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A huge thank you to all of you patrons and listeners for your support. I wouldn't be able to keep this podcast going without you, the creepy community. Thank you so much. Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so, the mysterious and unsolved.
Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid curiosity, and it has gripped millions of people throughout the ages. I am one of those people. My name is Halley, and this is the Morbid Curiosity Podcast. I've always been drawn to anything mysterious and death related.
The idea of ghosts fascinates me. However, I am a skeptic. That doesn't mean I don't consider ghosts to be a possibility. It just means I need proof, proof that can stand the test of rigorous scientific investigation.
And that means the phenomena is observed in controlled conditions and is repeatable and measurable. That's asking a lot, I know. Still, I hope that someday some paranormal investigator will find that proof. How wonderful and comforting would it be to know there's life after death?
People have been dreaming of life after death and searching for proof of its existence for hundreds of years, but it feels like there are more seekers than ever these days. This is likely due in part to the reality ghost hunting shows of the early 2000s, the smartphone, affordable security systems, detection tools, and social media to share with the world what these devices catch. It seems like, with all these technological advances, there would be great evidence by now. But there isn't.
When ghost hunters descend on an allegedly haunted location, they usually find something they believe is paranormal. It may be a moving door, a chill, a glow, electrical fluctuations, or unexplainable bumps, shadows or voices. Many ghost hunters interpret this as evidence and investigate no further. They don't look for an alternative explanation.
This creates false positives, where something normal was labeled as paranormal and confirmation bias which is a common and mostly subconscious dismissal of information that contradicts your beliefs. Ghost hunting in this manner actually hinders the collection of potential real activity by obscuring it with a myriad of so-called evidence that could easily be disproven but isn't. On top of this, most ghostly experiences include some sort of impediment to seeing or interpreting the experience, bad lighting, grainy video footage, heightened emotions, social and cultural influences, a misunderstanding of how the devices work and prior beliefs and personality traits of the investigators. All of these can lead investigators to believe they've had a ghostly encounter despite a lack of ghosts.
That's why personal experiences with ghosts can't substitute for objective and empirical research. Even so, the multitudes of ghost sightings and stories give us pause. Surely, there must be something to it. History can show us how we came to where we are in terms of theories about the existence of ghosts and why they seem to stand the test of time despite a lack of evidence.
Just to note, I'll be looking at the western version of the ghost. In the future, I'd love to do research on ghost legends and theories from outside of western countries. Stories of ghosts go back centuries. One of the first documents that mentions ghosts is an ancient Babylonian clay tablet created about 3500 years ago.
The tablet is part of an exorcist's guide to banishing unwanted ghosts. The ancient Egyptians wrote about ghosts as did the ancient Greeks and the Romans. In all three cases, ghosts were believed to be the spirits of the dead and could interact with the living in a variety of ways, some helpful, some terrifying. Medieval ghosts were considered to be either the souls of the dead or demons.
Souls of the dead returned to earth for a specific purpose, while demonic ghosts appeared to torment or tempt the living. One could tell the difference by asking the ghost to state its purpose in the name of Jesus. The soul would give an answer while the demon would be banished. Ghosts of the medieval period were more substantial, appearing as paler, sadder versions of their living selves.
Some were more ethereal, but almost all were male. It was believed the ghosts of the dead were sent to purgatory to a tone for sin committed in life. Usually, this came with punishments and suffering. They were said to appear to mortals to ask for prayers to end their own suffering, or to warn mortals to confess their sins before death.
In the Renaissance and Romantic period, ghost stories expanded. One widespread belief was that the dead were doomed to haunt their living lovers if they married again without some kind of release ritual. Another common story was that ghosts were disturbed from their peaceful rest by the excessive grief of their families. Up to this point in time, ghosts were considered to be part of a wider, ordered spiritual world which also included devils, angels, witches, and saints.
During the Reformation, a period in the 16th century in which Catholicism splintered into several other forms of Christianity, controversy arose over the existence of ghosts. Catholics saw ghosts as evidence of the existence of purgatory. This caused Protestants, who didn't believe in purgatory, to attempt to discredit all known examples of ghostly visitations. However, this wasn't a simple task.
