Yesterday, I decided to roll myself into a blanket burrito and not move from the cocoon I’d made on my couch all day. Okay, that’s not entirely true. I had bills to pay and food to make, but otherwise I was nice and toasty under some of my warmest blankets. I was perusing the family’s Amazon Prime Video account when I came across the show “I Wouldn’t Go In There”.
Now I’m all about TV shows and documentaries that take a peek at the paranormal or include a good ghost story. However, I’m not all that interested in watching people wander around with night vision cameras looking for proof of ghosts (unless it’s Buzzfeed Unsolved Supernatural with Ryan and Shane - I will watch Ryan freak himself out until the end of time). What I am interested in are the stories themselves.
The host of “I Wouldn’t Go In There” is a blogger and urban explorer named Robert Joe. He takes a much different approach to the paranormal stories he hears while traveling around east Asia. For one thing, he doesn’t believe in ghosts. What he does believe in is that ghost stories are a type of oral history keeping the memory of lesser known or generally forgotten events alive. At the beginning of each episode, Robert interviews someone with a ghost story. He then goes to the site in question (if he can) to explore a bit. Then, he digs into the history of the site to determine what could be the cause of the haunting,
More often than not the stories he dug up were about violent or traumatic events that the people in the area where still processing, sometimes centuries after the inciting incident occurred.
Robert Joe would also go to local experts to understand the culture and customs surrounding death, superstition, and ghosts. This information helped give better context of how the stories started and why people were experiencing these hauntings.
Overall I enjoyed the show and binge-watched all ten episodes while wrapped up as a blanket sushi roll. It was a Saturday well spent and it made me long to explore the same countries Robert was visiting, or at the very least learn more about their history. I think the episode that stuck out the most was the episode about a haunted house in South Korea. I won’t spoil the ending, but the emotional story that is presented at the end about a battle during the Korean War is heart wrenching.
And to be honest, this is the kind of show that got me interested in history and learning about other cultures as a little kid.
Back in the 90s and early 2000s there was a show on the History Channel called “Haunted History”. They tried to reboot it a few years ago and it wasn’t nearly as good. The original had multiple episodes about hour long, focusing on the spooky stories from one city and how these stories tied into actual historical events. It was a little cheesy and dramatized at times, but it was entertaining and somewhat educational.
You can watch episodes from this show on both Amazon Prime and YouTube with a little search savvy ingenuity.
This show led me to picking up books on hauntings, which then led me to doing my own research into the subject. As this was going on, I became less sensitive to horror movies and book featuring ghosts and hauntings (gory horror movies are still a bit hard on me), eventually leading to me becoming a horror writer mostly interested in the paranormal (insert shameless plus about the anthology I’m featured in).
During this obsession to understand the unknowable, I came to a couple of conclusions. Now these are my own personal conclusions and in no way reflect how the world may actually work nor do I have a degree in anthropology, sociology, or history (I do in fact have a fancy Math degree written in Latin, but I don’t think that counts here). My conclusions are these:
1) Places, people, and objects can all be haunted.
2) Ghost stories, superstitions, folk lore, and legends often reflect the emotional needs and values of the community they come from.
3) The reason ghosts exist isn’t to frighten the living, but to help deal with death, trauma, cultural norms, and the unknown.
A lot of ghost stories are traumatic. Some aren’t. There is the occasional sweet ghost story about someone’s grandma or great uncle visiting them or haunting their home because of how much they loved the place, but those aren’t the majority. And those touching stories help people grieve and recover from the loss they suffered.
I find that a lot of hauntings deal with violent or sudden deaths. They might also occur because someone disturbed a grave site or because they weren’t given a (culturally recognized) proper burial.
And culture matters a lot in what causes a haunting.
Take for example Salem Massachusetts and the ghost stories surrounding the Salem Witch Trials. There are a lot of ghost stories and plenty of ghost tours you can pick from when you visit. I personally prefer the tours that focus more on the history and the whys of the story versus the actual ghost parts and Salem has a lot of history full of explaining those whys.
Salem is haunted by the trauma of the Witch Trails, even over three centuries later. In fact, for a long time the town of Salem didn’t want to even acknowledge what had happened, but the community did remember. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s book “The House of the Seven Gables” is full of allusions to the community guilt plaguing Salem. The author even changed his name to distance himself from an ancestor who was one of the main leaders behind the Witch Trials.
Salem of today embraces what happened. It’s become one of the witch capitols of the world. People come far and wide to learn about one tiny piece of Salem’s history and to possibly see a ghost specifically from that time. The trauma of innocent people imprisoned and being put to death hasn’t gone away, but it is being processed (even if a lot of it is for financial gain).
I’ve never personally experienced a haunting. I’ve been to places that people say are haunted or that I thought should be haunted, but aren’t. My grandfather’s house comes to mind. As a child I really wanted it to be haunted, so my grandfather concocted a story about a chocolate eating ghost in the kitchen. There was no ghost, it was just my grandfather messing with me.
I currently live in a house that’s over a hundred years old. My sister insists that it’s haunted. The only haunting I’m aware of is the grumpy twenty-something job hunting on the second floor and maybe one or two squirrels trying to break into the attic. Because of the house’s age and somewhat spooky disposition (the floor’ uneven and a couple of the doors don’t like staying shut), it seems like an excellent spot for a ghost or two.
