Americans are addicted to haunted houses. Craig F. Walker/The Denver Post via Getty Images
“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 center 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 commercialized industry. Before TV shows popularized 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, specialized equipment. The financial cost can get really high. You get really into it.”
[su_unherd_related fttitle=”Suggested reading” author=”Alexander Poots”]https://unherd-wpml-test.go-vip.net/2025/02/the-secret-world-of-hobbyists/[/su_unherd_related]
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 neighborhood. 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 skeptical, 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.
[su_pullquote]”Nearly two-thirds of Americans hold supernatural beliefs.”[/su_pullquote]
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 disorganized 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 underutilization 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 pedophiles.
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.
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling is a freelance investigative journalist. His latest book is The Ghost Lab: How Bigfoot Hunters, Mediums, and Alien Enthusiasts Are Wrecking Science
hh_matt 
The problem isn’t regular people believing in tall tales and ghost-hunting for fun in their free time.
It’s the people in charge believing in made-up nonsense about wet markets and pangolins, and forcing that on the rest of us.
And for heaven’s sake, do we really have to blame Trump for everything, even an increase in the number of people going to haunted houses?
””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.””
So the Bio-pharma industry are not corrupt? The Agency heads like Fauci do not run and fund their research to enable results rather than to discover results? The Green Energy industry is above board? The Security State apparatus is not funded sufficiently in its ”research”? The Student Loan scam University scam is just about research? Lockdowns and 6 foot distance? Got your 6th booster yet?
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.
haha….. did a ghost tell you this? As I have never seen this in the real world. Everyone is in thrall to their tech – no one seems to reject the phone and internet and LLMs.
PS, don’t play with the occult – it is NOT good. May not be ”The Science” to say that, but it is true.
Playing with the occult as you call it is disastrous if you have not cleared your energy system of blockages caused by emotion and attachment. This has been taught by yoga for over 2000 years.
Debunkers are bores who do not really have sound evidence for their metaphysical position that tje material world is all there is. Those who regard science as an ideology and not an empirical heuristic for helping develop plausible theories about the material world have it coming to them. They are intelkectual first cousins tothe execrable “Woke” promoters who are also often found at universities.
Disappointing to see yet another piece that seeks to band together the spiritists, ghost hunters, mediums etc. as science-rejecting/Trump-worshipping specimens.
Science is not a set of facts or a belief system. Its a process to discover useful concepts. It has given rise to and destroyed many ideas like flat earths and ice ages. Wet pangolins are still hanging in there. If ghost-hunting is useful why not ?
I seem to remember similar articles when Graham Hancock’s series got the establishment media in a twist, complete with similar grandiose hypothesising about dangerous links to populism. The message underneath is the liberal shibboleth, that anybody voting for somebody they disapprove must be a credulous low information voter in need of patronising re-education.
The reason The Science is no longer trusted is entirely self-inflicted. The management of the Covid event has now also led to a collapse in trust in the climate emergency narrative, because people now recognise the same nudge, propaganda and narrative control techniques in play.
We are now even seeing a revival of Christian belief, fuelled by the recognition that the death of God might not have been an unqualified Enlightenment triumph, but the complete unmooring of our morality, culture and history. This will probably be reflected in increasing column inches too.
As expected the comments here are all saying some variation of ‘scientists and scientific institutions only have themselves to blame for the public turning towards woo-woo’.
And that is undeniably true.
At the same time, do we really want to be celebrating the rise of woo-woo on the right and the slashing of medical/scientific research? Regardless of who is to blame, it will be a tragedy if understandably distrustful people, burned by the system and lied to once too often, take their sick kid to a faith healer or new-age quack instead of a hospital. It will likewise be a tragedy if scientists who were working on non-politicised projects, only to find their funding cut overnight, go to China instead.
The right seems to have learned many of the wrong lessons from the ideological capture of science. Instead of wanting to purge science of bias, of pushing for better science with higher standards, they’ve decided that science itself is a priori woke and so has to go.
Ironic as it has for a long time being the hippie liberal types who were more into the woo-woo than conservatives – I guess it’s woo all round now!
Which is more damaging to science – alternative medicine, or p-hacking, the reproducibility crisis, journal gatekeeping, and the failure to publish negative results?
