is the skepticism I want to practice.

Not soft skepticism or credulity in a nicer jumper, but a skepticism that understands people as more than containers for bad claims, and recognises emotion not as the enemy of thought, but as part of the terrain thought has to travel through.

This is where some famous skeptics seem to lose their way. They become so accustomed to being the reasonable person in the room that they stop checking whether they are still being reasonable. They become fluent in the vocabulary of bias while treating their own biases as exceptions. They can identify tribalism in everyone except their own audience, and they can see how belief protects identity in religious or paranormal communities, but not how skepticism can do exactly the same thing.

The answer is not to abandon skepticism. That would be ridiculous. The world does not need less critical thinking. It needs better critical thinking that’s more honest, more self-directed which does not stop at the border of the self.

The answer is to stop treating “skeptic” as a personality type.

Critical thinking is not a personality trait. It is not something you either possess or lack which is bestowed upon you because you read the right books, listened to the right podcasts, attended the right conferences, or learned to say “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” with the correct amount of eyebrow.

It is something you do.

You do it when you check a source before sharing a claim that flatters your worldview. You do it when you notice that your dislike of someone is making their argument sound worse than it is. You do it when you admit that someone outside your tribe has made a fair point. You do it when you apologise properly. You do it when you stop explaining and start listening. You do it when you ask whether your “rational” reaction is actually fear wearing a lab coat.

You do it when you let yourself be corrected, and you do it when you hold to account people in our movement who have prejudice opinions.

That, to me, is the missing piece. A public skeptic should not be someone who is never wrong. That is impossible. A public skeptic should be someone who has built visible, reliable ways of noticing when they are wrong and responding well. Not perfectly. Not theatrically. Just honestly.

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There is a great deal of talk in skeptic spaces about intellectual honesty. There is far less modelling of emotional honesty. Yet the two are connected. If you cannot say “I felt defensive,” “I felt embarrassed,” “I felt threatened,” “I reacted badly,” or “I did not want that to be true,” then your intellectual honesty has a ceiling. It will only operate in situations where your ego is not at stake.

That is not enough.

If the current SGU situation prompts anything useful, I hope it is not simply another round of side-taking. I hope it prompts some uncomfortable reflection among people who identify strongly with skepticism, science communication, atheism, rationalism, or critical thinking communities.

What are we actually practising?

Are we becoming more careful, or merely more confident?

Are we better at recognising bad reasoning, or just faster at labelling it in others?

Are we using skepticism to reduce harm, or to feel superior?

Are we willing to scrutinise our heroes with the same seriousness we bring to strangers?

Are we brave enough to notice when the call is coming from inside the skeptical house?

Because that is where the work is.

Not in declaring ourselves the rational ones. Not in collecting disappointing men and then acting shocked when they disappoint us. Not in replacing one hero with another, or pretending that cleverness, education, or a long history of debunking protects anyone from prejudice, cruelty, or self-deception.

Skepticism is not a destination you arrive at. It is not a title you earn and keep forever. It is maintenance. It is hygiene. It is a practice of returning, again and again, to the possibility that you may have missed something.

Including something in yourself.

And if that sounds less glamorous than being a famous skeptic, good.

It should.

What I needed, they said, was “one big case.”

It was meant kindly, I think. Encouragingly. The kind of thing people say when they can see you working a field but do not yet know what shape your involvement takes. In their mind, the big case was the thing that would crystallise everything: interest, expertise, credibility, direction. It would give my work a centre of gravity.

At the time, I laughed politely. It was not an unreasonable comment, exactly. Many fields have their own mythology around the defining case. The journalist has the investigation that breaks a scandal, the academic the paper everybody cites, and the true crime writer has the case that reframes a tragedy for a wider audience.

But later, while brushing my teeth (which is often when my brain chooses to become annoyingly productive) I found myself thinking about ghost hunting, because paranormal culture has its own version of the big case.

Everybody wants their own Enfield.

Their own Borley Rectory.

Their own haunting that becomes more than a haunting. A case with a name and a mythology. A place in the books. A story that gets brought up in interviews, documentaries, podcasts, conference talks, and late-night conversations between people who know exactly how to lower their voice before saying, “There was this one case…”

In ghost research culture, the landmark case is not only evidence or mystery. It is status. It gives the investigator proximity to history and allows them to stand beside the haunting and become part of its afterlife.

That is fascinating.

It is also ethically uncomfortable.

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The case as legacy

Paranormal history is full of cases that have become inseparable from the people who investigated, promoted, challenged, or wrote about them. Mention Borley Rectory and Harry Price appears almost immediately in the mental footnotes. Mention the Enfield Poltergeist and a whole cast of investigators, journalists, broadcasters, sceptics, and commentators gather around the story. The haunting becomes a cultural object, and the people attached to it become part of the object’s meaning.

There is nothing inherently suspicious about that. If someone spends time documenting a case, their name will naturally become associated with it - any field that records human experience does this. Researchers become linked to studies just as journalists become linked to investigations and campaigners become linked to injustices they helped expose.

The problem is not association. It is aspiration.

There is a difference between becoming known for careful work and wanting a case because of what it might do for you, and that distinction matters in paranormal culture because the people at the centre of haunting cases are often not powerful institutions or abstract subjects. They are families, children, people who are grieving, frightened, or isolated. Households under pressure. Their experiences may be sincere, confusing, frightening, exaggerated, misremembered, socially reinforced, misinterpreted, or some tangled mixture of all those things.

But they are rarely simple.

Yet the culture around hauntings often pushes towards simplification. A complex domestic situation becomes “the case.” A family home becomes “the house.” A person in distress becomes “the witness” or even “the epicentre.” Human ambiguity is tidied into narrative shape.

Once that happens, the case can begin to serve people who are not the ones living through it.

It can serve the investigator’s reputation. A podcast, or a YouTube channel. A book, a conference slot, a documentary, or a personal mythology. The haunting becomes a kind of professional inheritance, something a person can carry around with them as proof that they were there when something important happened. That they have made it as a paranormal investigator.

But if your legacy is built on another person’s most vulnerable moments, what exactly is being preserved? And who is it really for?

Branding the haunting

One of the clearest signs of this process is the way cases are named.

A haunting rarely remains a plain description for long. It becomes “The Hell House,” “The Demon House,” “The Something Poltergeist,” “The Black Monk,” “Britain’s Most Haunted X,” or some other title designed to make ambiguity sound like destiny.

This is not a neutral act.

Naming a case gives it shape and tells the audience how to approach it before they have considered a single detail. A sinister title creates expectation and it implies danger, seriousness, and narrative weight. It suggests that what happened is not merely strange, but significant.

A family reporting noises, apparitions, objects moving, cold spots, smells, dreams, or frightening coincidences may be describing experiences that deserve careful attention. But once their home has been branded, the meaning of those experiences is no longer being gently explored. It is being packaged.

The domestic becomes theatrical, the personal becomes public-facing, and the messy becomes marketable.

This is especially obvious in the age of online paranormal media. A careful, cautious title does not travel as well as one that promises terror. “Family Reports Disturbing Experiences During Period of Stress” is never going to compete with “The Most Evil House We Have Ever Investigated.” The algorithm does not reward careful uncertainty. It rewards escalation, certainty, dread, and the promise that this case is different from all the others.

So cases get bigger in the telling.

Not always because anyone is lying. Often because the culture rewards bigness. It rewards the dramatic frame, the ominous nickname, the sense that this haunting might be the one. The one that finally proves something, makes everyone take notice, and secures a place in the lineage.

That is where the ethical tension sits. Not necessarily in outright deception, but in the gradual transformation of somebody’s lived experience into someone else’s cultural capital.

Vulnerability is not a plot device

The people at the centre of haunting cases are often treated as if they are there to provide testimony, atmosphere, and emotional stakes. They become the reason the story matters, but not always the people whose wellbeing matters most.

That should trouble us.

Many reported hauntings emerge during periods of disruption. Bereavement, adolescence, family breakdown, illness, loneliness, religious anxiety, financial stress, trauma, and unstable housing can all shape the way people experience and interpret the world around them. That does not mean witnesses are lying, foolish, or unreliable in some simplistic way. It means they are human.

Human perception is not a CCTV camera. Memory is not a filing cabinet. Fear changes attention. Expectation changes interpretation. Repeated questioning can change recall, and group dynamics can reinforce certain explanations while quietly excluding others. A child who discovers that a particular detail makes adults react may learn, consciously or not, how to keep the attention coming. An adult who feels unheard may find that a paranormal explanation finally makes other people take their distress seriously.

None of this requires fraud.

That is precisely why it deserves care.

The lazy sceptical response is to treat vulnerability as evidence against a witness. The lazy believer response is to treat vulnerability as proof of paranormal victimhood. Both can be dehumanising. In one version, the witness is too unstable to be trusted and in the other, they are so haunted that every part of their distress is absorbed into the ghost story.

A more humane approach would start with the person rather than the phenomenon.

What is happening in this home? What pressures exist here? Who benefits from the haunting being understood in a particular way? Who feels believed for the first time? Who feels important? Who feels frightened? Who is being watched? Who is being ignored? What might publicity do to these people after the investigators have packed up their equipment and moved on?

Those questions are not as exciting as “is this the next Enfield?” yet they are much more important.

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The investigator as central character

Paranormal culture often casts the investigator in a flattering role. They are brave, open-minded, sensitive, curious, and willing to enter strange situations that others dismiss. In many stories, the ghost hunter becomes a kind of advocate for the frightened household. They listen when others laugh. They offer explanations, rituals, advice, equipment, sympathy, and sometimes the immense relief of being believed.

There are investigators who do try to help. It would be unfair to pretend otherwise, but good intentions do not erase the possibility of harm.

An investigator can be sincere and still be intrusive. They can be compassionate and still enjoy the status a case gives them. They can believe they are protecting a family while also reinforcing the family’s fear. They can be convinced they are preserving testimony while slowly making the story harder for the witnesses to leave behind.

The investigator can become too important to the case.

This is one of the strangest dynamics in famous hauntings. Over time, the haunting is no longer remembered simply as something a household reported. It becomes a story with expert interpreters, defenders, sceptical opponents, favoured versions, forbidden doubts, and established lore. The original people remain central in theory, but the public conversation often belongs to others.

The case becomes a stage on which reputations are made.

Once that happens, there is a powerful incentive not to let the story become smaller. A haunting that becomes more ambiguous with time is not as useful as a haunting that becomes more legendary. A vulnerable household that needed support is less glamorous than a family at the centre of a battle between good and evil. A confused period in someone’s life is harder to sell than a terrifying case that shook investigators to their core.

The incentives are not subtle.

