Have You Ever Seen A Ghost? · Storyflo

I always end up living in the spookiest place in whatever city I’m living in. I don’t do it on purpose. In Victoria it was Beacon Hill Park, where the Lekwungen buried their dead under piles of stones running down the hill, and where the city took some of those cairns apart in the seventies so it could mow the grass. In Edmonton it was deep in Mill Creek Ravine, which the Cree called Stony Creek and used for hunting and spiritual ceremonies before it filled up with meat packing plants, coal mines, and a shanty town archaeologists are still digging up. In Los Angeles it’s a spooky place too, and I’m leaving it at that.

So, have you ever seen a ghost? I have. About 1 in 5 Americans say they have too, and the number has held steady across Pew and YouGov polls for 15 years. Women say it more than men. People under 30 say it the most, which is strange, because they’ve had the fewest years to run into one.

I wanted to know what the 1 in 5 have in common.

A psychologist named William Langston at Middle Tennessee State reviewed sightings and discovered the people who see ghosts score high on something called absorption, which is the ability to get so far inside a song or a book or a thought that the room disappears. Transliminality is a fancy word for a thin wall between the unconscious and the conscious, so things cross over that stay put in other people. Openness, sensation seeking, and sensory sensitivity round it out. Noise is louder for them. Light is brighter. Fabric is a menace mostly.

After reading those descriptions about light and sound and touch I moved into the autism research, and I read it twice. A Swedish study followed young adults on the spectrum and found they reported sensing a presence, feeling a touch, and seeing figures far more often than the matched group, and when they tried to explain what happened to them they reached for ghosts and spirits, not God. A lab in Sheffield found almost every autistic adult they tested scored higher on anomalous perception than the control group. There’s even a paper from 2006 that ties ADHD tendencies to belief in ghosts specifically.

There’s a woman with red hair in a basement in Edmonton. There’s a man at the end of a bed in Calgary who I thought was there to kill me. The third one I saw at a dinner at Busy Philipps’ house. When you subscribe I always make it worth your dollar. Don’t trust me, trust 24,000 people.

Have You Ever Seen A Ghost? · Storyflo