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1440 Explores
Ghosts: Why We See What Isn't There
00:25:36
<p>Every culture has them—restless spirits, haunted houses, things that go bump in the night. But why do we believe in ghosts? Psychologist and skeptic Dr. Chris French joins host Sony Kassam to explore the science behind the supernatural, from sleep paralysis and hallucinations to the brain’s pattern-making instincts. Together, they uncover why our minds see meaning—and sometimes ghosts—where none exist, and what that reveals about fear, memory, and our need to believe in something beyond the grave.</p><br><p><strong>Guest: </strong>Dr. Chris French, head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London.</p><br><p><strong>Credits: </strong>1440 Explores is a production of Rhyme Media for 1440 Media, hosted by Sony Kassam. This episode was produced by Nicolo Majnoni. It was fact-checked by Meher Qazilbash. Our sound designer is Jay Cowit. The executive producer at Rhyme is Dan Bobkoff, and the executive producers at 1440 a...
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- [00:04]
Soni Kassam
Why do we believe in ghosts? Why do so many of us say we've felt something? A presence in the room, a whisper, a chill? Even if we're not totally sure we believe in the supernatural. And how is it that nearly every culture across history has told stories of the dead walking among the living with jack o lanterns flickering and doorbells ringing this time of year? On this episode, we're not just chasing ghosts. We're chasing the why behind them. I'm Soni Kassam and this is 1440 explores. We're on a mission to uncover the essential knowledge that explains your world. We talk to the experts who know the subject best, and today's guide is psychologist and professor Chris French. He'll help us explain what's happening in the brain when we think we've seen a ghost, why our memories deceive us, and how grief, trauma and culture shape the seemingly supernatural. And along the way, I'll learn what really happened one night when I woke up and saw a figure standing over my brother's bed. Stay with us.
- [01:22]
Professor Chris French
Foreign.
- [01:28]
1440 Host/Announcer
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- [02:34]
Soni Kassam
A few months ago, I went on a ghost tour in Charleston. The night was hot and humid, the air thick with history. We paused outside an old cemetery and slipped down narrow alleys where tiny handprints were pressed into the bricks. Children, laborers frozen in time. Stories rose from every corner. Lavinia Fisher, hanged long ago, whose ghost still paces the old jail. And the Gullah Boo Hag, a skin shedding spirit you can fool by leaving rice to count. As I listened, it became clear these tales aren't just local legends. Ghost stories, it seems, are everywhere. And belief in ghosts even more so. Our guide in this episode, Professor Chris French, had his own brush with the paranormal.
- [03:35]
Professor Chris French
I was working at Bangor University in North Wales, and my girlfriend at the time was doing a medical degree in Leicester University, which was kind of several hours away on the train. And I do remember one morning waking up and it was kind of just about dawn, and thinking I could see her standing at the foot of the bed, I kind of rubbed my eyes, did a double take, gone. I felt compelled to ring her that evening and say, were you okay last night? Were you ill? Or were you having any strange experiences? And no, she hadn't been. You know, she'd been absolutely fine.
- [04:11]
Soni Kassam
But here's the twist.
- [04:12]
Professor Chris French
It wasn't until I was doing my PhD that I actually discovered the joys of skepticism.
- [04:18]
Soni Kassam
Over time, Chris became Professor French and what we call a skeptic.
- [04:23]
Professor Chris French
Someone just recommended a book to me, one particular book called Parapsychology Science or Magic by a Canadian social psychologist called James Alcock. And it was the first skeptical treatment of all this stuff that I'd ever come across.
- [04:41]
Soni Kassam
Since then, he's specialized in finding scientific answers to why people think they see ghosts, but ultimately don't. Today he's professor emeritus at Goldsmiths, University of London. Professor French has spent his career trying to understand why people supposedly see ghosts, feel haunted, and believe the unbelievable. Belief, Professor French says, isn't always rational. It's emotional, it's cultural, and it's surprisingly common. Approximately 40% of Americans believe in ghosts, which is just a bit lower than the global average. But this is nothing new. It's just the latest chapter in a much older story.
- [05:25]
Professor Chris French
You won't find a single culture, either geographically or historically, that doesn't have beliefs relating to spirits and life after death and so on and so forth.