They may not always be conscious either, which is part of the problem. People are very good at mistaking their professional or personal investment for moral duty. The case must be defended because the witnesses deserve belief. The story must be promoted because the truth matters. The sceptics must be challenged because ridicule harms experiencers.

Sometimes those things may be true but they may also be convenient.

Borrowed importance

There is a particular kind of importance that comes from being near someone else’s crisis.

It can happen in true crime, in documentary-making, in journalism, in activism, in academia, and in paranormal investigation. A person enters a situation marked by fear, grief, confusion, or injustice, and because they are the one who records it, explains it, translates it, or publicises it, some of the emotional force of that situation attaches to them.

They become important because the story is important, but borrowed importance becomes dangerous when the storyteller begins to confuse access with ownership.

A haunting that happens in someone else’s home is not automatically yours because you investigated it. The fact that a case gave you purpose does not mean the case exists for that purpose, and this is where I think paranormal culture needs to be more honest with itself.

The desire for a landmark case is understandable. Most people want their work to matter. Many paranormal enthusiasts have spent years being mocked, dismissed, or treated as unserious. The idea of finding the case that proves the value of your interest is emotionally powerful. It promises vindication. It offers a way to say: this is why I kept going.

But the desire to matter can distort judgement because if an investigator needs a case to be significant, they may struggle to recognise when it is fragile, mundane, exaggerated, socially complicated, or ethically unwise to publicise. If their reputation becomes tied to the haunting, doubt can start to feel like personal attack. If their identity depends on being the person who saw the truth, alternative explanations may feel like attempts to erase them.

At that point, the vulnerable household is no longer the only thing being protected.

So is the investigator’s legacy.

Investigators often survive as names, personalities, pioneers, experts, eccentrics, or legends. Families are more likely to survive as case studies. Their homes become locations, their fear becomes atmosphere, and their private lives become context for the haunting.

The imbalance is striking.

A ghost hunter attached to a famous case may be remembered as bold, controversial, flawed, brilliant, or ahead of their time. The people who lived through the case may be remembered as frightened, fraudulent, troubled, suggestible, tragic, or simply “the family involved.”

That difference reveals something about whose stories paranormal culture values.

It is not that investigators should never be remembered. Some did important work. Some preserved accounts that would otherwise have vanished and asked serious questions in environments that did not reward seriousness. But involvement in a famous case should not automatically confer moral authority. Being present is not the same as being careful. Becoming part of a legend is not the same as having behaved ethically inside it.

We should be able to ask harder questions of the ghost hunters of the past.

What did their involvement do to the people at the centre of the case? Did they reduce harm or increase it? Did they protect privacy or encourage spectacle? Did they challenge the story when necessary, or did they become invested in its escalation? Did they help the household regain stability, or did they help turn instability into folklore?

These questions do not ruin paranormal history but make it more honest.

Refer a friend

The legacy problem

This is the thought I keep returning to: what does it say about a person’s legacy if it depends on preserving someone else’s vulnerability as a story?

Not learning from it, helping or documenting with care, but preserving it in the amber of public fascination: offering paranormal audiences a tantalising peek behind the curtain of a real-life ghost story.

A haunting can become a strange kind of monument. It holds a family at a particular moment in time, often the worst or most confusing moment of their lives. The story is retold, reshaped, dramatised, defended, doubted, and revived. New generations discover it and new commentators reinterpret it. New investigators visit the location, if the location still exists, and the case remains alive in culture long after the original people have lost control of it.

For the investigator, that may look like legacy but for the people at the centre, it may look more like being trapped.

There is something profoundly questionable about seeking immortality through another person’s distress. Even when the haunting is fascinating and the witnesses are sincere. Even if the investigator means well, the ethical problem does not disappear just because the story is compelling.

Compelling stories are the ones most likely to be taken from people.

A different ambition

I do not think people should stop investigating strange experiences. That would be too blunt an answer, and not a particularly useful one. People will continue to have experiences they interpret as paranormal. Some will seek help. Some will want to be heard by someone who does not immediately laugh at them. Some will need practical support, environmental checks, emotional reassurance, or simply a calm conversation that does not make them feel foolish.

There is room for thoughtful investigation, but perhaps the ambition needs to change. Instead of chasing the case that makes your name, the better aim might be to leave people steadier than you found them. To treat privacy as a form of care and to resist branding someone’s home like a horror attraction.

A good investigation might never become famous.

It might not produce a book, a series, a conference talk, or a place in the paranormal canon. It might end with practical explanations, reduced fear, a few unresolved details, and a family who no longer feel as though their home is the centre of something monstrous.

That should not be considered failure.

If ghost research wants to be taken seriously as something more than content creation, it needs to develop a stronger sense of duty towards the people whose stories sustain it. Not just fascination, belief and the thrill of proximity to mystery.

The haunting is not only a story, it is someone’s life. And if your legacy is built there, on the frightened edges of someone else’s private world, then the least you owe them is the humility to ask whether your involvement helped them - or merely helped you become part of the legend.

It lives in my house for aesthetic purposes, which sounds faintly ridiculous, but there we are. Some people have tasteful ceramics or framed botanical prints. I have an original Parker Brothers Ouija board, kept mostly because it looks good, has cultural history attached to it, and occasionally makes visitors react in exactly the way you would expect visitors to react when they realise there is a Ouija board nearby.

I was reminded of it because of a discussion on BlueSky. Dr Jo Kershaw had written, as part of an ongoing thread:

“Ouija boards are peculiar, because they absolutely were just made up as a parlour game, but they do seem to have a much higher strike rate (and I’m agnostic as to why) for people seriously frightening themselves than more obviously ‘serious’ esoteric stuff like tarot.”

My first response was, admittedly, quite blunt: Er… the key here is the people.

Not because the observation is wrong. Ouija boards do seem to frighten people in a way many other divinatory or esoteric tools do not. Plenty of people who are relaxed about tarot cards, pendulums, astrology apps, ghost stories, or haunted locations will still draw a firm line at the Ouija board.

They might not even believe in it. In fact, some of the strongest reactions I’ve heard come from people who are very clear that they do not believe Ouija boards literally contact the dead.

They still don’t want to touch one.

That, to me, is where the interesting bit begins - not with the board, but with the people around it.

Because the Ouija board itself is not peculiar in any especially mystical sense. It is a board with letters, numbers, yes, no, goodbye, and usually a planchette. Historically, it belongs as much to the world of parlour games, novelty objects, entertainment, and spiritualist-adjacent commercial culture as it does to anything more solemn or occult. Its peculiarity does not live in the cardboard, wood, or plastic.

It lives in us.

We bring things to it before we ever place a finger on the planchette. We bring horror films, sleepover dares, warnings from relatives, religious messaging, urban legends, and the accumulated cultural knowledge that tells us: this object is not neutral.

The board does not have to do anything dramatic to affect the room. It has already been cast in a role. Which is why my long-running joke has always been that the only real danger a Ouija board poses is if someone hits you round the head with it.

Then, one morning, mine hit me in the face.

I should state for accuracy that the board was not wielded by a person, nor launched by a spirit. There was only gravity, bad storage, and physics.

The board and its box are much bigger than people expect, and I had stored it on top of my wardrobe because that is the only flat-ish space in my room it fits. Unfortunately, I had clearly not stored it flat enough. Something at the back of the wardrobe top must have lifted it slightly, creating a very gentle slope and every time I opened or closed the sliding wardrobe doors, the vibration shifted the box forward by a tiny amount.

Which is how one morning I stood in front of the wardrobe, bleary-eyed and still in my pyjamas, trying to get my outfit ready for the day ahead, when I heard a strange friction sound directly above me and looked up just in time to see the Ouija board heading towards my face.

I had exactly enough time to close my eyes before it struck me across the top of my nose and brow. I started the day stood there, in my pyjamas, holding a Ouija board, thinking: “well, that felt a little ominous.”

I do not think the Ouija board was trying to send me a message. I think the message, if there was one, was probably ‘store large rectangular objects more responsibly’, but I would be lying if I said the moment did not feel like a wink from the universe.

For years I had joked that blunt force trauma was the only real Ouija board danger. Then the Ouija board delivered. Har Har.

Now, if a Monopoly board or Scrabble had fallen on my face, I would have been annoyed but because it was a Ouija board, the incident instantly became a story. The same physical event, filtered through a different object, felt different.

That does not mean it was different, just that it felt like it for a moment, because the brain in my head is really good at making meaning.

This particular board already came with a story attached, too. I bought it from a man who lived a few towns over, and he delivered it to my door himself. When he arrived, he told me he had to smuggle Ouija boards in and out of his house because his gran considered them evil.

I loved this immediately.

Not because I thought his gran was correct, but because it was such a perfect little piece of living folklore. A mass-produced Parker Brothers board game being treated as contraband. A commercial object with the social life of a cursed artefact. Something sold, collected, hidden, feared, joked about, and whispered around.

Before I ever owned it, this board was already carrying someone else’s story.

And that matters, because objects do not only exist materially - they also exist socially. A Ouija board is a physical object, yes, but it is also a bundle of associations. People respond not just to what it is, but to what they think it means.

That is not foolishness but normal human cognition.

We use pre-existing cultural and social knowledge to decide how to behave and respond to information. We interpret ambiguous experiences through expectation. We notice the things that confirm the story we already know and react to atmosphere, context, memory, suggestion, and the reactions of the people around us.

So when people frighten themselves with Ouija boards, I am less interested in asking “what is the board doing?” and more interested in asking “what are the people doing?”

This is also why I do not think this can be reduced to ‘believers are gullible’ or ‘skeptics are immune’ divide. It’s simply not true.

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Once, at a skeptic conference, I ended up in the bar between sessions teaching a group of self-identified skeptics how to do glass divination. It was not a solemn ritual or staged like a séance. It was a bar, at a skeptic event, with people who generally understood concepts like suggestion, expectation, and the ideomotor effect.

For anyone unfamiliar, glass divination usually involves placing an upturned glass on a table, with people resting their fingertips lightly on it. Questions are asked, and the glass appears to move in response. The rational explanation for what is happening is the ideomotor effect: small, unconscious muscular movements can produce motion without people feeling as though they are deliberately pushing.

Everyone involved can know that, and still, when the glass starts moving, the room changes. And that is what happened. The glass began to move, and people freaked out.

Not because they had all suddenly abandoned skepticism or because they secretly believed all along. Not because a group of skeptics in a bar had accidentally opened a portal while waiting for the next conference session.

They reacted because knowing the explanation is not always the same as being untouched by the experience.

There is a difference between understanding the ideomotor effect in theory and feeling an object move beneath your fingers and between intellectual belief and embodied reaction.

That gap is not hypocrisy - it is the human condition.

This is where discussions about Ouija boards become more interesting. The question does not have to be ‘are they real or fake?’ The more useful question might be why are some objects so good at recruiting us into a story?

