Ghosts and their Stories
This week I touch on reasons we as a society enjoy ghost stories and being scared.
Have you ever sat around a campfire, the wind rustling the trees, leaning in to hear someone tell a scary story? In undergrad, Dr. Fischbach, one of my history professors, would tell students about the various hauntings on the historic Randolph-Macon College campus from his classroom in Washington-Franklin Hall, home to a few ghosts. The other students and I would be locked in and excited to listen. While the details are fuzzy, I remember that one story was about a fraternity pledge who died of a heart attack after the fraternity put him in a box and then placed the box next to the train tracks that bisect the campus. Another was of a Civil War soldier walking around the first floor of one of the historic buildings on campus.
A good ghost story is undeniably magnetic, especially whentold well. In the United States, we seem to be obsessed with them. I cannot tell you how many Instagram accounts share Halloween Movie Marathons. Ghost tours in Old Town Alexandria, where I live, seem to be on every corner, every street, every night. I’ve gone on a few of them myself. But if you pause and think about it, isn’t that kind of weird?
I know, I am writing a blog that focuses on death and dying, but when you look at the folks on these tours or sitting in theatres, it’s a diverse crowd. Why do we seek out stories of things we would never, in a million years, want to experience? Why do we want our hearts to race and our palms to sweat as we begin to question every sound we hear? Our obsession with ghost stories and horror movies is more than just cheap thrills. These stories, no matter what the format, are almost like looking in a mirror that reflects darker parts of our societies. They let us navigate our own fears; they teach children how to stay safe; they help us process profound grief; and they force us to face historical truths left out of our history classes.
Fun Fear Psychology
Scary movies, ghost stories, and haunted houses are exhilarating. As the story builds, it triggers fight-or-flight mode in our brains; adrenaline starts pumping, our senses sharpen, and our brains get a hit of dopamine. They are quite literally thrillers: anxiety, tension, excitement, and the second the scary moment is solved, we shift to excitement, pleasure, and relief. Even though these emotions and chemicals fire off in our brain and body, we still experience it from a safe distance. We know the ghost can’t jump out at us, and we know we can walk away and tell ourselves it’s not real. I think, and therefore it must be scientific truth, that it is more fun to watch a scary movie with someone else or read the same ghost story. It is human nature to crave and need companionship and reassurance after a scary experience, real or not.
Morality and Social Guardrails
Most stories pull double duty: entertainment and moral guidance. Aesop’s Fables, parables in the Bible, the OG fairy tales, not the Disneyfied cartoons. For children, scary stories are clever survival mechanisms disguised as supernatural horrors. An example of this is the legend of “Dry Head and Bloody Bones.” This story was collected and recorded as part of the Works Progress Administration project on slave narratives. Florida Clayton explained that she and her friends were warned to never approach a mysterious covered wagon in a secluded part of town. They were told that an evil spirit named Dry Head and Bloody Bones lived in there and would eat children who came too close. Clayton said that it wasn’t until she had grown up that the wagon belonged to a slave hunter who would kidnap children and sell them illegally. The spirit in the story was to instill fear of a VERY REAL horror.
History is written by the victors; ghost stories are not.
Originally, I planned this post to focus only on how ghost stories make sense of grief, history, and buried atrocities. I kept thinking of a book I read a few years ago, “Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places” by Colin Dickey. Dickey takes readers on a journey through history, showing how ghost stories shape how we talk about America’s crimes against humanity. Dickey writes that ghost stories are “the dreams (or nightmares) of a nation, the Freudian slips of whole communities.”
Just as Freudian slips reveal thoughts buried deep in one’s subconscious, the ghost stories we tell come from our culture’s subconscious, exposing uncomfortable truths and historic guilt we have tried to whitewash. History books tell sanitized versions to make readers feel comfortable and to make it seem like every action by the “good” people was good. Ghost stories are the parallel history of the marginalized, oppressed, and forgotten. Think about ghost story tropes in the United States: most of them revolve around colonial guilt and stolen land (constructed on ‘Indian burial grounds’), haunted plantations, prisons, and insane asylums.
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Another haunted house and ghost story that reflects a person’s guilt or shame of having other people’s blood on their hands is Sarah Winchester. She was the heiress to the Winchester fortune, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. After her husband’s death, Sarah moved to San Jose, California, and began building her home, Llanada Villa, now known as the Winchester Mystery House. A confusing structure with 40 bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, 6 kitchens, 2 basements, 1 séance room, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 17 chimneys, 2000 doors, 10,000 windows, 52 skylights, and 3 elevators. While these wild numbers could reflect a handful of Gilded Age Mansions, a few stairways rise directly into flat ceilings or dead ends. You can open one door and find an 8-foot drop into a sink or a 15-foot drop outside, and many windows open into interior spaces. This was all built over 38 years. Why? Sarah believed the spirits of the people who were killed by Winchester rifles were seeking vengeance on her; the constant construction and labyrinth of rooms and hallways was to keep the spirits lost and confused.
What is a ghost story telling you?
Coya Paz, in her TEDx lecture, says to ask yourself two questions: what does the ghost want, and what do you want with the ghost?
Acknowledgement. To remind us of a person, a historical truth, or a story.
Connection: a test of our courage, soothing our fears, enforcing fairness in an unfair world.
Thinking back to my professor telling the ghost stories of Randolph-Macon College, the ghosts and their stories all linked back to something tragic and unthinkable: a death caused by hazing, the previously unseen amount of bloodshed of the Civil War, especially only 16 miles north of Richmond, VA. These stories let the Randolph-Macon community talk about things that were otherwise taboo.
The ghost stories are not about the dead, they are about those of us telling and listening to them.
Next week’s post is about final dispositions. A post script for your life if you will.
Dig Deeper (Sources)
“Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places” by Colin Dickey