Discrediting ghosts meant the discredit of many other supernatural creatures, which in turn could undo the whole web of Christian belief and doctrine. Protestants eventually found a way around this, stating ghosts were other supernatural creatures masquerading as deceased people. In a 1588 treatise of ghosts, a list appears of all the traditional concepts of ghosts and ghostly phenomena. These include ghosts demanding revenge, burial, or absolution, mysterious footsteps, omens of death, spirits in houses and mines, the second sight, phantom funerals, and mysterious warnings.
All of these phenomena were already well established ghost lore at the time and were almost irrefutable due to their association with religious doctrine. By the end of the 17th century, the belief that ghosts were all the work of the devil was fading, but not completely gone. The idea that ghosts were related to deceased humans became the going theory. They might appear after the discovery of human bones and demand justice for an untimely death, and perhaps promise protection or wealth if this was done.
The demand for justice was so common that there's documented cases of court proceedings where ghosts, through a living person, accused living people of murder. In these cases, the court seems skeptical, which is a new occurrence, as ghosts and spirits were seen as doctrine up until this point. Elites especially moved away from belief in supernatural beings and occurrence, wanting to further separate themselves from the masses. Some early scientists, known as natural philosophers, became interested in ghosts not as a religious argument, but as entities themselves, a phenomenon to be investigated.
John Aubrey, an English antiquary, natural philosopher and pioneer folklorist, believed in the existence of ghosts, and despite ridicule from some of his contemporaries, he indiscriminately hoarded reports of any and all ghostly phenomena, publishing a collection in 1696. However, he retained some objectivity, stating that, quote, there have been such apparitions, but where one is true, a hundred are figments, end quote. During the 18th century, skepticism surrounding ghosts and other supernatural creatures gradually became less taboo. It was no longer seen as an affront against the church.
This could be due to the sheer number of which trials and supernatural court cases wearing out the courts and the rulers. It could also have to do with the rise of scientific theory and practice during this time. Whatever the cause, the desire to get involved, to investigate ghosts and hauntings grew. Interest came both from those who wanted to prove their existence and those who wanted to disprove it.
In the 19th century, stories of ghosts proliferated with the Victorian obsession with death and mourning. This is when the modern western concept of the ghosts as spirits of the dead locked in a sort of half-life due to sins they committed, sins committed against them or an early and violent death. Revenge was still one of the main goals of the ghost, while others just wanted peace from whatever tormented them. They sought a living human to avenge or placate them.
In the mid-19th century, ghosts became more active figures, empowered by their deaths instead of constrained by them. The spiritualist religious movement included belief in God, heaven, and hell, but also a spirit world that could be contacted through mediums. Ghosts were now more human-like, yet somehow more powerful and more knowledgeable. They haunted places where they suffered, moved about seeking to physically harm the living out of spite and revenge, or perhaps educate them about their death.
They could be called upon for information, prophecy, or sought to find their living relatives through mediums. The spiritualist movement with its seances, mediums, and ghostly knocking spurred this more active version of the ghost to spread nearly globally. Physicians, psychiatrists, physicists, engineers, and other scientific researchers made up the opposing side of ghost theory. It was theorized that ghost sightings were in uncommon but natural occurrence with many possible causes.
Optical illusions, hallucinations, and environmental phenomena such as wind, humidity, and air pressure could cause a human to believe they had seen a ghost when they actually hadn't. With the growth of scientific theory and physics in the late 19th century, ghosts became a focus of scientific research. Energy physics and spiritualism played off one another, making the environment ripe for scientific theories surrounding ghosts, the afterlife, and death. Could this new science prove their existence?
Many thought so. The theories that were proposed have lasted into our modern era and all have to do with energy. Stone tape theory emerged in the mid-19th century. This theory suggests that ghosts and hauntings are due to mental impressions which occur during emotional or traumatic events, being projected as energy which creates a record in rocks and other objects.