Ouija boards have a high fright potential because they combine several powerful ingredients:

• They are interactive. You do not just look at them; you participate.

• They are ambiguous. The planchette moves, but the source of movement is not obvious in the moment.

• They are social. Usually, more than one person is involved, so everyone is reading everyone else’s reactions, and responding in real time.

• They are culturally loaded. Most people arrive with some idea that Ouija boards are risky, forbidden, occult, or at least not quite ordinary.

Ouija boards are also structured like communication - they don’t merely create a strange noise or an odd sensation. The board appears to answer - spells out words, chooses how to respond, gives the impression of agency.

That is potent.

Refer a friend

Tarot may be more obviously esoteric, but tarot often places interpretation in the hands of the reader. Cards are drawn, symbols are considered, meanings are discussed. There is room for reflection, metaphor, and distance. A Ouija board, by contrast, can feel immediate - something moves under your hand and appears to speak back.

That immediacy can be frightening, even when the mechanism is not supernatural, especially when the people using it already know the story they are supposed to be inside.

This is not an argument that Ouija boards are dangerous and nor is it an argument that people who fear them are silly. I think both conclusions are too flat.

What interests me is that the fear is real even if the danger is not.

People can sincerely disbelieve in spirits and still hesitate before touching a planchette, just as a skeptic can understand the ideomotor effect and still get a jolt when the glass moves. I can own a Ouija board purely for aesthetic reasons, know perfectly well that it fell because I stored it badly, and still stand there in my pyjamas feeling like I had just been lightly bullied by the universe.

We are not perfectly rational machines. We are bodies in rooms, surrounded by objects that have histories, meanings, reputations, and moods. We inherit stories about those objects, and then we interpret our experiences through those stories.

Sometimes that produces fear, sometimes it produces folklore, and sometimes it produces a blog post because a haunted parlour game fell off a wardrobe and smacked you in the nose.

So yes, perhaps Ouija boards are peculiar, but not because they possess some special hidden force. They are peculiar because they reveal something peculiar about us: how quickly we can animate an object with expectation, how easily a room can become charged, how powerfully culture shapes perception, and how even disbelief does not fully protect us from a good story.

Remember, the board is not the strange part. We are.

And if you own a Ouija board, please store it flat.

Not the Victorian lady in white or the sinister shadow at the end of the corridor. Nor the haunted doll, wheeled out every few months to menace the internet anew. The ghost orb - that pale, floating circle of light that has been turning up in darkened pubs, graveyards, car parks, hallways, and ghost hunting photos for years - has proved almost impossible to kill off.

This is mildly impressive, because people have been trying.

For as long as orbs have been offered up as possible evidence of the paranormal, other people have been explaining that they are usually far less dramatic than all that: dust, moisture, pollen, insects, droplets, lens effects, flash reflecting off particles too close to the camera. In most cases, the mystery is not especially mysterious. And yet the ghost orb lives on. It drifts cheerfully through ghost-hunting television, online spaces, and the occasional earnest email from somebody wanting to know if the glowing disc in their Nan’s sitting room might be Grandad dropping by.

At this point, I’m less interested in asking what ghost orbs are than why they have proved so culturally durable.

Because that, really, is the story. Not the orb as evidence, but the orb as survivor. As one of the great persistent motifs of modern paranormal culture, and an example of what happens when technology, interpretation, and atmosphere collide and produce something people are reluctant to let go of.

Like it or not, the ghost orb is here to stay. And the fact that it is here to stay tells us quite a lot - not necessarily about the dead, but certainly about the living.

A modern ghost story in photographic form

One of the easiest mistakes to make with something like the ghost orb is to treat it as though it belongs only to the argument over whether it is real. That matters, of course, up to a point. But it is also much too narrow.

The more useful way to think about the orb is as a piece of modern folklore.

Folklore is not only made of ancient legends, rural warnings, and stories old enough to have worn smooth around the edges. It is still being made now. It forms around technologies, subcultures, shared anxieties, recurring images and motifs, and repeatable little moments of uncertainty. Give people a strange thing that appears often enough to become familiar, and before long a story will begin to gather around it.

That is more or less what happened with the orb.

A photographic artefact - usually quite ordinary in origin - became a paranormal sign through repetition. People saw strange circles in photographs, yes, but more importantly they learned how to interpret those circles. Books, websites, ghost-hunting shows, online forums, and years of recycled paranormal language helped turn the glowing dot into a recognisable category. It was no longer just a quirk in an image. It was an orb. And once something has a name, a visual identity, and a story attached to it, it becomes much harder to dislodge.

This is one of the reasons the orb has had such a long shelf life. People are not coming to it fresh every time. They’re not simply looking at a white blur and inventing meaning from scratch. Instead, they are seeing something culture has already taught them to recognise.

The orb arrives pre-loaded with significance.

Which is how folklore works. It teaches people what kind of thing they are looking at. And in that sense, the ghost orb belongs to a much older tradition than its digital trappings might suggest.

Every era seems to produce its own visually persuasive form of supernatural evidence. Earlier periods had spirit photographs, ectoplasmic drapery, mysterious extra faces, ghostly smudges, and vague luminous forms. The tools change and the style changes but the human impulse behind it does not. We remain deeply attracted to the possibility that the camera, somehow, has caught more than we did.

The digital age did not invent that longing. It just gave it a nice round shape.

Why the orb feels persuasive

Part of the orb’s enduring appeal lies in a very ordinary fact: photographs carry authority.

Even now, with all we know about how easily images can mislead, photographs often feel more factual than they really are. They look like proof. Something was in front of the camera, after all. Something made that mark. Something was captured.

But photographs are never just neutral slices of reality. They are shaped by light, angle, motion, focus, timing, hardware, software, depth, surface, reflection… and whatever else happened to be going on in the environment at the time. They do not lie exactly, but neither do they simply present the world as it is. They translate it. Sometimes they translate it beautifully, sometimes badly. And sometimes they produce exactly the sort of oddity that people are primed to find meaningful.

The orb is one of those oddities.

It works because it has enough visible form to seem evidential. It is there in the image, apparently concrete, observable, and seemingly independent of the person who took the photo. A funny feeling can be dismissed and a story can be questioned, but a photograph feels like a record. It can be shown, enlarged, circled, posted online, sent to friends, revisited years later. It gives people something to point to.

At the same time, the orb is ambiguous in exactly the right way. It is not usually clear enough to settle anything, but it is clear enough to invite speculation. It offers just enough shape to feel significant and just enough uncertainty to keep the argument alive.

That is a very potent combination.

Human beings are excellent at building meaning from ambiguous things. That is not just a paranormal problem. It is one of the ways we move through the world. We notice patterns, lean on context, connect details, fill in gaps, and interpret uncertainty through the lens of what we already know, suspect, hope, or fear. The orb slips neatly into that process. If you already think a place is haunted, or if a particular image arrives in an emotionally charged context, it does not take much for a pale floating circle to start feeling like more than a camera artefact.

The orb may not be especially strong evidence. But it is very good at looking like the sort of thing evidence might resemble.

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The orb and the limits of visual literacy

If the orb is folklore, it is also a lesson in media literacy - or, more to the point, in how shaky media literacy often is.

One of the stranger features of modern life is that we are surrounded by images while remaining remarkably under-equipped to interpret them. We swim in photographs, screenshots, clips, CCTV stills, compression artefacts, edited images, decontextualised frames, and now AI-generated nonsense too, and yet many people still approach images as though they arrive bearing self-evident truth.

The ghost orb is a small but useful reminder that they do not.

So many orb photographs can be traced back to very ordinary physical causes: airborne dust, moisture, pollen, tiny insects, flash bouncing off particles too close to the lens, droplets in the air, marks on the lens, all caught in conditions where a camera is already struggling to make sense of darkness and contrast. None of that is exotic. But unless you have some sense of how cameras behave, it often does not feel intuitive either.

What feels intuitive is the image itself. There is a bright circle. It appears suspended in the frame. It does not look like dust in the way dust exists in the imagination - dry, dull, settled, ignorable. It looks luminous. Distinct. Worth noticing.

And because many people still treat photographs as straightforward witnesses, the image gets taken too literally. The result of flash and proximity becomes a floating object. A lens artefact becomes an external thing. A camera quirk becomes, if not a spirit, then at least the possibility of one.

Again, this is not a problem unique to paranormal belief. It is a human problem, and increasingly a general cultural one. The orb simply shows it to us in miniature. It demonstrates how easily a misunderstood image can become a meaningful claim once the technical context drops away and a ready-made story steps in to fill the gap.

That, to me, is one of the reasons the orb remains useful to think about. Not because it is compelling proof of ghosts, but because it reveals how much interpretive work people do - often without realising it - when they look at a picture.

From evidence to icon

There is another reason the ghost orb has survived so well, and it is perhaps the most revealing of all: the orb is no longer just evidence. It is iconography.

At some point, it stopped functioning only as a claim and started functioning as a symbol.

You do not have to believe in ghost orbs to recognise what they are supposed to mean. A dark room filled with floating pale circles announces itself immediately as belonging to the visual world of haunting. It tells you what genre you are in. It evokes ghost hunts, old buildings, whispered excitement, late-night vigils, and all the familiar staging of paranormal media. The orb has become part of the aesthetic language of the supernatural.

It sits alongside green night vision, torchlit corridors, static on an audio recording, EMF meters glowing theatrically in the dark, thermal silhouettes, and the soft visual grammar of “something may be happening here.” These things do not merely document paranormal culture, but help create it. They are part of its look, its mood, and its branding.

And once something reaches that point, its survival no longer depends on whether it stands up well as evidence.

This is where the orb becomes especially interesting. It has moved beyond the question of proof and into the realm of recognition. It is now one of those images that says ghosts almost instantly, even to people who would never treat it as compelling data. It is useful. It signals atmosphere. It suggests uncanny presence. It belongs to the furniture of the genre.

In other words, the orb has done what a great many pieces of poor evidence never manage: it has become culturally indispensable.

There is something faintly admirable about that. Not evidentially admirable, perhaps, but aesthetically. The orb has had a remarkable little afterlife. A photographic nuisance wandered into paranormal culture and somehow secured permanent residency.

Why the usual rebuttal never really finishes the job

None of this means the mundane explanations are wrong. They are often exactly right. But being right and being effective are not always the same thing.

One reason the orb persists is that sceptical responses to it are frequently too thin to deal with what is actually going on. “It’s just dust” may explain the mechanism perfectly well, but it often fails to address why the image mattered in the first place.

People rarely bring orb photographs to others as purely technical puzzles. They bring them because the image sits inside a larger emotional or narrative context. They were already uneasy in that building. They had a strange experience before taking the photo. The image was captured in a place with personal meaning. It appeared after a bereavement. It feels charged and like it belongs to a story.

