It’s striking that so many people believe in haunted places. That idea may seem quite persuasive when we see “ghost hunters” on our TV sets, or hear spine-tingling “true” ghost stories from our friends and loved ones. But should we accept haunting as a genuine part of our real world? Or could there be better explanations for the tales people tell about things that go bump in the night?
Skeptics, believers, and paranormal investigators have argued about ghosts for a very long time—for centuries, in fact. It’s turned out to be a perplexing subject. According to folklore, ghosts behave in spooky, unpredictable, inconsistent ways. They’re supposed to be truly “supernatural,” interacting with our world yet somehow existing outside of the ordinary laws of nature. Such thoroughly magical claims would be hard to study if they were true. And they’re equally hard to disprove if they’re untrue.