Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Saga. Hey, Robert,
Speaker 1: do you believe in ghosts? I believe in ghosts stories.
Speaker 1: I've I've never had a supernatural experience. I have not
Speaker 1: seen a ghost. I've I've spoken to many people who
Speaker 1: claim to have seen him, or they seem something they
Speaker 1: can't fully explain and turn to the ghost narrative. But yeah,
Speaker 1: for my own part, I don't believe in ghosts, but
Speaker 1: I believe in the power of ghost stories. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: I think that's a good position to take on this.
Speaker 1: I don't know that I necessarily believe in ghosts. I
Speaker 1: don't not believe in ghosts, if that makes sense, But
Speaker 1: I'm open to the idea. And I do know too
Speaker 1: people though, who are sort of into the whole amateur
Speaker 1: ghost hunting thing and will like occasionally go to like
Speaker 1: abandoned houses in middle of nowhere with what do you
Speaker 1: call him, like E M F meters and stuff like
Speaker 1: that and try to do like spirit photography. But uh,
Speaker 1: it's never really struck me as something that that was
Speaker 1: particularly interesting. One time I was with this guy who
Speaker 1: this is one of the people who's into this, and
Speaker 1: we're driving by the cemetery where like half of my
Speaker 1: family is buried, and he was telling me about how
Speaker 1: he had been like hanging out in that cemetery doing
Speaker 1: ghost hunting in the middle of the night. It just
Speaker 1: strikes me as a bit too radio shack from my
Speaker 1: own like hanging out in the cemetery going to try
Speaker 1: and see a ghost. I'm all in favor of that visit,
Speaker 1: going on ghost tours, that sort of thing. I love it,
Speaker 1: But in terms of like building some device and then
Speaker 1: using it or perhaps misusing it to try and find
Speaker 1: evidence of supernatural activity unless it's an actual proton pack,
Speaker 1: I'm just not really on board. That would be great
Speaker 1: if we could get an actual proton pack out of it.
Speaker 1: I think a lot more people would be involved. But
Speaker 1: you gotta go on licensed with it. That's true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But this particular episode, just so that you are all aware,
Speaker 1: is not going to be one where we look at
Speaker 1: ghost hunting and say, oh, well, this is all pseudoscience, right, Like,
Speaker 1: we're not going to do that breakdown. I'm sure you've
Speaker 1: probably heard or seen that many times before. Uh, this
Speaker 1: is we're more interested in ghost stories in this episode,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna look at ghost stories from around the
Speaker 1: world and how they reflect the human condition. Uh So, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's lots of studies about e v P or infrasound
Speaker 1: and how the ghost hunters have flawed methodologies and all
Speaker 1: that stuff, Right, but that's not really what we're gonna
Speaker 1: do in this particular episode. Yeah, we we decided to
Speaker 1: look to each continent, and we realized that that's that's
Speaker 1: a very broad system, and we're going to leave out
Speaker 1: a lot of wonderful ghost stories and ghost traditions and
Speaker 1: spirit belief systems. But we decided to just hit each
Speaker 1: continent that has human habitation and pick out one particular
Speaker 1: ghost story or ghost belief system that has some sort
Speaker 1: of anthropological, psychological, or scientific basis for discussion. Right, and
Speaker 1: why are we doing this, you may ask yourselves, This
Speaker 1: seems like an unusual topic for stuff to blow your
Speaker 1: mind a science podcast. Well, hey, it's October for us.
Speaker 1: Maybe listening to this in January, but it is now
Speaker 1: October for us in space and time. In every October,
Speaker 1: we do episodes that are related to Halloween, and this
Speaker 1: is one of them. Yeah, and by no means that
Speaker 1: this episode stand outside of a lot of the topics
Speaker 1: we cover, because, as we discuss in this episode, you're
Speaker 1: gonna find links to episodes that we've covered dealing with
Speaker 1: psychology and anthropology, belief systems, and just sort of the
Speaker 1: tension that emerges in a post colonial world. Yeah. In fact,
Speaker 1: we have an entire episode that Robert and I did
Speaker 1: about Chinese ghost weddings that immediately sprang to mind here.
Speaker 1: But people are probably wondering, well, what do you mean
Speaker 1: by ghost story? That's a pretty broad, you know, thing
Speaker 1: to talk about. Specifically, we're talking about fiction that either
Speaker 1: includes a ghost or the characters in the stories belief
Speaker 1: in ghosts. Sometimes, you know, ghost stories are used to
Speaker 1: just be scary, right, but we're particularly interested in stories
Speaker 1: that have ghosts in them here, not just any old
Speaker 1: scary story. Yeah. I feel like a ghost story really
Speaker 1: tells you something about the the storyteller or the storyteller's
Speaker 1: culture as it relates to bereavement and death and loss
Speaker 1: and what they think about the afterlife and just how
Speaker 1: they deal with death on a day to day basis. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think I mentioned this in one of our other
Speaker 1: October episodes that we've recorded this month. But to me,
Speaker 1: horror stories in general are cautionary tales, and ultimately we
Speaker 1: started passing them down to one another over the generations,
Speaker 1: whether it was around a campfire or in a book,
Speaker 1: right in these tomes of literature, because they teach us
Speaker 1: something about the world and about surviving in it. And
Speaker 1: so that's what I think I'm interested in finding out
Speaker 1: here about all these very cultures from around the world
Speaker 1: and what they've passed on and are trying to teach
Speaker 1: one another. Yeah. Indeed, and now one more thought before
Speaker 1: we actually began to get into the media the episode.
Speaker 1: We recently had an episode Joe and I recently did
Speaker 1: one on the Bicameral Mind, and I know that if
Speaker 1: you recently listen to those episodes, you're gonna think to
Speaker 1: that time after time in this because we're gonna talking
Speaker 1: about like dead voices speaking to the living in this episode.
Speaker 1: We're really not going to get into any bicameral Mind
Speaker 1: theories regarding the subject matter, but certainly if connections occur
Speaker 1: to you right into us, let us know on social media,
Speaker 1: because there's there's plenty of of of room to compare
Speaker 1: the two. Right, So we're gonna start off with Europe.
Speaker 1: Why are we starting with Europe? Well, that is I
Speaker 1: think the foundation for what most people listening to this
Speaker 1: show have for their idea of a ghost story, and
Speaker 1: it seems like a good place to sort of cement ourselves. Especially.
Speaker 1: This is not going to be like a literary podcast
Speaker 1: where we're going to walk through the sort of literary
Speaker 1: history of ghost stories, but we'll give you like a
Speaker 1: very very concise summary before each of these. I should
Speaker 1: also say that the sort of the the European ghost
Speaker 1: stinku manages to work its way into a lot of
Speaker 1: these other ghost traditions that we're going to discuss. Yes,
Speaker 1: it does, for sure, we we we will find it
Speaker 1: on almost every continent, and we had to when we
Speaker 1: were choosing what stories we were going to share with you,
Speaker 1: we had to be very mindful of the sort of
Speaker 1: European colonial aspect of ghost stories. So ghosts and hauntings
Speaker 1: they actually appear in European literature as early as the
Speaker 1: ancient Greeks. Now obviously this extends into Shakespeare with literature
Speaker 1: and drama. We all know the ghost of Hamlet's father
Speaker 1: that shows up in Hamlet for instance. Now here's an
Speaker 1: interesting thing that I learned with relation to the Shakespeare stuff, though,
Speaker 1: this is where we get the sheeted ghost from. So
Speaker 1: the whole idea of somebody just wearing a sheet with
Speaker 1: holes punched into it to like represent a ghost doesn't
Speaker 1: directly come from Shakespeare, but it comes from dramatic presentations
Speaker 1: of ghosts on the stage. The reason why was they
Speaker 1: were originally depicted in armor. So these big suits of
Speaker 1: armor would be like rigged up on police systems and
Speaker 1: and like lowered onto the stage, and that was supposed
Speaker 1: to invoke a ghost. But as you may imagine, armors
Speaker 1: pretty heavy and that was difficult to pull off every night.
Speaker 1: So they turned to what they referred to as spirit
Speaker 1: drapery h and that was essentially putting the sheet over
Speaker 1: somebody's head and they would go oh uh. Ghost stories
Speaker 1: though then extended into Gothic literature, and the difference seems
Speaker 1: to be whether or not the ghost stories themselves had
Speaker 1: a contemporary setting. And this this seems to be fairly
Speaker 1: important in the European sense of ghost stories. Now, the
Speaker 1: golden age in literature of ghost stories really seems to
Speaker 1: kick off in the eighteen hundreds. You've got po Sheridan Lafaneu,
Speaker 1: who we've talked about on the show before, wrote Green Tea.
Speaker 1: We have a whole episode on his concept of whether
Speaker 1: or not green tea would make you see hallucinations or
Speaker 1: ghosts uh, and lots of others, which leads us to
Speaker 1: m R James, who I really want to talk about
Speaker 1: here for a second because he's he's really considered the
Speaker 1: master of the ghost story. And James lived from eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty two to nineteen thirty six. He was a college provost.
Speaker 1: He did not tell ghost stories for a living. In fact,
Speaker 1: he studied medieval history in the Bible. But he is
Speaker 1: now known best today as a teller of ghost stories
Speaker 1: because what he would do is every Christmas Eve he
Speaker 1: would compose a new ghost story and he would have
Speaker 1: people come over, whether they were students or acquaintances, and
Speaker 1: he would present them with a ghost story. And so
Speaker 1: this is where we get his ghost stories of the
Speaker 1: Antiquary from. And if you haven't read these, I really
Speaker 1: recommend it. I think they hold up. It is my
Speaker 1: new holiday tradition to read an m. R. James story
Speaker 1: every Christmas. Oh yeah, this is this is one of
Speaker 1: the big names and for sure. Yeah. So James wrote
Speaker 1: an article for a magazine called The Bookman in December
Speaker 1: nine and this was his official five point designation of
Speaker 1: what you needed to have in your European slash English
Speaker 1: ghost story. Okay, so these are the five things we're
Speaker 1: looking for here to be a true ghost story. The
Speaker 1: supernatural quality of the ghost can't be explained away with rationality. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you can't. You can't have like a science or
Speaker 1: pseudoscience kind of explanation. The second is that the ghost
Speaker 1: story itself should inspire the reader with what he calls
Speaker 1: pleasing terror. So he essentially means like that's sort of
Speaker 1: like adrenaline high that you get when you go to
Speaker 1: see a horror movie, right, like the the excitement of
Speaker 1: the fight or flight response of being presented with a
Speaker 1: horror story. The third is a ghost story should not
Speaker 1: have gratuitous violence or sex in it, which I thought
Speaker 1: was interesting, especially where most of our ghost stories go nowadays.