A flat explanation can dismantle the optics while leaving the significance untouched, and this is where a lot of sceptical communication goes wrong - not just with orbs but with paranormal claims more broadly.

It focuses narrowly on mechanism and treats context as irrelevant, when context is often the entire reason the claim has any grip at all. People are not only asking “what caused this?” They are also asking “what do I do with how this feels?” and “am I wrong to think this matters?”

If those questions are ignored, the belief may remain perfectly intact, orb and all.

The orb, then, survives not because it is unbeatable, but because it is culturally and emotionally well-positioned. Believers often overread the image while sceptics often underread the human being looking at it. Between the two, the ghost orb continues to float serenely on.

What the ghost orb tells us now

The ghost orb may not tell us much about the afterlife but it tells us a great deal about the culture of haunting.

It tells us that folklore did not stop evolving when technology arrived. On the contrary, technology gave it new surfaces on which to bloom. A camera artefact became a ghost story because enough people learned how to read it that way.

It tells us that visual literacy matters, and that we are often less confident readers of images than we like to imagine. Cameras do not merely capture the world. They interpret it mechanically, imperfectly, and sometimes misleadingly. When people forget that, ordinary artefacts can begin to look uncanny very quickly.

And it tells us that paranormal culture, like any other culture, develops its own symbols. The orb has lasted because it is no longer just a claim about what might be in a photograph. It is part of the recognisable visual language of ghost belief itself.

That is why I do not think the orb is going anywhere.

Not because it has won the evidential argument or because sceptics have failed to explain it. But because it now performs too many cultural functions to disappear neatly. It is folklore. It is misread media. It is aesthetic shorthand. It is one of the ways modern ghost culture recognises itself.

For something so often dismissed as a speck of dust, that is quite an achievement.

That is interesting, though perhaps not especially shocking. People do not all arrive at their beliefs in the same way. Some lean more heavily on analysis, structure, and external evidence. Others place more weight on intuition, lived experience, internal coherence, and felt meaning. Most of us, of course, are not tidy examples of either. We are mixtures. What this paper tries to do is map some of those differences more formally, and to ask whether scientific scepticism and paranormal belief tend to cluster around different ways of thinking.

To do that, the researchers used questionnaire measures of paranormal belief, belief in science, and several traits linked to cognitive style. They then used latent profile analysis, a statistical method designed to look for patterns within the sample, to see whether certain combinations of beliefs tended to hang together. Their best-fitting model identified two broad profiles. One, labelled Higher Evidence-based Thinking, made up 55 per cent of the sample and showed higher belief in science alongside lower traditional paranormal belief and New Age belief. The other, labelled Lower Evidence-based Thinking, made up 45 per cent of the sample and showed the reverse pattern.

The two groups also differed on several self-report measures linked to thinking style. Compared with the higher evidence-based group, the lower evidence-based group scored higher on experiential thinking, empathising, and reality-testing deficits, and lower on rational thinking and systematising. Need for closure and dogmatism, interestingly, did not significantly distinguish the groups in the way many people might expect. The authors argue that the profiles are better understood as competing worldviews than as a simple split between informed and uninformed people.

That is where I think this paper becomes genuinely useful. Not because it gives us an excuse to sort people into the clever camp and the gullible camp, but because it points toward something more subtle: that disagreements around science, scepticism, and the paranormal may sometimes reflect differences in cognitive orientation, not just differences in raw intelligence or sincerity. In other words, some of the friction here may come from people weighting evidence, intuition, personal experience, and explanatory coherence differently from the outset.

That said, I think it is important to be careful with what follows from that.

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This does not mean that everybody is equally rational, only in their own special way. Some claims are better evidenced than others. Some people really are more careful, more reflective, and more methodologically disciplined than others. We are all vulnerable to mental shortcuts, motivated reasoning, and the quiet pull of our prior beliefs, but not always to the same degree, and not always with the same willingness to correct for them. The burden of proof still matters. Evidence still matters. Knowing the language of critical thinking does not make you immune from bias, but neither does that mean standards of reasoning suddenly disappear. This paper complicates the idea that “sceptic” and “believer” are simple stand-ins for intellectual worth. It does not flatten all differences in reasoning quality into meaninglessness. The paper itself also notes that dogmatism did not neatly separate the two groups, which is a useful reminder that rigidity is not the private property of one side.

That distinction matters to me, because it is something I have always tried to reiterate when speaking to mixed audiences of believers, sceptics, and the merely curious. Having a more rational thinking style does not make you automatically right. It does not make you wiser, more objective, or inherently cleverer than somebody who believes in ghosts. But neither does it follow that all routes to belief are equally reliable. We still have to ask what evidence exists for a claim, how strong it is, what alternative explanations might fit, and whether the conclusion actually follows. The point is not that reason does not matter. It is that reason is not a halo automatically granted to one tribe and withheld from another.

There is another reason to read this paper with some caution, especially if your own interests are hauntings, apparitions, folklore, and other anomalous experiences. The measure of paranormal belief used here was the Revised Paranormal Belief Scale, and the authors themselves note that, while it captures a breadth of supernatural ideas, it leaves out important areas such as ghosts and hauntings, poltergeists, folklore entities, and other culturally relevant phenomena. I had similar issues when using the same scale for my final research project as a Psychology undergrad. So this is not a final word on ghost belief but instead a study of a particular, questionnaire-defined version of paranormal belief, and that is not quite the same thing.

That caveat is more important than it might first appear. “Paranormal belief” is often treated as though it were one neat psychological category, but anyone who has spent time around this subject knows it is far messier. A person may reject astrology, psychic healing, and most supernatural claims while still feeling deeply affected by an experience in a particular house after a bereavement. Another may love ghost stories and folklore without making sweeping claims about what is objectively out there. Another may identify as a sceptic and still feel thoroughly shaken by something they cannot explain. A scale can be useful but it is not the whole terrain.

The study also comes with the usual limitations that deserve to be taken seriously. The data were collected through self-report questionnaires, which means the researchers measured how people described their own thinking, not how they performed on live reasoning tasks. The authors explicitly acknowledge that self-report can be distorted by response bias, social desirability, and limited self-awareness, and that reported thinking style may not match actual reasoning performance. They suggest future work should combine self-report with more objective measures.

The sample was recruited through social media, was self-selecting, and was not especially diverse, with the paper noting that about 87.6 per cent of participants identified as White British/Irish or White other. The authors also note that this limits how confidently the findings can be generalised to broader or more culturally diverse populations. The study was cross-sectional too, meaning it captured people at one moment in time rather than following them over time, so it cannot establish causation. It cannot tell us whether a given thinking style leads to a belief pattern, whether a belief pattern shapes thinking style, or whether both are influenced by other factors.

So what does this paper mean?

Refer a friend

I think it suggests that scientific scepticism and paranormal belief may often sit within broader patterns of worldview and self-concept. It supports the idea that how people prefer to process information may help shape what kinds of claims they find persuasive, meaningful, or credible. That is valuable, because it helps explain why debates in this area can feel so frustratingly circular. Sometimes people are not just disagreeing over one fact. They are approaching the same territory with different assumptions about what counts as convincing in the first place.

What it does not mean is that one side has now been scientifically crowned the rational side or that sceptics are immune from bias, tribalism, or wishful thinking. It does not mean believers are incapable of careful reasoning or that paranormal belief can simply be reduced to poor thinking. Or that openness to anomalous experience tells you everything you need to know about a person’s relationship with evidence. And it certainly does not mean that knowing a few cognitive-bias terms grants anyone exemption from being gloriously, stubbornly human.

If anything, that may be the most useful takeaway. We all like to imagine that our own route to belief is the sensible one. We all like to think that other people are the ones being led astray by emotion, culture, identity, or prior assumptions. But human beings are rarely that clean. We are shaped by temperament, experience, community, story, education, fear, hope, and the meanings we make from strange things. Some of us use more visible scaffolding than others. None of us builds a worldview in a vacuum.

That is why papers like this are worth reading carefully. Not because they hand us a winner, but because they add another piece to the puzzle. They tell us something useful about patterns in belief and cognition. They may help explain why believers and sceptics sometimes seem to be speaking slightly different psychological languages. But they do not settle who is right about ghosts, or about reality more broadly. They cannot carry that weight on their own. What they can do is remind us that paying attention to cognitive style should sharpen our awareness of evidence, not replace it - and that mistaking our preferred way of thinking for a guarantee of being correct is one of the oldest human habits going.

It is not merely the backdrop to rest, dreams, or the body quietly getting on with repair. It is the hour of creaks and shadows and too much awareness. The hour in which the mind, untethered from daylight logic, starts reaching for meaning in every sound.

I know that feeling very well.

For several years, I often put off going to sleep as long as I could because I knew what was waiting for me when I got there: nightmares. Not the occasional bad dream that leaves you rattled for a moment, but recurring, exhausting, horrible dreams that left me feeling more tired in the morning than I had when I went to bed. Sleep was not restorative. It was adversarial. It was something to brace for and I would wake up trying to work out what it all meant. What kind of person I was to always be fighting such terrible things when I should have been resting.

In truth, my fear of the night began much earlier than that. As a child, I dreaded bedtime because I believed our house was haunted and I’d end up laying in bed overly alert, listening out for the noises that proved it. The dark made everything feel charged. Every shift in the house seemed meaningful. Every sound felt like evidence. Long before I had any useful language for nightmares, parasomnias, or the strange mechanics of the sleeping brain, I knew what it was to be afraid of what night might bring.

During my ASD assessment a few years ago, the psychologist clocked something in passing that turned out not to be small at all: nightmare disorder. Nightmare disorder is a recognised parasomnia involving recurring nightmares that cause distress, disrupt sleep, and affect daytime functioning. I hadn’t known it was a disorder and thankfully treatment eventually did something I had not realised I was still quietly hoping for. It stopped the relentless nightmares, and also stopped my lucid dreaming.

My nights have become less punishing,

I think my lifelong experience with nightmares and lucid dreaming has made the paranormal experiences that happen in the porous territory around sleep and arrive while someone is falling asleep, or waking up, or trapped somewhere in between the most compelling to me as a researcher.

The shadow at the bedside, a sense of a presence in the room. The dream that feels so invasive, so vivid, so emotionally real that it lingers all day like weather. I know what it is to be afraid of the night and for sleep to feel less like refuge than surrender.

I recently read Rahul Jandial’s This Is Why You Dream, which offers fascinating insights into the neuroscience of dreaming. What stayed with me most, though, was not simply the science for its own sake, but the usefulness of it: the possibility that some of the most frightening experiences people have at night are not made smaller by explanation, but more navigable, legible and less cruel.

