Are there ghosts everywhere

It may be because Halloween is approaching , but it seems we remain fascinated by the idea of whether ghosts actually exist. The Guardian has gathered writers from the fields of psychology to religion to think about why. It may be an apocryphal story, but anthropologists often speak of it.

One of those earlyth-century English anthropologist travels to Africa to expose the foolishness of what they presume to be "primitive" beliefs. The man thinks, carefully. Perhaps the most persistent attempt to expose the foolishness of the belief in ghosts is Scooby-Doo.

Pretty much every week since , when the series started, Scooby, Shaggy, Velma and the gang have been exposing the lie behind their fears of ghosts and ghoulies. It always turns out to be the strange caretaker with a clever projector, or some such; Velma's scientific turn of mind shows that Shaggy's fears are unfounded. But here's my question: why do Shaggy and Scooby keep getting frightened, again and again?

Are they just plain stupid? Or is there something about Velma's style of explanation that doesn't fully address the continual anxiety on which the series is premised?

Despite the exposure of the caretaker, something remains under-explained — hence the continuously ongoing work of "Mystery, Inc". From Pliny the Younger 's story of an old man in chains haunting his house, through the stories of the Dybbuk , to the great gothic storytellers and the Blair Witch Project , in all cultures and times there is something here that won't go away; some fear that is legitimately being expressed — the continual return of the repressed.

And the simple point that ghosts don't exist obviously they don't, by the way doesn't cut it. In a way, Velma is making a category mistake.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation, and is republished under a Creative Commons licence. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc. Why we should believe in ghosts. Share using Email. By Tok Thompson 31st October From The Conversation. Telling tales of ghouls and spectres can have a surprising benefit by encouraging people to change the way they behave. Sometimes the ghostly encounter allows us to recognize the ghost as our own ancestor; it repairs a familial relation or undoes a forgetting.

Other times, it involves recognizing that the landscape of the dead is populated by ghosts who we ourselves do not and cannot claim as ancestors but who nevertheless demand and deserve acknowledgment.

It is about listening to and making space for these ghosts and realizing that our fates—those of the dead and those of the living—are bound together. Ghosts remind us that we live with and must be in good relation to people we may never know.

The ghostly encounter is, after all, a matter of justice. It means coming to terms with how the past animates the present. It is about reworking the past and establishing our relationship to it. It is about making claims on the past that implicate us in profound and enduring ways. As such, engaging with ghosts has transformative potential—it has the capacity to transform action, affect, and politics.

As a form of memory work, engaging ghosts is an act of the imagination, an interpretive labor, and a moral practice all at once. It is at once a deeply personal exercise and always more-than-personal, an engagement within and beyond ourselves. We want something from ghosts, and our engagement with them has stakes ; our presents and futures are tied up with their pasts. Haunting is the way ghosts make their desires known. This means acknowledging two things.

These demands are always specific to the ghost. Sometimes these demands are satisfied through acknowledgment, but sometimes they demand action.

A Harris poll from last year found that 42 percent of Americans say they believe in ghosts. The percentage is similar in the United Kingdom, where 52 percent of respondents indicated that they believed in ghosts in a recent poll.

In the U. While the terms spirit and ghost are related and even interchangeable in some languages, the word ghost in English tends to refer to the soul or spirit of a deceased person that can appear to the living. In A Natural History of Ghosts , Roger Clarke discusses nine varieties of ghosts identified by Peter Underwood, who has studied ghost stories for decades. It seems that belief in ghosts is even more widespread in much of Asia, where ghosts are characterized as neutral and can be appeased through rituals or angered if provoked as opposed to our scarier depictions of ghosts in the West , according to Justin McDaniel, a professor of religious studies and director of the Penn Ghost Project at the University of Pennsylvania.

In China, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Thailand, the seventh month of the lunar calendar which falls in August this year ushers in the Hungry Ghost Festival , when it is believed that ghosts of the deceased are temporarily released from the lower realm to visit the living. In Taiwan, some people believe that the presence of wandering ghosts during Ghost Month can cause accidents to the living. At least one study has shown that people avoid risky behaviors during this time, including those in bodies of water, reducing the number of deaths by drowning.

In places like Japan where secularism is very strong, the belief in ghosts is still high.