Ghost Hunting

In case you want to write fiction about ghosts and hauntings or just read intriguing material about supposedly real cases of those phenomena, I ran across a website with lots of relevant resources:

The Shadowlands: Ghosts and Hauntings

There's a page with dozens of links to articles about ghosts, hauntings, and hunting for ghosts. Another page, on "Famous Hauntings," lists over sixty entries, some familiar, others more obscure. "True Stories," by contrast, comprises hundreds of personal accounts of encounters with the spirit world. Most interesting to me is the extensive list of "Haunted Places," with separate pages for each state and many foreign countries. Although the creator of the website believes in supernatural occurrences and claims to have experienced them, the "Haunted Places" section acknowledges that some of these stories of allegedly haunted locations may consist of local legends and urban folklore rather than reflections of actual events.

The articles on ghost hunting include tips on "How to conduct a safe ghost hunt" and warnings against trespassing on private property without permission. The site owner also deconstructs the concept of "debunking" from the angle that absence of evidence doesn't equal evidence of absence. To disprove a haunting, it's not enough to visit the place several times and conclude it harbors no ghosts because you didn't witness any. A valid "debunking" would involve discovering a plausible natural explanation for the witnessed and reported phenomena. That specific approach hadn't occurred to me before, and it does make a certain amount of sense.

On the other hand, the "debunking" side is robustly represented by SKEPTICAL INQUIRER magazine, which deconstructs not only ghosts and hauntings but other paranormal phenomena, as well as urban legends, cryptids, fraudulent cures, UFOs, and a wide variety of other dubious beliefs:

Skeptical Inquirer

Their website includes links to recent articles from the magazine that can be read for free. From this kind of material, a writer adapting a "real" ghost story for fictional purposes could find tips on how a skeptical investigator might try to disprove the haunting.

In fiction, we can make room for both Mulder and Scully.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.