That matters, particularly in paranormal spaces, where sleep-related experiences have such a long and culturally sticky afterlife. A figure in the room, a force that pins you down, or the conviction that something was there. Historically, people have understood such things through the cultural language available to them: ghosts, goblins, incubi, demons, aliens. And of course they have. These experiences do not feel abstract or metaphorical when they happen but instead feel immediate and bodily. And very real.

That is one of the reasons I have little patience for the lazy version of scientific scepticism that treats explanation as deflation. As if saying ‘the brain did it’ should end the conversation. The brain is not a dull answer and it should never be offered as a reductive solution to the vividity of human experience. The brain is where these haunting experiences happen and the fact that an event may have a neurological basis does not make it less uncanny. If anything, it can make it more so.

Take sleep paralysis as an example.

Sleep paralysis is a temporary inability to move or speak that happens as someone is falling asleep or waking up. During an episode, part of the brain has surfaced into awareness while the body remains caught in the muscle paralysis associated with REM sleep. It is often accompanied by vivid hallucinations, intense fear, chest pressure, and the overwhelming sense that another presence is nearby. Sometimes malicious. It is difficult to imagine a more efficient machine for producing ghost stories.

The details vary by culture and expectation, but the underlying structure remains strikingly familiar. Something is in the room, something is watching, it is pressing on you. Something is not right and you are in danger. Across centuries, people have populated this shape with whatever entities made sense to them. The night hag. The incubus. The demon. The intruder. The alien visitor. But the human experience underneath those interpretations is recognisable enough that it almost feels like its own folklore template - one written partly by culture, yes, but also by the sleeping body.

What I found most valuable in Jandial’s discussion of sleep paralysis was not only the possible neuroscience behind it, but the advice for getting through it. When panic begins to climb, he suggests closing your eyes and reminding yourself that this is a bodily experience, not a supernatural one.

I think that is powerful.

Not because it transforms sleep paralysis into something pleasant, or tidy, or easy to dismiss. But because panic loves narrative. The moment the brain reaches for something is here, terror expands to fill the room. And if sleep paralysis is, in effect, a misaligned overlap of wakefulness and dreaming - if consciousness has returned before the body has fully caught up - then one of the most useful things a person can do may be to interrupt the story before it hardens. This is temporary. This is my body. This is frightening, but known.

There is something deeply humane in that reframing. It does not mock the fear but honours it while refusing to hand it a demon mask.

This is one of the places where science perspectives can be actively kind by offering language that does not belittle the experience, but does loosen its supernatural inevitability. If you know that sleep paralysis is a known phenomenon, that sensed presences and chest pressure are common features, that the event will pass, then the fear may still be there, but it is no longer quite so total. The night has not opened up to swallow you whole. Your nervous system is doing something alarming, but not unknowable.

Nightmares, of course, operate differently. They do not pin you in place between states. They drag you fully under.

Bad dreams are ordinary. but nightmare disorder is something else. When nightmares recur often enough to disrupt sleep, worsen mood, make a person dread bedtime, or impair how they function the next day, they stop being an occasional bit of nocturnal unpleasantness and start becoming a health issue. For people living with that pattern, the sleeping mind can begin to feel almost hostile. Not mysterious in an enticing way, but punitive. Treacherous. A place you are forced to visit even when you know it will hurt you.

That is why I was glad to see imagery rehearsal therapy mentioned as a response to nightmares. Imagery rehearsal therapy, or IRT, is an evidence-based approach in which a recurring nightmare is rewritten while awake into a less threatening version, then mentally rehearsed. NHS and hospital guidance describe it as a well-supported treatment for recurring nightmares and nightmare disorder. There is something almost radical in that idea: not because it promises mastery, but because it rejects inevitability.

The nightmare is not sacred, or untouchable. It is not necessarily a prophecy, or a punishment, or a truth serum administered by the unconscious. Sometimes it is a loop. A script. A pattern that has been carved too deep and fires too easily. And sometimes, with the right support, it can be interrupted.

Refer a friend

That fascinates me, especially in the context of the paranormal, because night-time experiences are so often handed immediately to the supernatural. I understand why. Night is when the borders feel thin and the self is less stable, less defended, less able to insist on the ordinary. A dream can feel like visitation. Sleep paralysis can feel like assault. A half-waking presence can feel more convincing than anything daylight could possibly explain away.

But convincing is not the same thing as external, and I think that distinction matters.

Not because I want to flatten every eerie night-time experience into a diagnosis or a neurotransmitter problem. That would be as unhelpful, in its own way, as declaring every strange sensation proof of haunting. What interests me is the overlap: the space where fear, physiology, culture, memory and imagination all meet. The place where the brain’s talent for storytelling can turn the bedroom into a stage set for terror, and understanding the mechanisms behind this does not destroy mystery, but changes its scale.

That has always been, to me, one of the most compelling lessons in the science behind the paranormal. Human beings are not passive cameras but instead embodied meaning-makers. We dream, misperceive and fill in gaps. We feel things before we can name them, and bring old beliefs and personal history into the room with us. That does not make our experiences trivial. It makes them richly, sometimes painfully, human.

Understanding nightmares and sleep paralysis through a neuroscientific lens is not simply information to consider but a frame through which to see frightening night experiences as real without seeing them as supernatural by default. It enables you to take them seriously without surrendering to them and to understand that fear at night can be ancient and bodily and culturally freighted all at once.

The night is very good at telling stories. Some of them come from old houses and older beliefs. Some come from the strange theatre of the sleeping brain, and some come from the collision between the two.

But if you have ever delayed going to bed because you knew what waited for you there, then language matters. Explanation matters. Relief matters.

Sometimes the most compassionate thing science can do is not strip the mystery away, but hand you a torch and say: here. This is frightening. But you are not alone in it. And there may be a way through.

There was a period after I stopped being a believer in ghosts when I became a little too fond of debunking things.

That was probably inevitable. When you change your mind about something big, there is a temptation to swing too far the other way. In my case, that meant becoming very interested in pulling claims apart, spotting the weak points, and refusing to let anything even vaguely spooky stay mysterious if I could help it.

To be fair, some of that instinct is still useful. A lot of paranormal media is rubbish, and online ghost-hunting content is often built on bad evidence, worse reasoning, and the assumption that if you say something dramatically enough in the dark, nobody will ask follow-up questions. I’m not above pointing that out, and I doubt I ever will be.

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But at some point I realised that trying to shoehorn every phenomenon into an explanation as quickly as possible is not actually the most interesting question. Quite often, it is the least interesting one.

What interests me much more now is the bigger picture. How people interpret unusual experiences. Why some beliefs stick. What role trust, education, prior belief, culture, and personal context play in shaping what an experience means. Not because I think everything strange can be flattened into psychology, but because human experience does not happen in neat little compartments and if something odd happens to someone, it does not arrive in a vacuum. It arrives in a life.

That is a large part of why I study psychology.

My final project for my Bachelors in Psychology really sharpened this for me. I looked at whether paranormal belief could be predicted by science literacy and levels of trust in science. Using responses from 618 members of the public, I found that lower science literacy and lower levels of trust in science significantly predicted higher paranormal belief scores. Overall, the model explained 46.3% of the variance in paranormal belief. Put plainly, that means these variables explained nearly half of why people in the sample differed in their levels of paranormal belief, which is a pretty sizeable chunk when you’re dealing with something as complicated as human belief.

What mattered to me about those findings was not that they handed me a neat script for explaining belief away or defining believers. It was that they made the whole subject feel much bigger.

They pushed me toward broader questions about how people build a view of the world in the first place. How trust in science operates, and what happens when people feel disconnected from scientific authority or excluded from it. How education affects confidence and interpretation and why belief is shaped not just by a single spooky claim, but by the wider framework a person brings to it.

Just as importantly, the project also reminded me how messy these questions are when you get up close to them. In the limitations section, I wrote about how some of the survey items risked flattening nuance. One participant got stuck on the statement “witches do exist” because they read it partly through the lens of contemporary Wicca rather than supernatural witchcraft and magic. Another participant, who described themselves as a non-believer and very sceptical about the supernatural, strongly agreed that there is life on other planets, which then pushed up their paranormal belief score. That is partly a survey-design issue, obviously, but it is also a useful reminder that people do not interpret language in neat, uniform ways just because a researcher would like them to.

And that, honestly, is far more interesting to me than simply standing on the sidelines trying to declare everything explained.

I do not particularly want to be someone whose entire role is to pop up whenever a ghost-hunting influencer posts some nonsense and say, with weary authority, that it was dust or infrasound or bad wiring. Sometimes it probably is dust, or infrasound, or bad wiring. Sometimes ridiculous claims do need challenging. And yes, I suspect being a talking head in newspapers is one of those occupational hazards that comes with the territory. But I do not want that to be the centre of my work.

What I care about is the wider picture around paranormal belief and experience. The human part of it. The interpretive part. The part that tells you something about the person, the setting, the moment, and the ideas already in play before anybody even starts arguing over whether a ghost was involved.

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That is why I keep coming back to the idea of the interconnectedness of all things and taking a holistic approach to the way I research spooky stuff (hence the spiral in my new artwork). You’ll forgive me for getting all Dirk Gently on you, but it’s a good way of explaining what I’m trying to say.

Because I do think the best investigators understand this, whether they phrase it like that or not. They know that you cannot really look at a haunting, or an uncanny experience, or a strange report as though it exists on its own. You have to look at the wider situation around it too. That is not dodging the question - it is part of the question. An important one.

Studying psychology has helped me make sense of that. It has not made me less interested in the paranormal. If anything, it has made me more interested in it, because it has given me better tools for asking better questions and for reflexivity. I’m now in the middle of a Masters in Psychology as well, and part of what keeps me there is that sense that the subject keeps opening things up rather than closing them down.

It has also helped me understand more clearly what I want this space to be.

For years, many of you knew me through Hayley is a Ghost. That blog was part of my life for a very long time, and I’m still fond of it for that reason. But moving from there into The Ghost Geek was not just a platform change, and it was not just about wanting a different title. It reflected a shift in me too.

The last couple of years have given me a lot to think about, in work and in life generally. Enough to make me re-evaluate where I am, what I’m doing, and what kind of researcher and writer I actually want to be. So in some ways, this piece is me re-establishing myself a bit. Not as someone who has abandoned the paranormal, and not as someone who thinks the only respectable response to strange experience is to explain it away as fast as possible, but as someone who is much more interested in the bigger questions than I used to be.

I’m still interested in ghosts. I’m still interested in hauntings, monsters, weird experiences, folklore, belief, testimony, and terrible investigations. And good ones, too! But I’m much less interested in forcing everything into a tidy explanation, having that tunnel-vision to find the most rational explanation as quickly as possible. I’m much more interested in what these experiences reveal when you stop treating them as isolated curiosities and start looking at the wider human picture around them.

