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.

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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.

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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.

If you’re new here, allow me to explain: I’m a paranormal researcher who uses scientific scepticism to look for rational explanations for the weird and spooky things people experience. I don’t believe in the paranormal, but it’s a subject that endlessly fascinates me, and I’ve been investigating ghost mysteries for over 20 years.

2025’s Worst Ghosts list has it all: haunted hotels, medieval doorways doing a lot of heavy lifting, night-vision apparitions courtesy of Ring doorbells (of course), legend trippers calling themselves investigators but not knowing how cameras work, and ghost-hunting gadgets lighting up the countryside like a 90s rave.

So, without further ado, let’s jump into the worst ghosts of 2025! ⛈️

#5 By golly, a ghost!

The first ghost on the list technically dates back to 2016 but made the headlines in 2025. The holiday photo was taken at the famously haunted Stanley Hotel where Henry Yau claims he deliberately waited until the grand staircase was clear of people before taking the photo, only to later discover a dark, human-shaped figure standing at the top of the stairs. He shared the image on Facebook with a red circle for clarity and the immortal caption: “By golly! I think I may have captured a #ghost.” The hotel, of course, is best known for inspiring The Shining, which did absolutely nothing to calm the internet down.

What we’re likely looking at here is a combination of low light, long exposure, and someone quietly not being as gone as hoped. Hotel interiors like this are dim, warmly lit, and full of reflective surfaces; a person moving or standing still briefly at the top of the stairs can register as a dark, semi-defined shape, especially if they’re dressed in darker clothing and partially backlit. Add a bit of noise, compression, and expectation - plus the psychological boost of knowing the hotel’s reputation - and suddenly a perfectly normal human becomes a Victorian-looking apparition.

As for the sudden illness afterwards? Chalk that up to altitude, excitement, a late dinner, or the creeping realisation that you’ve just accidentally invented a ghost story you’ll be explaining for the next nine years. By golly, indeed.

#4 The ghost of a miner’s wife

This one comes courtesy of a Ring doorbell in Staffordshire via those top class journalists over at LadBible. Homeowner, Kerry-Anne Docherty, spotted what looked like a semi-transparent figure drifting past her neighbour, Jackie Batt, in night-vision footage captured early one morning. Batt, who says she didn’t see anyone else at the time, later suggested the tall, hat-wearing figure resembled a woman in 1940s clothing and speculated it might be the ghost of a miner’s wife, given the history of their houses.

The reality is that transparent figures (and even animals and cars) in Ring doorbell night-vision footage are a well-documented camera artefact rather than evidence of anything paranormal. In low-light conditions, Ring cameras rely on infrared illumination, heavy video compression, and frame-to-frame noise reduction to produce a usable image. When a person or object moves through the scene, these processes can partially blend frames, smear motion, or preserve the static background more strongly than the moving subject, creating the illusion that a person briefly fades, doubles, or becomes see-through. Reflections of infrared light from nearby walls, windows, wet surfaces, or even slight lens smudges can exaggerate the effect, particularly in night mode where the system is already working at the limits of what the sensor can resolve.

Or, you know, it’s the ghost of a Miner’s wife, I guess 🤷

#3 Empress Matilda (but make it a doorway)

This one comes from Oxford Castle, where an Australian backpacker on a daytime tour accidentally photographed what tabloids like The Mirror quickly identified as the ghost of Empress Matilda. The pale, cloaked figure appears to be standing in a shadowy doorway inside St George’s Tower - a location famously linked to Matilda’s dramatic 12th-century escape during a siege. The photographer says the room looked empty moments earlier and they only noticed the figure later when reviewing the photos at home, a detail which, naturally, did not calm anyone down.

In reality, this is a like a case of architectural pareidolia: a narrow stone recess photographed at an angle, with the inner room not properly visible, taken in uneven daylight, picking out some elements and leaving the rest in shadow. The “figure” has no face, limbs, depth, or separation from the surrounding stone - just a convenient vertical light patch doing its best impression of a medieval woman once a story is attached. Without the caption, it’s a doorway. With it, it’s suddenly Plantagenet royalty popping back in to check nobody’s nicked her escape route…

#2 Lady Dinah Pearce’s ghost in motion

This photo comes from a séance held at The Pearce Institute in Glasgow, where according to The National, ghost hunting event staff claim to have captured on camera the ghost of Lady Dinah Pearce, benefactor of the building and widow of shipbuilding magnate Sir William Pearce. The photograph was taken after a late-night séance in which participants sat around a table calling out to Lady Pearce, and was later shared by Paranormal Scotland Ltd as what they describe as their clearest evidence yet of an “intelligent haunting” (👀).

It’s claimed the photo shows the outline of a figure, including face and clothing. In reality, it shows multiple seated people who are already visibly blurred, strongly suggesting a slow shutter speed or long exposure in low light. When someone moves through the frame - or shifts position - they appear semi-transparent, smeared, or partially overlaid on the background, producing exactly the kind of apparition effect seen here. There’s no single, stable figure - just motion blur, camera shake, and overlapping exposures doing what they’ve always done best at séances - creating something uncanny enough for the brain to promote it straight to ghost.

#1 The blood moon EDM rave ghost

This entry comes from Kinnitty Castle, where a group calling themselves Paranormal Supernatural Investigations Ireland (paranormal and supernatural, just in case you were worried they’d miss anything) claimed to capture an “extraordinary mass of energy” at a stone circle following a blood moon. According to the group, their equipment was “lighting up,” the atmosphere was “electric,” and a mysterious shape appeared in one photograph but not the next - which they took as clear evidence of an entity making itself known.

What the image actually shows is a low-light, long-exposure photograph featuring significant motion blur, camera shake, and a frankly heroic amount of red and green LEDs from ghost-hunting equipment. The result looks less like an ancient spirit and more like someone accidentally wandered into a forest rave while the DJ was mid–light test. The dark, semi-transparent figure is consistent with a person moving through the frame during a slow shutter, while the neon ground glow is just gadgets enthusiastically painting the landscape like it’s Glastonbury, but for vibes.

Either that, or the ghosts of Offaly have finally embraced drum and bass 🙌

Thanks for reading, and for indulging this annual tradition of gentle scepticism and festive side-eye. Whether you’re spending the holidays with family, friends, or quietly reviewing blurry photos from haunted hotels on a solo stakeout, I wish you a very Merry Christmas and a happy, peaceful New Year - and may 2026 bring us fewer red circles, fewer masses of energy, and just the right number of rubbish ghosts.

Coming in 2026…

In January, I’m turning on subscriber referrals which will unlock exclusive The Ghost Geek rewards, including The Ghost Geek Practical Field Kit and The Ghost Geek’s Tips & Tricks - handy, no-nonsense guides to paranormal research and making sense of ghost stories in the wild, including print out and keep resources. All you’ll have to do to is share The Ghost Geek with your friends and family. Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss the launch for these freebies!

In a recent episode of the BBCs Uncanny, that closure arrives in the form of popcorn.

In the episode in question, the setup is elegant radio. Danny Robins frames the case as the rare one that stumped Dr Ciarán O’Keeffe. O’Keeffe pushes back - he’s not stumped, he has a possible explanation - and then comes the pivot: the clue lies in what the witnesses were doing before they saw a ghost. They were at the cinema and at a cinema you might eat popcorn. Popcorn, O’Keeffe points out, that is stored in humid environments can develop mould, and mould can produce mycotoxins. Mycotoxins can affect you neurologically and therefore popcorn becomes the suspect for what is framed as a potential hallucination experienced by two people at the same time.

It’s neat. It’s also a masterclass in how a single speculative mechanism can get promoted into a story-solving diagnosis without the audience ever being given the evidential bridge they’d need to cross. And boy, is that a bridge that needs to be crossed here. There are two separate topics that keep getting braided together:

1. damp and mould as a real public-health problem,

2. so-called toxic mould as a catch-all explanation for anomalous experiences.

