I'm Professor Tok Thompson, professor of anthropology
at the University of Southern California.
Let's answer some questions from the internet.
what the oldest recorded ghost story is?
So we know that from the earliest writings,
especially back to ancient Babylonian times, Sumer, Ur,
some of the earliest stories people were writing down
So maybe 3,500 years ago, we have inscriptions
of what seemed to be even an exorcism ritual.
but they already had ritual specialists
that figured out how to get rid of ghosts.
Again, we know that as soon as writing pops up,
and these are some of our earliest writings.
From Anna, @lesaenni, What counts as a ghost?
Ghosts aren't a scientific concept.
We've never established them as a scientific reality.
that science doesn't even acknowledge existing?
The definition I like to use is that a ghost
is a spirit of a dead person who appears to the living.
that might be other spirits or other demons or ghouls
or things that might not be the spirit of a dead person.
On the other hand, it opens up a lot of possibilities.
One example is what if the dead person
Some people might say yes, some people might say no.
So again, these are sort of handy definitions,
and we like to see how far we can stretch these.
that are, like, '90s dudes with backwards caps and [beeps]?
I've been studying those for a while,
and one of the places we really find millennial ghosts
We have all these stories of haunted servers.
Minecraft has one of the most famous
supposed ghost stories on the internet.
So there are a tremendous amount of new ghost stories
and especially this idea of the cyber world.
Maybe this is where our afterlife is.
We have souls maybe trapped on a computer game
So I have all these sort of stories I've collected
of people getting text messages from the beyond
The online ghosts are all the people
and their social communications online.
So when they die, this is where they haunt.
I like to always offer the possibility
that, well, one, maybe they're real,
or other suggestions might be something like
you probably believe in some sort of an afterlife.
Ghost stories are also a way of establishing ethics
as something more than just transactional.
by your ethical failures if you make them.
There was a great scientific experiment a few years ago.
They had these students come in and do a test.
The only catch was that they could easily cheat on the test.
Okay, you know, please don't cheat.
But they kept track of how many students did.
And one group, they also said that,
Oh, by the way, this room is supposed to be haunted.
The group that felt their room was haunted
were far less likely to cheat at the test.
why ghost stories became so big in the Victorian era
is that that's when home gas lighting became prevalent.
Everyone's getting carbon monoxide poisoning
when they're trying to contact the spirit world.
with various drugs or gases or whatnot.
The Oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece,
we know that gases were coming out,
with the participants' experience being gassed.
that ghosts became really big during the Victorian era.
One of the biggest ones was that, you know,
versus the Catholic groups in Europe.
you weren't supposed to believe in ghosts suddenly.
That was supposed to be an old Catholic superstition
that, you know, the Reformation was supposed to get rid of.
And one of the big problems is that people
kept seeing a lot of ghosts in the Victorian era.
What we have is this really interesting rise
of scientific inquiries into ghosts.
So maybe ghosts weren't supernatural;
maybe science could prove ghosts exist, you know?
Maybe electricity had something to do with ghosts,
like Frankenstein, or maybe X-rays.
Maybe we could take photographs of the spirit world.
of sort of Eastern mysticism and science.
The other thing I think I could mention too
which was huge during the Victorian era.
And that's really talking about the fall of the aristocracy.
Charles Dickens wrote a lot about ghosts.
So this is a big deal in the Victorian era,
and they're becoming a big deal today as well
Okay, I realize it's customary, if not mandatory,
for Christians to believe in demons and Satan,
When Christianity started off, one of its main core tenets
is that ghosts weren't supposed to happen.
eventually you're gonna go to the Day of Judgment.
So a lot of people were worshiping ancestors
and Christianity was saying, No, this doesn't happen.
And then [laughs] when it spreads into Northern Europe,
the Germanic peoples were very, very much into their ghosts.
And Pope Gregory I said, Look, you don't have to change
So by the time we get to the Middle Ages,
If you see a ghost, you can go to your priest,
and you can say, Hey, priest, I saw a ghost.
And then the priest would say, Ah, yes, you know,
that's your grandfather, and he's stuck in purgatory,
and he needs help to bring him up the ranks of purgatory.
Therefore, you need to pay me to pray for him.
So this idea of the sale of indulgences,
which is a big moneymaker for the church,
When Martin Luther started off the Reformation
with his complaints against the church,
the number one thing was the sale of indulgences.
And very connected to that, ghosts.
Martin Luther said, Look, Christians
aren't supposed to believe in ghosts.
The church shouldn't believe in ghosts.
You know, what are you doing believing in ghosts?
This ultimately led to the Protestant Reformation.
And so now you had the Catholic Church
that still believed in ghosts and exorcisms,
largely denied the existence of ghosts.
That starts to change in the American experience
when you have these sort of newer religious movements,
the Third Great Awakening as it's sometimes called.
Southern Pentecostals, the so-called holy rollers,
and the devil's a very active force.
but the idea now is going back to this older idea
that, oh no, there are no such things as ghosts.
It's only demons or devils trying to trick you.
What spirits in the movie are based off of real spirits
in Japanese folklore and Shintoism?
Spirited Away which is a beautiful movie
I think it really captures the look and feel
is not that far away from the human world.
You can easily sort of wander into it by accident.
and sometimes people are necessary to help out spirits.
All of this is very, very traditional.
The actual figures, the actual characters themselves,
not so much based on actual Japanese folklore.
A friend of mine who's a scholar on Japanese folklore,
and he calls this the folkloresque.
You're making something really feel like folklore,
even if it's really not based on traditional folklore.
Another question coming in from EngineeringNo8660.
have the most ghost/spirit rich history?
that by far the majority of Taiwan believes in ghosts,
probably 90%, 95% of the population.
Which is to say, if you're in Taiwan
you're kinda weird; you're kind of strange.
You have the big celebrations for the ghosts.
In Japan, very similarly, this is the Obon Festival.
It's a bit like American Christmas.
you're supposed to go home with the family.
But the other thing is, it's not just your living family;
Traditional families would set places out
and invite the ancestors to come in and enjoy a meal
and to return and greet their living relatives.
You have your wanted ghosts, like ancestor spirits,
the ones that tend to haunt us or cause trouble.
These work a little bit differently
from conflations of Buddhism and other traditions,
but we have several different types of ghosts.
Very often these ghosts are corporeal,
so you don't notice they're ghosts at first.
and fleshed out in a lot of East Asian traditions.
You can even have sex with a ghost and have ghost babies.
And so some people that are remarkable people,
This idea that being close to the spirit world
is also maybe what makes some people so very special.
This becomes a much bigger sort of cultural concern
than we might see in places like America.
@NoctivagantPod, Are poltergeist and ghosts the same thing?
The idea of the poltergeist experience
is when things are, you know, flying off the walls;
So they're creating a lot of noise.
But some people that believe in poltergeists and ghosts
would maintain that these are not ghosts,
that this is something else involved,
that they're not really ghosts; it's probably telekinesis.
no one ever sees ghosts of animals?
The main reason that people don't see many ghosts
it's largely an Abrahamic and largely Christian nation
where we have this idea that only people have souls.
On the other hand, in societies that are non-Abrahamic,
Look at India; you have animal ghosts.
And if you look at Native American folklore,
And that goes to this fundamental thoughts,
very different thoughts about the soul.
And so therefore, if you kill an animal
or even harvest plants, Native American tradition,
you have to, you know, say thank you.
You have to pray for its spiritual journey.
You have to give it some sort of funerary ritual
or else, you know, something might go wrong,
and it might come back and haunt you.
This idea of being haunted by ghosts
really shaped a lot of Native American spiritual traditions.
always talk about the lady in white?
Why not the lady in turquoise or the lady in burgundy?
Well, a lot of ghosts show up in night
and I think maybe white actually shows up better
So it's a very sort of compelling imagery
the lady in white in the middle of the night.
especially sort of patrilineal and patriarchal cultures,
the idea of the failed bride becoming a ghost,
like the woman who never quite gets married,
abandoned at the altar and commits suicide,
And of course we represent unmarried women by wearing white.
So there's some very particular things about ladies in white
that have a long, long trajectory in European culture.
@dioscuri, I wonder if part of the reason
people tell ghost stories is that it's comforting to think
leaves a spiritual scar in a place, rather than nature
and geography being utterly indifferent to human affairs.
I like to say that history is written by the victors,
but ghost stories are written by the victims.
One great example is called Duffy's Cut.
This was a valley in the East Coast.
Irish American laborers came in to work on a railroad.
The local town said it was a cholera epidemic.
End of story, except for the next 100-plus years,
people kept seeing ghosts in this valley.
Finally, just a few years ago, people dug up the graves,
So yeah, ghost stories do represent the sordid history,
@thetoughestbean, Lincoln, and especially his wife,
I think they held a seance at the White House.
It was mentioned in the newspapers.
They would've called it not occultism;
they would've called it spiritualism.
So this is kind of remarkable by today's standards.
that the spirit world maybe was not so far away
and that the dead could actually be probably
had several seances in the White House,
and this was completely acceptable during that time period.
@MIDNIGHTER, Why is the American South
Like, why can't they just chill out for a sec?
Ghost stories come out very often of ethical failures.
So is the South still haunted by its slaveholding past?
A lot of Americans are obsessed with paranormal
What's Europe's relationship with the paranormal?
Europe's a big place, got a lot of different countries.
So there's actually a lot of sort of differences
in the different European traditions as well.
A good friend of mine actually did a recent survey
over in Iceland, trying to figure out, you know,
what level of Icelanders believed in ghosts.
And it was somewhere around the 60%,
This is pretty much like we see in the United States.
depending on what survey you look at.
On the other hand, you can look at some countries in Europe
France does not report a lot of ghosts.
What France does report is a lot of saintly apparitions,
Marian apparitions where they see Mother Mary.
They wouldn't say they're ghosts in France.
It's like, Oh, no, this is religion.
Because some people might not like that word, ghost.
Like, Oh, no, I don't believe in ghosts.
Anything strange ever happened to you?
Oh, my dead husband appeared to me one night.
This sort of thing happens all the time.
So surveys can be very, very difficult
at figuring out what people actually really believe.
that people report on these surveys
very, very differently in different European countries.
Can other living spaces be haunted?
Go on a little camping trip with my new ghost buddy?
and come back home to my little spooky pal
Yeah, the haunted house shows up a lot.
We live in houses sorta like we live in our bodies.
There's a lot of metaphors that sort of, you know,
associate your house and your body.
So maybe this is where we spend a lot of our time.
as your spirit leaves your body, [laughs] still lingers,
and very often it still lingers in the house.
that these are sort of domestic ghosts, right?
If ghosts are often ethical failings,
then these are domestic failings, maybe abusive families
or, you know, family murders, stuff like this.
This pops up around the world, interestingly enough.
that maybe kids are more susceptible to ghostly influence.
Maybe they don't have a hearty adult soul, in a sense.
Well, kids just haven't learned not to see them.
As adults, maybe we learn to shut them out,
And then, of course, there's also the idea
of kids having a very active imagination.
So kids talking to ghosts is a very, very common motif,
and I think it brings in a lot of different thoughts
the relationship between kids and the dead.
@cloakbrand, What is Dia de los Muertos about?
Do you celebrate this holiday with your family?
Yes, you celebrate this holiday with your family, ideally.
This is a very, very well-beloved festival
that was brought into the Catholic calendar.
of All Souls' Day and All Saints' Day.
So long ago, this is probably developed to move Samhain,
the Celtic Halloween, into the Christian fold.
So this is why those days are right at Samhain,
And then when they came to the Americas,
they put the Days of the Dead from Central America
So right now in, like, Los Angeles,
we have a lot of Hispanic traditions for Days of the Dead,
going on at the same time we have Halloween celebrations.
So modern America, Halloween is very often about spooks
and the Days of the Dead for Hispanic culture
is very, very much about the wanted dead.
There's this idea that, you know, you can keep coming back.
You set up a little altar, an ofrenda,
and very often with pictures of loved ones,
and a lot of interesting symbolism like marigolds,
which had long been a symbol of the return of the dead
in ancient Aztec and Mayan culture.
So Days of the Dead is this wonderful blend
from pre-colonial indigenous traditions
and also very, very contemporary in today's society.
There's a phrase that often goes with it:
So your afterlife depends on the people remembering you,
and that's what Days of the Dead is all about.
This is everything I got for today.
and thank you for watching Ghost Support.