Speaker 1: Now I have to say that one of my favorite
Speaker 1: haunted house books that Richard Matheson's Hell Houses already already
Speaker 1: it's broken too of these rules. Yeah, it's interesting, and
Speaker 1: I think that there's an argument to be made that
Speaker 1: might have been appropriate for James time, but you can
Speaker 1: still make it work nowadays. Ghost stories this is the
Speaker 1: last one should have a contemporary setting where the reader
Speaker 1: can identify with the protagonist. So basically it needs to
Speaker 1: be it can't be like a period piece, that is
Speaker 1: what he's saying, because you won't necessarily identify with the
Speaker 1: protagonist as quickly and put yourself in their position. So again,
Speaker 1: I think you can probably manipulate that I've seen lots
Speaker 1: of good ghost stories were still we're still watching a
Speaker 1: lot and reading a lot of these these older ghost stories,
Speaker 1: and we don't have any trouble exactly like Mr James
Speaker 1: ghost stories. Yeah. Um, but let's step back and take
Speaker 1: a look at James style and of himself. Okay, So
Speaker 1: James wrote ghost stories that were usually set in a
Speaker 1: small European town. His protagonist was almost always what would
Speaker 1: be like some kind of gentleman's scholar, uh, and they
Speaker 1: would discover some antique object and that would kick off
Speaker 1: the lot to the ghost showing up. Uh. He also
Speaker 1: thought it was really important to build atmosphere and have
Speaker 1: like an accelerating pace or intensity to these stories. Dread
Speaker 1: so this leads to his whole pleasing terror idea. The
Speaker 1: characters in his stories were usually ordinary people, and the
Speaker 1: reason why is he wanted us again to be able
Speaker 1: to relate to who they are, especially when they're pulled
Speaker 1: out of their calm environment by something that's ominous or malevolent. Right,
Speaker 1: so again just being able to put yourself in the
Speaker 1: shoes of the of the main characters. Now, after Mr James,
Speaker 1: in the early twentieth century, English ghost stories began to
Speaker 1: incorporate psychological aspects into them. So when you hear people
Speaker 1: talk about psychological horror, this is when this kind of
Speaker 1: kicked off. And I'm thinking here of some of our
Speaker 1: favorites like Algernon Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson, both wonderful.
Speaker 1: Hodgson wrote The night Lands. Yeah, yeah, Now today the
Speaker 1: modern ghost tale, or what is sometimes referred to just
Speaker 1: as weird fiction. The writer I think that is most
Speaker 1: soociated with European ghost stories is probably Ramsey campbell Um.
Speaker 1: So if you're not familiar with him, check out his work.
Speaker 1: He doesn't exclusively write ghost stories. In fact, he started
Speaker 1: off as a kind of Lovecraft homage guy. But but
Speaker 1: he seems to have like taken up that mantle. So,
Speaker 1: now that we've got that out of the way, what's
Speaker 1: my pick for a great European ghost story that that
Speaker 1: shows us something about ourselves. I'm gonna choose Daphne de
Speaker 1: Mauriers Don't Look Now. And you may be familiar with
Speaker 1: this because there was a movie that was made out
Speaker 1: of it that stars Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie and
Speaker 1: was directed by Nicholas Rogue. It's wonderful film as well.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be talking about both throughout this, but I
Speaker 1: really feel like it's a It's a great example of
Speaker 1: both the European ghost story and the psychological trend that
Speaker 1: we started to see in the twentieth century. So you
Speaker 1: may have not heard of Damria. She actually wrote in
Speaker 1: a lot of different styles. She wasn't strictly a horror writer, say,
Speaker 1: but her novels and short stories were adapted into horror
Speaker 1: movies like Don't Look Now, and then Alfred Hitchcock's films
Speaker 1: Rebecca and The Birds were both based cat Maria. I
Speaker 1: was not I was not aware that The Birds was
Speaker 1: based on a written work. Yeah, yeah, me either until
Speaker 1: I sat down to do this research. So real quick
Speaker 1: I'm gonna give you the summary of Don't Look Now.
Speaker 1: Spoilers for Don't Look Now. It's about a husband and
Speaker 1: wife who are visiting Venice after they have had a
Speaker 1: young daughter who died. In the book, I believe she
Speaker 1: died of meningitis. In the film, she is drowned in
Speaker 1: a pond in their backyard. They go to Venice so
Speaker 1: they can kind of shake this off, and they encounter
Speaker 1: two twins, one of whom claims to be a seer,
Speaker 1: and the seer tells them, oh, I can see your
Speaker 1: daughter's ghost. She's right there with you. This is a
Speaker 1: comforting thing. You should be happy now. The husband, John
Speaker 1: begins seeing a hooded little girl and he starts following
Speaker 1: her around Venice. There's some kind of sense that maybe
Speaker 1: the sears around and maybe I'm somehow sensing the ghost
Speaker 1: of my dead daughter. I'm going to go follow her. Later,
Speaker 1: he sees his wife with these two twins, sisters, and
Speaker 1: they're on their way back to their hotel in Venice
Speaker 1: on a boat, and he thinks, well, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: what's she doing. I saw her just leave for the
Speaker 1: airport to go to England. Why are they coming back?
Speaker 1: And he's like yelling at them, and they don't they
Speaker 1: don't recognize him, they don't seem to hear him, and
Speaker 1: he's kind of freaking out, like reality seems to be
Speaker 1: falling apart for him. Uh. And one of the twins says, well, actually,
Speaker 1: what you saw was a vision of the future. Now,
Speaker 1: at the end of the story, he has killed there's
Speaker 1: a this is kind of a random thing that there's
Speaker 1: a serial killer running around the streets of Venice who
Speaker 1: kills him. Uh. And in the I think it's in
Speaker 1: both the short story and well definitely in the film
Speaker 1: it is a murderous old dwarf woman. Uh. And she
Speaker 1: murders him, and as he's dying, he realizes, oh, I
Speaker 1: was actually seeing the future. My wife was coming back
Speaker 1: in that future orientation to bury me. This was she
Speaker 1: was coming back for my funeral because I've been murdered
Speaker 1: here and so like, he sort of falls into this
Speaker 1: situation where he's like, wait, am I a ghost or
Speaker 1: have I been a ghost this whole time? Or am
Speaker 1: I experiencing some kind of extrasensory perception type thing. Well,
Speaker 1: I was not. I have not seen it or read it.
Speaker 1: I was not expecting the funeral Dwarf to play Man.
Speaker 1: You've got to see the movie. It's so good. I
Speaker 1: really recommend the short story too, it's quite good. Now
Speaker 1: I turned to our old buddy St. Joshi, who is
Speaker 1: the go to expert on all things horror literature. He
Speaker 1: has this awesome book, Unutterable Horror, that I use anytime
Speaker 1: I'm looking for literary reference on the history of horror,
Speaker 1: and St Josh he's right up on Daphne de Maurier
Speaker 1: was about two pages long. He says Don't Look Now
Speaker 1: is his favorite of her stories. But then, in typical
Speaker 1: Joshi fashion, where he's kind of curmudgeon lee about writers,
Speaker 1: he says her work is not to be entirely despised. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's really for him. Those are quite high marks. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: so I recommend it. But obviously, like I said, de
Speaker 1: Morier's work kind of goes all over the place. So
Speaker 1: if you're looking for horror stories, i'd recommend starting with
Speaker 1: Don't Look Now. Okay, Well, how does it match up
Speaker 1: with him R. James Rules for ghost stories? Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is a good question. So let's take a look at
Speaker 1: him or james rules and put them up against the
Speaker 1: the Mourier story. Here so okay, Yes, the supernatural isn't
Speaker 1: explained away with rationality at any point in the story.
Speaker 1: In fact, the husband is constantly trying to say, there's
Speaker 1: no supernatural events going on. I'm a rational man, I
Speaker 1: don't believe in these things. And then at the end
Speaker 1: comes around as he's dying and I guess turning into
Speaker 1: a ghost. The story itself, just like uh m R
Speaker 1: James prescribes, builds dread in a way that I would
Speaker 1: describe as pleasing terror in his his words, the short
Speaker 1: story itself is not gratuitous, but I do have to
Speaker 1: mention and the film is infamous for the sex scene
Speaker 1: between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. It is this famous,
Speaker 1: infamous scene of the two of them having sex, and
Speaker 1: four years people thought it was real. People thought it
Speaker 1: was like not simulated, that they had actually had sex
Speaker 1: in a hotel room in Nicholas. Rogue just shot that,
Speaker 1: and in fact, uh, that's not true at all. Rogue
Speaker 1: kind of like played around the idea over the years
Speaker 1: of just keeping the press, you know, going with this
Speaker 1: urban myth. But I'll also say there's a good bit
Speaker 1: of fake blood in this movie too. You see a
Speaker 1: lot of like, uh, nineteen seventies style fake blood, it's
Speaker 1: like really viscous, you know that's that style. Okay, So
Speaker 1: it's so it's This is an example though, where I
Speaker 1: would say, like the sex and the violence still works
Speaker 1: in a ghost story. Um, the supernatural isn't really explained
Speaker 1: at any point. The setting at the time was contemporary Venice.
Speaker 1: They didn't have it in any kind of period. Now
Speaker 1: if you're watching it now, it's almost fifty years later.
Speaker 1: Now here's what's interesting. When you look at it up
Speaker 1: against m R James Tropes. John is just like one
Speaker 1: of his characters, he's a man of rationality in the film,
Speaker 1: he's an architect and he's written a book about geometry,
Speaker 1: so he's very grounded in the whole idea of being
Speaker 1: a rational man. And uh, just making sure that you know,
Speaker 1: he is the patriarchal figure that's kind of trying to
Speaker 1: hold everything together. Now at this point, I feel like
Speaker 1: we we've established sort of the guidelines for a European
Speaker 1: horror story, and we've talked about the the the qualities
Speaker 1: of this particular story. What what does all of this
Speaker 1: reveal about the human condition of Europeans. So I found
Speaker 1: an article that was written by G. Whisker in and
Speaker 1: it's about de Maurier's horror writing, and it was published
Speaker 1: in the Journal of Gender Studies, and I think that
Speaker 1: it does a really good job of explaining what she
Speaker 1: was trying to do without being overt about it. Essentially,
Speaker 1: Whisker argues that horror at its best intervenes in our
Speaker 1: critical understanding of the political, social, sexual, and psychological world.
Speaker 1: Now it allows us to explore fears and then we
Speaker 1: can put them back away again, right, Like we can
Speaker 1: take them out of the box, and we can put
Speaker 1: them back away. We don't have to live with them.
Speaker 1: And this is especially true if you're following the M. R.
