Might Ghosts Exist?

by Brian Dunning
December 9, 2025

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I've talked about ghosts on Skeptoid many, many times. I've talked about how incredibly unscientific the TV ghost hunters are, and noted that using electronic apparati is not the same thing as doing science; in no science textbook anywhere does it say "Use an electronic device to make whatever you're doing real science." I've talked about what an actual ghost-hunting kit should include. I've talked about any number of ghostly local legends, and many famous ghost cases from history. But I've never zeroed in on the central question: Do ghosts exist at all? Is there any version of physical reality that can accommodate their non-physical reality? Today we're going to get down to brass tacks and figure it out once and for all.

What Do We Mean by "Ghost"?

People have all sorts of different ideas of what they mean when they talk about a ghost. It's not always simply the spirit of a dead person who happens to be haunting this location. Here are some of the most popular alternate definitions of a ghost:

• Shadow People - Visible black shadows flitting about the corners of houses, often in your bedroom at night. Some believe them to be beings ripping through from other dimensions; demons or spirits not connected to specific deceased humans; or even projections of your own thoughts and fears (see Skeptoid #175 for my complete show on them).
  
  
• Poltergeists - The noisy ghosts causing physical disruptions or violence around the house. These are also not believed to be specific dead people, but are some unknown malevolent spirit or created by the internal turmoil of a psychologically disturbed person.
  
  
• Doppelgangers - It's not you, and it's not someone else: it's a combination. Also called a fetch, these beings appear to mirror you in every way, and will do your bidding. Some believe it is your "astral double" who somehow made it onto this plane.

There is also a contingent of thinkers out there — and this is something that's very much inside Joe Rogan territory — who are into a recycled 21st century version of consciousness theory. Put philosophical studies on consciousness into a blender with Silicon Valley tech bros, and here are three mocktails you might pour from it. So light up a fat one and enjoy the following:

• Stone Tape Theory - This holds that natural substrates like quartz act as recording media that can store highly emotional events experienced by living people. Then in later years, it can replay them; perhaps when you happen to walk into the room at midnight.
  
  
• The Cloud Analogy - All brains are quantum entangled with the fabric of the universe, so when a tragically jilted bride died, her consciousness returned there. Then when you climbed the stairs into the belltower at midnight, you encountered a glitch: a fragment or echo that had not fully dissipated back yet.
  
  
• Multiverse Leaks - In a universe with infinite parallel timelines, there might be a transient thinness between the barriers that separate them. And through one of these transparencies, you might briefly perceive another person, who is actually alive but only spectrally manifested.

However — and this is really important — none of these are what the average small town American is thinking about when they note that Grandma seems to be haunting the small bedroom upstairs. What the majority of everyday Americans think of when they think of a ghost is the idea we want to validate today. We're focusing on the traditional idea of a ghost: the disembodied spirit of a dead person, usually associated with a particular place that they haunt. They are normally invisible but can sometimes manifest as an apparition. They might speak in your ear or scream from the other end of the house. Some believe ghosts can be detected with technology: they form a cold spot, or cause electrical interference. They can step on floorboards and make them creak; they can slam doors; they can move objects around the house. And we almost always believe them to be the spirit of a person who has passed on, perhaps with unfinished business or some other reason they won't step into the proverbial light.

The reason it's important to lay out this distinction is because that traditional definition of a ghost is the one that such a huge proportion of people believe is real, and which most of whom have had a personal encounter or one within their immediate family.

The Physics of Traditional Ghosts

Such a ghost is relatively difficult to fit into our world, because the world — and the universe it's in — operates according to the laws of nature, such as thermodynamics and electromagnetism. And our traditional ghosts are doing things that are governed by those laws, such as making noises, moving things, and reflecting light. Therefore the only way that ghost can do such things is to exist in our world and have properties that obey those laws.

To push a floorboard and move a door, you need at least three things: mass, a way to generate force, and a solid surface that won't ghost right through those objects when you try to interact with them. For mass, you need molecules, lots and lots of them. To have a solid surface, they need to be bound electromagnetically. To generate force you need an energy source: chemical energy like food. I could go on, but the point's been made. If a ghost can interact, it needs real interactive properties.

Some people explain this all away by saying "Ghosts are able to do those things without being material because they consist of pure energy." They are misusing the word energy because they've heard it misused that way on TV their whole lives. Consider this famous quote from Skeptoid #2 in 2006:

In popular New Age culture, "energy" has somehow become a noun unto itself. "Energy" is considered to be literally like a glowing, hovering, shimmering cloud, from which adepts can draw power, and feel rejuvenated. Imagine a vaporous creature from the original Star Trek series, and you'll have a good idea of what New Agers think energy is. In fact, energy is not really a tangible "thing" at all. Energy is a measurement of something's ability to perform work.

