The Bigger Picture

A reintroduction to your friendly neighbourhood ghost researcher.

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.

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.

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.