These impressions can be replayed under certain conditions. It also makes it possible for certain people to see these impressions by holding the objects. This part of the theory is called psychometry. Stone tape theory comes partially from what was a fairly new technology, audio recording, and partially from energy theory, which I'll get into in a moment.
Experiments in Sound Capture began in the early 1800s, but success was achieved in the mid-19th century. In 1857, the phonograph was invented, and in 1877, the phonograph. These recorders documented the physical air pressure of sound waves produced by human voices or musical instruments. A sensitive membrane was connected to an articulated stylus, and as the changing air pressure moved the membrane back and forth, the stylus scratched an analog of the sound waves onto a moving recording medium, such as paper, a cylinder, or a disc coated with soft materials such as wax or a soft metal.
The energy theory that first caught the ghost theorist's attention was thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is a branch of physics that deals with heat, temperature, energy, and the physical properties of matter and radiation. Over time, the laws of thermodynamics were discovered and set down by physicists and engineers. I'm not a physicist, and a lot of this goes over my head a bit, so I'll quote the online physics tutor to explain the four laws of thermodynamics.
Quote, the zero-eth law of thermodynamics. If two systems are in thermal equilibrium with a third, they are in thermal equilibrium with each other. It's called the zero-eth law because it was thought of after the other three and is more fundamental, so instead of renumbering the other three, it was just called the zero-eth law. The first law of thermodynamics states, energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
It can only change forms. This also means for an isolated system. The total energy never changes. The second law of thermodynamics states, no engine or refrigerator, works a cycle that is 100% efficient.
This means that energy is lost to heat in any system, and you can never get back all the energy you put in. It also states that entropy, energy that cannot do work, must never decrease. The third law of thermodynamics states, you cannot reach absolute zero. As temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy or disorder of a system approaches a minimum.
This also means that you can't create order or reduce entropy by adding energy to a system. The system must spend energy to reduce local entropy and become more organized. The British scientist and author CP Snow came up with an easier way to remember these. For the first law, you cannot win.
That is, you cannot get something for nothing because matter and energy are conserved. For the second, you cannot break even. You cannot return to the same energy state because there is always an increase in disorder. Entropy always increases.
And for the third law, you cannot get out of the game. Because absolute zero is unattainable, you must always obey the laws of thermodynamics. End quote. These laws seem very esoteric to most of us, and that was the case at the time as well.
There was even pushback from other scientists, saying these energy theories were philosophical at best. That theorists were just exchanging one form of faith with another, one in a scientific skin. Others believed science and religion were compatible. In the 1875 book called The Unseen Universe, Stuart and Tate suggested the world's wasted energy, the heat that is referred to in the second law, is not lost but transferred into an invisible and immortal beyond heaven.
This energy was then used by the souls of the dead to communicate and appear to the living. This theory was neither provable nor refutable, therefore it was dismissed by scientists and accepted by spiritualists. Scientists found a few issues with this theory. If ghosts were formed of energy and not matter, the second law applies, meaning they would lose energy, making it impossible for them to maintain their structure for long.
If ghosts were energy and able to interact with the physical world, they would be using energy to do so, and according to the first and second law, they would fade out of existence. The only way to make a lasting haunting possible would be for ghosts to draw energy from the environment in order to sustain their existence. Entropy is also against ghosts. A system needs to spend energy to become more ordered, therefore spontaneous organization of energy to form a ghostly figure would require spending energy.
The ghost would spend energy doing so, so again, they wouldn't last long. And because energy cannot be created, it can only change its form. Ghosts would need a source of energy, which means taking it from somewhere else. This would be detectable, and I'll get into theories about this in a moment.
It would require very solid evidence to disprove the first and second laws of thermodynamics, as these concepts have been shown to be true repeatedly through scientific experimentation and documentation. The idea that ghosts could be an exception to these rules opposes the known laws of reality. In addition, when a human dies, their energy does not disappear, it goes back into the environment. When a human dies, the energy stored in their body is released in the form of heat and transferred into the organisms of decomposition, such as wild animals if the body isn't buried, or worms and bacteria if it is, as well as the plants and fungi that grow up around the body.