Speaker 1: James doctrine of ghost stories, right, yeah, especially the the
Speaker 1: idea of like keeping it safe, I guess, right, Like,
Speaker 1: like the way that he would write them kept them
Speaker 1: contained within the world of the ghost story, so when
Speaker 1: you were done with it didn't linger. Now, Okay. So
Speaker 1: Whisker has an interesting argument about de Mourier, and the
Speaker 1: argument goes that de Mourier was providing an entertaining way
Speaker 1: to interrogate gender representations, and that horror, being about power
Speaker 1: relationships in society, was the perfect way for her to
Speaker 1: do that. So women in horror, and at least until then,
Speaker 1: had either been passive and vulnerable victims, or they are
Speaker 1: depicted as fem fatales that threatened the boundaries of of
Speaker 1: the home and of relationships. Okay, now, one claim about
Speaker 1: horror is that the pleasure that we get it from it.
Speaker 1: So the pleasurable terror of Mr James is when the
Speaker 1: narrative provides closure and that the horror itself is destroyed
Speaker 1: or contained again, so that the the idea that you
Speaker 1: know you dispelled the horror before you go back out
Speaker 1: into the real world. This re establishes the familiar for us,
Speaker 1: and when the horror is disrupted, our security of self
Speaker 1: in place can return. But female writers of horror are
Speaker 1: unlikely to want to represent their own gender as being
Speaker 1: either monstrous or somehow you know, naive, and they're not
Speaker 1: gonna want to celebrate a return to a male empowered
Speaker 1: status quo. So du Moier herself she wrote her stories
Speaker 1: between World War One and World War Two. That's arguably
Speaker 1: an error of conservative gender roles in England. Now and
Speaker 1: Don't Look Now and other stories she seems to be
Speaker 1: undermining the conservative vision of the role of the husband
Speaker 1: and the father, and the story deconstructs this. Now, Whisker argues, actually,
Speaker 1: if you've seen Rogues film, it is a feminist interpretation
Speaker 1: of Little Red riding Hood and the reason why here
Speaker 1: to give you an idea of the film. He uses
Speaker 1: red in really powerful ways, and specifically a red macintosh
Speaker 1: that both the daughter wears and then the dwarf wears
Speaker 1: later on. So whenever you see the color red in
Speaker 1: the film, it kind of fills you with dread. So
Speaker 1: the story is purposely destabilizing. It makes you constantly uneasy.
Speaker 1: It mis directs you away from the actual horror that's
Speaker 1: going to come at the end of the film. For example,
Speaker 1: when the story opens and we're very first introduced to
Speaker 1: the old Lady twins, they're described jokingly by John as
Speaker 1: male twins in drag who are definitely murderers. He's joking
Speaker 1: around with his wife during dinner basically uh. And when
Speaker 1: they meet the twins, they actually he introduced themselves. The
Speaker 1: seer says, oh, hey, your daughter's ghost is sitting safely
Speaker 1: between you, and John immediately feels as if he's immobilized
Speaker 1: with terror, and he says, look, this is weird. Like
Speaker 1: the idea that she's able to say that and see this,
Speaker 1: even though I'm a rational man, I feel like this
Speaker 1: is the end. There's no escape, there's no future. So
Speaker 1: that gives you this idea of there's something cyclical going
Speaker 1: on within this story and it's taking the power away
Speaker 1: from him as the father. Now, Whisker implies that perhaps
Speaker 1: the sisters themselves are the fates, and that the third
Speaker 1: fate is missing because she's the little female dwarf at
Speaker 1: the end who kills John. That I've seen this movie
Speaker 1: probably I don't know five or six times and read
Speaker 1: the story. Never occurred to me. But it's an interesting
Speaker 1: interpretation for sure. So uh. Throughout the story, John reassures
Speaker 1: his wife, Look, Venice is totally safe. You don't need
Speaker 1: to be worried. Because she starts worrying about these killings
Speaker 1: that are going on around the town. He says, look,
Speaker 1: let's just stick to logic. I'm going to deny the supernatural.
Speaker 1: It doesn't exist. He rejects her feminine intuition of her emotions,
Speaker 1: and he tries to re establish his sort of paternal
Speaker 1: fantasy of control, which honestly he probably lost a little
Speaker 1: bit of when his daughter died, so when he sees
Speaker 1: this little girl in the hood running around Venice, he
Speaker 1: wants to rescue her. He wants to reattain that uh.
Speaker 1: And instead of needing protection, the hooded girl turns out
Speaker 1: to be the monster who ultimately kills him. So you
Speaker 1: can see there, d'amurier is doing the psychological here. She's
Speaker 1: taking pretty much all of m. R. James tropes, but
Speaker 1: she's turning them against the James z and idea of
Speaker 1: the ghost story to examine gender roles. So I thought
Speaker 1: that was an interesting take on the European sub genre
Speaker 1: of ghost story. You know, she's she's doing something different
Speaker 1: with it. She's using horror to its ends to sort
Speaker 1: of expose something about culture and society, uh and at
Speaker 1: the same time fill you with pleasing to error, as
Speaker 1: James would call it. It's it's interesting to to look
Speaker 1: at this as European storytellers who are conscious of the
Speaker 1: properties of their own ghost traditions and then utilizing those
Speaker 1: for social commentary and sort of to make sense of
Speaker 1: the world around them. And in some of these examples
Speaker 1: we're gonna look at you have the same thing going
Speaker 1: on in other parts of the world, as colonial Europeans
Speaker 1: go to some new land, encounter some new mode of
Speaker 1: spirit traditions, and then they're they're either taking it. At
Speaker 1: the very worst, I guess they're they're taking those and
Speaker 1: just exploiting them, using them to create new stories for amusement.
Speaker 1: But in the better scenarios, I think they're they're trying
Speaker 1: to understand what they've gotten themselves into, what's going on
Speaker 1: in this collision of cultures. Yeah, we're going to see
Speaker 1: that time and again throughout the rest of the episode.
Speaker 1: That's why I wanted to put Europe up at the
Speaker 1: top here so we can sort of see it's a
Speaker 1: little conservative instagi but it it has its own rules
Speaker 1: set essentially. Uh, it would be interesting to see how
Speaker 1: Mr james idea of the ghost story plays out across
Speaker 1: other cultures. Alright, Well, on that note, let's head on
Speaker 1: to Asia. All right. So I'm imagining we've got like
Speaker 1: a big map of the world, and our little plane
Speaker 1: is following a dotted line from from Venice to where
Speaker 1: Hong Kong. Well, you know when I first when we
Speaker 1: first sort of agreed to the the the outline for
Speaker 1: this episode, I thought, oh, well, you know, there's so
Speaker 1: many wonderful Chinese ghost stories, or there's so many wonderful
Speaker 1: Japanese ghost stories, or hey, Thailand has a as a
Speaker 1: rich tradition of of hauntings and ghosts. But instead I
Speaker 1: find that we are going to wind up in Mongolia.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, okay, all right, and it will involve Chinese ghosts.
Speaker 1: But we're in Mongolia. So we all have cultural perceptions
Speaker 1: of haunted houses, right, and it's such we have our
Speaker 1: own cultural haunted house attractions, haunted attractions as they're called,
Speaker 1: that speak to these expectations. Here in Atlanta, we have
Speaker 1: an amazing one in the form of nether World. When
Speaker 1: I was a kid in a rural Tennessee, there was
Speaker 1: a there was one called scare Mayor that we all
Speaker 1: called prayer Mayor because it was that it was hosted
Speaker 1: by a local church a house. It was like a
Speaker 1: hell house, light like a lower budget, like they didn't
Speaker 1: have a lot of they didn't have the budget for
Speaker 1: a lot of really heavy uh you know, religious overtones
Speaker 1: that they were there probably explain what that is to
Speaker 1: our audience. Huh. So a hell house is a thing
Speaker 1: that's unique here in America, I think to the Southeast too. Uh.
Speaker 1: That is a version of a haunted house attraction, but
Speaker 1: it's heavily religious based and the ideas that as you
Speaker 1: go through the room you will see like what the
Speaker 1: punishments of hell will be like if you continue to
Speaker 1: commit sins and then at the end you're hopefully saved. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There's a wonderful documentary about this called called Hell House. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's quite Yeah. So Prayer Mayor or Scare Mayor that
Speaker 1: I went to. It was a lower budget, but at
Speaker 1: the end you would exit into a tent and some
Speaker 1: and this preacher would would preach it right right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So various cult oral expectations are playing into that as well. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I I do want to point out the good.
Speaker 1: I believe there are some some Buddhist oriented hell houses
Speaker 1: of a of a kind that you'll find in Asia
Speaker 1: as well. Have you have you seen that movie The
Speaker 1: Houses that October Built. It's uh, it's an okay found
Speaker 1: footage horror movie about people going around to various haunted
Speaker 1: attractions trying to find the scariest one, and of course
Speaker 1: whatever they find ends up being real. Are they just
Speaker 1: traveling around in the US or it's in the US. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're in like a Winnebago. In fact, there's a sequel
Speaker 1: coming out in like a month. Okay, Well, for for this, uh,
Speaker 1: for this ghost story that we're about to get into,
Speaker 1: I want you to uh to set aside your own
Speaker 1: experiences with US haunted houses or even most Asian haunted houses,
Speaker 1: because we are now going to ulan Bator, Mongolia, capital
Speaker 1: of Mongolia. Okay, Now imagine yourself in Mongolia. You look
Speaker 1: up at this bill board for a haunted attraction, and
Speaker 1: it's illustrated with a pale face with bloody tears, and
Speaker 1: the text reads as follows, though obviously in Mongolian instead
Speaker 1: of English. Have you experienced ghosts from movies so far?
Speaker 1: You have now the opportunity to experience them in person
Speaker 1: by entering a scary haunted house. A family of Chinese
Speaker 1: origins slaughtered each other for obscure reasons. They remain in
Speaker 1: this haunted house while the house masters, who become ghostly corpses,
Speaker 1: will serve you some tea that dead children will run
Speaker 1: around you. That sounds great. I would definitely pay to
Speaker 1: go do that. It does sound unique, Yeah, it sounds
Speaker 1: it sounds rather different. It sounds better than another world
Speaker 1: instead of like somebody with a fake chainsaws jumping owns Now,
Speaker 1: there's are real chainsaws, don't have the chains on them. Okay,
Speaker 1: good thing I didn't get my hand in there, alright.
Speaker 1: So the really interesting thing here is this speaks to
Speaker 1: a specifically Mongolian take on ghosts and hauntings, one in
Speaker 1: which the ghosts of Chinese merchants, silken robed and long bearded,
Speaker 1: haunt the places they buried their accumulated wealth, or near
Speaker 1: where they bury their accumulated wealth, and they're they're haunting
Speaker 1: the area seeking their gold or their belongings. They walk
Speaker 1: in small steps and either speak in Chinese or with
Speaker 1: a quote unquote funny Chinese accent. Okay, so you and
Speaker 1: I have both spent time in China, but I haven't
Speaker 1: been to Mongolia before, so I'm not quite sure what
Speaker 1: the dialect sounds like they're yeah, or or more to
Speaker 1: the point, what does a Chinese accent sound like a Mongolian.