They are not the same thing - and if you care about scepticism, or witnesses, or basic intellectual hygiene, you don’t treat them as interchangeable.

Damp and mould are real problems that matter

Let’s start with the boring bit that is actually important: damp and mould are a genuine health issue. UK guidance aimed at housing providers is explicit about the health risks and the need for prompt action. At a broader level, the Institute of Medicine’s landmark report on damp indoor spaces reviewed the evidence linking dampness and mould with adverse health outcomes, particularly respiratory symptoms and asthma-related effects.

So yes - if you have visible mould, persistent damp, a musty smell, or condensation you’re constantly chasing, that’s a problem worth fixing. These are issues that can make people feel physically unwell, disturb sleep, cause stress, and create a background hum of discomfort that changes how a place feels to live in.

However, none of that requires us to turn the witness into a malfunctioning body. It’s enough to just recognise that environments shape experience. Where things begin to wobble is when that grounded point becomes a kind of narrative crowbar. When the facts that mould exists and can be harmful turns into “therefore mould explains your ghost story.”

The “toxic mould” gravity well

Here’s the thing - the idea that mould could cause ghost experiences feels right, and this is because of the popularity of claims and beliefs around Toxic Mould Syndrome (TMS). TMS is where a lot of media explanations pick up their momentum because it sounds like a credible diagnosis, it feels technical, and offers a single culprit for a wide range of medical symptoms. And hey, we’re all a little wary of mould, right?

But mainstream allergy and toxicology guidance repeatedly cautions against exactly this kind of overreach. The American College of Medical Toxicology’s position statement on mould-related inhalation exposures is unusually plainspoken: it states there is no documented evidence that inhalation exposure to fungi or indoor mycotoxins causes a chronic toxic encephalopathy. It also notes that mould VOCs can cause transient irritant symptoms and subjective complaints such as headache and dizziness, but it must be noted that these are not in the same ballpark as experiencing hallucinations.

Meanwhile, the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, & Immunology (AAAAI) has public-facing guidance on TMS that works hard to separate what is known (allergy, asthma triggers, irritant effects) from what is commonly asserted without robust evidence. If you want a deeper clinical anchor, the AAAAI position paper The medical effects of mold exposure sets out the mechanisms by which mould is known to affect health (allergy, hypersensitivity conditions, infection in vulnerable people) and is frank about how many broader claimed effects remain unproven.

And that’s the context missing when mould is used as a debunking trump card. People can suffer real symptoms in mouldy environments - and they deserve proper support and remediation - but the leap from “mould is present” to “mould caused a specific neuropsychiatric event” is not one you get to take on vibes alone.

Popcorn as the “clue” is a mechanism without a case

So… could popcorn develop mould if it were stored badly? In principle, yes. Could corn products be contaminated with mycotoxins under poor conditions? Also yes.

But Uncanny isn’t presenting a food safety lecture. It’s proposing popcorn as a suspect in a specific, dramatic account - a shared roadside vision described as a possible apparition of a young man writhing around on a car bonnet. That moves us from general possibility into case-based inference, and that requires evidence.

To make popcorn or mould a credible explanation for this story, you would need at minimum, evidence that popcorn was even consumed and, if it was, that it was contaminated (not merely that contamination is theoretically possible). You’d need to establish a plausible exposure route and dose relevant to acute neurological effects in two people at the same time, as well as a basic attempt at differential thinking, because there are many common factors that can produce frightening misperceptions on roads at night without invoking intoxication.

Instead, the listener gets a chain of coulds delivered in the language of detective work. It’s not that O’Keeffe literally says “this is definitely what happened.” It’s that the framing encourages the audience to treat it as a satisfyingly mundane solve - a rational ending to a scary story - rather than as a speculative suggestion with no case-specific support. And this matters because medicalised explanations carry a particular weight. They don’t just challenge a paranormal interpretation; they implicitly offer a diagnosis of the witness’s perception. And that can be reductive in a different way - especially when the show hasn’t done the work to justify it.

The mould-ghost story that keeps spreading

The mouldy popcorn idea doesn’t float in a vacuum. It plugs into a broader, already-familiar meme: that mould and mycotoxins can explain hauntings.

The most cited scientific version of this is the work associated with Dr Shane Rogers at Clarkson University. In 2015, a widely syndicated announcement described a team studying possible links between reported hauntings and indoor air quality, framing the question in terms of similarities between some haunting reports and symptoms some people attribute to toxic mould exposure.

More recently, a 2023 Atlas Obscura piece restated the project and included the quote that now travels everywhere: that Rogers found “five to six times more mould spores” in places reported haunted, while explicitly noting that the study has not undergone peer review.

There are two details in that write-up worth lingering on.

First, Rogers describes using ghost-hunting TV shows to identify haunted locations to use in the study. If the concept of a haunted location is operationalised as a place selected by television producers for atmosphere and reputation, you are not sampling hauntings; you are sampling a media-curated subset of old, dramatic buildings. Precisely the sort of environments more likely to have ventilation issues, damp, footfall, dust, and all the rest.

Second, the same article describes the work as analysing particulate sizes, noting the method does not specifically identify mould spores. That may be entirely fine as an early-stage screening approach - but without a published methods section (because the 2015 research was never published, by the way), we can’t assess what was measured, how confounds were controlled, or what “significant difference” actually means statistically between so-called haunted locations and non-haunted locations.

And that is the core issue: a decade on, the claim is still largely circulating through interviews and articles rather than a publicly accessible report that would let anyone evaluate it properly. It’s possible the preliminary pattern Rogers describes is real in those specific sites. It’s also possible it’s a predictable artefact of site selection and building age. Without transparent methods and data, those two possibilities can’t be separated - yet the claim is being used in paranormal discourse as if it has already done that explanatory work and these are established facts.

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What the environmental research actually suggests

If you want to take a grown-up view of environmental explanations for haunted house experiences, it’s worth looking at the literature review terrain rather than one endlessly re-quoted unpublished project.

Dagnall and colleagues’ 2020 appraisal of the past two decades of environmental research on haunted-house experiences describes a field that is patchy and methodologically messy, with inconsistent findings across variables like air quality, temperature, lighting, and electromagnetic fields. Notably, O’Keeffe is a co-author on this review. This research doesn’t mean environment is irrelevant but means means it is rarely simple, rarely single-cause, and rarely a magic bullet that turns a vivid experience into a one-word explanation.

This is why the popcorn explanation lands as such an oddly confident suspect. It doesn’t sound like careful scepticism. It sounds like a story being given its ending.

When people report frightening, uncanny experiences - particularly in conditions that involve darkness, speed, stress, unusual angles of light, fatigue, or expectation - perception itself is a rich, mundane explanatory landscape. The human brain is a pattern-detection engine that makes rapid judgments under uncertainty. Under threat, it over-interprets. Under low information, it fills gaps. Under heightened emotion, it tags experiences as significant and memorable. That’s not pathology; that’s how we function.

There is also an ethical point here: scepticism doesn’t have to default to medicalising people. Hallucination is a loaded word. Neurological effects is a loaded phrase. If you are going to imply that someone’s mind was chemically altered into seeing a writhing figure on their car bonnet, you need more than a neat clue. You need evidence - and you need to communicate the uncertainty honestly. I also wonder if the people whose story is being discussed were spoken to about the hallucination suggestion before it was broadcast to the public because this could be a troubling suggestion for some.

What would responsible citing look like?

If a podcast wants to float popcorn mycotoxins as a possible explanation for something experienced by two people at the same time, the minimum standard is not dramatic confidence but transparency.

I do not find hallucination to be a satisfactory explanation for what is reported by these two eye-witnesses. I do not know what caused their experience and I wouldn’t like to speculate because it would not be appropriate to do so. That, I believe, is the ethical and responsible position for investigators to take in these cases.