Seriously, it’s not haunted. No ghosts reside in my house.
However I did attend a college full of ghost stories. All of which have been passed from student to student over the years. In fact many of the stories I know, I learned from another student attending the college.
The two stories I am most familiar with from my time on campus deal with some of the darker history of my school. In some ways I think these stories continue to be told as a reminder that our school wasn’t perfect for everyone.
The first story has to do with colonialism and the shameful history of kidnapping Native American children and forcing them to conform to European standards. It’s said that on cool nights in the dead of winter, if you’re walking by the sunken gardens you might catch a glimpse of a (possibly) murdered Native American boy running a good five feet off the ground. The sunken gardens didn’t exist when the child was forced to attend the school and would often escape to run free in the surrounding woods (which also no longer really exist). One night he never returned and is thought to have been murdered by someone near where the sunken gardens now are.
Pretty spooky, right? But this story also keeps the shameful memory of an often overlooked period of American history. Native American children were kidnapped and “civilized” well into the 1900s throughout North America. The fact that my school participated in this practice is an uncomfortable truth that should be acknowledged more.
The second story is a lot more gruesome in my opinion and speaks on one of the lesser well known reputations about my beautiful alma mater. To give some background , when I first applied and was accepted, one of my friends (who went to an equally prestigious but rival school) said this: “Oh, you’re going to Suicide U”. I was a little taken aback by this comment. Why did my dream university have such a reputation. I knew it was a tough school, but I didn’t think it had that kind of reputation.
Until I heard this story:
One year, during finals, a young woman was studying in the top most classroom of one of the older academic buildings. Things weren’t going well. In fact things were going down right bad for this woman, so she left all of her thing in the room, walked into the lady’s room across the hall, and killed herself.
A year passed and it was time for finals again. A different student decided to study in the same location as the woman who committed suicide the previous year had. It was getting late and this student was really getting into the study groove when there was a knock on the door. The student looked up to see a woman sticking their head into the room. The woman looked around, saw the study materials and asked how finals were going. The studying student said that everything was going great. This angered the woman. She stormed in, ripped apart all of the study guides, and left as quickly as she came.
Soon other sightings of this woman started being shared. If the woman showed up and things weren’t going well while studying she would try to tempt the other person into killing themselves. However, she only ever showed up at this one classroom and only if a person was studying alone late at night. From what I heard people stopped studying there all together unless they had a group, so the ghost turned to tempting the lady’s who used the restroom where she died instead. According to the stories I heard, the hauntings in the bathroom got so bad that the school switched the genders with the idea that guys didn’t need to use the restroom as often as the ladies, so they’d avoid that one all together.
I have no idea how true this story is or isn’t. But it was one of those stories whispered about on campus. Personally, I think it spoke to the very real anxieties the students had as well as the stress and mental health problems not being addressed on our campus (I’m hoping things have gotten better, but that’s an entirely different post). We all wanted to be the prefect student. Most of us had been so in high school. Our university, though, was tough and proud of the academic rigor, which knock a lot of us down a few pegs (or in my case down an entire level of the multiverse).
And the truth is, my campus wasn’t unfamiliar with the pain of suicides. There were at least three suicides that I can remember happening while I was a student. Each suicide was sudden, shocking, and traumatic.
I can’t help but wonder if the story about the girl studying for finals is also a warning to the students to take care of themselves or if it’s is a way for the other students to deal with the shocking loss of suicide. It seems morbid when phrased that way, but we humans need closure and explanations for when things like this happens.
Ghost stories, hauntings, myths, legends, they stick around because we as humans need them to. They offer explanations for the unknown and help us deal with the raw emotions that come with living in a dangerous world. These stories keep the very human tradition of oral history alive.
What do you guys think? Do you know of any ghost stories that might tell a bigger story?
I know this was a long post and I took it to a bit of a dark place, but I wanted to give some insight (and maybe review my own thoughts) on what makes a places haunted. Because places, people, and even objects can be haunted. They carry the memories and emotions of past events. The stories are a way for us to remember the past and process the difficult emotions and traumas that occurred. I recommend checking out “I Wouldn’t Go In There” if you’re interested in learning about hauntings, the supernatural, and historical events in Eastern Asia.
I also recommend watching Buzzfeed Unsolved with Ryan and Shane, but mainly to see Ryan freak out and Shane be so done with Ryan.
Until next week.
Before I give my usual closing please know that if you or a loved one is suffering from mental illness your not alone. Don’t ever hesitate to reach out for help. If you ever feel suicidal please remember that there is a national suicide helpline (1-800-273-8255).
If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you guys like hearing from me too.
Hiya AJ. I can't offer any answers about ghost stories. I know there are a couple in my family. Even as recently as a couple of weeks ago a relative of mine says they have footprints in their house they claim were made by a ghost. My personal favorite are Japanese ghost stories, especially those found in manga. They creep me out but I eat those stories up like I'm eating california rolls. I think the only element you maybe missing is people's interest in the macabre. Its like rubber neckers on the highway, people look because they want to see the accident damage. Fear can be exhilarating, especially when we can put that scary book or movie down and walk away from it unscathed.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the insight and yes I agree with you on the interest in the macabre. I might have to explore that more in an upcoming blog.
DeleteThank you for sharing the stories about your family.