Energy is a system's capacity to do work. It is not a constituent from which a ghost (or anything else) could take shape or do something. Saying that a ghost consists of pure energy is completely meaningless; it's like saying they consist of oobleck or of sunny spring afternoons. It is neither an explanation nor a validation; it does not describe any potentially real construct.

Ghosts and the Scientific Method

There is probably not a scientist alive who wouldn't relish the opportunity to do actual scientific research on an actual ghost. Personally, I would quit Skeptoid today if there was a real opportunity to go do that. But it seems unlikely to materialize — no pun intended. And here's why.

Ghosts appear to lack the basic things we need to do any experiments with them. Let me start at the top of that to explain.

A scientific hypothesis is one that's falsifiable. An example of how a ghost hypothesis would be falsifiable is "If ghosts exist and are made of electromagnetic energy, they would interact with electromagnetic fields in measurable ways at location X using instrument Y." This will always fail. I've been on any number of TV and movie sets hoping to capture such an event and, spoiler alert, ghosts do not ever happen to oblige and appear on cue. Nothing will ever appear on instrument Y at location X. And the ghost proponents have an endless number of excuses to fall back on: the ghost wasn't in today, the ghost was afraid of all the cameras, the skeptics who were on hand had negative energy, the entrails were not favorable, and so on, ad infinitum.

This is the main thing we lack: a hypothesis about ghosts that is coherent, consistent, generally agreed upon by ghost believers so that they're satisfied too, and most importantly: falsifiable. And falsifiable in such a way that a single failure disproves that hypothesis to the satisfaction of all.

Let me know when that hypothesis materializes. Pun intended this time.

Ghosts and Christianity

Ghosts are particularly problematic within Christianity, even though demographically, there's huge crossover between people who believe in ghosts and who identify as Christians. The two don't mix, so such people are not doing one of those two things right.

The moment you die, you're standing before God (Heb 9:27, Luk 23:43, 2Cor 5:8). It's not an hour later, it's not after dragging chains in the attic for a few decades. It's immediate. You're either sent up or down. If you go down, you're not able to leave at all, so you can't ever be a ghost (Luk 16:26, Mat 25:46). If you go up, you're in a place of absolute completeness; no more unfinished business (Rev 21:4). You have total happiness that leaves no room for any longing for your past life (Psa 16:11). Every person in heaven wants more than anything to be with the Lord (2Cor 5:8). The dead in heaven have no capacity for any interest in any earthly matters.

Any knowledgeable Christian should know their religion teaches there is no way that a deceased person's soul, spirit, consciousness — whatever you want to call it — could be here on Earth as a ghost.

The Christians we associate most with ghosts are probably the celebrity psychics who take money to dupe the grieving into thinking they're talking to their dead relatives. Nearly all of them claim their ability is a gift from God, or that they're seeing visions in the same way saints could. If so, God was not following his own rules that day, because all things like consulting the dead or acting as a medium, or even fortune telling, are expressly forbidden (Deu 18:10-12). It's also a violation of the First Commandment.

When any psychic tells you they are receiving a communication from a dead relative, Christianity tells us (in no uncertain terms) that 100% of the time, that psychic is being deceived by a demon who is impersonating the relative (2Cor 11:14, Lev 19:31 & 20:6, 1Tim 4:1). So don't listen to them.

Psychics are the worst Christians. And ordinary ghost hunters (or just plain ghost believers) who identify as Christians had better rethink just who it might be making those creaks on the stairs.

So What Are People Seeing?

So we are unable to find any version of reality — even one that is tweaked to accommodate divine intervention — that can accommodate ghosts in the form that most people think of them. So to all listeners wondering if ghosts coming out of their closet, or out from under their bed, are things they need to worry about, we can give a confident and reassuring no.

But most everyone else is left with a giant unsatisfied question. My saying this today does not reduce the staggering number of eyewitness accounts of ghosts, not only throughout history but continuing through today, and even right now in a thousand dark rooms across the globe. If we are forced to put me on the spot and say that all these people must be lying, I say: Take a chill pill.

The ghosts need not be real, and not a single one of these good people need be lying. There is a third possibility that adequately accounts for the vast majority of ghost encounters.

What is it? Well, we are going to have to bump that forward and return to the subject a few episodes in the future. Look for an episode titled "What Accounts for Ghost Encounters?" in the coming weeks — because it's a big topic, and we can't squeeze it all in today.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning