- Thanks to Care/of for
sponsoring this video. Let's take a trip back in time to the year 2011. I'm in the "Ghost
Adventures" fandom. (laughs) Just over a decade ago, I was in the "Ghost Adventures" fandom. I mean, what can I say? The show has an allure and most of it is the dozens of questions that I have surrounding
Zachary Bagels as a person. - [Zach] Post captures a small, unexplained stick figure standing on top of me. And very soon after this, something seems to overtake me. - What? - I'll talk more about the show later on in this video, I promise it's relevant. But I've been interested
in ghosts my whole life. In fact, I've even had a few paranormal experiences of my own. In high school, a friend, and I honestly caught a really good EVP while lurking in a supposedly haunted lot near our school. - [Girl] (indistinct) We
went all the way down. (leaves crunching)
- Go back. - There was literally no one else there, and neither of us said, "Go back." So who said it? Of course, evidence like the EVP that we caught, or
things like ghost photos or electromagnetic energy readings are hard proof of spirits to some, and hokey nonsense to others. If you're a fan of Ryan Bergara and Shane Madej's antics on "Buzzfeed Unsolved: Supernatural," you're familiar with both camps on the are ghosts real issue. (tense music)
- I'm gonna to take everything said by a ghost hunter with a grain of salt. - Mmhm, well, technically,
now you're a ghost hunter, so think about that. - Oh, shit. - But ghost hunting itself is not a new phenomenon at all. And people have obviously believed in ghosts or spirits since, well, the dawn of humanity. But why? And why are we so desperate to find proof, so much so that ghost hunting itself has now become a
multi-million-dollar industry. Come learn with me. (chuckles) Quick disclaimer, first. Firstly, this video will
mainly focus on the US. Other parts of the world have super-rich and amazing ghost hunting histories that I just don't have
time to get into here. Also, if discussions that really dissect the ghost hunting genre are really likely to piss you off, or if you really just don't wanna hear the research and discussion of anyone skeptical of
paranormal investigation and ghostly evidence, then this is absolutely
not the video for you. I'm saving your precious time, just click away now.(chuckles) Because, yeah, I'm gonna be ripping into some things. Did you leave yet? No? Okay. Awesome. So before we get into it, let's hear a word from
today's sponsor, Care/of. I am notoriously bad at
taking care of my health. So I'm really excited that Care/of is today's sponsor, because they've made it a complete no-brainer for me to be able to keep track
of my daily supplements. Care/of is a subscription service that ships high quality,
personalized vitamins to your door every month. All you have to do is complete their super-straightforward quiz to lay out your health goals and needs. And they curate a list
of recommended vitamins and supplements for you to choose from. And then each month, they arrive on your doorstep in the
super-convenient packaging, and your daily dosage is in these little compostable packets. From the list they gave me, I chose what I already knew that I needed. A daily probiotic, Vitamin C, astaxanthin for healthy skin, brain, and heart, and rhodiola for my stress, which is really helping me keep on top of the needs that I have. They also have these really convenient probiotic and immunity sticks in case you need something on the go, or if you're traveling. I've been using this for a few weeks now, and it's genuinely made it so much easier for me to keep up with my health. It just kinda takes the
overthinking out of it, and I don't need to
worry about rounding up a million separate bottles and containers. One of my biggest goals for 2022 was taking better care of myself, so this is really helping. And I love that I can
trust that the vitamins are made with good ingredients, and that the subscription service is so easy to adjust based on my needs, whether they change or not. Visit the link in the description box to take the quiz, to find out What's recommended for you. And use my code, KAZ50, for 50% off your first order. Thank you so much to Care/of for sponsoring this video. And now, let's get back to learning the history of ghost hunting. By the way, Tutter is here; he's hiding behind me. That's better. Ghosts as a concept, and ghost stories, for that matter, date back as far as any oral or written stories that we have. And the idea of what a ghost even is isn't standard throughout
time and location. In the epic of Gilgamesh, ghosts are something
in-between human and creature. In the Middle Ages, oftentimes ghosts came in the form of reanimated corpses or apparitions of holy figures. In the Jacobean Era, ghosts were demons in disguise. Chinese folklore has a huge variety of types of ghosts, from hungry ghosts to trickster ghosts, to ghosts simply looking for offerings. In ye olde Ancient Roman times, Pliny the Younger wrote
in one of his letters the story of a house that was haunted by a disheveled, starving
man bound in chains. After years of vacancy, a philosopher named
Athenodorus rented the home and waited one night to see the ghost while he did some work. When the ghost finally appeared, Athenodorus was like, - [Man] "Man, shut your..."
(explosion resonates) Dude, if I was that ghost, I'd be so pissed. (giggling) Well, eventually, he finished his work and the ghost led him outside. Where, in the morning, Athenodorus dug up a chained skeleton. He gave the ghost a proper burial, and the ghost moved on
to wherever ghosts go. Well, that's the big question, isn't it? At the core of our obsession with ghosts, there lies the real problem. What happens to us after we die? So many of us want to believe that we don't simply stop. You know, cease to exist. It's a comforting thought for many, and terrifying for others. A lot of folks who fervently believe in ghosts are the latter. But regardless, this is the question that humans have struggled
with for millennia, because we don't have an answer. And ghost stories seem to give us one. And ghost sightings are
supposedly the backbone of these stories. They also give us a sort
of tangible connection to the humans of the past, something that most people crave, consciously or not. Colin Dickey writes in Ghostland, "In a world where nearly every moment of our lives is photographed, recorded, and documented, the gaps in the past still beckon us. Searching for ghosts can be an attempt to reconstruct what is lost. By sifting through time for stories that have been misplaced or forgotten, we listen to the voices that call out to be remembered. Our ghost stories centered
on unfinished endings, broken relationships,
things left unexplained. They offer an alternative kind of history, foregrounding what might
otherwise be ignored." We all want to be remembered, to have our wishes and duties completed before we pass on, to die the good death. Ghosts act as two different
opposing concepts. They remind us both that
the bad death exists, that we may pass on with
unfinished business, doomed to never find peace. And they also give us the hope that these issues can be
solved after death too, that some kind person can come along and put our spirits to rest. There is, of course, no shortage of media surrounding this idea of the haunted hero with the curse of mediumship. One TV show that was
extremely formative to me as a kid, was The Ghost Whisperer, starring Jennifer Love Hewitt. The show ran from 2005 to 2010, and follows a character
named Melinda Gordon who was born with the
ability to see ghosts. She lives in a cute, picturesque town that definitely isn't the set from Back to the Future,
and runs an antique store with her best friend, which honestly gave me highly unrealistic expectations for my adult life. (sighs) So each episode basically has Melinda being confronted by a new ghost, gasping a lot, and wearing shirts with dangerously plunging necklines, and doing some sleuthing and pestering grieving strangers so she can figure out why this ghost is trapped on earth, and trying to solve
whatever their issue is so the ghost can go into the light. And if the ghost doesn't wanna go into the light, they become an evil ghost. The lore got even more and more convoluted over time, and in my opinion, the show jumped the shark when her creepy son was born, but you get the idea. (chuckles) This type of plot line, where some living person is cursed with the duty to help the dead find peace is extremely common. You see it in other types of media too, like Bleach, or the novel, Cemetery Boys, which is extremely good if you're looking for a book to read. They all focus on a
person haunted by spirits, often fighting time to save the dead, before they turn into a malevolent spirit. It makes complete sense why this concept is so popular. It gives us this dreamy idea that there's people out there who can help us even after death, when we are helpless. And it also explains why there are good and bad ghosts, or why good ghosts may do bad things. It's also a really attractive concept for writers because, well, it's really fun and inherently interesting to have a sort of tortured protagonist doomed to help the wayward spirits because no one else can. I get it! (chuckles) My own web comic, Cunning Fire, has this exact type of protagonist too, and one of the characters is the literal spirit of death. Plus the antagonist is literally just a glorified, and really stupid poltergeist. (chuckles) Looks like all that ghost media I grew up with was more
formative than I realized. But this specific storyline as a trope is only new in a few ways. The basis of it, that being a person acting as a bridge between the realms of the living and the dead is an extremely old concept. And not just in fiction. Centuries ago in the Middle Ages, this might've come in the forms of saints and holy men and women making spiritual contact
with biblical figures, more acting as prophets
than anything else. Later centuries saw people taking a more proactive approach. In the 1600s, a vicar
named Joseph Glanvill began pursuing his supernatural beliefs that ghosts could be used to prove the existence of God. This was an era where atheism was rising among the population, and there was a lot of worry that the common open mockery of religion would result in a greater
spiritual catastrophe. Glanvill believed that proving the existence of ghosts, therefore, in his eyes, proving God's existence would solve the problem. Of course, we still have
atheists and ghost hunters desperately searching for proof today, so I think it goes without saying that Glanvill was unsuccessful. We don't see anyone who could be truly dubbed
a ghost hunter again until well into the Victorian era. And that's when things start to get really spicy on the spiritual front. (suspenseful music) The Victorian era was a hotbed for interest in spirits and the paranormal for a number of reasons. For one thing, it was a period of unbelievable
technological advancements, though today we don't tend to realize it. It was the era with the
invention of the radio, the telegraph, steam boats, cars, trains, photography, modern
bicycles, electric lighting, the telephone, x-rays,
medical antiseptics, the sewing machine,
paved roads, typewriters, recorded sound in film,
and much, much more. And many of these inventions, photography, electricity
and recorded sound in particular, completely altered the spiritual landscape for many people. For one thing, new electricity in homes often made strange sounds, smells, or flashes that people weren't used to and may have chalked up to the paranormal. But photography and sound recording saw something far more cataclysmic. It made the dead, in a way, undead. In the past, the dead were gone and lived only in memory. Perhaps you had their writings, or a painting or drawing of them, but never before could the exact image and voice of a deceased person exist beyond the grave. John Peters told the
Distillations podcast, "In a sense, all recording
media are cemeteries. The idea that you could record the dead, their minds, their thoughts, their words, their deeds, to live on,
is a very ancient one. So if you read Homer, he's singing the praises of great deeds on the battlefield of
Achilles, for example. But writing does not preserve the voice of the dead. It preserves the words of the dead, and there's a profound difference. And the idea that we could suddenly know what someone sounds like, and keep hearing their voice after they were dead, seemed particularly haunting. Previously, to hear the
voice of a dead person was the domain of magic, or sorcery, or something weird and haunted. So you can see how the phonograph has this patina of the uncanny." When Thomas Edison invented
his phonograph in 1878, it was described in
The Scientific American as making speech immortal. And it's true, but it didn't just make speech immortal. In a huge way, it made people immortal. The phonograph and commercialization of photography came on the heels of The Civil War, which took the lives of over 700,000 people. So many people died out in the open, and laid in plain sight, unburied for weeks or longer. Death was always visible for Victorians. Disease killed so many more people then than it does now, but the brutality of the War was something that tore through the lives of every American to so
much higher a degree, so much so that traditional
ways of mourning and rationalizing death were failing. People struggled to come to terms with the loss and the trauma and craved something, anything, that could connect them
to their dead loved ones. And people like mediums and spirit photographers gave people exactly what they wanted. Spirit photography happened completely by accident the first time. William Mumler was working in his studio, taking self portraits, when, upon developing one of them, the image came to life showing the spirit of
his long-deceased cousin behind him, a girl made of light. He was startled until
he realized his mistake. He had accidentally reused an old plate that already had a photo on it, so what resulted was a double image. He showed the photo to a friend who was a spiritualist, who took it very seriously, and said that it was absolutely the real image of a ghost. The photo began to circulate, usually embellished in the papers with grim details, such
as that Mumler's arm felt numb while sitting for the photo. Or, he could only take a few photos at a time before becoming exhausted from the strain of connecting to the spirit world. People were eating it up, and Mumler was more than willing to cash in on the craze. This began in 1861, just at the very beginning
