Everybody seems to be talking about ghosts right now. I turn up to dinners with friends, we’re talking about ghosts. I sit in the office, the conversation is dominated by ghosts again. I’m scrolling through Facebook groups and reading ghost stories that I then try to tell my boyfriend about (he ignores me). It feels as if ghosts are suddenly having a moment, a strange little resurgence into the mainstream. I think ghosts may be in vogue.
As for how and why ghosts have started to creep into polite conversation, there is a clear culprit. A few months ago the Amazon-owned podcast network Wondery published Ghost Story, a seven-part series hosted by the journalist Tristan Redman. Ghost Story focuses on a murder that occurred two generations ago in Redman’s wife’s family and, by absolute coincidence, took place in the house next door to where Redman grew up.
Redman details unnerving and inexplicable experiences that he had in his childhood bedroom and explains that his investigation into his wife’s family story was launched by news that two families who had lived successively in the house after his own family moved out had also experienced similar – seemingly paranormal – activity.
Despite clearly knowing better than to prod into the details of a little-discussed murder among his in-laws, Redman gives in to journalistic curiosity and delves into the history of the Dancy family (it’s worth mentioning here that the British actor Hugh Dancy is Redman’s brother-in-law).
Ghost Story is a wildly compelling podcast that has received glowing reviews and in the weeks after its release it spread like the pox through my friends’ Instagram stories. It’s not just that the podcast centres on a ghost story – it’s that it’s a ghost story told by somebody who keeps rushing to reassure us that, as a journalist, as a rational, clear-thinking person, he really does not believe in ghosts. But in this case the evidence is too fascinating to ignore.
“Look, I know how this sounds but I think this all might be more than just a bizarre coincidence,” Redman says in the trailer.
It’s in this delicate negotiation between the sensible, scientific world and the unfounded, supernatural world that I believe Ghost Story found its success. While a surprisingly high number of Australians believe (or are open to the possibility) that ghosts truly do exist (48%, according to one 2021 survey), lots of us still seem to rely quite heavily on the beginning of somebody’s story for permission to indulge these outlandish accounts – the part where a person says “I don’t believe in ghosts but … ”
What Ghost Story has uncovered is that, for so many of us, stories of the paranormal can be a strange, exciting and decadent activity, like buying oysters to eat in your own house.
Even if the higher-order thinking parts of our brains quickly remind us that it’s all basically nonsense, ghost stories seem to set the childish, reptilian parts of our brains alight. When one of my best friends agrees to tell the story, in full, of the time that a set of ghostly legs appeared to walk her family dog past her bedroom door, everybody at the table, no matter how cynical, visibly squirms.
After I recommended the Ghost Story podcast to one of the smartest people I’ve met, he messaged soon after to say that he had devoured the whole thing but his partner was away and it had made him terrified to sleep at night.
And look, maybe it’s unsurprising that this year, of all years, people are turning to the paranormal. Interest in the supernatural appears to spike in times of existential crises and a cost-of-living crisis accompanied by a climate crisis as well as the world witnessing a devastating humanitarian crisis feels like a lot to bear.
Stress can increase our awareness of the little bumps and quirks of life that we may have previously walked past without a second thought. And of course it is entirely possible that talking about ghosts with friends primes us to pay attention to the dark corners of our apartments that previously felt perfectly comfortable and didn’t have to contain malevolent spirits or anything. This could be a rather self-perpetuating cycle.
But it’s also fair to say that telling ghost stories can be a simple comfort and form of escapism that we shouldn’t completely denounce. After all, many of us grew up in cultures where ghosts were part of the spiritual landscape and, in the vast universe of bizarre things to believe in, ghosts have to be among the most benign and least politically bothersome. They don’t lend themselves particularly well to the construction of conspiracy theories, they don’t have any troubling racist undertones and they’re not going to lead people to attempt an insurrection at the Capitol Building any time soon.
We should always remain vigilant about the emergence of pseudoscience and perhaps Carl Sagan would argue that even humouring ghost stories is a slippery slope towards a total collapse of scientific knowledge. But I think we can all agree that people can be much more discerning than that and, in the troubling year of 2023, maybe we all deserve a few ghost stories, as a treat.