Speaker 1: That's that's something that's kind of beyond, perhaps beyond our
Speaker 1: ability to really grasp. Yeah. Absolutely, Now this sounds like
Speaker 1: a superstition that's loaded with cultural weight and perceptions of
Speaker 1: other races and nationalities. Then you were absolutely correct. I
Speaker 1: turned to a really insightful paper about it, this by
Speaker 1: George dela Place out of Cambridge, and it was published
Speaker 1: in the journal Inner Asia, titled Chinese Ghosts in Mongolian.
Speaker 1: This is from two thousand ten. Now, dela Place describes
Speaker 1: the haunted attraction. UH has these monster movie faces on
Speaker 1: the wall. There's there's Russian furniture, as the Mongolians tend
Speaker 1: to refer to it, of thoroughly non Mongolian home furnishings
Speaker 1: influenced by European motifs. There's art on the walls that's UH,
Speaker 1: you know, expressly Chinese. And then when the ghosts start
Speaker 1: talking to the visitors to the Haunted Attraction through recordings
Speaker 1: on headphones, they're speaking exclusively and untranslated Chinese, not Mongolian. Now,
Speaker 1: one of the things you have to keep in mind
Speaker 1: and processing all of this is UH, first of all,
Speaker 1: the modern nature of Mongolia as a buffer state between
Speaker 1: the Powers of Russia and the People's Republic of China,
Speaker 1: despite its past status as as conquerors and kings of
Speaker 1: both regions. The Mongolian Haunted House here that we're looking at,
Speaker 1: it's defined by foreign influences You're not walking into a
Speaker 1: haunted Mongolian house. You're walking into this this weird uh
Speaker 1: you know, hybrid of Russia and Chinese influences. Yeah, Deela
Speaker 1: place rights quote. Through the setting of this sitting room,
Speaker 1: Chinese people appear as some sort of hyper foreigner whose
Speaker 1: culture is imagined as a heterogeneous assemblage of typically non
Speaker 1: Mongolian features Chinese language. Furthermore, perhaps one of the most
Speaker 1: prominent items of Chinese culture to foreigners is seemingly meant
Speaker 1: to be frightening in in and of itself to mongol ears. Okay, Now,
Speaker 1: he notes that how this actually shook out is that
Speaker 1: the the organizer of the haunted house essentially bought it
Speaker 1: wholesale in China, and that's why the Chinese language is
Speaker 1: there and it's untranslated. But it's believed that this ended
Speaker 1: up working in its in its favor because again it
Speaker 1: plays on an existing motif of Chinese ghosts. So they
Speaker 1: bought a house and moved it to Mongolia. It's kind
Speaker 1: of like here in the States, we have the haunted
Speaker 1: attraction industry, and they have industry trade shows and you
Speaker 1: can go by all these various set pieces. So essentially
Speaker 1: the organizer bought a large portion of this as is
Speaker 1: from somewhere in China, so it's not as as calculated
Speaker 1: a move as as one might think, but it's still
Speaker 1: again plays into an existing motif, and that again is
Speaker 1: that is that you have these these Chinese ghosts in
Speaker 1: Mongolian cities that have a quote notorious history of Chinese migration. Now,
Speaker 1: this tradition emerges from a colonial past, yet also speaks
Speaker 1: to the complications a mode of modern Mongolia and its
Speaker 1: interactions with Chinese enterprise, and the ghosts are seen as
Speaker 1: immigrant parasites, almost a sort of economic and cultural vampire.
Speaker 1: All right, So we're immediately seeing how the culture of
Speaker 1: Mongolia influences what their scare culture is essentially. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, and how their their past interactions with the
Speaker 1: Chinese and areous racial racial stereotypes about about the Chinese,
Speaker 1: how those factor into their haunt industry. And this this
Speaker 1: is something that's not completely out of line with with
Speaker 1: haunted attractions here in the States. There there have been
Speaker 1: haunted attractions that have been criticized for leaning into racial
Speaker 1: stereotypes as well. Yeah, I'm thinking of here in Georgio,
Speaker 1: we have like haunted hair rides around Atlanta that you
Speaker 1: can go do where you you know, you ride through
Speaker 1: a corn field essentially, and again people with fake chainsaws
Speaker 1: or maybe real chinsaws jump out of the corn at
Speaker 1: you and spook you. So we have this idea of
Speaker 1: the Chinese merchant ghost in Mongolia, and it's it's it's
Speaker 1: excessively far and it's difficult to actually banish these ghosts,
Speaker 1: in large part because the the basic idea here is
Speaker 1: that they average Mongolian doesn't really understand how this how
Speaker 1: the Chinese think, how the sort of stereotypical Chinese merchant thinks,
Speaker 1: and therefore it's difficult to communicate with them, difficult to
Speaker 1: try and banish them. Now you have variations on this
Speaker 1: ghost story. For instance, you have ghosts of war, particularly
Speaker 1: of the Mongolian struggle for independence in the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: This would have been the Mongolian Revolution of ninety one,
Speaker 1: in which the Soviet Red Army backed the overthrow of
Speaker 1: the Russian White Guard. These were anti communist forces and
Speaker 1: also into the Chinese occupation of Mongolia, which had been
Speaker 1: going on since nineteen nineteen. Now, Mongolia remained a Soviet
Speaker 1: satellite state until around nineteen so we're talking, so we're
Speaker 1: so we're talking wandering ghost store soldiers here, a ghost general,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. But mostly it's Chinese merchant ghosts
Speaker 1: that you hear ghost stories about in Mongolia. And I
Speaker 1: think that's rather telling. It forces you to ask the question,
Speaker 1: are the scars of economic colonial exploitation even more traumatic
Speaker 1: than those of actual warfare, actual actual bloodshed, especially when
Speaker 1: you consider to like the push and pull of capitalism
Speaker 1: versus communism in that region. Yeah? Yeah, indeed. So I'm
Speaker 1: gonna roll through just some examples of this kind of
Speaker 1: ghost story of from Mongolia. Uh, and these are all
Speaker 1: related in Della Places article. So there's the ghost of
Speaker 1: a Chinese man who becomes rich transporting water via horse cart,
Speaker 1: and one day he's knocked off his horse cart, he's injured,
Speaker 1: and he dies, and he comes back to haunt his
Speaker 1: former home in sorch of his search of his horse,
Speaker 1: his cart, and his money. And this takes place in
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties. He goes around saying, where is my
Speaker 1: water carrying horse cart? Have my two powerful pure bred
Speaker 1: horse has been stolen and eaten? I know where I
Speaker 1: have put my gold? Okay, So it's Ultimately it's like
Speaker 1: about the money. Yeah, that's fascinating, and I wonder too
Speaker 1: how much possess Yeah, I wonder how much too that
Speaker 1: has to do then with um poverty in the region
Speaker 1: as well, there's a definite economic factor. Del Plus argues.
Speaker 1: This seems to be the case with the story that
Speaker 1: I have from Africa that we'll talk about. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think we both found that in seeking on examples from
Speaker 1: emory every continent, it was impossible to avoid like post
Speaker 1: colonial trauma or anxiety. Alright, So another one, this is
Speaker 1: from a a haunted courtyard in uh Ulan, Bator, and
Speaker 1: this is haunted again by the ghost of a Chinese man.
Speaker 1: This one, in particular, became rich running a restaurant in
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties, and it was said that when he died,
Speaker 1: his soul took refuge in his money. Now, this individual
Speaker 1: was supposedly fully integrated into Mongolian society, and so he
Speaker 1: did not receive a proper Chinese funeral, thus the haunting.
Speaker 1: In this particular ghost story, they tried a Buddhist ceremony
Speaker 1: to drive the spirit away. It didn't work. The current
Speaker 1: owner of the property he lost his temper. He throws
Speaker 1: some coins out into the courtyard and he lambasts the
Speaker 1: ghost with a racial slur. Yeah, and this causes the
Speaker 1: ghost to leave. But then the owner has to do
Speaker 1: this every night to keep the ghost away. And this
Speaker 1: a story from around two thousand and three. And the
Speaker 1: ghost in this scenario is just heard to say, hey,
Speaker 1: my money, Hey my money. Wow. Yeah. I I don't
Speaker 1: know that I've necessarily maybe I'm missing something here, audience,
Speaker 1: But I can't think of a Western example of this
Speaker 1: that's so heavily uh embedded in economics. Yeah, the economics
Speaker 1: are kid here because Delpha's points out that this is
Speaker 1: this is a typical scenario, not the ghost part, but
Speaker 1: the business aspect of it. Here, during the Qing dynasty,
Speaker 1: this is the last imperial dynasty of China ended in uh,
Speaker 1: you would see Chinese owned businesses in Mongolia and it
Speaker 1: involved a China based owner and a Chinese manager who
Speaker 1: owned a stake in the in the business and spent
Speaker 1: a large portion of his time on site in Mongolia. Seasonally.
Speaker 1: They would often take a Mongolian name, and despite a
Speaker 1: law against it, they might take a Mongolian wife and
Speaker 1: start a family there, even if they had a family
Speaker 1: back in line as well, and economically they had an
Speaker 1: advantage over locals, and they operated a harsh credit policy
Speaker 1: on the Mongolians. And when there were revolts against cheeing
Speaker 1: occupat occupation, they often took their anger out in these
Speaker 1: Chinese businesses and thieves that that hit these businesses. They
Speaker 1: had a robin hood kind of charm among the locals. Okay,
Speaker 1: So I'm I'm trying to understand this from our American
Speaker 1: Western perspective. It sounds like what some people refer to
Speaker 1: derisively here in America as a carpetbagger. So somebody who
Speaker 1: is not from a region moves to that region and
Speaker 1: then is like economically successful, but doesn't uh give that
Speaker 1: money or or in some cases political influence back to
Speaker 1: the community. They keep it for themselves or bring it
Speaker 1: back to their home. Yeah. The idea here is that
Speaker 1: even though this merchant, this overseer of the business would
Speaker 1: have to a certain extent immerse themselves in the local culture,
Speaker 1: they were still seen by others as to the parasite,
Speaker 1: ascetic arm of of Chinese interests. So we're left with
Speaker 1: this idea. This this really just ultimately gross stereotype that
Speaker 1: Chinese people are so stingy, again a stereotype brought on
Speaker 1: by economic policies of the time, that they came back
Speaker 1: as ghosts even if there had been no violent tragedy,
Speaker 1: which is generally the rule for Mongolian ghost traditions. It's
Speaker 1: also a general practice for an elderly Mongolian man to
Speaker 1: distribute his belongings among his children before he dies, though
Speaker 1: they might have a prize possession that serves as a
Speaker 1: quote unquote refuge thing that might need to be buried
Speaker 1: to avoid haunting. So you have like a Mongolian grandfather,
Speaker 1: he's tended to most of his estate and handed it
Speaker 1: off getting ready for death. But say he had a
Speaker 1: favorite soup bowl that he used, Well, that might be
Speaker 1: a thing. You know, it has no real value particularly,
Speaker 1: but it's valuable enough to him that his his ghost
Speaker 1: might haunt it, and you have to deal with that.