That is what I’m doing now.

That is what The Ghost Geek is for. I’m really pleased you’re here with me, and I hope that this shift in focus is intriguing enough for you to stick around.

Who knows what we might discover.

I picked up Be More Bird: Life Lessons from a Hawk by Candida Meyrick on a whim, which is often how the best books seem to find us. It was sitting there on one of those little promotional displays in the bookshop, and because I’ve always had a particular fondness for birds of prey, I added it to my pile as a last-minute impulse purchase.

I’m so glad I did.

I loved this book. Genuinely, deeply loved it. It’s beautiful - not in a polished, superficial sense, but in the way it quietly unfolds its thoughts about illness, identity, freedom, family, fear, and the strange ways our lives can be reshaped by paying attention to another living creature. Bird, Meyrick’s hawk, is at the heart of the story, but this isn’t simply a book about falconry or nature writing. It’s about what Bird came to mean to her, and what Meyrick discovered through loving, observing, hunting, and living alongside her.

The book traces Meyrick’s rethinking of her life after a cancer diagnosis, her experience of Bird joining her family during lockdown, and the lessons she came to take from that relationship. I thought the Guardian review was rather harsh, criticising it as a sort of self-help book that misses the mark, but that wasn’t my reading of it at all. To me, this isn’t really a self-help manual in the usual sense. It doesn’t feel like Meyrick is trying to hand down a neat set of universal life lessons for the rest of us to obediently apply.

Instead, it feels much more honest than that.

This is Meyrick’s story about the lessons she took from Bird. That’s what makes it work. It’s personal rather than prescriptive, reflective rather than preachy. The book is less “here is how to live” and more “this is what this extraordinary creature helped me to see about my own life.” That distinction matters, and I think it’s where some reviews have perhaps missed the point. Not every reflective book has to present itself as a blueprint. Sometimes it is enough, and more than enough, for a writer to say: this is what happened to me, and this is what I learned from it.

One quote right near the end of the book really stopped me in my tracks:

“We’re all wearing disguises, more or less, but some are chosen - beautiful costumes designed to manifest new intention. Others are just unwanted, hand-me-downs: someone else’s life you’ve been wearing for far too long.”

That hit me hard.

As someone who has only recently emerged back into the world after a career break of almost a year because of neurodivergent burnout, I felt that one in my chest. Sometimes a sentence arrives at exactly the right moment, and this one did. It captures something I think many people will recognise: the exhausting experience of living in shapes that don’t fit you, of carrying ways of being that were never really yours, of realising that survival and authenticity are not always the same thing.

That, for me, is where Be More Bird really shines. It isn’t trying to be a tidy, marketable handbook for personal transformation. It’s much more intimate and more human than that. It’s about recovery, attention, companionship, and the small but profound shifts that can happen when your life is interrupted and you’re forced to ask yourself whether the way you’ve been living is actually the way you want to go on.

This is a lovely, thoughtful, moving book, best read slow - I’m honestly delighted that I picked it up on impulse, and I’m going to make an effort to be more Bird.

You can almost set your watch by how these stories get treated. A headline written with all the delicacy of someone throwing a custard pie at the supernatural, intended to produce cheap laughs and raised eyebrows before everyone moves on. What you almost never get is anything more interesting than that. No curiosity, context, or attempts to explore what might actually sit underneath such claims, beyond the easy thrill of “look at this ridiculous woman and her spectral boyfriend.”

But that is the boring version of the story.

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The more interesting version starts from a much less glamorous truth - human beings are actually very good at having strange experiences, and not all of them fit neatly into the polite boxes of ordinary life. Shocking, I know. The field of Psychology has a term that is useful here: felt presence. It refers to the sense that someone or something is there, nearby, even when there is no clear sensory evidence of another person. Some people reading this may have experienced this. It’s an experience that’s not just the stuff of ghost stories and has been discussed in relation to bereavement, neurological conditions, psychosis, spiritual practice, anxiety, and physically or psychologically taxing situations. In fact, a large 2024 population study found that 1.6% of participants reported a felt presence in the past month, and that these experiences were associated with loneliness, poor sleep, adverse events, and other hallucinatory or delusion-like experiences.1

That does not mean every “ghost lover” story has a neat medical explanation, still less that strangers in the press should be diagnosed from the comfort of your sofa. Instead, it shows us how the raw experience itself - the feeling that an unseen other is present, attentive, maybe even interactive - is a recognised part of human experience. In other words, the sensation may be real as an experience even if the explanation attached to it is doing a lot of cultural work. Research on anomalous experiences makes exactly this distinction: between the experience someone has and the paranormal attribution they give it afterwards. 2

Sleep is another big piece of the puzzle. Sleep paralysis is far from rare, and one systematic review found lifetime prevalence rates of 7.6% in the general population, rising much higher in students and psychiatric samples. These episodes can involve waking immobility, terror, chest pressure, tactile sensations, and the overwhelming conviction that there is another presence in the room.3 As a ghost researcher, the strangest stories of sleep paralysis I’ve encountered from members of the public who contacted me for help involved a person who would wake to see a giant frog sitting on their chest, and another who got hugged by an unseen presence from behind. Not nice.

There is also so-called incubus phenomenon, a sleep-related experience involving paralysis, a sensed entity, bodily pressure, and sometimes explicitly sexual sensations. A meta-analysis estimated its lifetime prevalence at around 11% in the general population and 41% in selected at-risk groups. That does not prove ghost sex, obviously, but shows that intensely physical, intimate-feeling experiences involving an unseen presence are not some impossible absurdity dreamt up by tabloids for a slow news day.4

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Then there is grief, which has always sat uncomfortably between psychology, religion, and folklore. Bereavement researchers have long noted that many grieving people report sensing the presence of the dead. Sometimes that means hearing a voice, smelling a familiar perfume, or feeling a touch. Sometimes it’s less sensory than that - just a vivid, inexplicable sense that someone beloved is there. Reviews of this literature suggest these experiences are often benign and need to be understood in their personal, relational, and cultural context, not flattened immediately into pathology. That matters because once you accept that people can experience the dead as emotionally and even physically near, the leap from presence to relationship starts to look less like nonsense and more like a human attempt to narrate something unusual using the language available to them.5

And that, really, is the key point…

Experiences like this do not arrive with subtitles. People have sensations, impressions, bodily states, dreams, half-waking episodes, grief reactions, and moments of intense emotional conviction and culture hands them a script. In one context the unseen presence is interpreted as a demon, in another it is a spirit guide. To someone else it is a dead spouse, an angel, a haunting, or simply “something odd that happened when I was exhausted.” Folklore has always provided templates for intimate encounters with unseen beings - modern paranormal culture just gives those old ideas a fresh haircut and a media strategy.

That’s also why the gendered side of these stories is worth noticing. Some research has found that women are more likely than men to report belief in many paranormal phenomena, and the large felt-presence study found women overrepresented among those reporting the experience. At the same time, we should not be naive about media selection. “Woman says she has a ghost lover” is not just a paranormal story but also a story about femininity, sexuality, weirdness, and public spectacle. It fits a very old cultural pattern in which women’s claims about bodies, desire, mysticism, and the unseen are made both hyper-visible and faintly ridiculous. Even if women were not more likely to report certain beliefs or experiences - and in some areas they do seem to be - editors would still be more likely to package these stories in ways designed to invite mockery.6

Media plays another important role here, too. People don’t make sense of unusual experiences in a vacuum and a 2024 study found that viewing paranormal documentaries and reality TV, following paranormal news, and even using YouTube for paranormal content predicted stronger belief in hauntings. That doesn’t mean if someone watches enough ghost television they suddenly develop a supernatural situationship, but instead that contemporary culture supplies ready-made ways for explaining experiences that are already emotionally powerful, confusing, or intense. If your world is full of paranormal language, then the paranormal becomes one of the easiest ways to narrate what happened to you.7

This is why I find the point-and-laugh coverage so unsatisfying. It tells us almost nothing interesting and reduces a potentially rich topic - belief, embodiment, loneliness, sexuality, grief, suggestion, culture, sleep, folklore - to a punchline. And frankly, we can do better than that. I do not believe in literal ghost boyfriends, but I do believe that people can have vivid, intimate, frightening, comforting, or socially meaningful experiences that they then interpret through a supernatural frame.

That, to me, is the real story. Not the question of “is ghost sex real?” but “what kind of human experience becomes legible as ghost sex in the first place?” Once you ask that sort of question, the whole thing gets a lot less silly and a lot more revealing because beneath the daft headlines and the easy jokes, this is not really a story about ghosts but instead an exploration of how people make meaning out of the strange things their minds and bodies sometimes do, and about how eagerly the rest of us turn that into entertainment.

I didn’t get spooked. I got déjà vu.

I recognised that “little boy ghost” instantly - not from a haunted theatre, but from my own photo taken in a park here in Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire. What are the chances that the same ghost, making the same pose, can appear in photos taken so far apart at different times?

Quite high, actually.

Because the little boy in question is one of the stock spectres in a ghost-photo app called Ghost Stickers - an app that lets you drop ready-made spooky transparent figures into your photos and pretend you’ve photographed the afterlife on a Thursday afternoon. I have a love-hate relationship with them. I love them because lol, I hate them because ugh.

I double checked the app, and there he was: same pose, same outline, same pressed collar, same wistful “I died but make it aesthetic” vibe. Click the images below to see the app screens in more detail:

What I can’t tell you is who added the ghost - that’s between whoever sent the photo to The Friends of Oldham Coliseum and their conscience. What I can say, with confidence, is that there is no genuine “spirit of a little boy” in that picture.

Here is a zoomed-in version of the original photo with the little boy sticker overlaid:

There are so many app-generated ghost photos floating around now that you couldn’t debunk them all if you tried. This one just happened to cross my feed, and I recognised the ghost on sight.

What? Did you think I was being cute when I called my blog The Ghost Geek?

Predictably, the reaction online split into two camps.

On one side were people asking how on earth a modern health service could entertain something so “medieval”. On the other were people insisting that of course hospitals are haunted, because how could they not be?

What didn’t quite make it into the final article was the longer thread of thought behind my response. And that longer thread matters (in my humble opinion) because this story isn’t really about ghosts at all.

It’s about context, fear, and what happens when we treat distress as a supernatural problem to be solved.

Why certain places feel haunted

One of the things I said in my conversation with the science editor of The Telegraph is that it’s not unusual for people to link strange experiences to ghosts in places where we’re forced to confront mortality.

