If you ever watched a ghost hunting show, you've witnessed the ghost hunters trying to puzzle out what it is they've just recorded. The technology that ghost hunters use is almost always inexact. Lisa Berry Drago: Let's start with the method.
These three ingredients for communicating with the dead help feed an inherent yearning to keep the door open, to what we'll call the "what if?" There's never quite enough evidence to prove that ghosts are real, but there's also never quite enough to prove that they're not real. And the outcome is always about keeping things open to interpretation.
The goal is almost always to prove that ghosts are real. This is my favorite part of the night.Īlexis Pedrick: Ghost hunting shows are a whole genre. Lisa Berry Drago: Let's figure out what the heck's going on here. The lights were going on and off, these arms grabbed me, and knocked. Ghosthunters TV show: Is someone in here with us? Ghost Hunters is back, with a new team, better tech, and more answers. Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After DeathĪlexis Pedrick: When you think about ghosts, something like this might come to mind. Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication Ghostland: An American History in Hunted Places Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons Resource List Special thanks to Charley Levin and Lena Kidd-Nicolella for their portrayal of Maggie and Kate Fox. “Chronicles of a Mystic Dream” by Grant Newman Hosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago The people who were trying to figure out if we could really talk to ghosts were not just on the fringes many of them were scientists. But something else was going on in the 19th century.
The radio, the telegraph, the phonograph: these allowed us to speak over inconceivable distances, communicate instantly from an ocean away, and even preserve human voices in time and after death. And part of it was that some of these new tools felt supernatural in and of themselves. There have always been questions about life after death, but in the 19th century people found new ways to investigate them using these new cutting-edge technological tools. Although it might seem contradictory, it’s not a coincidence that this was all happening at the same time. People tried to talk to their dead loved ones using Ouija boards and automatic writing. But this era was also the peak of spiritualism: the belief that ghosts and spirits were real and could be communicated with after death. The 19th century was a time of rapid technological leaps: the telegraph, the steam boat, the radio were invented during this century.
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