Speaker 1: And idea here is that they saw the Chinese, that
Speaker 1: the kind of people that their soul would get caught
Speaker 1: up in virtually everything they owned, all their possessions, all
Speaker 1: their money that they were. They view them as that materialistic.
Speaker 1: And of course you also have to think in all
Speaker 1: of this about like the just cultural differences between the
Speaker 1: Mongolian and the Chinese. The Mongolians traditionally had a nomadic culture,
Speaker 1: uh that they would move around, they would be able
Speaker 1: to pick up and go, whereas the Chinese culture was
Speaker 1: more set in one place. So thinking back to m
Speaker 1: R James's rules, it seems like they're adhering to at
Speaker 1: least one of them in that there's like an antique object,
Speaker 1: right that seems to be the like center point for
Speaker 1: the ghost, and somebody discovering this object or touching it
Speaker 1: or whatever triggers the plot of the haunting. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: I think the Mongolian version here is that, yes, that's
Speaker 1: the way it should work in a traditional Mongolian ghost story.
Speaker 1: But they're saying that these Chinese merchants, they are so
Speaker 1: greedy that that they're they're ghost. It just caught gets
Speaker 1: caught up in every material thing that they own and
Speaker 1: every shred of their money. So Double Place sums it
Speaker 1: up as follows. Quote. Chinese ghosts are frightening because they
Speaker 1: bridge a collective memory of past colonial exploitation and a
Speaker 1: present concern about migration. They picture present day Chinese migrants
Speaker 1: not as new businessmen but merely as returning colonial merchants
Speaker 1: as current instances of an ongoing parasitic relationship. That is
Speaker 1: very interesting. Yeah, I know, you know, Asian ghost stories
Speaker 1: have become more popular over here in the last fifteen years,
Speaker 1: maybe you know obviously Ringo or Jewan stuff like that,
Speaker 1: but I can't think of any Chinese examples off the
Speaker 1: top of my head, and I wonder, oh, well, there
Speaker 1: was there was one that came out a fe years
Speaker 1: back that I keep meaning to watch titled h was
Speaker 1: it called Riga Mortis. Oh, I've seen Riga Mortis. It's
Speaker 1: a Cantonese language film. That's yeah, that's a cool movie. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't remember necessarily at having this economic aspect. Oh no,
Speaker 1: I don't think that it necessarily did. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean really for it would be I guess it would
Speaker 1: be interesting and probably uncomfortable to watch a Mongolian horror
Speaker 1: movie based around like a kind of an obscene stereotype
Speaker 1: like this, Yeah, totally. I mean, it would be interesting
Speaker 1: from a sort of anthropological standpoint. But uh, this is
Speaker 1: what definitely a case where the ghost story reveals a
Speaker 1: lot of unpleasant things about a relationship between two people's Well,
Speaker 1: why don't we take a break and when we get back,
Speaker 1: we can take our little dotted line airplane to Malawi
Speaker 1: in Africa and explore something similar. Alright, we're back, We've
Speaker 1: hit Europe and we've hit Asia. What's next Africa? And
Speaker 1: I was excited because I anticipated that there was just
Speaker 1: going to be this like plethora of great African ghost
Speaker 1: stories available, right uh, And I had the hardest time
Speaker 1: finding anything. What's interesting is that despite Africa having a
Speaker 1: rich mythological folklore as well as many different belief systems
Speaker 1: about the afterlife, almost all the ghost stories per se
Speaker 1: that are available are post colonial. So to me, this
Speaker 1: meant that there is still some kind of Eurocentric thing
Speaker 1: that's being worked off of the same literary system, going
Speaker 1: back to our European example and Mr James there, and
Speaker 1: I was looking for something to be a little different
Speaker 1: than that. So there's lots of ghost stories that are
Speaker 1: in South Africa, for instance, but I couldn't find any
Speaker 1: that we're from before Dutch or British colonization. So then
Speaker 1: I considered, well, maybe I should turn to the Middle
Speaker 1: East instead. There's a rich ghost story tradition there that
Speaker 1: goes back to a thousand and one nights, but one
Speaker 1: real life story kept coming up over and over again
Speaker 1: in my search, and so I decided to have this
Speaker 1: be the one that I shared. This is from two
Speaker 1: thousand five. In Malawi, it was widely reported that the
Speaker 1: then president bingu Wa muth Rika had fled his three
Speaker 1: hundred room palace because he believed that it was haunted. Now,
Speaker 1: two journalists quoted his religious advisor, Reverend Milani and Tonga,
Speaker 1: as saying that muther Rika had summoned religious leaders there
Speaker 1: specifically to exercise evil spirits. A third journalist reported that
Speaker 1: muther Rika had sensed invisible rodents crawling all over him
Speaker 1: at night. So when this came out publicly, muth Rika
Speaker 1: was not happy about it, and he totally denied it
Speaker 1: and he said, I have not seen any ghosts yet.
Speaker 1: I have never in my life been afraid of ghosts.
Speaker 1: It's important a note here too. He is Roman Catholic,
Speaker 1: was Roman Catholic, so he had this strange maybe not
Speaker 1: strange if you're from Malawi, but he was integrating Roman
Speaker 1: Catholic religious beliefs with the sort of traditional cultural beliefs
Speaker 1: from that area. Oh yeah, and this this is this
Speaker 1: a trend we see time and time again. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: police officials actually arrested two of these journalists and they
Speaker 1: drove them three miles to a police station and then
Speaker 1: charged them with a statute that made it illegal to
Speaker 1: ridicule the president. Uh. This obviously recalled a less democratic
Speaker 1: past for that nation, really worried people about what his
Speaker 1: relationship with the freedom of the press was going to be.
Speaker 1: The nation's top prosecutor at the time said that the
Speaker 1: stories that they had written were too irresponsible to ignore
Speaker 1: and that he was going to pursue a criminal conviction
Speaker 1: that would place them in prison for up to two years. Now,
Speaker 1: it sounds like what ended up happening was they were
Speaker 1: released on bail shortly afterwards. So I think this was
Speaker 1: kind of like a warning shot for the press in Malawi. Now.
Speaker 1: It turns out though Malawi has a history of ghost
Speaker 1: stories in its state houses. So the first head of State,
Speaker 1: Hastings Kamuzu Banda, said that he was regularly visited by
Speaker 1: mysterious dwarves at the san Jica Palace. Yeah, what is
Speaker 1: up with these ghost dwarves? Uh and his successor, Buck
Speaker 1: Kelly Muluzi also suspected that there were spirits there. So
Speaker 1: the former press officer for one of those administrations said, look,
Speaker 1: no one could sleep at that presidential residence, so we
Speaker 1: we ended up moving to another one. So I'm reading this,
Speaker 1: I'm going, what's going on here? This is an article
Speaker 1: in the New York Times from two thousand five, something
Speaker 1: strange is up. According to the then editor of Malawi's newspaper,
Speaker 1: which is called The Chronicle, ghosts and spirits are understood
Speaker 1: to be a part of everyday reality in Malawi and
Speaker 1: it was not a taboo subject. And he was surprised
Speaker 1: that the president reacted this way. That when The New
Speaker 1: York Times reported it, they said, in many parts of
Speaker 1: Sub Saharan Africa tried aditional superstitions coexist seamlessly with modern sensibilities.
Speaker 1: Now I found an example of one. This isn't a
Speaker 1: ghost per se, but I thought this was worth noting
Speaker 1: because it's especially upsetting. So I couldn't find anything about ghosts.
Speaker 1: But it turns out that in Malawi, albinos are a
Speaker 1: valuable commodity for their body parts. Uh They're often trafficked
Speaker 1: across borders for use in witchcraft rituals. So basically the
Speaker 1: idea is that the body parts of albinos are said
Speaker 1: to bring riches, success, power or sexual conquest. Uh. And
Speaker 1: the mutilated bodies of albinos are found later on, without
Speaker 1: their hands, their feet, their breasts, their genitals, their skin,
Speaker 1: sometimes their eyes or their hair. So this is real
Speaker 1: life horror going on home, but it's something that's broadly understood. Now.
Speaker 1: The ghost thing is interesting. Was this simply about saving
Speaker 1: face because muther Rika didn't like that he looked scared
Speaker 1: to a global audience. The country Information Minister actually claimed
Speaker 1: that the president was totally unaware of the arrests of
Speaker 1: these journalists before they happened. He wasn't responsible for them necessarily.
Speaker 1: Then Tonga reversed and said, oh no, no, no, I
Speaker 1: all those quotes about me saying that the president was
Speaker 1: worried about spirits being in his palace, that that's not
Speaker 1: true at all. He doesn't believe in charms. So there's
Speaker 1: clearly some kind of spin doctoring going on here. So
Speaker 1: what's up with this haunted building? First of all, like,
Speaker 1: why have three presidents in Malawi UH supposedly seen ghosts there? Well,
Speaker 1: it turns out that it is a one hundred million
Speaker 1: dollar mansion that was erected in Malawi under Banda. That's
Speaker 1: the first president while his nation was undergoing appalling poverty.
Speaker 1: This place has three hundred rooms, two helipads, a game
Speaker 1: park in a banquet room for six hundred people. His
Speaker 1: successor called it obscene opulence. And when the government you know,
Speaker 1: got ahold of it later on, they said, maybe you
Speaker 1: should just turn this into a five star hotel, Like
Speaker 1: it just looks really bad when the leader of the
Speaker 1: country lives here. When muther Rika was elected, the place
Speaker 1: was in total disrepair. So he had it renovated and
Speaker 1: then he moved in and said, look, it's actually going
Speaker 1: to cut costs if I live here rather than this
Speaker 1: other palace in this other city. Now what I'm wondering
Speaker 1: here maybe these ghost stories that are going on and
Speaker 1: again these are real stories. This isn't this is an
Speaker 1: m R James telling a story of a learned gentleman.
Speaker 1: This is the actual president of a nation who seems
Speaker 1: to be seeing ghosts in his home. Uh, maybe there
Speaker 1: are manifestations of the presidential guilt over living in such
Speaker 1: opulence while the citizenry goes poor. So I did a
Speaker 1: little bit more digging to learn about muther Rika. He
Speaker 1: passed away in in and the Guardians obituary starts off
Speaker 1: by saying he went from being one of Africa's most
Speaker 1: respected leaders to a repressive despot in just two years.
Speaker 1: So it seems like and that was right. So two
Speaker 1: thousand five was towards the beginning of his time and
Speaker 1: power there. So it seems like this is a guy
Speaker 1: He had previously been a loans officer at the World Bank.