- [05:35]
Soni Kassam
But Professor French says if you look.
- [05:37]
Professor Chris French
At the detail of what people believe, it varies enormously. You know, the ancient Greeks idea of what a ghost was is very different to the modern Western idea of what a ghost is.
- [05:50]
Soni Kassam
Yes, very different. Greek ghosts aren't floating bedsheets. They are souls of the unburied or the unjustly killed, drifting between the underworld and the living world, usually some degree of mournful and restless. The Western ghosts, on the other hand, are way more theatrical. You know the look, white sheet, eye holes floating in the dark. That image comes from old European burial customs. Before coffins, bodies were wrapped in white linen. Over time, people began associating ghosts with the sight of the recently dead, still draped in shrouds. By the 1500s, pranksters were already wearing sheets to scare people. In 1804, a London man in white work clothes was mistaken for a ghost and shot dead. But that image, it's mostly European. In Japan, ghosts wear funeral kimonos and have long black hair. In China, they can have green faces.
- [07:08]
Professor Chris French
You find that variation in line with kind of wider cultural beliefs, and that very much suggests that we're dealing with something that is a product of those cultural beliefs rather than something that has any objective reality.
- [07:22]
Soni Kassam
Okay, okay, but playing devil's advocate here, couldn't it be that ghost sightings all over the world are proof that there's something to them?
- [07:32]
Professor Chris French
You might initially think, well, maybe that suggests that some of these things are genuinely beyond scientific explanation. But I would say maybe the explanation is that we all have very similar brains. You know, our brains have not changed that much to, you know, a few thousand years ago. And maybe it's telling us about kind of certain glitches that can take place that lead us to draw the wrong conclusions.
- [07:58]
Soni Kassam
That right there is the heart of it. Not whether ghosts are real, but why we think they are. Whether they're bedsheets with eyes or mopey ancient Greeks or Gullah boo hags counting marbles. Let's dig into the science. According to Professor French, the first reason we believe in ghosts is surprisingly simple.
- [08:23]
Professor Chris French
We're all afraid of our own mortality. Whether you're a believer or a skeptic, we don't like the idea that. That when the physical body dies, that's the end of us. We don't like that idea as it applies to us, and we certainly don't like that idea as it applies to our loved ones. The idea that when they die, that's it, we'll never have any contact with them again.
- [08:48]
Soni Kassam
I'd never thought of that. But it makes sense, right? Ghosts, though scary, sure. Are also a way of answering the question, are we really gone when we die? And could there still be some way to hold on to the people we've lost? A brush with the paranormal could, for some of us, be a brush with hope, a way to believe that death isn't final? But as Professor French points out, belief doesn't just come from what we hope is true. It's also fed by how our brains work.
- [09:23]
Professor Chris French
And one of the most pervasive and powerful cognitive biases that we all suffer from is something called confirmation bias. If we really want something to be the case, or we already believe strongly that it is the case, then we don't need the evidence to be that strong to keep that belief going. Because we would like to believe in the idea of life after death. Even though the idea of ghosts is often quite a scary idea for people, it does Actually constitute evidence for life after death. And so I think that that's the kind of motivational side.
- [10:08]
Soni Kassam
So, yes, our beliefs about ghosts might come from what we want to be true, but they also come from how we're wired. Because sometimes believing in ghosts isn't just about hope that our long lost loved ones might still be out there. It's about survival. Professor French says our brains aren't designed to tell us what's real. They're designed to keep us alive. And sometimes that means seeing things that aren't there.
- [10:39]
Professor Chris French
So if you look at the evolutionary history of, of our species, for most of that time, we lived in a kind of very dangerous world where there were potentially predators or enemies around us. And our brains evolved basically to keep us alive long enough to pass on our genes to the next generation. Not necessarily brains that evolved in order to ascertain the truth with a capital T about the way the universe is. As a result of that, we're hyper alert for potential threats. The idea that when something happens in the. In the world around us, it happens because some sentient agent with particular intentions towards us made it happen. That makes sense in our terms of our evolutionary history. Because that's a potential threat, we need to know what that is and what the intentions are towards us. We've got brains that tend towards assuming that there is something there rather than there isn't.
