“We’re going to talk to the ghosts the same way I’m talking to you. With decency and respect.” Lou Calcagni, a bulky navy veteran wearing a Patriots winter hat and a camouflage jacket, looked sternly at we 30-or-so trembling would-be ghost hunters. “We expect you to do the same.” Just two weeks ago, someone who hadn’t treated the ghosts with respect had been scratched by a spirit.
We were in the belly of a Forties-era warship, USS Salem, nicknamed the “Sea Witch”. I had splashed out $53 to see a well-known ghost-hunting group, the Greater Boston Paranormal Associates, in action.
When the time came to initiate contact with the spirits of deceased sailors, we were herded through dark corridors towards the rear of the ship. GBPA cofounder Don DeCristofaro, who had a bushy white beard and walked with a limp, supervised as Lou and the others set up their numerous ghost-hunting gadgets — K2 meters, Paralights, a Static Dome, a cylindrical Rem Pod.
Don and Lou stood in the centre of the room.
“Is there anyone here with us?” asked Don.
There was a pregnant pause. Then one of the devices exploded into a spectacular light show, cycling through a quick pattern of red, blue, and green, indicating different electromagnetic frequencies — and therefore, according to the modern ghost-hunting canon, the presence of a ghost.
“Is that you, Chief?” asked Don. Again, the device responded with a light show.
Beeeeeyeeeep.
This was my introduction to the world of paratourism — once, a fringe scene; now, a highly commercialised industry. Before TV shows popularised ghost hunting, the money was negligible. But things have changed, and quickly, according to Amelia Childs Schwartzman, who used to run a haunted vegan crepe restaurant in Wellesley, Massachusetts. (By which I mean the restaurant was haunted. The crepes were fine.) The ghost-hunting landscape is highly competitive, she tells me, with authors, TikTok influencers, tour hosts, hoteliers, and barkeepers all trying to build their audiences. “There’s a lot of ego involved. You want to be billed as a big name.”
“It’s not just something stoners in high school would do, breaking into an abandoned building to try to find a ghost,” Childs Schwartzman adds. “There’s high end, specialised equipment. The financial cost can get really high. You get really into it.”
No one knows the true worth of the entire paranormal industry — mediums, ghost-hunting gadgets, books and all — though some suggest it’s a multibillion-dollar enterprise in America alone. What we do know is that tens of millions of Americans spend more than $300 million annually to visit haunted sites. There’s currently a waiting list for people to pay $380 to visit Fall River, Massachusetts, where Lizzie Borden murdered her parents with an axe in 1892. Tourists can even sleep in her room. “The money behind ghost hunting is growing,” explains Dr Michele Hanks, a New York University anthropologist.
In a vast unregulated landscape, any ghost-hunting yahoo can claim that a site is haunted, which means it’s a great money-spinner for struggling towns. Civic leaders in Waco, Texas, crafted an economic development plan to breathe new life into a sagging neighbourhood. The centerpiece of the plan was turning an old bottling plant into the Dr Pepper Museum, which would allow visitors to interact with the spirits of bottlers past. And soon enough, to boost its value, it declared itself officially haunted.
But there’s a dark side: not the ghouls, but the sensationalism of local history. One particularly troubling example of this can be found in the former slaver states of the American South, where financially struggling plantations increasingly rely on funds from ghost tours. In order to attract tourists, the plantations spin lurid tales that hinge on the misery of enslaved people. However, as MacArthur Fellow Tiya Miles found in researching her book, Tales from the Haunted South, many of the stories told are either grossly inaccurate, or wholly made up, often portraying the slave owners in far too sympathetic a light. In thousands of tourist spots all over America, history is being rewritten — for profit.
Yet for many, ghosts are more than just valuable assets. Surveys suggest that nearly two thirds of Americans hold supernatural beliefs, and my fellow tourists on the USS Salem seemed to run the gamut, ranging from the secretly sceptical, to the open-minded and curious, to the heavily attuned. I overheard one young woman talking to her boyfriend about a tightness in her chest. “I love this stuff, but at the same time, sometimes I hate what it does to me,” she told him. I struck up a conversation with her. She was 22, and had been in a nine-year relationship with a child ghost who was perpetually five years old. She told me that her boyfriend was fine with her spiritual sensitivity. “He knew that I could see dead people when we started going out, and he said it didn’t matter.” Her boyfriend didn’t respond.
“Nearly two-thirds of Americans hold supernatural beliefs.”
Then there were the ghost-hunters themselves, members of the GBPA, who I became convinced were acting in good faith. When it came to interacting with the spirits aboard the ship — a soap-opera-style conversation about which spirit had previously scratched Zach, a young paratourist — things were too disorganised and too spontaneous to be carefully choreographed. If they were playacting, it was world class.
Besides, the rise of paratourism is part of a wider nationwide trend. Homegrown experts in ghost hunting and other paranormal pursuits — mediums, energy healers, cryptozoologists and UFOlogists, among others — have attained new levels of prominence and power in the United States over the last 20 years, buoyed by a surge in public interest in supernatural phenomena.
There are several reasons for this development. The emergence of bias-affirming digital information bubbles is one; another is the rise of political instability. The annual Chapman University survey of American fears found that paranormal beliefs of all sorts spiked in the years following Donald Trump’s 2016 election. Between 2016 and 2018, Americans became approximately 10 percentage points more likely to believe that aliens have visited the Earth in modern times; 7 percentage points more likely to believe in Bigfoot; and 11 percentage points more likely to believe in haunted houses. Christopher Bader, the author of the study, put this down to a shift in the nature of trust, with faith in individual experience replacing faith in institutions.
This heralds a dramatic sea change in the way Americans think about traditional power structures. Already distrust is corroding institutions: the underutilisation of science-based medicine in America’s rural areas, for instance, contributed to the closure of 136 hospitals between 2010 and 2021. And a devaluing of higher education has contributed to the closure of thousands of campuses. Now, a distrustful public has re-elected Donald Trump, a man who in 2017 attempted to appoint a ghost hunter as a federal judge. The President has since escalated his war on science and expertise by pledging a wholesale dismantling of government agencies, as well as academic and science research institutions and journals. He has purged scientists from the Federal payroll, cut the budgets of science-directed agencies, and throttled the funding from vital research projects. And he’s being cheered on by Americans who have completely rejected the value of science and see Trump as the heroic disruptor of a corrupt system.
The role that the paranormal plays in this is under-appreciated. Those who believe they have encountered a spirit are faced with a mystery: why does the scientific establishment dismiss the existence of something that seems self-evident to a majority of Americans? The common assumption is that science is either a poor tool to understand the universe, or that mainstream scientists are engaged in a massive cover-up. This sets the stage for various conspiracy theories; one poll showed that the percentage of New Hampshire residents who trust the Federal government is slightly less than the percentage of Americans who think their government is run by Satan-worshipping paedophiles.
The danger is that American institutions cannot survive this era of widespread disbelief. They’ve kicked too many people out of the tent. And they can’t simply debunk their way out of this crisis. Unless they take imaginative steps to rebuild public trust, science may become just another disembodied voice haunting the minds of a credulous public.
***
This is an edited excerpt from Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s latest book, The Ghost Lab: How Bigfoot Hunters, Mediums, and Alien Enthusiasts Are Wrecking Science.