Speaker 1: Then he became a dictator afterwards, and when the global
Speaker 1: recession reached Malawi in two thousand ten, he actually responded violently.
Speaker 1: He curtailed civil liberties. Protesters of his presidency were shot
Speaker 1: dead by the police there, and he was criticized for
Speaker 1: purchasing a thirteen million dollar private jet for himself just
Speaker 1: before this. So he died in two thousand twelve from
Speaker 1: a heart attack. Couldn't find a ton more about this.
Speaker 1: I would love it if our listeners who out there
Speaker 1: no way more about Malawi than we do, could chime in.
Speaker 1: But it seems to me from Afar looking at this,
Speaker 1: that there's some kind of again post colonial guilt, right
Speaker 1: like he seemed Mutherrika seemed to be this guy who
Speaker 1: had traveled around the world and had a Western education
Speaker 1: and came back and was successful and rich and powerful,
Speaker 1: and yet the people were still poor, and we're upset
Speaker 1: at him for these choices he made, living in this
Speaker 1: huge mansion, buying this private jet, all this stuff, and
Speaker 1: they reacted to it poorly. But maybe his subconscious was
Speaker 1: also reacting to it poorly, and also his predecessors. Clearly
Speaker 1: they all had the same weird ghost guilt going on.
Speaker 1: And of course, one of the things about a ghost story,
Speaker 1: even like this, of course, is that it becomes the
Speaker 1: property of all those who tell it. It becomes the
Speaker 1: property of of outsiders looking in as well as the
Speaker 1: local residents and the people that that that lived and
Speaker 1: perhaps suffered under him. So it can be a way
Speaker 1: to to understand or better understand what has happened. Yeah,
Speaker 1: now my understanding is you encountered somewhat of a similar
Speaker 1: thing when you looked at Australia's ghost stories. Certainly, when
Speaker 1: it comes to that the the idea of like two
Speaker 1: different cultural traditions coming together and creating kind of a
Speaker 1: hybrid belief system, which is certainly what I was expecting,
Speaker 1: uh from US Astralia, because you obviously have a rich
Speaker 1: Aboriginal tradition that involves spirit realm and spirits walking among us.
Speaker 1: And then you have the European traditions that are brought
Speaker 1: there with the colonial influence, uh and the you know,
Speaker 1: the the Western Australians. So it seems like, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's we we have a lot of fiction out there,
Speaker 1: some cinematic where we see, uh, these traditional values of
Speaker 1: the Aboriginal people kind of melding with European expectations, or
Speaker 1: it's Europeans telling stories about Aboriginal spiritualism. Okay, so there's
Speaker 1: certainly Australian ghost stories, but it looks like you've got
Speaker 1: a book here that you turn to. So there's actual
Speaker 1: research on this tradition, right. There are two authors in particular,
Speaker 1: Kim Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs that came up a
Speaker 1: couple of times. They wrote a book titled Uncanny Australia,
Speaker 1: Sacredness and Identity and a post Colonial Nation. Uh. It's
Speaker 1: really really excellent book. Check it out if you want
Speaker 1: to explore more on this topic. But I was reading
Speaker 1: an article they wrote titled the post Colonial ghost Story,
Speaker 1: in which the authors point out that one encounters a
Speaker 1: form of of postcolonial racism in Australia and which Aboriginal
Speaker 1: people are seen as lacking in some areas, uh you know,
Speaker 1: such as uh wealth and access to various uh you know,
Speaker 1: properties of the modern society. But then they're also seen
Speaker 1: is is having too much in other areas. In other words,
Speaker 1: they have they have certain rights pertaining to sacred lands
Speaker 1: that sometimes rubs the uh you know, the the western
Speaker 1: modern Australia the wrong way. Right. Yeah, Well, we have
Speaker 1: a similar thing here in the States with the Native people.
Speaker 1: Is here their sacred lands and then oh jeez, with
Speaker 1: the whole history of those people being relegated to reservations
Speaker 1: or places that aren't actually their homes. Yeah, I think it.
Speaker 1: It matches up with a lot of of surviving tensions
Speaker 1: between native peoples and colonial powers. And Gelder and Jacobs
Speaker 1: say the following about it. Quote in this climate, Aborigines
Speaker 1: certainly continue to receive sympathy for what they do not
Speaker 1: have good health, adequate housing and so on. And yet
Speaker 1: at the same time they draw resentment from white Australians
Speaker 1: because they seem to be claiming more than their quote
Speaker 1: fair share. Still there's this expected exchange of beliefs and superstitions.
Speaker 1: The Europeans, for their part, incorporated bits of local feklore
Speaker 1: folklore into their own stories and of course borrowed and
Speaker 1: westernized aspects of it for their own fiction. Meanwhile, is
Speaker 1: Philip A. Clark writes in his two thousand seven folklore
Speaker 1: paper Indigenous Spirit and Ghost Folklore of Settled Australia. Modern
Speaker 1: Aboriginal people are in many cases less familiar with the
Speaker 1: complex creation myths of their people, but cling to hybrid
Speaker 1: beliefs that sprang up in the wake of colonialism. And
Speaker 1: it's this fits with what we've talked about before on
Speaker 1: the show, uh, involving cargo cults, the idea that you
Speaker 1: you ultimately have to find some sort of hybrid creation
Speaker 1: of culture in many cases in order to survive culturally.
Speaker 1: Like you you you were just going to be plowed
Speaker 1: over by these intimidating colonial forces in many cases unless
Speaker 1: you find this common ground, uh, this kind of cultural
Speaker 1: survival tactic. Yeah, I'm thinking back on our episode about
Speaker 1: the Serpent and the Rainbow, and uh, the whole idea
Speaker 1: that like certain kinds of voodoo cultures are an integration
Speaker 1: of local mysticism with like Roman Catholicism. For instance. Okay, now,
Speaker 1: out of these hybrid beliefs that the hybrid ghost stories
Speaker 1: that emerge. Uh Guelder and Jacobs argue in their book
Speaker 1: that these Australian ghost stories are not so much about possession,
Speaker 1: such as the owning or acquiring of a haunted house
Speaker 1: or a haunted object, but they're about dispossession. Now specifically,
Speaker 1: some of the Aboriginal motifs that are that are still
Speaker 1: represented in these hyper belief systems. You have this idea
Speaker 1: that there are just a lot of spirits and that
Speaker 1: one kind of lives uh among them. Many of these
Speaker 1: spirits have have humanoid qualities to them, and there are
Speaker 1: also traditions of like little people and sourcers, shape shifters, uh, etcetera.
Speaker 1: Uh Now. Clark writes that the Aboriginal people also believe
Speaker 1: that there was a powerful element of the human spirit
Speaker 1: that for most individuals lay dormant in them throughout their lives,
Speaker 1: and this was called the prupy and belief in this
Speaker 1: still lingers to this day, sometimes as an opponent, potent
Speaker 1: aspect of the self that may be called upon as
Speaker 1: a living spirit or helper in order to you know,
Speaker 1: protect yourself or attack someone. Now agopa, however, is the
Speaker 1: spirit of its deceased person and operates much like a
Speaker 1: ghost in other traditions. A goopa, while disruptive, will eventually
Speaker 1: quote come to rest with the old people. And these
Speaker 1: are differ and from the sort of evil spirits, the
Speaker 1: bad spirits kind of demons that exist in Aboriginal belief
Speaker 1: systems as well. Okay, so there's a complex afterlife, believe them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but they do have something that is a lot like
Speaker 1: the Western ghost and therefore melds well with the colonial
Speaker 1: ideas of what a ghost should be now and and
Speaker 1: for that reason, belief and goopa press persists, and Clark
Speaker 1: points out that massacre sites and missions are frequent haunts. Uh.
Speaker 1: This is they'll love this as a dog owner, that
Speaker 1: dogs can often see these spirits when we cannot, and
Speaker 1: you can see them too, perhaps if you get right
Speaker 1: behind your dog and you stare through the space between
Speaker 1: the dogs ears. Okay, yeah, this actually came up in
Speaker 1: multiple cultures, the idea because you get the dogs who
Speaker 1: just kind of stare off into space weirdly and you're
Speaker 1: not quite sure what they're looking at. Yeah, and multiple
Speaker 1: cultures the idea is that, oh, well, they can see
Speaker 1: the dead. Yeah, clearly they're they're seeing something that is
Speaker 1: hidden from us. Now, even today, when a goopa is
Speaker 1: spotted the Aboriginal community, they have to discuss the revalence
Speaker 1: of the sighting, what does it mean, why is it occurring,
Speaker 1: and particularly how is it linked to any recent conflict
Speaker 1: or tension concerning local Aboriginal affairs. Now, so this is
Speaker 1: this is rather important here, I think, because essentially you're
Speaker 1: seeing um the idea that sightings, ghost sightings lead to
Speaker 1: community discussions. Uh so you might have a ghost that
Speaker 1: props that pops up because of a suicide, because of
Speaker 1: a death that is somehow connected to drug addiction. So
Speaker 1: you have you have deaths that are occurring due to
Speaker 1: societal problems within the Aboriginal community. And then if the
Speaker 1: ghost decided, then the community must discuss the problem. So
Speaker 1: it becomes a reason to have these important discussions about
Speaker 1: real world issues. So it's sort of a manifestation of
Speaker 1: the communities unconscious, right, and like these are maybe societal
Speaker 1: things that they need to discuss, but they don't realize
Speaker 1: they need to discuss them until this person dies and
Speaker 1: then their spirit starts haunting, right. Yeah, and you know
Speaker 1: when you get into you can also get into the
Speaker 1: whole question of well what are people Are the people
Speaker 1: actually seeing something are they just making it up as
Speaker 1: some sort of psychological affair. I mean, there there's so
Speaker 1: many different interpretations of what could be happening. A call
Speaker 1: back to our Will of the Whisp episode from a
Speaker 1: year two ago, there are some who think that the
Speaker 1: initial group of sighting could be connected to some sort
Speaker 1: of Will of the Whisp phenomenon, but you know, it
Speaker 1: could be any number of things. It could be hallucination,
Speaker 1: trick of the eye, whatever it is, something something strikes
Speaker 1: an individual as being ghostly, and then they can connect
Speaker 1: it to some sort of tragic event in the community
Speaker 1: and then bring it forward as a discussion. Wow. So
Speaker 1: this is actually like an extension of what I was
Speaker 1: talking about earlier with just horror stories in general, that
Speaker 1: they're ref flective of cultural issues. But they're taking it
Speaker 1: a step further and saying like, Okay, this is reflective
Speaker 1: of issues that we're dealing with. Now we need to
Speaker 1: address those issues as a group. Now. I know we
Speaker 1: have a number of Australian Australian listeners, we have some
Speaker 1: some Kiwi listeners, as well. So I would love to
Speaker 1: hear from you. If you have specific ghost stories that
Speaker 1: you think reveal something about about culture in your neck
Speaker 1: of the woods, let us know. I would love to
Speaker 1: hear from you. So let's take one more break, and
Speaker 1: when we get back, we're going to head over to
Speaker 1: South America. Alright, So we're turning to South America now, uh,
Speaker 1: and then we'll end with North America, which is probably
Speaker 1: what you and I are most familiar with and most
Speaker 1: of our audience is most familiar with. So would you
Speaker 1: find in South America? Is it pretty common in terms
Speaker 1: of are are we finding yet another example of the
Speaker 1: post colonial uh influence on ghosts? There is, there's definitely
Speaker 1: a post colonial influence, But this tradition I think is
Speaker 1: more revealing about pre colonial um beliefs in this case
Speaker 1: because it concerns a particular native people. So for this one,
Speaker 1: I turned to a really captivating paper titled Three Days
Speaker 1: for Weeping Dreams, Emotions and Death in the Peruvian Amazon
Speaker 1: by Glenn Shephard, published a two thousand two in Medical
Speaker 1: Anthropology Quarterly. And this is one of those you know,
Speaker 1: this is one of those papers. But we read a
Speaker 1: lot of different academic papers for this show, and this
Speaker 1: is one of those that managed to weave together a
Speaker 1: personal story with anthropological commentary, uh in a way that
Speaker 1: just really worked. Yeah, that's pretty rare in the stuff
Speaker 1: that we read, but I'm thinking of like ethnographies tend
Speaker 1: to have more allowance for like a subjective narrative to
Speaker 1: be inserted among their observations. So it's certainly far less
Speaker 1: common and say, you know, archaeological paper, but but this
Speaker 1: one just has really captivated me as it really stood
Speaker 1: apart from from even other excellent papers I've said. So.
