PHILADELPHIA — Justin McDaniel, a professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, teaches a popular course called "Gods, Ghosts and Monsters," a comparative religion course about death and the afterlife. He's long been fascinated with ghost stories — and why they fascinate us.
During the pandemic, he said, his class took on a deeper meaning for his students, who come from a number of different academic backgrounds, from history majors to nursing students.
As millions across the country confronted death up-close, he said, learning about funerary rites and afterlife beliefs helped his students connect, cope, and understand what they were going through.
The first thing McDaniel wants people to know is this: It doesn't matter if ghosts are "real."
"Ghosts are socially real — people think and talk about them," he said. Ghost stories "resonate across cultures, religions, class, race."
The pandemic has forced many of us to confront death on a larger scale than ever before. How has that changed the way people think about belief in an afterlife?
My own father died very suddenly of COVID. He's one of millions. He was incredibly healthy and active in every way, and he was dead within nine days. So it certainly affected me personally, and a lot of my students.
A lot of students became much more viscerally interested in the afterlife [during the pandemic]. I was really struck by my nursing school students. A large number of them started taking the course online, and they were dealing with death on the front line every day — nursing students in their first and second years, forced to be in clinical rotations in the hospital immediately.
Other students were moving home, living with grandparents or combined with family members in one house for safety. They were really seeing the world as a very threatening place and isolating place.
They wanted to know more about palliative care and funerary traditions. For a lot of students, [funerals during the pandemic] were the first funerals they were going to. It made things a little bit more visceral.
What they were struck by is how different religions' traditions helped people emotionally, how they helped get through the initial shock. You do so many things ritually that you're busy.
And then the stories coming out of different religions really helped with long-term emotional strife. Not one story is ever going to give you an answer, but they allow you to see how emotions are expressed in many different forms.
Why are ghosts and ghost stories such an enduring cultural touchstone?
There are lots of reasons — we can look at it as a psychological coping mechanism for loss. Or social pressure: If everyone else believes it, why don't I? There's a Marxist interpretation of ghost stories, that people in power are manipulating us and making us afraid. Or biogenetics: It's part of our evolutionary history that having hope [that your legacy will last beyond your death] is an evolutionary advantage.
But I think any one of these is reductionist. If you reduce everything to a psychological coping mechanism, or a tool of power, it takes away from the question of why [ghost stories] are culturally relevant — why people like them.
We want the world to be more interesting than it is. We want the world to be a little more enchanted.
The probable thing is that when you die, your body slowly disintegrates and is part of the atoms of the universe again. But it's much more interesting if your uncle, grandmother, or sister is someone who can still touch your life after they're gone.
Imagine the world without ghost stories or the possibility of an afterlife. Huge parts of our culture would go away.
How do you address people who are skeptical about researching ghosts or ghost stories?
We deal with magic every day. Like the stock market — it's a lot of people believing something based on half-truths and rumor and gossip. Sports is a version of enchantment — why is everyone in Philadelphia happy all of a sudden? We have five winning sports teams, and it just seems like magic is happening.
Most people are dealing with realms of the unknown, magic, and possibility. Most of us believe things we don't understand all the time. And I see ghosts as one thing on that spectrum of things we don't understand.
It's a part of the spectrum I wouldn't want to disappear. I don't want to live in a world without that possibility.