of the The Civil War. Over the course of his career as a spirit photographer, more and more people were losing their loved ones to the violence, and they craved seeing their lost person so much, so desperate for a connection with someone they'll never see again, people were more than willing to pay the extraordinarily high price of over $10 per photo that Mumler charged. In today's money, that's
over $300 per photo. His career didn't last long though. In 1863, a man sat for Mumler, and when the photo was developed, he recognized the ghost as a very much alive man that he knew. Mumler was sued, sparking a media circus and was eventually acquitted, but it was too late. His reputation now was truly in the grave. But Mumler's success
spawned a ton of imitators. Spirit photography was
extraordinarily easy to do, and the demand was very high. And grieving people
weren't just in the market to see their dead loved ones in photos. They wanted to hear and speak to them too. The Victorian era saw a ton of women who became famous mediums, or people who could speak to the dead; or otherwise had some connection to the spirit world. The most famous of this time was the case of the Fox sisters. In 1847, the Fox family moved to a home in Hydesville, New York. It wasn't long before the daughters, Marguerite, Kate, and Maggie, started hearing strange knocking sounds in the house at night. They finally called out, asking who it was making the sounds. And apparently they got answers back, from a ghost they called Mr. Splitfoot. They communicated with Mr. Splitfoot in something very similar to the newly invented Morse code. One knock for yes, two knocks for no. Mr. Splitfoot was giving
very specific answers, so people started to really believe that this was real. After the papers later reported that the Fox family had dug up Mr. Splitfoot's body on their property, P.T. Barnum, the circus villain, decided to give the girls a job at his new American museum, where they would hold seances for pay. And the Fox sisters became
massive celebrities, which of course earned them a lot of hate. Their career didn't last, after a commission of skeptics investigated them and published the declaration that their
whole shtick was a hoax. Maggie Fox, who was an alcoholic, went on to publish a tell-all in the paper about how they made the noises happen by cracking their toe joints. And the sisters died in poverty. But they weren't alone in this. The skeptic scientists in this era had it out for the spiritualists. Not all scientists were skeptics looking to ruin careers or lives, though. In fact, many Victorian scientists saw a lot of value in honestly investigating the paranormal. This is in part because the massive shift in Victorian people's idea of how the natural world works as new inventions
revolutionized daily life. Radio itself actually brought an entirely new realm of thought to the world of science, the concept of the ether. People talked about radio waves as tangibly traveling through space through a sort of parallel, quite literally, ethereal plane, both our physical space and not. It was the idea that the ether is what carries electricity, light, and radio waves, and heat, et cetera. And the ether is also what carries spirit energy, or where spirits live. This gave many researchers a huge interest in studying the ether,
and ghosts in general, as a real scientific possibility, and marked the beginning of combining technology with the idea
of hunting for ghosts. There was a new faction of science emerging called psychical research, which sought to explore the
properties of the ether. They really believed that there may actually be a scientific
way to make contact between the living and the dead. In the US, the key figure
in psychical research was a man named William James, often dubbed the father
of American psychology. In 1884, James founded The Society for Psychical
Research, which sought to investigate scientifically
anything paranormal. Their special interest was proving the existence of telepathy. James became sort of obsessed with a famous Boston
woman named Leonora Piper, who claimed that she heard the voices of the dead, and could communicate with them through automatic writing, which is where the sitter
goes into a trance, And the spirit moves their
hand to write a message. James paid for a sitting with Piper, and she was able to tell him highly specific information
about his family that no stranger would know. And from that moment on, he was convinced that she did have some unexplained gift. He began to study her and put her through tests like having her identify random people after only touching, like, a lock of their