In the case of cremation, the energy is released in the form of heat and light. The collapse of the spiritualism movement due to accusations of fraud and many other credibility issues caused the popularity of ghosts and theories of their existence to fade into the background for a while. Massive interest only blossomed again during the late 90s and early 2000s because of the trend of reality TV shows. The TV show, Ghost Hunters, brought viewers on a search for evidence of ghosts and hauntings.
The main goal was to once again use science in order to prove or disprove the existence of ghosts. Ghost hunting became known as paranormal investigation, and a plethora of technology from other scientific fields was used to capture potential evidence. These instruments range from audio recorders to infrared and electromagnetic field detectors. Each tool supposedly detects or can be interacted with by ghosts in different ways.
I did a whole episode about ghost hunting technology for patrons, so if you're interested in hearing about that, you should join the MCP on Patreon. All of these tools depend on a new energy theory, the theory of energy manifestation. This theory suggests that ghostly entities, spirits, or other paranormal phenomena can manifest or interact with the physical world by harnessing or manipulating energy. This theory also proposes that there is an energy source or field distinct from the known forms of energy in physics such as kinetic energy, thermal energy, or electromagnetic energy that can be harnessed by spirits or entities to interact with the physical world.
Entities are thought to manipulate this paranormal energy through their intent or willpower. For example, they might use this energy to produce visual or auditory phenomena, or to move objects. The conversion of this paranormal energy to other forms of energy is thought to be responsible for various paranormal phenomena such as apparitions, poltergeist activity, or the manipulation of electronic devices. In some variations of the theory, traumatic or emotionally charged events can leave behind residual energy in a location.
This residual energy is believed to be capable of replaying or manifesting as paranormal phenomena. The theory goes on to suggest that humans can also interact with this paranormal energy, either consciously or unconsciously. Psychic abilities such as those used by mediums, clairvoyance, and sensitive are sometimes attributed to the ability to tap into this energy. This sounds a lot like the theories presented in the Stone Tape theory and the Unseen Universe, except Christian notions like Heaven and Hell are not included.
This omission is likely because today science and religion are seen as mostly incompatible. For theory to hold weight in science, intangible things like religious belief must be left out, as they too cannot be measured or proven. The theory of energy manifestation is considered pseudoscientific by mainstream science, as it uses scientific sounding words and references to real phenomena to obscure that it lacks research and solid evidence and cannot be proven, despite a long history of testing. Paranormal investigations also often lack the controlled conditions and repeatability that is necessary for scientific research.
While some phenomena captured during paranormal investigations may be unexplainable at the time, without controlled experiments and the ability to reproduce results, it's impossible to prove a paranormal cause. So far, paranormal phenomena are not supported by the laws of physics. Scientists using reliable research methods have found zero evidence that ghosts exist. What they have found out over the years is that psychological factors and environmental conditions can account for almost all reported paranormal phenomena.
One of the scariest paranormal phenomena reported is waking up completely paralyzed and seeing a malevolent being either standing just out of sight or sitting right on the sleeper's chest. The being is referred to as a ghost, a demon, or a witch. What's actually going on is an abnormal sleep disorder called sleep paralysis. It occurs when the sleeper wakes before the brain is ready, which puts it on high alert, resulting in the feeling of a malevolent presence.
This phenomenon is extremely common and documented throughout history and even today. I did a whole episode about sleep paralysis, so check that out if you want to know more. Another instance of the brain doing its best to protect you but ending up scaring the crap out of you is periidolia. Periidolia is the tendency of a human brain to perceive familiar patterns or meanings in random or ambiguous stimuli.
The brain must make sense of all the sensory input it receives as well as internal thoughts and meaning. It prioritizes some information, ignoring many smaller details and focusing on important things. Sometimes it works a little too well and finds meaning in meaningless things or adds things to fill in the blanks. If it's dark, the brain has less visual information from the world, so it tries to fill in the blanks while prioritizing safety.