- [11:47]
Soni Kassam
So when something unexpected happens. A shadow moves, a floorboard creaks, Our brain reaches for an explanation. And the explanation it wants is a perfect presence. Not just a thing, but a mind. Something alive that might be watching us, hunting us. That reflex helped keep us alive. Spotting predators in the dark. But today, it can backfire. And there's another place where our evolutionary inheritance can betray us in a chilling way. The strange space between waking and sleeping. A moment when your brain is awake, but your body won't move. It usually lasts just seconds or a couple of terrifying minutes. This is sleep paralysis.
- [12:48]
Professor Chris French
You're either just drifting off to sleep or coming out of sleep into wakefulness, and you experience a temporary period of paralysis. However, it can be associated with other symptoms that can make it absolutely terrifying.
- [13:06]
Soni Kassam
For me, that space is not theoretical. When I was a kid, my younger brother and I shared a bedroom. Later, his personality shifted a bit. He started hanging out with a different crowd. One night, I had sleep paralysis, and I felt like there was a demon on my brother, a presence on him. I remember thinking, that's why he's changed. As I got older, I realized it was sleep paralysis. Now it Happens to me every couple of months. Turns out roughly one in five people experience sleep paralysis as at least once in their lives, and about 7 to 8% experience it regularly. It also happens to be one of the most common sources of supposed ghost sightings.
- [14:02]
Professor Chris French
Typical things that people report would be lights moving around the room, or dark shadows, monstrous figures, demons, old hags, full form apparitions. You might hear things, you might hear voices or footsteps or mechanical sounds. And remember while all this is happening, you can see that you're in your bedroom. One of the few parts of your body that you can move are your eyes. You can open your eyes, you can see you're in your bedroom. Does not feel like a dream. And yet all this stuff is happening.
- [14:39]
Soni Kassam
It's a terrifying paradox. You can see your room, you know you're awake, and yet something is in the room with you. A shadow, a figure, a voice. You can't move, you can't speak, you can't explain it. And for many people, that experience is so unnerving, they keep it to themselves.
- [15:09]
Professor Chris French
People are often kind of very reluctant to talk about these experiences because they know that a lot of people will look at them and think, oh God, you're weird, you know, and they'll keep a distance. And that's really unfair because it is just this thing that some people have a susceptibility to. There is a scientific and medical literature on it.
- [15:27]
Soni Kassam
It makes sense that people keep these stories to themselves. They're strange, they're hard to explain, and nobody wants to sound like they've lost the plot. But they're also incredibly common. And there's a growing body of science that says this isn't just superstition. There are real patterns behind these moments, patterns wired deep into the way our brains work. One of those patterns might feel even more familiar than sleep paralysis. As humans, we are wired to see faces everywhere. In the clouds, in a floral print dress, maybe even in a random stain on the wall. You name it. Maybe this has happened to you once or twice, and there's actually a name for this.
- [16:17]
Professor Chris French
It's down to this thing called pareidolia.
- [16:20]
Soni Kassam
Pareidol. More on that in a moment.
- [16:33]
1440 Host/Announcer
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- [17:41]
Soni Kassam
Pareidolia As Professor French has told us before, we're really good at noticing things out in the world. Predators, patterns of all sorts in nature. For most of human history, spotting a pair of eyes in the dark, real or imagined, could mean the difference between life and death. So we got good at it. Maybe too good.
- [18:04]
Professor Chris French
We do sometimes overplay it. Sometimes we think that we can see meaningful patterns when actually they're not really there. It's kind of randomness. We're particularly likely to see faces, for example, in visual noise, I mean, so it's like seeing a face in a cloud, or seeing a face in the bubbles on the top of your coffee, or a stain on the floor, or the pattern of the wallpaper.
- [18:32]
Soni Kassam
It sounds a bit trivial until it isn't. Until the eyes you spot in the dark feel like they're looking back. That's no accident either.
- [18:43]
Professor Chris French
If you're in a dark, spooky place with lots of shadows and so on, it's very, very easy to think you can see a face, or you can see a human figure somewhere behind in the trees and so on.