hair that they donated. And she passed every single test. One of James's skeptic colleagues, a man named G. Stanley Hall, was not buying it though. He put Piper through tests of his own, doing anything he could to try and break her trance. It was honestly more like torture though. The tests had her burned, pinched, had bitter things forced in her mouth, had her tied up, things
that left scars behind. And yet, despite all this, they weren't able to break
her trance even once. To this day, no one really knows what was really happening with Leonora Piper and her gift. Unlike most other mediums, which did turn out to be frauds, no one was able to debunk her. And mediums weren't the only ways people were making alleged tangible contact with the dead. This era marks the beginning of modern-day ghost hunting too. The first modern celebrity ghost hunter, as we think of them now, was an Englishman named Harry Price. Now, Price was a generally
extremely unlikeable person by most people who knew him. But the public loved him, because Harry became famous for viciously trying to debunk mediums and being a skeptic
against any hocus pocus, a thing that over time became more and more of a character act. He once said, "People
don't want the debunk, they want the bunk." And, I mean, yeah. People love an unhinged skeptic, especially if it doesn't spoil the fun of the magic of it all. Skeptics themselves add a kind of excitement to the paranormal. It gives the whole question bigger stakes, doesn't it? Price spent his career not necessarily looking
to prove or disprove ghosts themselves, but
was sort of in the middle. He debunked a lot of so-called mediums and spirit photographers, but at the end of the day, there were some hauntings and mediums he couldn't explain away. One of them was the case of Borley Rectory, often dubbed the most haunted house in England, especially after Price wrote a book on it, titled "The Most
Haunted House in England." While investigating Borley Rectory, which is reportedly haunted by a malevolent nun, Price and a number of witnesses that he hired would experience strange sounds, cold spots, objects
that moved on their own, or appeared and
disappeared, wall writings, strange lights, and even
full-blown apparitions. Given that the group of witnesses was made up of a mix of believers, skeptics, and avid debunkers, and many of these phenomena were experienced by
numerous people at once, it's definitely strange. In the end, no one could come to a conclusion as to what was going on at Borley Rectory, and the case remains unsolved.
(suspenseful music) But what became more and more prominent over the years, following Price's career, is the way that theology, the paranormal, and science have collided in a way that could only have existed in the post-industrial era. Ghost hunting, as it exists today, lies somewhere in the crossroads in-between faith and secular science. In a way, as paranormal investigation becomes more and more intertwined with technology and research, the more it circles right back around to the ideas that Glanvill had in the 17th century, using proof of ghosts to indirectly prove the existence of God. But much of the technology used to find this proof is inherently inconclusive. One of the most common tools that ghost hunters use today is an EMF reader, or
electromagnetic field reader. And one of the most common ones that people use is the K2, which can be bought on Amazon, was popularized by the
show "Ghost Hunters," a show well known for its reliable. But the K2 is an extremely inaccurate tool if you're looking for something specific. It only operates on one axis, and is unshielded, which means you have to wave it around and it can be set off by almost anything from a cell phone to a computer mouse. There's also the ever-popular spirit box, which loudly scans through
AM and FM frequencies, in the hopes that you're able to pick out some sort of coherent voice. Personally, I still think that Spaghetti and Apple Tater from Buzzfeed Unsolved are the most solid ghost evidence we'll ever get, but... (static crackles)
- Spaghetti. - (giggling) Spaghetti. - Tell us your name. - [Voice] Applicator. - Apple Tater? (Ryan laughs) - Investigators also use the old tried-and-true tools, like a simple camera or a voice recorder. The evidence that comes out of this technology is almost entirely interpretive though. And oftentimes, people's paranormal experiences are interpretations from the failure or ambiguity of something going on with a piece of technology. Camera batteries randomly die? Ghost. Audio breaks up? Ghost. Blur on a photo? Ghost. White noise? Ghost. You can't exactly prove