Where is the evidence that contamination occurred in this case? What dose and route are being implied? Which clinical or toxicological sources support the jump from mould exposure to vivid, content-specific hallucinations in an otherwise ordinary context? And if the broader mould-haunting claim is invoked, where is the publicly available study that can be scrutinised, rather than repeatedly hinted at?

Until those questions can be answered, mouldy popcorn is not an explanation. It is a storytelling device: a satisfyingly mundane suspect offered in the tone of science, with none of science’s accountability.

And that is, in its own way, as uncanny as anything on the road.

Recently, someone posted (clearly in jest) that A Muppet Christmas Carol is sad because even though Scrooge redeems himself, the Muppets don’t have souls so they all still go to hell.

Now.

Yes.

Obviously this was a joke. However, I am a Ghost Geek, a lifelong Muppet defender, and a person with both time and principles, so unfortunately I am going to have to respond.

I would like to state for the record that I do not believe in ghosts, souls, or hell, and I do not believe that felt puppets are being judged in the afterlife. I am, generally speaking, very boring about these things.

However.

I do believe in the Muppets and I know, in my heart, that they believe in me, too. So, today I am prepared to abandon reason in defence of Kermit the Frog and if you’ve got a problem with that, I will fight you with my fists.

There Are Literally Ghost Muppets in This Film

Let’s start with the most obvious problem with this take.

There are ghosts. In the film.

Marley and Marley are:

• Dead (to begin with) ✔️

• Condemned by their earthly sins ✔️

• Bound in (singing?) chains ✔️

• Appearing to Scrooge as spectral apparitions ✔️

• Muppets ✔️✔️✔️

If Muppets do not have souls, I would love someone to explain to me (as someone who knows a thing or two about ghosts) what the hell Marley and Marley are doing.

They are not metaphors, imagined projections of Scrooge’s guilt or general puppet-y vibes. There is not more of gravy than of grave about them.

They rattle chains. They warn of eternal consequences. They sing a song about damnation.

These are ghost Muppets.

And once you accept that ghost Muppets exist, you are already on a slippery felt-covered slope.

The Ghosts of Christmas Are Also Muppets, Actually

If Marley and Marley aren’t enough for you, let’s continue.

The Ghost of Christmas Past is:

• A glowing, uncanny being

• Existing outside linear time

• Emotionally devastating

The Ghost of Christmas Present is:

• A godlike embodiment of abundance

• All-seeing

• Judging Scrooge’s actions in real time

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is:

• Literally death

• Literally haunting

• A silent spectre

• The physical manifestation of consequence

All of them are what? Muppets. They’re Muppet souls.

So if Muppets do not have souls, then what you are proposing is not a moral fable but a surreal horror film in which a human man is psychologically tortured by soulless fabric entities performing theology at him.

Which is not - and I cannot stress this enough - the tone of A Muppet Christmas Carol. Or physically possible. I also know being haunted isn’t- look. Don’t try me.

Gonzo Is Charles Dickens and I Will Not Debate This

Gonzo is the narrator.
Gonzo is Charles Dickens.
Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol.

These are facts.

If Gonzo does not have a soul, then neither does Charles Dickens, and I am not prepared to make that claim in public, especially at Christmas.

Also, Gonzo/Charles Dickens, demonstrates moral insight, empathy, compassion, joy, and narrative authority. He literally steps out of the story to remind us of its meaning. He guides us on this moral journey when most of us are children or adults reliving our childhoods - at our most vulnerable.

That is not the behaviour of a damned entity. This is not the actions of a being without a soul. That is the behaviour of a being with a very specific ethical mission and a fondness for Rizzo the Rat (I love you, Rizzo, if you’re reading this).

Redemption Requires Moral Interior Life

Here’s where I briefly attempt to regain my rational footing.

Scrooge’s redemption only works if the world around him is morally real.

The Muppets suffer under his cruelty, respond emotionally to his change and, most importantly, they forgive him and welcome him back into community.

Forgiveness is not a mechanical process. It requires interiority and the recognition of harm. A being without a soul cannot forgive you. At best, it can be programmed to accept you. Also, if your reading of this film is that Bob Cratchit is essentially an animatronic forgiveness dispenser, then I don’t know what to tell you except that you are watching it wrong and it is you, Sir, you who have no soul.

Kermit the Frog Is the Moral Centre of the Universe

I am not going to justify this. I am simply stating it.

And Maybe That’s the Point

The ghosts don’t appear to prove the existence of an afterlife, or to map out the mechanics of damnation. They come to remind Michael Caine Scrooge and us - of something simpler and harder: that mankind is our business. That kindness, generosity, and care for one another are not optional extras, but the point of the whole exercise.

The Ghost of Christmas Past shows us what once was, not to trap us there, but to help us understand what is. The Ghost of Christmas Present invites us in - come in and know me better - and insists that this is the season of the heart. Even the silent figure of Christmas Yet to Come offers not certainty, but possibility: are these the shadows of things that must be, or only of things that may be?

And the Muppets understand this instinctively. Yes I know they’re not alive but stick with me here.

They remind us that redemption is possible, that warmth matters and how the joy we bring to others is the joy we have ourselves. That being blind to human kindness is the real tragedy - not some imagined metaphysical punishment waiting at the end of the road.

So while I don’t believe in souls in the literal sense - if a soul is the thing that lets a story teach us how to be better, change, forgive, and keep Christmas well - then the Muppets have them in abundance.

And honestly, if Christmas has room for ghosts, it definitely has room for them.

That sentence alone is enough to make some people picture a very specific type of person - the smug debunker, the eye-roller, the fun sponge who shows up to ruin the campfire just as the story gets good.

But that stereotype doesn’t describe me, and I don’t think it describes most skeptics who’ve genuinely found a home in these spaces.

Because here’s the truth - I love the weird.

I love the stories, the history, the local legends that attach themselves to old buildings like ivy. I love witness accounts that read like little human mysteries. I love how paranormal experiences sit in the overlap between fear and meaning, memory and place. And I love the way these communities preserve folklore, protect heritage, and encourage people to actually look at the world with a bit more wonder.

Plus, I’ve had plenty of strange experiences myself. Which brings me to the question I’m asked more than almost any other:

“How can you still be a skeptic if you’ve had spooky experiences?”

The short answer is that I take the experience seriously, even when I’m not convinced by the explanation.

If you tell me you heard footsteps in an empty hallway, felt a presence, saw something move, or had that sickening moment of “I know what I saw,” I’m not interested in brushing you off. I’m not reflexively assuming you’re lying, exaggerating, or stupid.

I’m assuming you’re human.

And humans are brilliant, messy, meaning-making creatures who experience the world through memory, emotion, expectation, stress, grief, sleep, social context, and the stories we’ve absorbed our whole lives. Our perceptions can be honest and vivid and still not be straightforward evidence of the supernatural.

That isn’t an insult. It’s what makes these experiences so psychologically and culturally fascinating in the first place.

The mistake people make about skepticism

A common belief is that skeptics don’t accept paranormal explanations because we’re not ready to have our worldview changed. I understand why that idea is comforting - it turns disagreement into a simple character flaw and removes the need to wrestle with uncertainty.

But for me, it’s backwards.

Changing my worldview is something I’m willing to do - and already did when I stopped believing in ghosts.

That shift didn’t happen because someone bullied me out of it or because I decided to be a contrarian. It happened because I learned that a comforting explanation is not the same thing as a robust one, and I realised I was more interested in being honest about what I knew than I was in protecting what I wanted to be true.

If you’ve been to one of my public talks you may remember my two golden rules of being a paranormal researcher:

1. how do I know that this is true?

2. what would it take for me to change my mind?

This is the basic way in which I check myself to ensure I’m not being closed-minded when I consider a case that I’m working on. Am I making any assumptions? Who does my conclusion serve? So no, my skepticism isn’t a locked door, and here’s a fun fact: changing your worldview isn’t actually that scary, and I’d be delighted to accept that ghosts are real.