The restoration of public trust in medicine will not be solved by censorship and denial, but by public disclosure and honesty.
I agree that is a tragedy that lives will be lost due to ignorance or ideological position, but to put it in context, 5-15% of deaths are iatrogenic.
Bhattacharya recognises the problem and is making it his central mission. The instincts on this side of the pond are just more censorship, will only worsen the problem.
The author is perhaps making the mistake of believing the surveys he reads. I suspect that many respondents are just having a bit of fun with the tedious and manipulative questions.
If some researcher asked me, I would check the box that said “Satan-worshipping pedophiles”. It’s just such a nice turn of phrase. I might even add “cross-dressing” just for the fun of it!
Oh dear, the writer is concerned for science, when he should be concerned for scientific materialism, which is a different thing. And just wait until the Telepathy Tapes podcast sweeps the world as it is showing signs of doing…the ideology that he is confusing science with (again, materialism), is in for a rough ride (the podcast basically contains scientific proof – as much as a podcast can anyway – for the incredible telepathy exhibited by non-verbal autistic children).
Oh dear, The Telepathy Tapes have some big holes and issues. But I wouldnt let my criticism of them discourage me from being open to other paranormal phenomena. Try podcasts by Jimmy Akin as being open and yet critical to the paranormal world.
Institutional Faith is a product of Institutional Performance. The better and more reliable the performance, the greater the faith, the higher the expectation that the institution in question will not only do what it’s supposed to do, but do it well, over and over again.
The converse is also true.
The more unreliable the performance, the greater the error-rate, the worse the mistakes…the more quickly institutional faith transmogrifies to institutional doubt. And, interestingly, the more often we are hit with pieces like this one, which tell us ” science may become just another disembodied voice haunting the minds of a credulous public” if we don’t start believing in our institutions once again…the greater that doubt becomes.
The more you tell me that NOT-BELIEVING is a no good, very bad thing, and that I should enthusiastically and always BELIEVE in whatever the Experts tell me to believe…the less likely it is that I’ll actually do that. Carnival hawkers & infomercials begin to carry more credibility.
CDC is a great example.
$11.5B budget, 12K employees….it’s stated mission: to protect the United States from disease threat. Covid comes along and is met with a great, big, resounding THUD of abysmal institutional failure. What the CDC did do, however, was generate 60K CDC website entries for Diversity, Inclusivity, and Equity….and almost 50K entries for Virus. So, hey, priorities I guess.
So no, unlike the Church, Science and the bureaucracies which surround it do not and cannot rely upon the ‘faith’ of the Progressive Believer to make things ‘work’. Rather the entire edifice exists to deliver real, tangible, highly beneficial results. Without that, there is nothing.
The author insists, “the underutilization of science-based medicine in America’s rural areas, for instance, contributed to the closure of 136 hospitals between 2010 and 2021.” No, it didn’t. American’s fly-over states did not suddenly turn to Witches, Doulas, and Indigenous Medicine Men with buckskin pouches filled with dried frog skin and eye of newt. No! Hospitals closed because they couldn’t be cost-effectively maintained….because staffing was difficult to acquire in the midst of rural Kansas….because treatment costs were too great to be covered by small patient volume.
He tells us, “… a devaluing of higher education has contributed to the closure of thousands of campuses.” No…it isn’t. Thousands of branch campuses are closing for the same reasons rural hospitals are closing. They’re not cost efficient. They’re particularly not cost-efficient given the precipitous decline in college enrollment since 2010 as college age populations shrink in comparison to the massive expansions seen from 1960 to the early 2000’s as increasingly large generations passed through and were funded by an out-of-control federal mandate . The shuttering of the ‘ivied halls’ is caused primarily by fewer students chasing fewer degrees.
And if this Admistration is successful at shuttering the DoE and turning the federal funding faucet off….there will be that many more closings (and a lot fewer climbing walls) as college’s role as a Universal Panacea rightfully collapses.
So a ghost story turns into a dry sociological tract with a warning to science things are getting out of hand. The reason people down through history have been drawn to the supernatural is it exists. I have had several such experiences myself, two quite frightening. They have served to innoculate me against reductive materialsm as the explanation of reality.