Hospices, hospitals, funeral homes, care homes, prisons, old institutions tied to illness or death. These are environments where people are under extreme emotional strain, sleep is disrupted, routines are unfamiliar, lighting, sounds, and smells are different from normal domestic spaces. Anxiety is high, control is low, and historical and social context are pressing down from all sides.

Psychologists have long noted that “magical thinking” increases during periods of uncertainty and stress - not because people become stupid, but because the human mind uses pattern-making, meaning-seeking processes to make sense of the world around us every single second of the day.

When we are frightened, we look for explanations. And a setting already loaded with cultural stories - “children’s hospital”, “old ward”, “hospice” - creates the perfect conditions for suggestion to do its work.

That doesn’t mean people are lying, or even that they’re wrong about what they experienced! We just have to clock the fact that their experiences are being interpreted through a lens that already expects something unusual.

When “solving” the haunting makes things worse

In the Norwich case, the response was to involve deliverance ministers - what most people would call exorcists - and to perform a blessing with holy oil, reportedly to calm staff and patients.

Personally, as a paranormal researcher, I advise people not to take this route. However, I understand why that happened, but I’ll come back to that.

There’s a risk here that rarely gets talked about and it is the part of these stories that worries me most - the part that tends to get lost when the focus stays on whether ghosts are real or not. Because when an exorcist, deliverance minister, or spirit medium is brought in, and a blessing or cleansing is performed, something very predictable often happens.

Things calm down.

The atmosphere feels lighter, people sleep better, anxiety drops. Staff feel supported and (importantly) listened to. The building feels different.

From the outside, this looks like a success, but what’s actually happened is that the emotional temperature has changed, not the underlying conditions.

Whatever caused the experiences in the first place - creaking floorboards, temperature fluctuations, lighting conditions, exhaustion, grief, stress, psychological priming, misidentification, a hoax, or any combination of the above - has not been explored or resolved. The cause is still there. It’s just quieter for a while, because people feel safer and frame things differently in their minds.

And then eventually - because buildings still make noises, because humans still misperceive things, because stress and fatigue come back - the experiences start up again. And this is where the real harm can begin, because at that point, the blessing hasn’t just failed. In the mind of the person experiencing the phenomena, it has proven something.

If the experiences stopped after the cleansing, then whatever was causing them must have been supernatural, right? And if they’ve started again, then the ghost - or spirit, or entity - must have returned.

The blessing becomes confirmation, not comfort.

From there, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to help someone reinterpret what they’re experiencing. Any attempt to talk about environmental causes or psychological factors now feels like denial because the logic is airtight from the inside: we dealt with the ghost, it went away, and now it’s back.

I’ve worked on cases where people reached this point and became far more frightened than they were at the beginning. One person needed sleeping tablets just to get through the night. Another became hyper-vigilant, constantly scanning their home for signs of activity. Their world narrowed around the haunting and eventually they had to move house.

And that’s the tragedy of it.

An intervention that felt kind, calming, and respectful in the short term can end up locking fear into place in the long term - because it reframes ordinary, explainable phenomena as evidence of something hostile and external. It adds to the narrative that the spooky stuff is unnatural and supernatural.

Once that frame is set, it’s incredibly hard to undo.

And yet… I still get why people turn to religion

Despite all of the above, I’m not sitting here rolling my eyes at terrified hospice staff or mocking people for seeking help from the church. I don’t believe in ghosts or gods myself - but I get it.

Underneath the lizard scales, I am a human too. If I were working long shifts in a hospice during or just after a pandemic, surrounded by death, uncertainty, and emotional overload - and something strange happened - I’d probably want someone to make it stop as well.

When someone is frightened, exhausted, grieving, or overwhelmed, what they are often looking for isn’t an explanation. They’re looking for comfort.

In those situations you need someone to tell you they believe you and don’t think you’re crazy. Someone who is a figure of perceived authority, who says calmly that you’re not alone, this can be dealt with, and that you’re safe.

The go-to for that is rarely a skeptic ghost investigator. (🥺)

From that perspective, a religious blessing or spirit cleansing functions a bit like a placebo.

Even The Telegraph’s follow-up piece from a deliverance minister’s perspective makes this clear, whether intentionally or not. Much of the work described isn’t dramatic Hollywood exorcism, but reassurance, listening, prayer, and creating a sense of order where things feel chaotic .

The problem isn’t compassion. The problem is what story we tell about why it’s happening.

The uncomfortable middle ground

So where does that leave us?

Ideally - theoretically - we’d take the time to investigate strange experiences carefully, patiently, and without defaulting to supernatural explanations. We’d look at environmental factors, psychological ones, social ones. We’d support people without reinforcing fear.

In reality, that takes time, money, training, and emotional labour - all things in short supply, especially in healthcare settings.

Which is why stories like this keep happening.

Not because ghosts are real but because fear is real. Grief is real. Stress is real. And humans will always reach for meaning when the ground feels unstable beneath them.

The challenge - for sceptics, clinicians, journalists, and non-belivers and believers alike - is to respond to that fear without accidentally making it worse.

Because the most haunting thing in these stories is never the ghost.

It’s the distress sitting underneath it.

It’s Friday, which means my brain has once again become a small magpie: snatching up shiny scraps of folklore, ghosts, grief, and odd little cultural tremors, and dragging them back to the nest.

Welcome to the second installment of The Ghost Geek’s Friday Files: a semi-regular round-up of the strange and interesting things that have crossed my screen lately. Think part scrapbook, part dispatch from the ghost-nerd trenches.

Ghosts as philosophy, not just Halloween décor

If you’re in the mood for a genuinely good current think piece, The Guardian has an interview with the author George Saunders that explicitly engages with ghosts as a way of thinking about mortality, meaning, and what we do with “presence” after a person is gone.

It also feels relevant right now because, in a period marked by mass death, public trauma, and a constant low-level sense of dread, Saunders frames ghosts not as horror props but as the natural consequence of lives cut short or left unresolved. It’s a useful reminder that ghost stories tend to surge when societies are struggling to process what’s happened to them - and what they’ve lost.

📌 ‘How do you really tell the truth about this moment?’: George Saunders on ghosts, mortality and Trump’s America (The Guardian)

Dead Man in the Pulpit 🩻

Simon Young’s recent post on his British Mythology substack, Dead Man in the Pulpit, is exactly the kind of historical ghost report that gets under your skin: a winter night, a church choir practising, a door creeping open… and then something walking down the aisle and climbing into the pulpit.

It gave me goosebumps 😱

It’s atmospheric, weirdly intimate, and (crucially) it doesn’t overplay its hand. It’s also a nice reminder that some of the best ghost writing isn’t about proving anything. It’s about the feeling of being there, in the dim light, with your heart in your throat. Absolutely love the British Mythology Substack!

📌 Dead Man in the Pulpit (British Mythology)

Grief, art, and ghosts as creative companions

Paste ran a cover story on Sufjan Stevens (no relation 😉) that dips into grief and ghosts in the way artists often do: not necessarily “I saw an apparition”, but the quieter sense of being haunted by love, memory, and the endurance of certain presences.

This piece quietly reframes ghosts as something closer to companionship than fear. These aren’t apparitions that need explaining away, but emotional presences that linger when love, grief, and memory don’t have a clean endpoint. In a culture that’s increasingly uncomfortable with prolonged mourning - that expects people to “move on” efficiently - Stevens treats being haunted as a form of fidelity - a way of continuing to carry those we’ve lost, even when it hurts.

📌 Sufjan Stevens Communicates With Ghosts (Paste Magazine)

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FYI: Stephen King on Netflix 🎞️

This one is less “think piece” and more practical ghost-nerd housekeeping: Netflix Tudum has a handy summary of Stephen King adaptations currently on Netflix, and I genuinely didn’t realise how many were sitting there waiting to be watched. So, if you’re the kind of person who periodically thinks “I want something unsettling, but familiar,” this is a useful little menu.

📌 Stephen King Movies & Series on Netflix to Watch Right Now (Netflix)

Also from me: The Worst Ghosts of 2025 👻

If you missed it, I recently posted The Worst Ghosts of 2025 - a lovingly judgemental little recap of the spectral nonsense that made me sigh into my tea last year. 5 worst ghosts to make the headlines in 2025 (and why I secretly love a naff spook.)

That concludes this week’s Friday Files. Hope you have a lovely weekend ✨

If you’ve got a link, story, or weird headline you think I’d enjoy, feel free to email me or fling it at me on social media (Bluesky | Instagram) like a small paranormal offering.

Not a presence.
Not a trace.
Not a maybe.

An enemy.

In contemporary paranormal television, ghost tours, podcasts, and viral clips, the default assumption is often no longer that something strange might be happening, but that something malevolent already is. The room isn’t just cold; it’s hostile. The building isn’t just old; it’s dangerous. The dead aren’t confused or lingering; they are angry, predatory, and watching.

This shift didn’t happen because we suddenly uncovered stronger evidence for the paranormal. It happened because evil is much easier to work with than uncertainty.

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If you look back at older ghost stories - folklore, early “true haunting” accounts, even the first wave of modern investigations - ghosts were often ambiguous. They were echoes, shades, repetitions, glitches in place and time and memory. They could be frightening, sure, but they were not always framed as actively malicious. The task was to endure them, accommodate them, or try to understand them, not to defeat them. The haunting was, in a sense, an unresolved question: something that sat at the edge of explanation and refused to move.

By contrast, much of today’s paranormal media approaches hauntings as confrontations. The language has hardened. Locations are not simply haunted; they are dangerous. Spirits are not merely restless; they are aggressive. Investigators do not enter spaces to observe; they enter to challenge. Torches, cameras, and EMF meters are presented not only as tools, but as a kind of armour. In this sense, curiosity is rebranded as bravery, and fear itself is quietly treated as confirmation that something dark must be present.

The ghost, in this modern framing, is no longer an echo. It is an opponent. And that transformation reflects wider habits in how we tell stories about risk, harm, and otherness.

Uncertainty is uncomfortable. It requires patience, humility, and a willingness to sit with “I don’t know”. Evil, by contrast, offers immediate relief. It supplies motive where none is obvious. It gives shape to randomness and tells us what to feel and who to blame. From a psychological perspective, this is highly appealing. Humans are pattern-seeking creatures with finely tuned threat-detection systems. When something feels uncanny - a noise in an empty corridor, a sensation of being watched, a moment of disorientation - our brains instinctively search for cause and agency. An evil presence provides both in a single move.

Label a place or a presence evil and several things are achieved at once. Fear is validated: feeling uneasy becomes evidence of an external threat, not a reflection of mood or context. Responsibility is displaced: if a location is dangerous by nature, then provoking it or mishandling the story becomes less of an ethical problem. Failure is excused: if the entity is malevolent, then inconclusive results can be reframed as “it was too strong” or “it was a trickster” rather than “our methods were limited”. The label does a great deal of quiet psychological work because it explains fear without requiring us to think too deeply about why we are afraid, or what else might be going on.