What “evidence” means in practice

When I point out there’s a lack of evidence for a paranormal claim, I’m sometimes met with the same refrain - a skeptic could be shown evidence of a genuine poltergeist and still refuse to accept it. The implication is that skepticism is just stubbornness, and that asking for evidence is somehow an extraordinary demand.

But when evidence is presented and I say it’s poor quality or doesn’t show what it’s claimed to show, the response is often the same dismissal. This suggests the issue isn’t that I’m impossible to convince, but that the standards for what counts as convincing evidence are too low.

Asking for evidence is not unacceptable, and asking for adequate evidence is not bad faith. If that feels unreasonable, the problem isn’t with my skepticism - it’s with the quality of the evidence being asked to carry some very confident conclusions.

The gulf between “that is strange” and “that is definitely a ghost” is precisely where good method matters. It’s where we test alternative explanations, ask about context, double-check timelines, or clarify whether something is genuinely anomalous or just ambiguous.

If the explanation is true, it should survive basic challenge. That’s not cynicism, but instead a respect for reality.

This is one of the deep differences in how people approach the paranormal. I don’t accept most of the evidence presented to me as proof of ghosts because I think certainty is for the arrogant.

I acknowledge that there are experiences that are too strange to dismiss, too emotionally intense to trivialise, too powerful to mock - I’ve had them myself and written about them here, in fact.

But certainty - the kind that turns questions into insults and curiosity into tribal allegiance - is where communities start to harden. It’s where nuance gets punished and people get sorted into heroes and villains.

I’m not interested in that.

If anything, I think the most respectful posture we can take toward the unknown is humble uncertainty.

The dreaded armchair skeptics

I’ll be honest, I’m sure armchair skeptics exist, but so do armchair believers.

The chair isn’t the issue.

The attitude is.

Someone who sneers at eye-witnesses without listening isn’t doing skepticism well. But someone who assumes that any question is an attack isn’t doing inquiry well either! When I’m critical, I’m critical of behaviour and claims - not of people for sport. I’m happy to be challenged on methodology and conclusions, and I try to offer that same standard back.

The best discussions I’ve ever had in paranormal spaces weren’t defined by agreement - they were defined by tone. Curiosity over conquest, shared excitement over scorekeeping, and a willingness to say, “I don’t know yet,” without turning that uncertainty into a moral failure.

Most of the people I meet in paranormal communities are thoughtful, kind, and genuinely curious. They want answers, but they also want to understand the questions properly. A small minority - on any side of the debate - seem far more interested in winning than learning.

I’m not really here for that brand of certainty.

I’m also aware that I’m a woman asking big questions in a space where certainty can be a status symbol. That sometimes changes the temperature of the room. I can live with disagreement but I won’t mistake hostility for insight.

If your whole position relies on turning skeptics into a cartoon villain who will “never accept anything as evidence,” you’re building a rhetorical shield around your own assumptions, and that’s a shame, because paranormal research and discussion is most interesting when we let it stay difficult.

So what does good skepticism look like here?

For me, it looks like this:

1. Respect the person, test the claim.

2. Start with curiosity, not correction.

3. Separate what happened from what it means.

4. Be honest about uncertainty.

5. Ask what would change your mind.

6. Don’t treat grief, fear, or trauma as entertainment.

7. Enjoy the mystery.

I’m not in paranormal communities to sneer from the edges, I’m here because I care about the stories we tell, the meanings we make, and the ethical responsibility we have when we interpret strange experiences - especially when those experiences involve vulnerable people, big emotions, or high stakes.

I don’t think skepticism is the opposite of wonder.

I think it’s one of the fundamental ways we protect it.

December is supposed to be all twinkly lights and novelty pyjamas, but it’s also the time of year when the dark wins. The afternoons vanish, the heating goes on, and suddenly you’re sitting in a small circle of lamplight while the rest of the house feels a bit… elsewhere.

It’s no coincidence that ghost stories have always been a winter tradition. Long before Netflix specials and based on a true story horror films, people were telling each other weird little tales by candlelight: strange lights in the lane, something heavy on the stairs, the feeling of being watched when you lock up at night. These weren’t just entertainment, they were ways of thinking out loud about death, memory, bad luck, and all the things we can’t quite put our finger on.

These days, if you say you’re into ghosts, people tend to picture jump-scare TV shows, demonologists shouting into the dark, and endless lists of “most haunted” castles. That’s one version of the paranormal, but it’s not the only one. There’s a quieter, more interesting strand of writing that treats ghosts as folklore and culture: as stories that grow out of landscapes, beliefs, families and fears – whether or not you think there’s anything genuinely supernatural going on.

That’s the kind of thing I’m interested in as a paranormal researcher who doesn’t actually believe in the paranormal. I like the messy bits: the legends that change over time, the hauntings that say more about class or gender than about the afterlife, the way a “true ghost story” can be both emotionally real and impossible to verify. And winter is the perfect time to lean into those kinds of hauntings, preferably with a hot drink, a cosy blanket, and a cat on your lap.

So, I’ve pulled together six books I’ve read this year that circle around ghosts, folklore, and the weird ways we live with the dead. Some focus on specific hauntings, some on landscape and memory, some on rituals and seasonal customs, but they all have one thing in common: they’re less about proving ghosts exist, and more about what our ghost stories and traditions say about us.

Whether you’re a believer, a sceptic, or hovering somewhere uncertain in the middle, these are excellent company for long, dark evenings.

1. Haunted: The Ghost Stories and Folklore of the British Isles – E. Jay Gilbert

Gilbert describes Britain as “an island of ghosts,” and roams through white ladies, banshees, black dogs and more to show how these stories have been shared at bedsides, kitchen tables and firesides for centuries. Rather than simply retelling spooky tales, she pauses to ask what they reveal about the teller, the listener, and the historical moment they come from. Aimed at both believers and non-believers alike, it’s part memoir, part tour of the paranormal, and part reflection on why we keep some ghosts so close. I found myself thinking about the stories I’ve grown up with, and how often they’re really about the people telling them.

Why you should read it: It’s a great starting point if you want British hauntings with a strong dose of context and humanity. I finished it feeling like I’d just had a long, late-night conversation about ghosts. You can find Haunted here.

2. Hallowed Ground: The Folklore of Churches and Churchyards – Mark Norman

Folklorist Mark Norman turns his attention to churches and graveyards, treating them not as solemn backdrops but as dense little ecosystems of story. He traces the beliefs and customs that cling to these spaces – from foundation legends and “devil’s stones” built into the walls, to midnight churchyard divinations to see who will marry, or die, in the coming year. Along the way you meet clergymen rumoured to keep occult libraries, spectral figures who stalk the paths between gravestones, and the stubborn traces of older, “pagan” imagery hiding in supposedly Christian spaces. It’s part social history, part tour of uncanny architecture, and part catalogue of the small rituals people have used to negotiate fear, fate and the dead.

Why you should read it: If you like your witchy traditions and ghostlore grounded in real places you can actually go and wander around, this is a wonderfully atmospheric guide to the strange life of churches after dark. Step into Hallowed Ground here.

3. London Uncanny: A Gothic Guide to the Capital Tour in Weird History and Fiction – Clive Bloom

Bloom treats London as a living ghost story, wandering through foggy streets, vanished theatres, occult salons, and riot-torn squares to map where the city’s history bleeds into horror fiction and urban legend. It often feels less like a guidebook and more like being led around by a slightly mischievous local who knows all the good, strange stories. Rather than simply listing spooky sites, he traces how writers, radicals, and weird events have turned parts of the capital into psychic hotspots, layered with stories of crime, protest, spiritualism, and the supernatural. It’s part literary guidebook, part cultural history, and part love letter to a city that has always been just a little bit haunted.

Why you should read it: If you like your ghostlore tangled up in real streets, politics, and the odd mood of a city after dark, this is for you. I occasionally found myself looking up places on a map and mentally add them to a future wander-round-London list. Explore London Uncanny here.

4. The Dead of Winter: The Demons, Witches and Ghosts of Christmas – Sarah Clegg

Clegg goes straight for the dark side of Christmas, pulling together European midwinter traditions full of demons, witches, masked invaders, and ghostly processions. From Austrian Krampus runs and violent Klaubauf visits to English mummers’ plays and modern pagan gatherings at Stonehenge, she shows how riotous, unsettling, and frankly dangerous the season could be before Victorian domesticity tidied it up. I loved how often she undercut the idea of some timeless “old tradition” with actual, messy human invention.

Why you should read it: This book links directly into the old idea of Christmas as ghost-story time, and reminds you how wild winter used to be. It’s perfect if you want something darker than cosy Christmas films, without being completely bleak. Open The Dead of Winter here.

5. Folklore: A Journey Through the Past and Present – Owen Davies & Ceri Houlbrook

Davies and Houlbrook take on the whole messy category of folklore, from village rituals and seasonal customs to fairy tales, urban legends, UFO lore and even online fanfiction. The book looks at how folklore has been collected and studied, but also how it continues to be lived now, in everything from local festivals to internet memes. It’s a gripping guide to British folklore that refuses to treat the past as dead and gone, and it made me feel oddly hopeful about how we keep reinventing our stories.

Why you should read it: It’s an ideal pick if you want to situate ghost stories within a broader, still-evolving landscape of belief and tradition. If you’ve ever wondered where ghost stories sit alongside fairies, UFOs, and creepypasta, this pulls it all into focus. Find Folklore here.

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3. The Water Remedy: Folklore, Ritual and Wisdom – Clare Gogerty

Gogerty follows rivers, springs, holy wells and sea edges across Britain, asking why water has always felt so charged with meaning. Drawing on fairytales, pilgrimage routes and local legends, she shows how people have turned to specific pools and streams for healing, prophecy, luck or forgiveness, and how those customs are echoing into modern wild swimming and wellness culture. It’s an illustrated blend of travel writing, gentle nature mysticism and practical suggestions for small rituals that reconnect you with the landscape. It’s the sort of book you read slowly, a chapter at a time, and then feel slightly different on your next walk by a river.

Why you should read it: It’s a quiet book for anyone who feels the pull of wells, rivers, and rain – perfect if you want your winter reading to nudge you back outside, looking at familiar water with new eyes. It made me want to go and revisit the places I thought I knew and pay better attention. Dip into The Water Remedy here.

You don’t have to get through all of these before the decorations come down, obviously. One of the nice things about ghostlore and folklore is that they’re not tied to any one season; winter just makes them feel a bit closer to the skin. The long nights, the family stories that only get told when everyone’s trapped indoors, the strange way old memories seem to drift back in with the cold – it all sets the mood.

If you pick any of these up over the winter, I’d love to hear what you make of them – and what you’d add to the list - feel free to share yours in the comments so we can all expand our reading piles for the next long, dark season.

While you’re here, why not check out my other book reviews?

So, have we actually found a psychic gene? Well…

Where This Story Comes From

The story, as it’s usually told, goes something like this. Psychic ability runs in families. A genetics study supposedly backs this up, because it looked at the DNA of people who describe themselves as psychic and compared them to people who don’t. The study reports a small but consistent difference in one tiny stretch of DNA – an intronic variant in a gene called TNRC18 – between 13 self-identified psychics and 9 controls (Wahbeh et al., 2022). IONS’ own write-up goes further and suggests this might represent a mutation that “suppresses” psychic ability in some people (Criswell, 2021).

Add in a speculative history lesson about centuries of witch trials supposedly culling psychically gifted families from the gene pool, and you end up with a dramatic explanation for why modern humans are, allegedly, less psychic than our ancestors. The study is real. The leap from odd little DNA blip to we’ve explained why you’re not psychic is where the problems start.

What the Study Actually Did

The paper is very clear about what it is: a pilot case–control study. In other words, a small, exploratory first look – not a grand discovery.

The researchers began by recruiting volunteers online. More than three thousand people completed questionnaires about their experiences and their families. From those, the team selected just thirteen people who described strong, lifelong psychic experiences and also reported similar abilities in their relatives. These became the “psychic” cases. They then selected ten people for a control group – people of similar age, sex, and ethnicity who said they had no psychic ability at all (Wahbeh et al., 2022). Everyone did some basic psychological screening to rule out things like psychosis, which is fair enough, but it doesn’t make the two groups identical in every other way.

Next, the researchers took saliva samples and sequenced the parts of the genome that code for proteins – the bit geneticists call the exome – plus some nearby non-coding stretches for good measure (Wahbeh et al., 2022; Veritas Genetics, 2024). They then compared the DNA of the psychic group and the control group to see if anything stood out.

In the protein-coding parts of the genome, they didn’t find anything that reliably separated psychics from those in the control group. There was no neat “psychic gene” sitting there. When they widened the net to include some non-coding regions, they did find one small difference - a particular DNA variant in an intron – a non-coding section – next to TNRC18 showed up more often in the controls than in the psychics.

And that’s it. That’s the core finding.

To their credit, the authors are quite cautious about what this means. The abstract explicitly notes the tiny sample size and says that random sampling could explain the pattern they saw. They describe the result as ‘provocative’ and say it needs replication in larger studies – which is exactly what you’d expect from a pilot (Wahbeh et al., 2022).

What it is not, is proof that some people are genetically destined to be psychic.

Why This Doesn’t Prove Anyone Is “Genetically Psychic”

You don’t need a genetics degree to see the problems here, you just need to be clear on what the data can’t tell us.

First, the numbers are small to the point of being fragile. We are talking about thirteen people in the psychic group and ten in the control group. That would be a worryingly small sample even for a basic psychology study. For DNA, where you are comparing lots of different positions across the genome, it’s tiny.

If you go fishing through thousands of positions in the genome with only 23 people, it’s not surprising that you find something that differs between the groups. If you give me two small groups of people and let me compare them on enough measures – height, shoe size, favourite biscuits – eventually I will find a difference that looks interesting just by chance. Geneticists worry about this all the time, and it’s why robust genetic studies on complex traits usually involve far larger samples – often tens or hundreds of thousands of people – and very strict rules about what counts as a real signal.

Even if you take this particular DNA difference at face value, it still doesn’t show that the variant reduces psychic ability, or that lacking it causes psychic skills. All it shows is that in this small, highly self-selected sample, people who identify as psychic didn’t carry that variant, and some non-psychic controls did - plenty of other explanations are possible, including pure statistical fluke.

We also have no idea how common this variant is in the wider population. To tell a big story about so-called psi-suppressor genes spreading through humanity, you’d need to know how frequent this variant is in large, representative samples from different populations, and whether there is any sign it has been under selection – in other words, becoming more common over generations because it had some advantage. None of that is in the pilot. There’s no population-level data – just those twenty-three people. So, any sweeping claims about why many people today aren’t psychic are leaping far beyond what the data can support.

Biologist P.Z. Myers (2021) makes a similar point in his own commentary on Radin’s genetics talk: with a sample this small, and such a huge search space, “provocative” blips are exactly what you’d expect to see by accident.

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Let’s Not Forget About the Witch Hunts

Radin doesn’t stop at the genetics, though. In the interview, he links the variant to a larger historical narrative - the idea that witch trials and the persecution of mystics effectively culled psychically gifted families from the gene pool. It’s a powerful story, and it doubles as strong book promotion – we’re in the territory of real magic and a persecuted, magical past.

But as an argument about genes, it has serious problems.

For this to work as a genetic explanation, you have to quietly accept the witch-hunters’ own premise and assume that people accused of witchcraft and heresy were, in fact, unusually mystical or psychic, and that authorities were somehow successfully targeting a real underlying trait rather than simply persecuting whoever was convenient. History doesn’t support that. Witchcraft accusations overwhelmingly tracked gender, poverty, and marginalisation, and were deeply embedded in neighbourly feuds, property disputes, and religious panics (Briggs, 1996; Sharpe, 1997). Witch or mystic in this context is a social label, not a diagnosis of genuinely magical people.

Even if, very generously, you assumed that some victims genuinely did have unusual abilities, you would still need to show that they were killed at a rate that disproportionately removed specific genetic variants, and that this removal was large and sustained enough to measurably shift gene frequencies across whole populations. That’s the kind of claim that normally requires heavy-duty population genetics; in this case, it’s simply asserted.

There is also an ethical issue in how this history is used. Recasting witch-hunt history as we killed the real psychics risks downplaying the role of misogyny, poverty, and social power, and glossing over torture, forced confessions, and show trials. It turns genuine human suffering into a tidy myth in service of a modern story about psychic genes.

What About the Other Evidence?

All of this is layered on top of the contested foundation of the broader evidence for psi. In the interview and in his book, Radin folds the genetics into a worldview where consciousness is fundamental, psi phenomena are real but subtle, and magic is essentially the disciplined use of intention. To support this, he points to meta-analyses of telepathy and precognition experiments, random-number generator studies where people try to mentally nudge their output, and double-slit experiments where focused attention allegedly shifts quantum interference patterns.

Those results are themselves heavily debated. Critics have raised concerns about very small effect sizes, publication bias (failed studies quietly disappearing), flexible analyses, and the general difficulty of independently replicating positive findings under stricter controls (Milton & Wiseman, 1999; Wagenmakers et al., 2011; Reber & Alcock, 2020). Even if you personally find some of those anomalies interesting, they are a long way from the kind of robust, predictive, independently replicated evidence you’d want before declaring that magic and genetics have just rewritten our picture of human nature.

And that is really the core problem - each step of the argument is already controversial before you even start stacking them on top of each other.

So, Have We Really Found a “Psychic Gene”?

The reality is closer to this - we have one small, exploratory exome study showing a single intronic variant difference between thirteen self-identified psychics and ten controls; we have a romanticised reading of witch-hunt history that treats accusations as if they mapped neatly onto a real, heritable psychic trait; and we have a set of parapsychological findings with tiny effects that are still being argued over in the literature. Stitched together, they make an engaging story about psi-suppressor genes and a persecuted magical past. As storytelling, you can see the appeal. As science, it’s a castle built on sand.

None of this means that research into unusual experiences is worthless, or that genetics could never tell us anything about why people differ in how they perceive and interpret the world. It is entirely reasonable to be curious about why some people report vivid premonitions or apparitions while others never do. However, if we care about evidence, we have to resist the urge to let one small study become proof of a grand theory.

If a future, large, preregistered, independently replicated genetics project finds robust, functionally understood differences between people with and without unusual abilities, that would be genuinely newsworthy. It still wouldn’t tell us that those experiences are paranormal – psychology and culture would still be in the mix – but it might tell us something interesting about perception, imagination, or how our brains filter reality.

Until then, the honest answer to “Have we really found a psychic gene?” is simple: no. What we’ve shown, at best, is that if you look very hard at the DNA of twenty-three people and you really love the idea of magic, you can spin an awful lot of story out of one tiny blip.

References

• Briggs, R. (1996) Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft. London: HarperCollins.

• Criswell, R. (2021) ‘How Psychic Suppression May Impact the Heredity of Psi-Genes’, Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), 21 August. Available at: https://noetic.org/blog/how-psychic-suppression-may-impact-the-heredity-of-psi-genes

• Milton, J. & Wiseman, R. (1999) ‘Does psi exist? Lack of replication of an anomalous process of information transfer’, Psychological Bulletin, 125(4), pp. 387–391.

• Myers, P.Z. (2021) ‘Plumbing the depths of psychic research’, Pharyngula, Freethought Blogs, 10 May. Available at: https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2021/05/10/plumbing-the-depths-of-psychic-research/

• Reber, A.S. & Alcock, J.E. (2020) ‘Searching for the impossible: Parapsychology’s elusive quest’, American Psychologist, 75(3), pp. 391–399.

• Sharpe, J.A. (1997) Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550–1750. London: Penguin.

• Veritas Genetics (2024) ‘Exome vs. genome: which type of test to choose?’, Genes Matter blog, 31 January. Available at: https://www.veritasint.com/blog/en/exome-vs-genome-which-type-to-choose

• Wahbeh, H. et al. (2022) ‘Genetics of psychic ability – A pilot case-control exome sequencing study’, Explore, 18(7), pp. 725–734.

• Wagenmakers, E.-J. et al. (2011) ‘Why psychologists must change the way they analyze their data: The case of psi’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(3), pp. 426–432.

Inspired by the FT article, I’m writing this examination of what’s claimed happened in the South Shields case, the sort of evidence documented, how the case has been treated in both parapsychology and sceptical commentary and, crucially, what the case tells us about the ethics and methods of modern ghost hunting. I’m not interested in calling anyone a liar, or in declaring the whole thing an obvious hoax. I’m interested in what we can reasonably conclude when a case is simultaneously billed as “one of the best attested” and yet largely inaccessible to outside scrutiny.

The Story as Told By the Investigators

In the FT article ‘The South Shields Poltergeist 20 Years On’, Ritson (2025) retells the core narrative of the case - a young couple, Marc and Marianne, and Marianne’s son, Robert, living in a modern house on an estate in South Tyneside, begin to experience odd happenings. Taps running by themselves, objects moving, doors found open, possessions going missing and reappearing in unlikely places. Over time, the activity escalated into loud knocks, voices heard over the baby monitor, and apparitions of a lady as well as a boy called “Sammy” who, Robert insisted, both came to play.

Family members began to witness events too. Chairs and cups allegedly moved by themselves - a cup said to have been in the child’s bedroom was later seen falling outside from above, despite the bedroom window being shut. This is presented as an instance of ‘“matter-through-matter penetration” – solid objects moving through solid barriers – a motif familiar from older poltergeist literature. (Murdie, 2010)

By the time Ritson and Hallowell are called in, in mid-2006, the case is already several months old. On their first visit, they report witnessing multiple object movements under what they felt were controlled conditions - toys sliding from shelves into bins, a plastic nut flying across a bedroom to strike Marianne, a small ball apparently materialising on a bed and found “hot to the touch.” All of this, they state, was captured on video. As the months roll on, the phenomena grows stranger and darker.

Eventually, after almost a year, the activity reportedly tails off. Ritson credits two factors: the family’s emotional exhaustion (he suggests fear is one of the entity’s “fuels”) and a practical measure recommended by a colleague – switching off and unplugging all electrical devices at night, to deprive the poltergeist of “stand-by power” as an energy source. After a short-lived burst of alleged phenomena at the couple’s workplace, the disturbances stop. (Ritson, 2025)

The case is then written up as The South Shields Poltergeist: One Family’s Fight Against an Invisible Intruder, first published in 2008 and subsequently reissued. The book, with a foreword by Guy Lyon Playfair, is pitched as one of the most significant poltergeist cases in fifty years. (Xavier, 2009)

From Living Room Haunting to Case Study

In the years since, South Shields has acquired an interesting dual life. On one hand, it has become a staple of books, magazine features, YouTube “top ten hauntings” and TV documentaries, often emphasising its violent and technological aspects. On the other, it has been taken up by parts of the parapsychological community as a valuable data set for theory-building.

Alan Murdie’s review for the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research is a good example of the latter. He visited the investigators and examined their archive – he mentions over 450 photographs, film clips, witness statements and other documents. Murdie (2010) concluded that, assuming the events occurred as described, there was a substantial body of material consistent with a genuine poltergeist case. He situates South Shields alongside Rosenheim, Enfield, and other “well-attested” cases, and argues that critics have been too quick to dismiss it without looking at the primary evidence.

More recently, a 2022 paper by James Houran, Brian Laythe and colleagues in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research treats South Shields as one of their flagship case studies. They code up reported incidents, examine temporal and thematic patterns, and discuss the case in the context of what they call “haunted people syndrome” – a cluster of psychosocial and environmental factors associated with recurrent anomalous experiences. (Houran et al., 2022) South Shields also appears in later methodological work as an example of how complex, multi-episode haunting narratives might be turned into structured ‘fact sheets’ for analysis. (Massullo et al., 2025)

Taken together, these treatments give the impression – and I think this is deliberate – that South Shields is not just a spooky story but a serious case that’s documented, archived, and has been scrutinised by sympathetic experts. If you confine yourself to published material, however, a different picture emerges…

What Evidence Can The Rest of Us See?

On the pro side, we have a detailed narrative in the book authored by Ritson & Hallowell (2008), reinforced and summarised in Ritson’s Fortean Times anniversary piece. Additionally, we have Murdie’s testimonial that he has personally inspected substantial archives, and finds them consistent with the book’s claims, as well as the assurance, from both the book and later papers, that footage and photographs exist and have been shown at lectures and to trusted colleagues.

On the publicly accessible side, we have a handful of still images reproduced in print and online, such as reports of a children’s plastic table ‘bent and twisted out of shape’, and the rocking horse found hanging by its reins from the loft hatch. (Ritson 2021, 2025; Boyle 2014) There’s also the widely discussed water-bottle photo and video, that shows a water bottle “mysteriously” balancing on one corner of its base. Once promoted via tabloid coverage, the bottle evidence was later pulled from many sites following ridicule and copyright complaints. (Ritson, 2021; Ritson, 2025; Hallowell, 2010; Boyle, 2014)

That’s essentially it. We are asked to take the rest on trust – either the investigators’ word, or the endorsements of those who have seen more. It is this gap has been a central point of criticism. A 2009 piece on GhostTheory, for example, notes that years after the initial media splash, the only substantive public evidence was the bottle video and some scratch photographs, with the more dramatic material held back pending a TV deal or restricted to paying readers of the book. The author argues, reasonably in my view, that making evidence contingent on publication or broadcast damages the claim that the case is “one of the best-ever documented.” (Xavier, 2009)

In a long and combative response letter, Hallowell (2010) rejects the idea that they’re withholding material for money, stressing that the main constraint is the family’s anonymity and the legal and ethical issues around releasing footage. He also points out (fairly) that the famous bottle clip is not, in their own view, strong evidence – there are possible normal explanations – and that the real weight of the case lies in the cumulative pattern of events.

From a distance, though, the case is marketed as unusually well-documented and evidential but most of that documentation is not available for independent assessment beyond a small circle of believers and parapsychology insiders. Additionally, requests to share even relatively low-risk material more widely (e.g. the bottle clip) have been met with copyright objections and, at least according to one critic, threats of legal action over unauthorised reposting of the water bottle footage. (Hallowell, 2010) You don’t have to assume fraud to see why many people find this unsatisfactory. This is simply not how evidence is usually handled in fields that aspire to be scientific and it raises a lot of healthy doubt.

Anonymity, Ethics, and the Catch-22

Here’s where I want to be very clear: I absolutely understand the desire to keep the family at the centre of the case anonymous. It’s how I work too. When I investigate contemporary haunting claims, I prioritise privacy because the media and online audiences can be cruel, intrusive, and relentless. Homeowners caught in the crossfire of a “good story” can find themselves doxxed, mocked, or flooded with unwanted attention, especially if children are involved.

Ritson and Hallowell repeatedly stress that they promised never to reveal the family’s identity, and that TV companies have pushed them to break that promise in exchange for access or exposure. In his Fortean Times piece, Ritson explicitly frames his refusal to work with those producers as a matter of “ethics over entertainment”, even at the cost of making the case less well known.

However, that creates a genuine methodological problem when the same case is held up as “one of the best attested” poltergeist outbreaks and used as a central data set in parapsychological research. You can’t really have it both ways. If the household must remain private – which is fair – then the evidence has to do more of the heavy lifting. That doesn’t mean naming the family or dumping every second of footage onto YouTube. There are well-established ways to separate the people at the centre of the data (the family and investigators) from the information the data can demonstrate (what happened, when, and how it was recorded).

For example, careful anonymisation of names, addresses, and potentially identifying backgrounds, the use redacted timelines and logs that still preserve sequence and context, and through controlled access to representative clips, audio, and photographs for independent reviewers. Other disciplines have been grappling with this for decades – from social psychology to medicine to criminology (Grinyer, 2002; Allen et al., 2023; Saunders et al., 2015)

If psychical research wants its flagship cases to be taken seriously beyond a small in-group, similar norms around anonymised data-sharing will have to become standard. Whether it’s intentional or not I cannot say, but currently, the ethical shield around the South Shields case also functions as a shield around the data. It must be acknowledged that this limits what anyone outside the trusted circle can conclude, and as a result, it is only natural that people will default to a sceptical position when asked to accept the claims central to the case.

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Methodological Questions & “Best Attested” Claims

Even if we bracket the evidence-access problem, there are still questions worth asking about the way the case has been framed and investigated.

➤ Timeline and Documentation

Murdie (2010) notes in his SPR review that the narrative is structured as an unfolding story, in the style of Guy Lyon Playfair’s This House is Haunted, and that this makes the chronology hard to follow at times. He explicitly says more detail on some incidents would be welcome, given how extraordinary they are. This is the person who, to the best of my knowledge, had the most access to the case files.

For a case claiming “one of the best” documentation levels, it would be useful to see a clear, dated, incident-by-incident log, with notes on who was present, what equipment was running, and what was or wasn’t captured.

➤ Investigator Role and Expectations

The investigators are not passive observers. They’re on-call supporters, confidants, sometimes quasi-ritualists (Murdie notes surprise at Hallowell using Native American-derived rituals during the case). That’s understandable on a human level – when terrified people are calling you at 3am, you’re not going to sit there and draft a protocol. But it does mean the investigators are emotionally embedded in the narrative. That’s not a sin; it does, however, need acknowledging when we talk about “best attested” anything.

➤ Ad Hoc Theorising

The eventual so-called solution to stopping the poltergeist – turning off all electrical appliances and unplugging them at night to deprive the entity of stand-by power – sits on top of multiple unproven assumptions. Namely that poltergeists are real, that they draw power from electricity, that stand-by power is especially useful to the entity, and that this, combined with reduced fear, explains the timing of the end of the activity.

Now, it’s one thing to speculate about such mechanisms, but another to present them as if they have real explanatory weight in a field that already struggles with testability. In doing so, the investigators risk the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (“after this, therefore because of this”) - the fact that the activity subsided after they began unplugging appliances does not, by itself, demonstrate that this change caused the phenomena to cease.

➤ Questionable Media Choices

Hallowell (2010) has since stressed that the bottle balancing on its edge is evidentially weak and easily faked; he even notes in the book that he could have knocked it into that position by accident. Yet this is the clip that was initially pushed to tabloids and TV, and it remains the most widely seen piece of South Shields evidence. If your strongest material is too sensitive to show, and your weakest becomes your public flagship, you’re setting up a credibility problem from the start.

None of these points disprove the South Shields case but they do make it harder to sustain the “best attested” label in any robust sense. At best, what we have is a deeply felt, sincerely reported narrative, backed by a private archive that some sympathetic reviewers and co-authors have found impressive – and that the rest of us are asked to accept largely on trust.

Critics, Trolling, and the Space In Between

Ritson is right to say that some of the criticism directed at him and Hallowell over the years has been unkind, and in some cases potentially defamatory. The Bad Thinking blog review of a South Shields TV documentary, for example, is laced with mockery and contempt. (Bad Thinking, 2014)

At the same time, not all critical engagement is trolling. The GhostTheory pieces and comments, for instance, raise specific, substantive issues: what happens when key evidence is withheld? How should we interpret a case whose public face is a single dubious video and a dramatic narrative? What is the line between protecting witnesses and restricting scrutiny?