Speaker 1: Shephard worked among the Matsa Genka of Peru in the
Speaker 1: late nineteen eighties. Now the Matsagenka they're an indigenous people
Speaker 1: of the Amazon Basin jungle regions of southeastern Peru, and
Speaker 1: his paper kicks off with an account of a local
Speaker 1: woman who suffered uterine bleeding, which was said to have
Speaker 1: begun one day quote when she heard an unknown voice
Speaker 1: calling to her while she was working alone in the
Speaker 1: family garden. Pain and nightmares followed, and in it he
Speaker 1: ended up convincing her to hey, let me bring you
Speaker 1: in for medical treatment. So he took her on this
Speaker 1: long journey they encountered numerous complications, so travel delays. Her
Speaker 1: being unaccustomed to modern medical exams, even encountered a problem
Speaker 1: where they ran into a traveling medicine Ginka shaman, and
Speaker 1: this perved stressful for as well because he was from
Speaker 1: another group and was therefore considered something of a warlock
Speaker 1: like they were. There was this ingrain um suspicion of
Speaker 1: shamans from other groups of the same people. So I'm
Speaker 1: imagining she like sensed a lot of just kind of
Speaker 1: bad energy in general with this journey. Yeah, and you
Speaker 1: know she's she's quite ill and h and ends up
Speaker 1: ends up dying now, but but it ends up. He
Speaker 1: uses this as a way to to further analyze what's
Speaker 1: going on with the Metsa Genka people and uh and
Speaker 1: what their beliefs reveal about their about their their customs
Speaker 1: and their view of death and bereavement. Now, the bat
Speaker 1: Metsagenka believe in spirits, and there are two varieties of
Speaker 1: note and they both have simple similar wording. So on
Speaker 1: one hand you have the Kama Guarini, these are the
Speaker 1: bringers of death. Now, these are evil spirits, essentially demons
Speaker 1: that seduce and or sexually assault matsagenka people resulting in
Speaker 1: illness or death. H Shepherd writes that the medicine geeker
Speaker 1: are generally a sex positive bunch, but they frown upon
Speaker 1: what they see as deviant sexuality or obsessive sexuality, and
Speaker 1: uh the kama guarini may may punish this, and they're
Speaker 1: defined by perversions of diet, sexuality and social behavior. So
Speaker 1: in this story of the the young woman who was suffering, uh,
Speaker 1: the ideas that she they thought that she had been
Speaker 1: attacked by a kama guarini. Now the second variety is
Speaker 1: a comet serie, which means dead person. And these are
Speaker 1: more traditional ghosts in some respects. These are the spirits
Speaker 1: of the dead, and I think it's it's very telling
Speaker 1: given how they view them. So like the demon that
Speaker 1: we described already, the bringer of death. Uh, these ghosts
Speaker 1: smell bad there and they're frightful. So if you dream
Speaker 1: about one, it's a total nightmare. You're gonna wake up
Speaker 1: with aches and you can and you can blame any
Speaker 1: existing aches on that ghost. Dream man. Maybe that's been
Speaker 1: going on with me lately. Well, I thought it was
Speaker 1: just like a bara metric pressure change, but it might
Speaker 1: be ghost dreams. Well, you might need to take some
Speaker 1: of the psychoactive and medicinal plants that they used to
Speaker 1: dispel these dreams. Especially, we have these dreams about a
Speaker 1: deceased loved one now seeing a ghost while awake. For them,
Speaker 1: it's a serious health scare. So you have this scenario
Speaker 1: where they're these demonic entities out there and there after you,
Speaker 1: and if they get you, it's gonna make you physically ill,
Speaker 1: and then you may die. And then when an individual dies,
Speaker 1: they will typically come back as a ghost. And and
Speaker 1: that ghost is also a frightful thing that can make
Speaker 1: you sick, that can bring on physical illness and death
Speaker 1: and essentially kind of leach your soul out of you.
Speaker 1: So there's this whole taxonomy going on here of these
Speaker 1: various types of ghosts and how they're leading to other
Speaker 1: ghost creation. Yeah, yeah, essentially. Now, Shepherd says that the
Speaker 1: Comet series here serves as a way to dehumanize the dead. Quote,
Speaker 1: the dead person is no longer a beloved spouse, a relative,
Speaker 1: a human companion with a name, and when a social
Speaker 1: identity immediately upon death, they become common siri dead person
Speaker 1: ghost belonging to the ranks of demons and dreadful spirits
Speaker 1: that are the ultimate cause of illness and death. Ghosts,
Speaker 1: for the mats A Ginka are not anonymous spirits from
Speaker 1: bygone generations, and a ghost only visits the people at
Speaker 1: knew in life. Uh So they are alone, they are needy,
Speaker 1: they are awful, and there to be shunned and avoided
Speaker 1: so that they might travel on to the next life.
Speaker 1: So this is very different from other cultures where they
Speaker 1: revere they're dead. Right. So it's an interesting twist because
Speaker 1: generally the motif with ghosts and bereavement here in Western
Speaker 1: society is the living are losing it. We're crying, we're weeping,
Speaker 1: we're expressing our emotions, and then here comes the stoic
Speaker 1: ghosts that wanders in and keeps us out. But it's
Speaker 1: the reverse for for for the in this tradition, the
Speaker 1: the ghost is this needy, emotional thing and the humans
Speaker 1: are the ones that are going to react stoically, like
Speaker 1: there is this intense cultural pressure to not let your
Speaker 1: emotions out in the in the face of death. Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: So this is very tied into that analysis of don't
Speaker 1: look now, the idea of like reintaining maintaining your rationality,
Speaker 1: maintaining your self control, and not allowing yourself to fall
Speaker 1: into the emotional. Yeah, like the emotion alone is is
Speaker 1: going to make you sick, Shepherd says. Quote. Just as
Speaker 1: happiness is synonymous with health, so is sadness synonymous with illness.
Speaker 1: Sadness represents a condition in which the soul turns away
Speaker 1: in contemplation, disassociating itself from the rest of the physical
Speaker 1: and social body. Now, another interesting telling thing about the
Speaker 1: mats and Ginka here is that the dead. Uh, we're
Speaker 1: not traditionally buried. Uh, not at least not until missionaries
Speaker 1: came along. And we're really insistent on the fact that
Speaker 1: the dead should be buried. And the idea here is that, well,
Speaker 1: the ground that's that's full of flames and foul vapors
Speaker 1: and demons and illnesses. The only thing that should be
Speaker 1: buried there are stillborn children, deformed children, and second born
Speaker 1: twins because they are essentially doppelgangers. Police. Wow. Okay, So
Speaker 1: instead they practiced an exposure burial in which the dead
Speaker 1: were left among the buttress roots of large trees. And
Speaker 1: if you were old and dying, well you might just
Speaker 1: take it on yourself to walk out into the wilds
Speaker 1: all alone and find some tree roots to die among.
Speaker 1: So this is kind of like sky burial, which we've
Speaker 1: talked about before. Yeah, the elements and would essentially consume you.
Speaker 1: Uh and and this is also interesting because the shepherd
Speaker 1: says that the exposure burial served to chart their soul's
Speaker 1: journey into the afterlife based on the body state of decay.
Speaker 1: So you could look at the dead body of of
Speaker 1: of one of your people and you could say, okay,
Speaker 1: well this body is really decaying. It's it's a safe
Speaker 1: body to be around because the the ghost is far away.
Speaker 1: But if the body is fresh, the body hasn't decayed
Speaker 1: all that much, Well, this is dangerous because that means
Speaker 1: they're near, they're still more seemingly alive. And it's just
Speaker 1: so it's really interesting to look at that in terms
Speaker 1: of a culture's bereavement tactic, Like it's such a stoic um,
Speaker 1: you know, shields up way of dealing with death, Like, no,
Speaker 1: the dead person is a dangerous ghost now and I
Speaker 1: can't feel anything because that will endanger me. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: once you die in that culture, you're sort of shunned
Speaker 1: until you've been dead for a while, and it's okay
Speaker 1: to think about you or experience emotion related to you
Speaker 1: because your spirit is so far away. Yeah, exactly. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I'll link to that full paper in the landing
Speaker 1: page of this episode of Stuff to Bring Your Mind
Speaker 1: dot Com because the whole paper is super interesting and
Speaker 1: it also gets into medicine, ginka notions of the soul
Speaker 1: as well. Okay, Well, for our last ghost story, we're
Speaker 1: gonna end where we reside here in North America. As
Speaker 1: you would imagine, the North American ghost story tradition is
Speaker 1: heavily tied into the European tradition, right. So North American
Speaker 1: ghost story writers like Henry James in eight ninety eight,
Speaker 1: or po or Washington Irving, they came out of that
Speaker 1: same tradition. And then the early nineteen hundreds we had
Speaker 1: pulp magazines that just helped spread ghost stories further. By
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty nine we got our own version of the
Speaker 1: psychological ghost story with Shirley Jackson's classic The Haunting of
Speaker 1: Hill House. But today I want to bring you right
Speaker 1: smack to here in seventeen Uh. This is interesting because
Speaker 1: it's both podcast related and it's a little bit of
Speaker 1: a meta take on the ghost story. And it's probably
Speaker 1: what most stuff to blow your mind listeners would expect
Speaker 1: from us in terms of our taking a look at
Speaker 1: ghost stories and sort of a scientific approach. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: we tend to look at things like, all right, what's
Speaker 1: going on with hallucination? What's going on here with uh,
Speaker 1: with the nature of human memory? Yeah. So, Carrie Poppy
Speaker 1: is the podcast host of a show called Oh No,
Speaker 1: Ross and Carry. I had not heard of it until
Speaker 1: discovering this story, but their podcast sounds like it would
Speaker 1: be something that our listeners would like. Probably some of
Speaker 1: you listen to it already. They explore fringe science, spirituality,
Speaker 1: and claims of the paranormal in our world. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: Carrie Poppy, she gave a ted talk at the beginning
Speaker 1: of Seen. She talks about how when she was twenty
Speaker 1: five years old, she felt like someone was watching her
Speaker 1: in her home and this kept getting worse, and she
Speaker 1: felt a pressure in her chest and it got so
Speaker 1: worse over time that she eventually felt physical pain from it.