it is really a ghost, but you can't always prove that it isn't, either. Some cases became famous, like the incident in the 1950s, when three children on Long Island were watching TV, when suddenly, a frightening face of a ghostly woman appeared on the screen
and wouldn't go away. It only disappeared when the TV itself later broke. And by this point, the media was having a field day with it, much in the same way that people go nuts when someone thinks that they see the image of Jesus burned into their toast or something. So even with the modern advancements in the more recent decades of ghost hunting tech in theory, a lot of it is never able to actually, concretely,
produce definitive proof. And a lot of that is by design, which we'll get more
into here in a minute. A lot of the time, these new methods of paranormal investigation ask the practitioner and the onlooker to already be believers. Like, they already believe in ghosts, so they're already inclined to believe that these methods work and have solid theory behind them. But that doesn't stop many paranormal investigators from going to great lengths to explain the scientific theory behind their tools and practice. David M. Rountree wrote an entire, highly detailed book on it. In it, he says that ghosts could be a number of things. Time anomalies, beings
from parallel dimensions, wormhole phenomena, et cetera. I mean, sure. I guess any one of those things could be true, right? It would be obscenely cocky to think that we as a civilization are currently so advanced that we can definitively say yes or no to any of these things. We're learning new things about the universe every day. But ghost hunting shows themselves never just relegate themselves to the world of science. That would, after all, be boring to most. So most, if not all of them, instead prefer to lay in the realm of adventure, true-crime storytelling, with a side order of science LARPing.
(eerie music) Now, as I said before, I used to be in the
"Ghost Adventures" fandom, I bought and read Zach
Bagan's first autobiography, I saw every episode premiere for a number of years, I
bought merch, everything. I was eating it up, and you know what? That show is fun as hell. I mean, "Ghost Adventures"
brought to the table what a lot of other ghost shows were lacking, and wouldn't gain again until, well, maybe Buzzfeed Unsolved. And that is, humor. What made "Ghost Adventures" so attractive to viewers wasn't just how convincing a lot of their evidence may have been. It was also how goddamn funny they are. Do you know how silly it is watching this totally jacked dude with a haircut that he calls the Zach fin running around old buildings in the dark going, "Dude,
did you hear that?" And as soon as someone else talks, he's like, "Shh." And then he makes poor, anxiety-ridden Aaron Goodwin go by himself into the worst parts of the building, Like a blood offering. (sighs) It's hysterical. For a while, they also uploaded a lot of little vlogs to YouTube, where they'd just generally goof off, like Zach's hair tutorial. And the show's early seasons have no shortage of, in my
opinion, iconic moments. The time Zach got possessed. The time Zach's ass
got slapped by a ghost. - [Zach] I just felt someone grab my ass. (metal resonates)
- What? - [Zach] Like, hard, Nick. - The time Zach wrote a love poem to a ghost, and then
busted his ass on the ice. The time Zach joked about wanting to bang the ghost. The scene on Snake Hill. (rock music)
- You wanna suck the venom out of me? - [Man] I don't wanna
suck anything out of you. - Of course, the vibes of the show have changed quite a bit over the years. It's gotten kind of more serious, and one of the members left the show. Now Zach talks to celebrities about hokey dybbuk boxes, and beefs with Annabelle the doll on Twitter. And "Ghost Adventures" itself is a really good example of how hypermasculinized
the genre has become. It's not enough to hunt ghosts, you need a team of buff,
rough-and-tough bros imprisoning themselves in the darkness, acting as aggressors towards the ghost, a lot of the time. In the past, spiritualism
was the realm of women. Women were the ones making contact and speaking to the ghosts,
often teenage girls. Today, most ghost-hunting teams on TV are made up of men who
think that fear is girly, engage in self-sacrifice
by investigating at all, describing the locations they enter as deeply dangerous; not because the buildings are decrepit, but because the ghost might hurt them. Though, that never really happens beyond some scratching
or Zack getting spanked. (tense music)
- But I could feel like this on my butt.
- Don't show me. - These investigations are - Raw.
(suspenseful music) - [Zach] Did someone just scratch me? - [Announcer] Extreme. - and so much more intense. It's almost as if there's an anxiety there, beneath the surface that the genre that they're engaging in, which, in the past was dominated by female mediums,
beautiful Gothic heroines, and supernatural romances targeted towards women, is inherently feminine. And now they need to
overcompensate for it. Stereotypically, men are too logical and rational to be taken up by feminine, mystical, and paranormal beliefs. In one episode, Zack himself makes this extremely plain when he says to a witness, "You look like kind of a tough guy. To me, it looks like it takes a lot to make you a believer in the paranormal." In another episode, after being terrified by something, he said, "Call me a vagina, but I'd like to get out of here." (Kaz groans) In earlier seasons, Zach would take his active, antagonizing ghosts and actively searching for the mean ones to extremes, which is something that he would later apologize for, and has since changed his tune considerably. But, at the end of the day,
Zach is an entertainer. All of these people are, and the bro-ification of
the genre still stands. To me, he's great for comedic value. You really can't take his whole thing too seriously. Not only that, but "Ghost Adventures," and many other ghost-related reality TV shows offer a pretty poignant view of a unique style of people engaging with their spirituality. That's what modern ghost hunting still has in common
with its past versions. Where interest in the paranormal ticked up after The Civil War, as grief and trauma drove people to seek connection with the other side, the same thing happened after 9/11. The 2000s saw a dramatic rise in interest in the paranormal, not just as a genre of fiction, but as a potential reality. And it makes sense. For all their machismo
and jokes and yelling, ghost reality media offers the viewer something like second-hand catharsis. Jessica O'Hara writes in "Making Their Presence Known: TV's Ghost-Hunter Phenomenon
in a 'Post-' World" "The role of the ghost
hunter is to recognize, acknowledge, and mourn the the dead. Indeed, participants of the
shows often 'speak back' to the ghost by acknowledging
the spirit's presence and the injustice they
suffered or caused." Is somebody here with me? Can you tell me your name? Can you tell me who hurt you? These are questions asked at nearly every paranormal investigation. It's a deliberate continuation of the Victorian seance, but it's also a natural reaction for people to cry out and plead for a response from the invisible being that they aren't sure is really there. This is in part a symptom of the genre's unbreakable connection to religion and spiritualism, no matter how much technology and scientific theory they try to employ. Because religion itself, as something most viewers are already familiar with, gives people a framework to approach paranormal ideologies with that they might already believe. Shannon Dale writes... (item crackles) (laughing) Sorry, something fell in the background, scared
the shit out of me. (Kaz laughs) Oh, it's a ghost. (sighs) Shannon Dale
writes, "The ghost hunters cannot rely on any form
of consistent belief to support their findings, but they do attempt to use one of the most widespread
pools of belief, that of contemporary Christianity. Religious beliefs are
often tied to family values and a sense of safety from the 'other,' which in this case is 'evil' or for the 'Ghost Adventures'
crew, malevolent spirits. Post-9/11 anxieties certainly encouraged this 'othering,' as well as the need to align oneself with
a mainstream discourse that supports current power structures. These discourse alignments provide a sense of safety and stability within a concrete set
of religious 'rules'." Again, you don't really need to prove anything to people who
already believe, right? The methods of paranormal investigation often mimic prayer in a way, or employ tools like holy water, or look at strange and confusing symbols, or, really, a lot of
nonwhite cultural practices, and see it as signs of
Satanism, or demonic worship. And many people become
paranormal investigators because it's a spiritual journey. The science and tech makes it feel more solid and legitimate of course, but at its core, these are people with existential
anxieties who want answers about what happens after we die. One investigator named Patti said, "My faith is stronger that
there is an afterlife. I always believed that we had a soul and it continued on after, but I guess before paranormal investigating, I was just like everyone else in organized religion:
you go up to heaven, you play the harp all day, or whatever." But over time, a lot of people involved in paranormal investigation find their spiritual beliefs expanding out of the religious thresholds that they previously had. Just like everyone else, it leaves them with more
questions than answers. Sure, they capture some
evidence per episode, though it's never enough
to prove anything, no matter how many fancy new gadgets they buy or develop. Almost by design, not one of dozens or hundreds of these
celebrity ghost hunters over the years has ever
been able to produce evidence that finally puts to rest the are ghosts real question. And before you start
yelling at me, listen, I also want to believe in ghosts. I'm on your side. (laughs) I even said at the
beginning of this video, that I've had spooky-ooky
ghost experiences and have caught what I think is pretty great ghost evidence, but that doesn't change the fact that people who set out to make a career on ghost hunting, more often than not are entertainers first. They're here to tell a great story and keep you watching
their show, or hiring them. If they actually captured the one piece of evidence to rule them all, how can they possibly replicate that again in any satisfying way, when no one has ever been able to do it even once before? The risks are super high. So it's understandable that they use tech that gives readings that might mean something is there;
it's more interpretive. Or you catch an EVP that sounds like it's saying something, but it's really scratchy, so it's all up to interpretation or you get weird marks on your skin, or you maybe saw something in the shadows. But it doesn't really go further. And you know what, maybe
we don't want it to. As John Peters told the
Distillations podcast, the interpretive part of ghost hunting is exactly what makes it special. "It seems to me that sometimes the psychical researchers and paranormal psychologists are really hoping they can get beyond interpretation, and they're really hoping that they can find transmission or
contact or connection, or mind-to-mind replication. I mean, that's kinda the Holy Grail, to try and find the
ability to send a signal. And to me, just ethically, poetically, aesthetically, this
just seems wrong-minded, because it seems to
underestimate the nature of the human condition, which
is one of interpretation. And this is something to be happy about. It's a handsome fact of human life that we get to interpret. That isn't a fallen, awful, thing. I mean, that's what makes us human." Because at the end of it all, the best part of ghosts and the best part of
paranormal investigation is that mystery. It's the fact that the
question is unanswered. That's what makes it exciting or scary. And think about it, nearly everything in the natural world was historically something really confusing or scary to people until we
figured out what it was, and what made it happen. If ghosts do exist, do you really want them
to become something as explainable and benign as the weather? I think ghosts serve a
greater purpose than that. I think that ghosts, more than anything, are reflections of human fear and guilt. Colin Dickey continues in Ghostland, "We like to view this
country as a unified, cohesive whole based on progress, a perpetual refinement of values, and an arc of history
bending towards justice. But the prevalence of
ghosts suggests otherwise. The ghosts who haunt our woods, our cemeteries, our houses, and our cities appear at moments of anxiety, and point to instability in our national and local identities. Our country's ghost stories are themselves the dreams or nightmares of a nation, the Freudian slips of whole communities: uncomfortable, and unbidden expressions of things that we'd assumed were long past and no longer important. If American history is
taught to schoolchildren as a series of great,
striding, benchmarks, the history of America's ghost stories is one of crimes left
unsolved or transgressions we now feel guilty about. They offer explanations for the seemingly inexplicable,
address injustices after the fact, and give expression to our unstated desires and fears." This is likely part of the reason why some of the most popular and sensationalized haunted locations are former asylums and prisons, decrepit boarding schools, quarantine wards of decaying hospitals, places where we, as a society, failed our most vulnerable. These places, purely by existing, seem haunted by nature. We can't fathom the people who lived there having died the good death, because more often than not, they didn't. Too frequently, the suffering of the powerless was preventable. And because the past is the past, there's nothing we can do to change that except to go to these places and cry out into the ether for these spirits to speak back. Because maybe this time
someone's listening. Thank you so much for joining me on this exploration of the history of the hunting of ghosts. I hope you didn't come away from this feeling like I've ruined the genre for you, because, I
mean, I made this video because I love the paranormal and ghost-hunting stuff. I think that thinking harder about these things leads
to a greater appreciation, at least for me. So until next time, wash thy hands, wear thy mask, and let
me know in the comments if you have any ghost
experiences of your own. I love hearing them. (upbeat music)