Those are fair questions, and they don’t magically become unfair because some other people on a different forum were rude. For what it’s worth, I have a lot of sympathy for the bind Ritson describes in his 2025 Fortean Times article. He and Hallowell walked into a situation that, if their account is accurate, was chaotic and frightening and they promised anonymity to a family who were already in distress. They then wrote up what they’d experienced in the way they knew – as a narrative book – and found themselves in the crossfire between believers hungry for proof and sceptics hungry for a debunking.

That doesn’t mean every choice they made was optimal, or that their conclusions are beyond question but it does mean we should aim to examine the work without turning the authors themselves into cartoon villains.

So Where Does That Leave South Shields?

If you start from a sceptical baseline, there are plenty of potential explanations available for the South Shields case - misperceptions, memory distortion, social contagion of fear, ordinary pranks, and, yes, the possibility of deliberate hoaxing by one or more householders or visitors. Poltergeist cases have always been messy mixtures of genuine puzzling events, suggestible context, and occasional theatrics.

If you start from a believer’s baseline, South Shields slots neatly into a lineage of house-bound disturbances, with familiar motifs (raps, thrown objects, person-centred focus), plus some newer flourishes like text messages and baby-monitor voices. You might look at the testimonies and internal consistency and conclude that something genuinely anomalous happened.

My own view, based on what’s available, is that the case is interesting, but the evidential claims are overstated. “Best attested” should imply broad, independent access to raw documentation, clear chronology, and methods that can be examined and replicated. South Shields doesn’t meet that bar. Also, while the ethical dilemma is real it is not insoluble - we don’t need to choose between protecting witnesses and sharing evidence. I’ve shown in this piece how other disciplines manage both. Psychical research could do more to develop anonymisation and data-sharing norms that don’t rely on personal trust in particular investigators, and until then, expect scepticism as a default response.

I also think the parapsychological uptake of South Shields should be read carefully. When researchers use the case as a data source, they are, in practice, treating the narrative as largely reliable and reasonably complete. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong, but it does mean their conclusions are only as strong as that assumption, and readers should keep that in mind. Turning a witness-led narrative into tables, codes, and graphs adds structure, not independent verification: it is still essentially an exercise in asking “if these reports are accurate, what patterns do we see?”, rather than testing whether those reports are the only or best explanation of what happened.

There’s also a more subtle problem. Once a case has been described as “well attested” and adopted into the literature, later authors tend to treat that label as settled fact, rather than a claim that itself needs scrutiny. South Shields is then cited as an example of documented poltergeist activity, and newer models are built on top of it, even though the underlying evidential record remains largely inaccessible to anyone outside a small circle of individuals. In effect, the community risks building increasingly elaborate theoretical scaffolding on foundations that have never really been stress-tested. That doesn’t necessarily invalidate the work entirely, but it does mean we should be cautious about how much weight we let one opaque case carry.

Perhaps the most useful thing the South Shields poltergeist gives us, twenty years on, is not a proof of anything paranormal, but a case study in how ghost stories become data, and how easily ethics, emotion, and evidence get tangled together.

There is a family at the centre of all this who, by all accounts, went through a period of genuine distress. There are investigators who believe – to this day – that they witnessed something impossible, and who describe paying a personal price for saying so. None of that should be dismissed lightly.

But if you ask the public, or other researchers, to accept large clusters of extraordinary claims largely on trust, and to take “well attested” at face value while most of the underlying record remains private, it shouldn’t be a surprise when people react with scepticism or push back. The controversy around South Shields isn’t just the fault of “armchair debunkers” or “keyboard warriors” - it’s baked into the way the case has been presented and managed. In some ways, that does the case itself a disservice, because it ensures it will always have a slightly mythic, untouchable edge rather than a fully examinable one.

In his Fortean Times piece, Ritson recalls asking Guy Lyon Playfair whether the accusations and doubts ever stop, and being told that they don’t. On one level, that’s simply true: if you work with hauntings and poltergeists, you will always have people who think you’re mistaken, have an agenda, or lying (something I myself face even as a sceptic). On another level, though, there is a gap here that needs acknowledging. If you want sceptics, historians, and curious outsiders to treat your work as more than a good story, you have to meet them halfway – by making as much anonymised evidence, context, and methodology available as you safely can, and by being open about what can’t be shown and why.

South Shields, twenty years on, is a reminder that ethics and evidence standards both matter. Protecting witnesses from exploitation is non-negotiable, so is the right of investigators to tell their story without being harassed - but if we want poltergeist research to be taken seriously beyond a small circle of believers, we also have to accept that extraordinary claims come with an expectation of extraordinary transparency. In that mix, the least we can do is keep our standards for evidence and fairness equally high – for witnesses, for investigators, and for those who dare to ask awkward questions.

References

Allen, C.I., Payne, S.H., & Valentine, J.L. (2023), ‘Ethical Data Sharing in Forensic Research’, Forensic Science International: Synergy, vol. 6, doi:10.1016/j.fsisyn.2023.100322. (Accessed 29 November 2025).

Boyle, A., (2014), ‘10 Terrifying Tales of Violent Poltergeists’, Listverse, 10 March. Available at: https://listverse.com/2014/03/10/10-terrifying-tales-of-violent-poltergeists/ (Accessed 29 November 2025).

Grinyer, A., (2002), ‘The Anonymity of Research Participants: Assumptions, Ethics and Practicalities’, Social Research Update, no. 36, University of Surrey. Available at: https://sru.soc.surrey.ac.uk/SRU36.html (Accessed 29 November 2025).

Hallowell, M.J., (2010), ‘South Shields Poltergeist: A letter to GhostTheory’, GhostTheory, 11 February. Available at: https://www.ghosttheory.com/2010/02/11/south-shields-poltergeist-a-letter-to-ghosttheory (Accessed 29 November 2025).

Houran, J., Little, C., Laythe, B., & Ritson, D.W., (2022), ‘Uncharted features and Dynamics of the South Shields Poltergeist’, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 86, no. 3, pp. 129–164. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/372825228_Uncharted_features_and_dynamics_of_the_South_Shields_poltergeist (Accessed 29 November 2025).

Massullo, B.J., Houran, J., Escolá Gascón, A., O’Keeffe, C., Drinkwater, K.G., & Dagnall, N. (2025), ‘Quality-Checking a Novel “Fact Sheet” on Ghostly Episodes’, Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 16. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1585437.

Murdie, A., (2010), ‘Review of The South Shields Poltergeist: One Family’s Fight Against an Invisible Intruder’, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 74, pp. 129–132. Reprinted in Europaranormal. (Accessed 29 November 2025).

Ritson, D. W., & Hallowell, M. J. (2008), ‘The South Shields Poltergeist: One Family’s Fight Against an Invisible Intruder’, The History Press, Stroud. (Rev. eds 2009, 2020.)

Ritson, D.W., (2021), ‘The South Shields Poltergeist, 15 Years On’, Spooky Isles, 28 May. Available at: https://www.spookyisles.com/south-shields-poltergeist-darren-w-ritson/ (Accessed 29 November 2025).

Ritson, D.W. (2025), ‘The South Shields Poltergeist 20 Years On’, Fortean Times, December 2025 Issue [FT465], pp. 32–39.

Saunders, B., Kitzinger, J., & Kitzinger, C., (2015), ‘Anonymising Interview Data: Challenges and Compromise in Practice’, Qualitative Research, vol. 15, no. 5, pp. 616–632. doi:10.1177/1468794114550439. (Accessed 29 November 2025).

‘Swiftsure’, (2014), ‘The South Shields Poltergeist – TV Documentary Even More Dire Than the Book’, Bad Thinking, 1 February. Available at: https://badthinking.wordpress.com/2014/02/01/the-south-shields-poltergeist-tv-documentary-even-more-dire-than-the-book/ (Accessed 29 November 2025).

‘Xavier’, (2009), ‘A Year Later, Where is the South Shields Evidence?’, GhostTheory, 18 June. Available at: https://www.ghosttheory.com/2009/06/18/a-year-later-where-is-the-south-shields-evidence (Accessed 29 November 2025).