- [19:06]
Soni Kassam
After everything we talked about, I asked Professor French what he personally believes. And the answer? Well, he doesn't. Not in ghosts or demons, and not in voices from beyond anyway. But to be clear, he's not dismissive of them. Quite the opposite. He believes in why we believe Together. Professor French and I talked quite a bit about the centuries of well meaning people that have tried and failed to prove the supernatural. Starting in the 1800s, scholars in London founded groups like the Society for Psychical Research. They set out to study hauntings with scientific tools, and early reports seemed to find something strange. Sounds, sudden chills, even glimpses of ghostly figures. But when those findings were investigated more closely, the explanations were usually mundane. Loose floorboards, drafty windows, flickering gaslights. You get the idea. In the 1970s, a Canadian research group created a fictional ghost, complete with a name and tragic backstory, then asked a group of volunteers to contact him through seances. Soon the room filled with eerie Knocks and table movements. But critics argue these experiences weren't caused by the dead. Rather, it came from the participants themselves.
- [20:39]
Professor Chris French
If you say to suggestible people, if you go in this space, you, might have some weird experiences. Some of them do. But it's all down to the power of suggestion.
- [20:49]
Soni Kassam
The experiment showed that shared belief and expectations alone could produce the illusion of a haunting. Professor French told me that even the tools of modern ghost hunting haven't held up. EMF meters, which measure electromagnetic fields, Tend to spike from things like bad wiring or appliances, not spirits. Thermal cameras, meant to detect ghostly cold spots, Usually just pick up drafts or poor insulation. And audio recorders used to Capture so called EVPs. Electronic voice phenomena Mostly reveal the brain's habit of hearing meaning and static. Just like seeing a face in the clouds Again and again, the trail doesn't lead to spirits. It leads to us, to our need to explain the unexplainable, to our brains finding patterns where none exist. And this leads us to the most human part of all, because if ghosts don't show up in the data, they definitely show up in hotel brochures, in walking tours, and in Halloween budgets. Belief, it turns out, is a great business in the United States. Paranormal tourism is an over $2 billion industry. Cities that once leaned on history now market their haunted side. Salem, Massachusetts, brought in $140 million in 2025 alone. Gettysburg now runs ghost tours so popular they outdraw many of the historical reenactments. New Orleans brings in over 19 million visitors a year, and a big slice of them are there for ghost tours. And then there's Halloween. In 2024, American spell spent around $10 billion on costumes, haunted houses, ghost events, you name it, trick or treat. And it is not only on the streets, it is on the screens. Hollywood movies, splashy investigations, Night vision chases, marathon ghost hunts. The fandom is a feedback loop. Here's professor French again.
- [23:06]
Professor Chris French
A lot of these groups, often inspired by the kind of TV programs, and I've taken part in a lot of those TV programs, and most of them are really awful, really, really bad. Again, I take part in them in the full knowledge that I am the token skeptic. These programs are aimed at believers. You can actually learn something about the kind of lay psychology of this stuff. I've seen real people who think that their houses are haunted and thinking about why they might think that. And finally, yes, I admit it, they pay me. So it helped to pay off the mortgage, you know, but, yeah, so I'm kind of quite ambivalent.
- [23:55]
Soni Kassam
Haunted streets, ghost tours and TV shows. They're fun, sure, but they're also mirrors of something big deeper our curiosity, our fears, and the stories we tell to make sense of the unknown. Maybe, in the end, ghosts tell us more about the living than the dead.
- [24:17]
Professor Chris French
It's an important part of what it means to be human. And so if, as psychologists, we've got nothing to say about that, I think we're missing out on a really important aspect of of what it means to be human.
- [24:34]
Soni Kassam
Many thanks to Dr. Christopher French for being our guide in this episode, and thank you for listening to 1440 explores. I'm Soni Kassam. Make sure to follow the show and leave a review on Spotify, Apple or wherever you listen to your podcasts and let us know what you think@podcastoin140.com while you're at it, start your learning journey with us at join140.com subscribe to our free daily and weekly newsletters on world affairs, business and finance, society and culture, and much more. 1440 explores is a production of rhyme media for 1440 media. This episode was produced by Nicolo Magnoni and edited by Dan Bobkoff. Our fact checker is Meher Kazalbash and our sound designer is Jay Cowett. The executive producer at Rhyme is Dan Bobkoff, and the executive producers at 1440 are me and Drew Steigerwald. See you next time.