Ghost experiences usually happen when you're alone, in the dark, and scared, because the brain is trying to protect you from what could be hiding in the dark. It's easier to dismiss the existence of the paranormal in broad daylight, but everything changes when you're in the dark. Unfamiliar and threatening environments activate the brain and bodies, survival instincts. Ancient humans had to be constantly alert in order to avoid dangers, like stealthy big cats and snakes.
Humans with a better safe than sorry attitude, survived more often and then reproduced, creating more cautious offspring. Our survival instinct sometimes causes us to sense another presence even when we're alone. That's why a sudden sound in the dark, even a mundane one, can activate our fight or flight response. The power of suggestion is strong in humans.
As I said, humans evolved to take cues from the outside world in order to escape threats, so a well-placed hint that something threatening is nearby can make us see and hear things that aren't there. Heard mentality also comes into play. If one person believes they've seen or heard a threat, the others in their group will respond to it as if it's real. This is another instance of our brain trying to keep us safe with its better safe than sorry default setting.
A variety of mental health conditions, such as schizophrenia, can also cause hallucinations of ghostly and levelant beings. Certain seizure disorders can also cause this. It has been shown that certain environmental factors can cause the brain to jump into survival mode or even hallucinate. Sound waves that are inaudible to human ears are called infrasound and they can affect our brains even if we can't hear them.
The most fear-inducing frequency is the 18-20 Hertz range. This frequency of sound can be created by a number of things, including electronic devices. Not many people carry around an audio gauge so the reason for their fear goes undiscovered. Science and the scientific method give us the ability to discover things, to know things.
There is a distinction between something being unknown to science and something that is beyond the ability of the scientific method to investigate. Science doesn't know everything, but not knowing something is different from not being able to investigate it. Does the supernatural exist? If the word supernatural is defined as a phenomenon that exists but current science is not able to explain it, then the supernatural does exist.
There are definitely questions that cannot be answered using our current technology. It took over two millennia before researchers proved atoms were real, despite being proposed in about 400 BC. On the other hand, if the definition of supernatural is a phenomenon that exists but science is unable to investigate it, even in principle, then the answer is no, the supernatural does not exist. If something exists, it is by definition natural and science can attempt to study it.
Even among scientists, paranormal beliefs persist. It's hard to dismiss the myriad reports of ghosts throughout history. Ghosts are linked with religion, a mix of Christianity and pagan concepts all smushed together. Neither Christianity nor paganism has died out, so the concept of spirits lingers as well.
Sprinkle in elements of the modern religion of science and the fact that many scientific theories are yet to be proven and you have just enough room for the possibility of ghosts existing. While I remain skeptical, I'm open to being proven wrong if the evidence is strong and compelling and collected according to the scientific method. The goal of a scientist is not to win an argument, but to discover the truth, the fact of the matter. It's important to learn how to question information and seek reasonable, realistic explanations in order to reveal what's really going on.
Places with tragic histories are often said to be the haunt of ghosts. Tragedy and violence always catch our attention and stories about them often linger in the public memory long after the incident occurred. Legends of ghosts grow up around these incidents like weeds and the real history often becomes obscured. Many times, a seed of truth remains at the heart of these tales.
The only way that seed can grow is for people like us to clear the weeds and dig deeper. So let's clear some weeds by looking deeper, staying objective and remaining morbidly curious. Thank you so much. And thank you to everyone who has joined the Patreon page as a free member.
I like seeing all of you there. Because of you, the listeners, our creepy community is growing strong. The MCP has joined the Straight Up Strange podcast network, which hosts true crime, paranormal, history, science, folklore and other enigmatic podcasts. Nothing is off limits when you enter the world of Straight Up Strange.
The MCP is also part of the Belfry podcast network, a haven for golf culture featuring podcasts, blogs and videos all catering to the darker side of life. If you'd like to support the MCP but would rather not become a patron, you can give one-time donations on our website and our Ko-fi page. Also on our website are links to all our social media, a full list of episodes, links to our merch and our mailing list. We also have an Amazon wishlist at bit.ly slash morbidwishlist.
That's B-I-T dot L-Y slash morbidwishlist. Any purchases from this list are greatly appreciated. We are eternally grateful for your support. My name is Halley and until next time, thanks for listening.