There is also a practical dimension. Paranormal tourism and media do not sit outside ordinary economic pressures. They operate in the same attention-driven environment as everything else, where escalation is rewarded and nuance quietly disappears. “Nothing happened” does not sell tickets. “Something strange, but unclear” rarely goes viral. “Some mundane explanations remain” does not sustain a television series. Evil, however, is marketable. Evil ghosts justify higher stakes, late-night live broadcasts, special access tours, and premium pricing. They transform historical sites into attractions with built-in drama and they allow experiences to be packaged, intensified and repeated.

None of this requires individual bad faith. It doesn’t demand that anyone secretly disbelieves what they are doing, it simply requires structural incentives that favour fear over ambiguity. When stories about dark forces outperform slow, inconclusive investigation, those stories become the template. When audiences reward confrontation, confrontation becomes the norm. The problem is not that people enjoy being scared - there is nothing new or inherently wrong about that - the problem is what happens to history, ethics, and basic empathy when fear has to be constantly escalated in order to hold attention.

Calling a place evil is not a neutral act. Haunted locations are rarely abstract spaces. They are homes, hospitals, prisons, workhouses, schools. They are sites of real human experience - poverty, illness, abuse, confinement, exploitation, injustice, violence. When we declare these places inherently malevolent, we risk flattening those histories into aesthetic and atmosphere. Trauma becomes a mood, injustice becomes lore, and the past becomes a monster.

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The language of evil allows us to skip harder questions:

Who lived here?

What was done to them?

Under what systems, and in whose interests?

Did they die without justice?

Evil replaces social and political context with supernatural intent. The building did not fail people; the ghost is bad. The institution did not harm anyone; the place is cursed. In this way, the evil ghost functions as a moral shortcut because it lets us engage with sites of suffering without having to dwell on the human decisions that produced that suffering in the first place. It absolves us of the responsibility for having fun on someone’s literal grave.

Once you notice this, certain moments in paranormal media take on a different tone entirely. One example that has stayed with me for a very long time comes from an early live broadcast of Most Haunted, filmed on Pendle Hill in Lancashire. The Pendle Witches case is a real historical episode involving real people, several of them women accused of witchcraft and executed in the seventeenth century. Whatever one believes about ghosts, these were not fictional characters, but human beings tried and put to death by the state.

During the show, ex-Blue Peter presenter Yvette Fielding accuses the dead women of torturing people, and at one point shouts at the presumed ghost of one of the executed women, challenges her to do something and calls her a “bitch”.

It was said in the now-familiar style of confrontational ghost hunting: direct, provocative, part of the attempt to elicit a response. The brave ghost hunter venturing into a supernatural hellhole, where evil entities wait in the shadows to attack the living. Pioneers, in other words.

The broadcast moved on. For many viewers, it probably registered as just another dramatic beat in a live Halloween event. But I remember watching it and feeling a jolt of discomfort. What does it mean to stand in a place linked to real executions, invoke the alleged ghost of an accused woman, and then, on live television, insult her in those terms? What does it mean to do so from a position backed by production, by an established brand, by an audience primed to see the location - and by extension its former inhabitants - as dangerous? (Let’s not dwell on the fact the women accused of witchcraft in Lancashire likely never stepped foot on that hill in the first place…)

That moment did not tell me anything about whether ghosts exist. It did, however, highlight how easily the language of evil and malevolent spirits can strip away context. An individual once caught up in a web of accusation, fear, injustice, and state-powered prosecution was reframed, in an instant, as a kind of character: a troublesome presence to be challenged, talked over, and dismissed.

It made my fucking blood boil.

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Whenever I hear people now speak confidently about evil locations, malevolent entities, or “real” dark hauntings, I often find myself thinking back to that broadcast from Pendle Hill. Not because it proves or disproves anything about the supernatural, but because it illustrates something revealing about the living: how quickly we can grant ourselves permission to speak about the dead as though they are fair game for whatever story we want to tell.

There is also something striking about the way so-called evil ghosts are treated more generally. They are not simply observed; they are challenged. Provoked. Instructed to perform on cue. Ghost hunters demand signs, knocks, words, physical sensations - any kind of measurable reaction - often couched in the language of confrontation: “Show yourself”, “Do something”, “Prove you’re here”.

This is not the posture of open curiosity. It is the posture of control and of contempt.

Framing the paranormal as adversarial mirrors other cultural anxieties: fear of losing authority, fear of the unseen, fear of not being in charge of the narrative. An evil ghost is something you can fight, even if only theatrically. Ambiguity is harder to stage. It does not lend itself to clear hero and villain roles. It does not resolve neatly at the end of an episode. By turning the unknown into an enemy, paranormal media reassure us that chaos can still be confronted - if only with the right kit, the right bravado, the right show format.

In the end, the current fascination with evil ghosts may tell us less about the dead than it does about the living. We inhabit a world where institutions feel fragile, expertise is contested, and information is overwhelming. Under those conditions, clear villains are attractive. They offer a kind of moral clarity: here is the bad thing; here is where we put our fear. Evil ghosts fit that role neatly. They allow us to externalise unease, to experience fear in a controlled way, to flirt with danger while being reassured that someone - usually the person with the torch and the earpiece - is still in charge.

Evil ghosts allow us to look away from more mundane and more uncomfortable realities. It is easier to talk about a cursed building than to examine who was imprisoned there and why. It is easier to blame a malevolent presence for a sense of dread than to consider environmental factors, personal history, or the suggestive power of a well-told story. The ghosts in these narratives are, in many ways, mirrors held up to our own preoccupations: with punishment, with transgression, with the desire to turn diffuse unease into something with a name and a motive.

None of this requires us to dismiss paranormal experiences altogether. One does not have to be a believer to acknowledge that people sometimes have vivid, unsettling, and meaningful encounters in particular places. Skepticism does not demand contempt just as curiosity does not require credulity. What it does suggest is that we have choices about the stories we tell around those experiences. We can treat haunted locations as battlegrounds, or as archives. We can insist that every strange feeling points to an enemy, or we can allow that some things may remain unresolved. We can prioritise spectacle, or we can prioritise care - for the living, and for the dead who once lived in those spaces. For the truth, in other words.

Ghosts do not need to be evil to be interesting and ambiguity does not need a villain in order to carry weight. The popularity of evil ghosts is not, at its core, a supernatural question but a psychological and cultural one. It speaks to our discomfort with not knowing, with unfinished histories, with emotions that don’t fit neatly into categories of good and bad.

We don’t need ghosts to be malevolent.

We need the world to make sense - and when it doesn’t, we reach for stories that promise it will, even if those stories flatten people into monsters and places into something we feel entitled to shout at. The more we rely on evil to tidy up our uncertainty, the less space we leave for asking what our ghosts - real, imagined or somewhere in between - might genuinely be trying to tell us.

I visited my Aunt and Uncle’s house for Christmas morning and we were taking some photographs in the lounge just before opening gifts. In this photo, there appears to be a white figure stood between the Christmas tree and the wall next to the window. There was no space there for a person to fit and nobody is unaccounted for in the photo for them to have accidentally been stood there. My aunt (in the green top and red trousers) believes it’s the ghost of her father.

It’s a familiar enough moment if you work in paranormal research: someone getting in touch because they’ve been spooked by a slightly uncanny image that shows a vague human-shaped form in the background, and that hopeful question - what do you think? In this case, the ghost is said to be a large white apparition standing behind a Christmas tree, half-obscured, easy to miss at first glance and impossible to unsee once pointed out.

My assessment is that the image isn’t paranormal at all - but it is interesting. Because this is the first time I’ve been asked to assess what I’m confident is an AI-generated ghost photo. I asked the sender for further photos from the set of those taken on that morning because I’d like to rule out that this was AI generated and I’ve heard nothing back in just over a week.

At first glance, the image presents itself as a candid festive scene: a group of people celebrating in a cosy living room, arms raised, a Christmas tree lit behind them. But on closer inspection, multiple elements don’t behave as real photographs (or places) do.

There are anatomical issues - a hand holding a wine glass that doesn’t convincingly grip it, fingers posed without a sense of pressure or weight. Decorative objects on the fireplace mantel resolve into vague, incoherent shapes rather than recognisable ornaments. A framed picture above the mantel has a border that exists only along its top edge, a structural failure that’s very common in generative imagery. The pattern on the rug looks weird, and the presents under the tree seem to merge.

Also, this is supposed to be a photo of people cheering but it looks instead like a room full of people holding their arms up in the air and keeping them still. Are they being held at gun point?

Lighting is another giveaway. The entire scene is bathed in a uniform, nostalgic glow that ignores the logic of competing light sources. The Christmas tree lights, the window, and the fireplace should be arguing with one another; instead, everything is evenly and politely illuminated. There’s motion without motion blur, softness without depth of field, and texture that smears rather than resolves - particularly in busy areas like wrapping paper, rugs, and baubles.

Taken together, these are not the quirks of a strange photograph but the fingerprints of image generation.

Which brings us to the “ghost” itself.

It is incredibly well placed and would make for a genuinely good, spooky ghost photo if this was genuinely as presented in the claimed story. The figure is human-sized, upright, centred behind a culturally loaded object, and partially obscured in a way that feels intentional rather than accidental. It almost looms there, watching over the people, unseen on the edge of the lively revelry in stark blues and whites which contrast to the warm colours of the living. This doesn’t look like an AI mistake that happened to resemble a ghost. It looks like an image prompted to contain one, but subtly enough to invite debate.

This is nothing new. People have been adding ghosts to photographs for as long as photography has existed. From Victorian spirit photography and double exposures to later darkroom tricks and digital edits, the desire to insert the uncanny into everyday images is not new. What has changed is simply the ease with which it can now be done.

AI image generation doesn’t create a new category of ghost photograph so much as it provides a new method for an old one. Instead of glass plates or Photoshop layers, we now have prompts and iterations. The intent - to produce something suggestive, ambiguous, and emotionally compelling - remains much the same.

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That’s why it’s important not to treat images like this as unprecedented or especially threatening. They don’t require panic, and they don’t require paranormal explanations. They require the same thing ghost photographs have always required: careful attention to how images are made, how they circulate, and how easily human perception fills in the gaps.

In this case, what’s being identified as a “ghost” isn’t an unexpected anomaly in a genuine photograph. It’s a deliberately shaped something in a synthetically generated image - designed to be noticed only after the fact. To suggest from the edge of the room.

This may be my first AI ghost photo, but it won’t be the last. And like every ghost image before it, it tells us far more about human expectation, storytelling, and belief than it does about the afterlife. Spooky.