Speaker 1: And over the course of a week, it got worse
Speaker 1: and it worse, and she thought maybe something was haunting her.
Speaker 1: So she eventually started hearing whooshing sounds like auditory sounds
Speaker 1: of whooshing going like sort of through her. So she
Speaker 1: turns to this forum of skeptics online and she types
Speaker 1: into them. She says, Hey, I'm experiencing this. What do
Speaker 1: you guys think is going on? One of them says,
Speaker 1: have you ever heard of carbon monoxide poisoning? And this
Speaker 1: is essentially when you have a gas leak, carbon monoxide
Speaker 1: leaks into your home. All the symptoms of carbon monoxide
Speaker 1: poisoning were similar to what she was experiencing. So she
Speaker 1: calls her gas company. They come out and they find,
Speaker 1: sure enough, she's got a gas leak and it would
Speaker 1: have killed her pretty soon if she hadn't addressed it.
Speaker 1: So in her TED talk, Carrie Poppy talks about how
Speaker 1: this incident led her to become an investigator, both in
Speaker 1: journalism and in the paranormal. So now she goes undercover
Speaker 1: and investigates stuff like exorcisms and fringe groups, and this
Speaker 1: is all part of that Oh No, Ross and Carry podcast.
Speaker 1: And in this talk she says, ten times out of ten,
Speaker 1: every time I've investigated something, paranormal science wins and saves
Speaker 1: the day. Uh. And she basically breaks it down. She says, look,
Speaker 1: there's two types of truth. There's outer truth, which is
Speaker 1: basically scientific truth that's objective, it has evidence. And she
Speaker 1: says there's also inner truth and this is more art
Speaker 1: oriented and personal. Now, she thinks here in the United
Speaker 1: States and in North America, we tend to make a
Speaker 1: mistake and we we conflate the two things, and we
Speaker 1: make other people defend their belief systems, their truths based
Speaker 1: on other standards. Right, So, for instance, like maybe we
Speaker 1: make a scientist defend their ideas based on our personal
Speaker 1: beliefs or vice versa. Maybe we interrogate somebody's personal beliefs,
Speaker 1: whether it be about religion or ghosts, and we interrogate
Speaker 1: them on some kind of scientific standing. Uh So about
Speaker 1: realizing that these these are two worlds that don't really
Speaker 1: necessarily touch exactly. Yeah, And so she says, when we
Speaker 1: have scientific explanations, we know literally when to give up
Speaker 1: the ghost. That like in her case, for instance, she
Speaker 1: found out what the scientific explanation was for carbon monoxide
Speaker 1: poisoning and that she was like, Okay, there's no longer
Speaker 1: any issue of me thinking there's a ghost here and
Speaker 1: anybody else I tell this story too, is probably not
Speaker 1: going to say to me, yeah, but there might still
Speaker 1: be a ghost there, you know, like it's been well explained.
Speaker 1: We're gonna quote give up the ghost and move on
Speaker 1: to the rational scientific side. And she discusses groups that
Speaker 1: test the paranormal and prove that the paranormal is in
Speaker 1: fact other things with evidence, right, these skeptic groups. She
Speaker 1: sees this as actually being motivated to help people's lives
Speaker 1: for the better. So we've talked about many instance of
Speaker 1: things like this on the show before, whether it's exorcisms
Speaker 1: or alien abductions, things like that. If you look at
Speaker 1: it and you're able to ground it in some kind
Speaker 1: of scientific evidence, then maybe you can help the victims
Speaker 1: of things like this come to terms with it, right exactly.
Speaker 1: You have to be accepting though on a certain level. Right,
Speaker 1: you can't just approach them completely, Uh, I don't know, dismissively.
Speaker 1: So Carrie Poppy, she says, look, every time I investigate
Speaker 1: one of these things, I hope I'll be proven wrong.
Speaker 1: I hope that there's ghosts out there. But then she asks, look,
Speaker 1: when you are investigating these things, are talking to other
Speaker 1: people who have claims like this, respect these people enough
Speaker 1: to test their claims rather than just immediately blowing them off.
Speaker 1: She says that through her search for what's out there,
Speaker 1: trying to investigate the paranormal, that helps us understand what's
Speaker 1: inside us. So I thought that was a really poignant
Speaker 1: way to kind of wrap up all of these ghost
Speaker 1: stories that we've been looking at here that inherently whether
Speaker 1: the ghost is real, whether you're reading a story that
Speaker 1: was written by m R. James, you're experiencing something in
Speaker 1: your culture in China or South America, or you're here
Speaker 1: in America and you're on this metal level where you're like,
Speaker 1: ghosts can't possibly be real. We have to figure out
Speaker 1: what's going on here. Yeah, Ultimately it's about the human condition. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, what what is this? What is what? What
Speaker 1: are we trying to, uh to communicate or how is
Speaker 1: the ghost story serving as sort of a pressure valve,
Speaker 1: uh for some sort of cultural angst? Yeah, exactly. So,
Speaker 1: just to fill out Poppies story, I want to throw
Speaker 1: out a few ideas as to what might be going
Speaker 1: on scientifically when we're looking at ghost sightings here. So,
Speaker 1: first of all, from scientific American hallucinations are very common
Speaker 1: when human beings are grieving. In fact, there's a study
Speaker 1: that shows over eight percent of elderly people said that
Speaker 1: they experienced hallucinations associated with their dead partner at least
Speaker 1: one month after bereavement. So that seems very common and
Speaker 1: not like something that I've heard about on a regular basis. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we've covered hallucinations on the show here before, and hallucinations occur.
Speaker 1: I mean, our our experience of reality is in many
Speaker 1: ways and an hallucination in and of itself. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: then I also looked at an article by Mental Philoss
Speaker 1: and they said that Canadian neuroscientist Michael Persinger has actually
Speaker 1: argued that electromagnetic fields maybe stimulating our temporal lobes and
Speaker 1: that this can potentially cause us to feel like there's
Speaker 1: a presence in a room. So if there's something that's
Speaker 1: generating this particular kind of electromagnetic field, that may explain
Speaker 1: what the phenomena is. Other hypotheses are things like infrasound.
Speaker 1: Those are sounds that are so little that we can't
Speaker 1: hear them. So these sounds cause us physiological discomfort, panic,
Speaker 1: changes in our heart rate, and our blood pressure. All
Speaker 1: of these things are associated with hauntings. There's an engineer
Speaker 1: named vict Pandy who wrote about this in a paper
Speaker 1: about a room that he worked in that felt haunted,
Speaker 1: and he eventually discovered it was actually home to a
Speaker 1: nineteen Hurts standing wave that was coming from a fan
Speaker 1: in the room and that that was what was causing
Speaker 1: him to experience these symptoms. If you look at Poppy's story,
Speaker 1: then in a doctor named W. H. Wilmer published a
Speaker 1: paper in the American Journal of Ophthalmology about a family
Speaker 1: who was experiencing a haunting and it turned out that
Speaker 1: they had a faulty furnace and that it was filling
Speaker 1: their home with carbon monoxide, which was causing them both
Speaker 1: oral and visual hallucinations. So all of this is to say,
Speaker 1: like we I think now, like you get to North
Speaker 1: America and maybe globally as like we've become more globalized,
Speaker 1: we're at this point point where our ghost stories are
Speaker 1: starting to be analyzed from this perspective like what what
Speaker 1: are we actually experiencing? But then what does the experience
Speaker 1: tell us about ourselves? Like placing the ghost narrative on
Speaker 1: top of it, what what what's going on inside? Uh?
Speaker 1: And I would just if carry Poppy is listening I
Speaker 1: would say, sounds like she's going to be the perfect
Speaker 1: victim in a story, for a classic Mr. James style
Speaker 1: ghost story, because she's the learned, gentlewoman who who's rational, right,
Speaker 1: and then eventually she's gonna stumble across some antique object.
Speaker 1: It's gonna unleash ghosts like crazy, and she's not gonna
Speaker 1: have an explanation for it. And then the murderous dwarf
Speaker 1: is gonna come for and it's over exactly. So there
Speaker 1: you go. We covered six continents. There were certainly were
Speaker 1: not able to get to every fabulous ghost story in
Speaker 1: the world, but we hit a few high points that
Speaker 1: were I feel like, help to illuminate what's going on
Speaker 1: in our ghost stories, what they're saying about the human experience,
Speaker 1: and even uh and even getting into some of the
Speaker 1: science of what could actually be going on to cause
Speaker 1: some of these disturbances. Yeah. So, if you are from
Speaker 1: any of these regions that we covered and you're like, guys,
Speaker 1: you totally missed this cool ghost story fact about my
Speaker 1: my area, please connect with us on social on media.
Speaker 1: We're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on tumbler, we're
Speaker 1: on Instagram. We've also got our Facebook discussion module. Where
Speaker 1: are the community around Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
Speaker 1: having awesome conversations every day based on our episodes are
Speaker 1: just based on things they think that will be interesting
Speaker 1: to fans of the show. Yeah, a great place to
Speaker 1: share your own ghost stories or if you want to
Speaker 1: if you want to talk about by Cameral Mind and
Speaker 1: how that play you think that could play into various
Speaker 1: ghost stories. That's a great place for those discussions as well.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, heading over to stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: Mind dot com, that's where we'll find all the podcast
Speaker 1: episodes going all the way back to the very beginning.
Speaker 1: You'll find uh blogs and videos as well, and you'll
Speaker 1: find links to those various social media accounts. And if
Speaker 1: you want to get in touch with us the old
Speaker 1: fashioned way, just hit us with an email at below
Speaker 1: the mind and how Stuff Works dot com. We're more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how
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