The Psychology Behind Paranormal Tourism

Why do we believe in ghosts? Why do so many of us say we've felt something? Presence in the room, a whisper, a chill. Even if we're not totally sure we believe in the supernatural. How is it that nearly every culture across history has told stories of the dead walking among the living? With Jack O'Lanterns flickering and doorbells ringing this time of year, on this episode, we're not just chasing ghosts, we're chasing the why behind them. I'm Sony Cassom, and this is 1440 Explores. We're on a mission to uncover the essential knowledge that explains your world. We talk to the experts who know the subject best. And today's guide is psychologist and professor Chris French. He'll help us explain what's happening in the brain when we think we've seen a ghost, why our memories deceive us, and how grief, trauma, and culture shape the seemingly supernatural. And along the way, I'll learn what really happened one night when I woke up and saw a figure standing over my brother's bed. Stay with us. Listen, learning has never been harder. The internet is overwhelmed with low quality content. bait with little substance, AI generated slop. and opinions masquerading as facts. Curious people like you are left sifting through noise instead of finding what matters. Enter 1440 Topics. We've curated the highest quality resources from across the internet. Think data visualizations, captivating videos, long form journalism, and paired them with staff written overviews to make every subject easy to understand and explore. Want to learn about venture capital or how new weight loss drugs work? Do you keep reading about CRISPR but are missing the best 101 on the breakthrough technology? All of this and so much more at join fourteen forty.com. 1440 Topics, separating what's worth your time from the rest of the internet. A few months ago. I went on a ghost tour in Charleston. The night was hot and humid. The air thick with history. We paused outside an old cemetery and slipped down narrow alleys where tiny handprints were pressed into the bricks. Children, laborers, frozen in time. Stories rose from every corner. Lavinia Fisher. Hanged long ago. whose ghost still paces the old jail. And the Gullah Boo Hag. A skin shedding spirit. You can fool by leaving rice to count. As I listened, it became clear. These tales aren't just local legends. Ghost stories, it seems, are everywhere. And belief in ghosts? Even more so. Our guide in this episode, Professor Chris French. had his own brush with the paranormal. I was working at Bangor University in North Wales. Um and my girlfriend at the time was doing a medical degree in Leicester University, which was kind of several hours away on the train. And I do remember one one morning waking up and it was kind of just about dawn. and thinking I could see her standing at the foot of the bed. I'm not gonna rub my eyes at a double take. Gone. I fent felt compelled to ring her that evening and say, Were were you okay last night? Or we were you ill? Or we were you having us any strange experiences? And no, she hadn't been, you know, she'd been absolutely fine. But here's the twist. It wasn't until I was doing my PhD that I actually discovered the joys of skepticism. Over time, Chris became Professor French. And what we call a sceptic. Someone just recommended a book to me, one particular book. Called Parapsychology. Science or Magic by a Canadian social psychologist called James Alcock, and it was the first sceptical treatment of all this stuff that I'd ever come across. Since then, he specialized in finding scientific answers to why people think they see ghosts, but ultimately don't. Today, he's Professor Emeritus at Goldsmiths University of London. Profess has spent his career Trying to understand why people supposedly see ghosts. feel haunted, and believe the unbelievable. Belief, Professor French says, isn't always rational. It's emotional. It's cultural, and it's surprising common. Approximately forty percent of Americans believe in ghosts. Which is just a bit lower than the global average. This is nothing new. It's just the latest chapter in a much older story. You won't find a single culture either geographically or historically. doesn't have beliefs relating to spirits and life after death and so on and so forth. But Professor Frank says if you look at the detail of what people believe, it varies enormously. Yeah, the ancient Greeks' idea of what a ghost was is very different to the modern Western idea of what a ghost is. Yes, very different. Greek ghosts aren't floating bed sheets. They are souls of the unburied or the unjustly killed, drifting between the underworld and the living world. Usually some degree of mournful and restless. The Western ghosts, on the other hand. Are way more theatrical. You know the look. Sheet. Eye holes. Floating in the dark. That image comes from old European burial customs. Before coffins, bodies were wrapped in white linen. Over time, people began associating ghosts with the sight of the recently dead. Still draped in shrouds. By the fifteen hundreds. Pranksters were already wearing sheets to scare people. In 1804, a London man in white work clothes Was mistaken for a ghost. And shot dead. But that image, it's mostly European. Pan. Ghosts wear funeral kimonos. and have long black hair. In China, they can have green faces. You find that variation in line with kind of wider cultural beliefs and that very much suggests that we're dealing with something that is a product of those cultural beliefs rather than some s something that has any Objective reality. Okay, okay. Playing devil's advocate here. Are proof that there's something to them? You might initially think, Well, maybe that suggests that some of these things are genuinely beyond scientific explanation. But I would say maybe the explanation is that we all have very similar brains. You know, our brains have not changed that much. to to you know a few thousand years ago. Um and maybe it's telling us about kind of certain glitches that can take place that lead us to draw the wrong conclusions. That right there is the heart of it. Not whether ghosts are real. But why we think they are. Whether they're bedsheets with eyes, or mopey ancient Greeks, or Gullah Boo hags counting marbles. Let's dig into the science. According to Professor French, the first reason we believe in ghosts. It's surprising simple. We're all afraid of our own mortality. Whether you're a believer or a sceptic. We don't like the idea that when the physical body dies, that's the end of us. We don't like that idea as it applies to us, and we certainly don't like that idea as it applies to our loved ones. The idea that when they die that's it, we'll never have any contact with them again. I never thought of that. It makes sense, right? Ghost Though scary, sure. Are we really gone when we die? And could there still be some way to hold on to the people we've lost? A brush with the paranormal could for some of us. Be a brush with hope. A way to believe Death isn't final. As Professor French points out. Belief doesn't just come from what we hope is true. It's also fed by how our brains work. One of the most pervasive and powerful cognitive biases that we all suffer from. is something call confirmation bias. If we really want something to be the case, or we already believe strongly that it is the case, then We don't need the evidence to be that strong to to keep that belief going. Because We would like to believe in the idea of life after death, even though the idea of ghosts is often quite a scary idea for people. it does actually constitute evidence for life after death. And so I think that that's that the kind of motivational side. So yes, our beliefs about ghosts might come from what we want to be true. but they also come from how we're wired. Because sometimes believing in ghosts Isn't just about hope. That our long lost loved ones. Still be out there. It's about survival. Professor French says, our brains aren't designed to tell us what's real. They're designed to keep us alive. And sometimes. Mean seeing things. Aren't there. So if you look at the evolutionary history of our species For most of that time we we lived in a kind of very dangerous world where there were potentially predators or enemies around us. And our brains evolved basically to keep us alive long enough to pass on our genes to the next generation, not necessarily brains that evolved in order to uh ascertain the truth with a capital T about the way the universe is. As a result of that, we're hyper-alert for potential threats. The idea that as when something happens in the in the world around us, it happens because some sentient agent with particular intentions towards us made it happen. That makes sense in our terms of our evolutionary history because that that's a potential threat. We need to know what that is and what the intentions are towards us. We've got brains that tend towards assuming that there is something there rather than there isn't. So when something unexpected happens, a shadow moves, a floorboard creaks, Our brain reaches for an explanation. And the explanation it wants is a presence. Not just a thing. But at mind. Something alive. that might be watching us. hunting us. That reflex helped keep us alive. Spotting predators in the dark. But today, it can't backfire. And there's another place where our evolutionary inheritance can betray us in a chilling way. The strange space between awaking and sleeping. a moment when your brain is awake. Body won't move. It usually lasts just seconds or a couple of terrifying minutes. This is sleep paralysis. You're either just drifting off to sleep or coming out of sleep into wakefulness, and you experience a temporary period of paralysis. However, it can be associated with other symptoms that can make it absolutely terrifying. For me, that space is not theoretical. When I was a kid. My younger brother and I Shared a bedroom. Later. Personality shifted a bit. He started hanging out with a different crowd. One night. I had sleep paralysis. I felt like there was a demon on my brother. presence on him. I remember thinking. That's why he's changed. As I got older, I realized it was sleep paralysis. No, it happens to me every couple of months. Turns out roughly one in five people experienced sleep paralysis at least once in their lives. And about seven to eight percent experience it regularly. It also happens to be one of the most common sources of Supposed ghost sightings. Typical things that people report would be lights moving around the room or dark shadows. Monstrous figures, demons, old hags. full form apparitions. Uh you might hear things. You might hear voices or footsteps or mechanical sounds. And remember while all this is happening, you can see that you're in your bedroom. One of the few parts of your body that you can move are your eyes. You can open your eyes, you can see you're in your bedroom. does not feel like a dream and yet yeah all this stuff is happening. It's a terrifying paradox. You can see your room. You know you're awake. And yet Something is in the room. You. Shadow A figure A voice Can't move. You can't speak. Can't explain it. And for many people That experience is so unnerving. They keep it to themselves. people are often kind of very reluctant to talk about these experiences. Because they they they know that a lot of people will look at them and think, Oh God, you're weird, you know, and they'll keep the distance. And and that's really unfair because it is just this thing that some people have a susceptibility to. There is a scientific and medical literature on it. Make sense that people keep these stories to themselves. They're strange. They're hard to explain. And nobody wants to sound like they've lost the plot. Also incredibly common. And there's a growing body of science that says this isn't just superstition. There are real patterns behind these moments. Patterns wired deep into the way our brains work. One of those patterns might feel even more familiar. And sleep paralysis. As humans, we are wired to see Faces. Everywhere. In the clouds, in a floral print dress. Maybe even in a random stain on the wall. You name it. Maybe this has happened to you once or twice. And there's actually a name for this. It's down to this thing called Pariodolia. Haria Dolia On that. In a moment. 1440 started in 2017 with a simple promise to deliver fact-driven, impactful news to smart curious readers. Today, our audience of over 4 million is made up of engaged news consumers who want more than just the headlines. They want to understand the why and the how. Yet finding high quality resources to go deeper, beyond this podcast of course, has never been more difficult. The best work, from videos to long form journalism, is too often buried beneath countless pages of clickbait and low quality AI generated content. That's why we created 1440 Topics. Our staff hand curates only the best content and organizes it into a single place for you to explore. We've done the hard work so you can spend more time learning about alternative investments, hurricanes. Ancient Rome, and so much more. Continue learning at join fourteen forty.com. Fourteen forty topics, separating what's worth your time from the rest of the internet. Teria Dolia. As Professor French has told us before, we're really good at noticing things out in the world. Predators, patterns of all sorts in nature. For most of human history, spotting a pair of eyes in the dark, real or imagined, could mean the difference between life and death. So we got good at it. Maybe too good. We do sometimes overplay it. Sometimes we think that we can see meaningful patterns when actually they're not really there. It's kind of randomness. We're particularly likely to see faces, for example, in visual noise. I mean so it's like you know like seeing a face in a cloud or seeing a face in the bubbles on the top of your coffee or a stain on the floor or the pattern of the wallpaper. It sounds a bit trivial. until it isn't. Until the eyes you spot in the dark. Feel like they're looking back. And that's no accident either. If you're in a dark, spooky place with lots of shadows and so on, it's very very easy to think you can see a face or you can see a human figure somewhere behind in the trees and so on. After everything we talked about. I asked Professor French what he personally believes. And the answer? Well, he doesn't. Not in ghosts or demons, and not in voices from beyond, anyway. But to be clear, he's not dismissive of them. The opposite. He believes in why we believe. Together, Professor French and I talked quite a bit about the centuries of well-meaning people that have tried and failed to prove the supernatural. Starting in the 1800s, scholars in London founded groups like the Society for Psychical Research. They set out to study hauntings with scientific tools. And early reports seem to find something. Strange sounds, sudden chills, even glimpses of ghostly figures. When those findings were investigated more closely. The explanations were usually mundane. Loose floorboards, drafty windows. Flickering gaslights. You get the idea. In the 1970s, a Canadian research group Created a fictional ghost. complete with a name and tragic backstory. Then asked a group of volunteers to contact him. Through seances. Soon the room filled with eerie knocks and table movements. Critics argue these experiences weren't caused by the dead. Rather, it came from the participants themselves. if you say to suggestible people, if you go in this space you might have some weird experiences. Some of them do, but it's all down to the power of suggestion. The experiment show that shared belief and expectations alone produce the illusion of a haunting. Professor French told me that even the tools of modern ghost hunting haven't held up. EMF meters. which measure electromagnetic fields tend to spike from things like bad wiring or appliances. Not spirits. thermal cameras. meant to detect ghostly cold spots, usually just pick up drafts or pour insulation. And audio recorders. capture so called E V Ps. Electronic voice phenomena. mostly reveal the brain's habit of hearing meaning and static. Just like seeing a face in the clouds. again and again, the trail doesn't lead to spirits. It leads to us. our need to explain the unexplainable. Our brains finding patterns where none exist. And this leads us to the most human part of all. Because if ghosts don't show up in the data Definitely show up. in hotel brochures, in walking tours, and in Halloween budgets. Belief. It turns out is a great business. In the United States, paranormal tourism is an over $2 billion industry. Cities that once leaned on history now market their haunted side. Salem, Massachusetts, brought in a hundred and forty million dollars in twenty twenty five alone. Gettysburg now runs ghost tours so popular. They outdraw many of the historical reenactments. New Orleans brings in over 19 million visitors a year. Big slice of them are there for ghost tours. And then there's Halloween. In twenty twenty four, Americans spent around ten billion dollars on costumes, haunted houses. Ghost events, you name it. And it is not only on the streets. It is on the screens. Hollywood movies. Splashy investigations. Vision chases. Marathon Ghost Hunts. The fandom is a feedback loop. Here's Professor French again. A lot of these groups often inspired by the kind of TV programs And I've taken part in a lot of those TV programs. And most of them are really awful. You know, really, really bad. And they're and again, I take part in them in the full knowledge that I am the token sceptic. I am these programs are aimed at believers. You can actually learn something about the kind of lay psychology of this stuff by seeing real people who think that their houses are haunted and thinking about why they might think that. And finally, yes, I admit it, they pay me. So uh it helps it helped to pay off the mortgage, you know? But um yeah, uh so I I'm kinda quite ambivalent. Haunted streets, ghost tours, and TV shows. They're fun, sure, but they're also mirrors of something deeper. Our curiosity. our fears and the stories we tell to make sense of the unknown. Maybe, in the end, ghosts tell us more about the living than the dead. It's an important part of what it means to be human. And so if as psychologists we've got nothing to say about that, I think we're missing out on a really important aspect of what it means to be human. Many thanks to Dr. Christopher French for being our guide in this episode, and thank you for listening to 1440 Explores. I'm Sony Cassom. Make sure to follow the show and leave a review on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And let us know what you think at podcast at join1440.com. While you're at it, start your learning journey with us at join1440.com. Subscribe to our free daily and weekly newsletters on world affairs, business and finance, society and culture, and much more. 1440 Explorers is a production of Rhyme Media for 1440 Media. This episode was produced by Nicolo Minoni and edited by Dan Bobkov. Our fact checker is Mahar Kazelbash. and our sound designer is Jay Cowitt. The executive producer at Rhyme is Dan Bobkoff, and the executive producers at 1440 are me and Drew Steigerwald. See you next time.