Every Town - Are Ghosts Real? The Truth About Hauntings

Episode Date: January 3, 2025

Today we’re going deep into the world of ghost and hauntings. And I’m not trying to convince you one way or the other, but together we’ll explore the possibilities that there are some things out there beyond our comprehension. 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://youtu.be/4rjmm78HhgE 👁 Check out our movie AN ANGRY BOY for FREE! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvtlOlODQ8g&t=5238s https://tubitv.com/movies/100029672/an-angry-boy International & Other Ways To Watch: https://www.anangryboy.com/ 💀 MERCH: https://scary-mysteries.teemill.com/ 💀 Free 7 Day Trail on Exclusive Episodes, Podcasts & Perks! https://www.patreon.com/scarymysteries   🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT 👁 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg 👁 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald 👁 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial 👁 X: https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1 🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you love true crime, grab your favorite mug and pour yourself a dose of creepy true crime every single morning with a morning cup of murder. This short daily show is the perfect podcast to incorporate into your morning routine because in less than 15 minutes, you'll hear about a true crime that took place on a day's date in history. Each day's dark history lesson will kickstart your morning with intriguing tales of murder, abduction, serial killers, cults, and everything in between.

With over 20 million downloads, Morning Cup of Murder has something for every true crime lover. One listener describes the show as a small package with a powerful punch of crime. Another writes that the show is an absolute delight in the morning. Support yourself a piping hot cup of murder every single morning with Morning Cup of Murder. Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Everytown has a dark side. Are ghosts actually real? If your answer is yes, then that's probably because you've had an experience firsthand.

Either that or you're an open-minded individual who believes in the possibility and there are simply things in this world that go beyond our current understanding and cannot yet be explained. If you answered no, you're following the science, figuring that if there's no definitive proof, which there isn't, then it's case closed. spirits are not walking among us. And really there's no right or wrong answer to this question, at least not yet. Regardless, it's a fascinating subject for many reasons. I mean, why does every single culture in the world and throughout history have stories about souls that linger and apparitions that appear?

And what exactly is that eerie feeling that something isn't right, but that someone's watching you when you go into certain old buildings or dark forests? Are these feelings and sightings all in our minds, something our brain creates in order to help us survive? Or are there really other realms, energies, and beings on another plane that live among us? And from time to time, we get to see, here, and even feel them. Hey guys, it's Andrew, and thanks so much for tuning into this episode of Everytown. Where today, we're going deep into the world of ghosts and hauntings. I'm not trying to convince you one way or the other, but together we'll look forward.

explore the possibilities that there are some things out there beyond our comprehension. Just keep an open mind, as I assure you, no matter how intelligent we think we are as a species, no matter how far we've come as a culture, it does not mean we have all the answers to the world's mysteries. And so, let's head all around the world for this one, and find out the truth behind ghosts and spirits. When you think about a haunted place harboring spirits, what do you picture in your head? Is it an old stone castle somewhere out in the countryside of the UK? Or is it a dilapidated mansion or motel that's been sitting vacant for decades ever since a series of grisly murders took place there? It could be a place outside, cemetery perhaps, or even a section of the woods.

Whatever you envision the perfect haunting location to be, a similar scene has played out countless times across human history. From the earliest civilizations to our monarchs, and our modern, and world, every single culture has stories of spirits, ghosts, and supernatural encounters. The epic of Gilgamesh, for example, is one of the oldest pieces of written literature that we have in the entire world, and it comes from the ancient Samirian civilization. In it, it tells a story of Gilgamesh, who is visited by the ghost of his friend and Qidu after his death. And fast forward through time and the endless stories of hauntings continue on from there.

And today, we have multiple Ghost Explorer shows on TV and YouTube, that even though they never find anything conclusive, rack up millions of views. The series Ghost Hunters premiered all the way back in 2004, and it's still alive today 20 years later. You'd think people would get bored, but they don't. So why is that? And why is it that despite centuries of scientific advancements, and all our technology and knowledge of the universe,

we still can't definitively prove or disprove the existence of ghosts. Why do nearly half of Americans believe in them, with 20% claiming they've personally encountered one? I mean, that's more than 50 million spirit encounters at this point in time in the United States alone, and yet not a single piece of conclusive scientific evidence. Answer these questions, let's start from square one to get a baseline. What do we mean exactly when we're talking about ghosts? Every place on earth has its own word for them.

The ancient Egyptians called them Ach. In Japan, they're Yuri. The Romans knew them as mains. Native Americans speak of ancestor spirits. The Chinese folklore tells of gui. And different names, different stories, but they're all talking about the same thing. The dead reaching back into our world. In the West, we've come to think of ghosts in pretty specific ways.

and the shadows you glimpse in old houses, and the sounds and whispers heard when nobody's there, the lights flickering without explanation or a cold spot in an otherwise warm room. And sometimes they're vengeful, and sometimes lost, as if they're stuck, echoing past moments over and over, like a film playing on repeat.

But step outside these familiar ghost stories, you'll find a world of different beliefs. In some cultures, ghosts are guardians, watching over their families. And others, they're messengers between our world and whatever lies beyond. The Japanese Yuri are tied to specific emotions, usually rage or sorrow.

Ancient Romans believe their ancestor spirits could be called home for dinner once a year. What's fascinating isn't how different these beliefs are. It's what they share. From the smallest tribal society to the largest modern nation humans everywhere believe that some part of us actually survives death, something conscious, the soul, and it can peer back through the veil and sometimes reach through it.

The details change in each encounter, but this core idea has followed us through all of human history. So if spirits of the dead returning to our world as such a universal belief, how is that possible? Well, lucky for us, science has been digging into these questions, and this is what they quote, quote unquote found. And take one of the most common ghost experiences, waking up in the middle of the night, unable to move, feeling an evil presence in the room with you. And maybe you see a dark figure in the corner or even sitting on your chest. And terrifying, of course, but there is an explanation.

And that experience is called sleep paralysis. It's essentially dreaming with your eyes open. You see, when we dream, our brain paralyzes our body to stop us, from acting out our dreams in real life. Imagine if you physically tried to fly when you dreamt about it, or tried to run when you were being chased in a dream. You'd run into some serious problems. So this paralysis is just a defense mechanism built into us to keep us alive.

Sleepwalkers have a miscommunication with the receptors in their brains when they wander around while sleeping. Similarly, sleep paralysis has our conscious mind awake and functioning but our body is still locked in dream mode, creating experiences that feel absolutely real. Sleep paralysis has been talked about for centuries, but the term wasn't coined until 1928. Before that, many people didn't know what was happening to them, so you can understand why they would run around town with terrifying stories to tell. So that can certainly explain away some ghost stories, but not all of them.

And what about all those ghost encounters people have in broad daylight? And that figure someone saw floating through their kitchen at 2 p.m. on a sunny Tuesday. A friend swearing they saw someone in the rearview mirror of their car sitting in their empty back seat. Those people weren't sleeping. They weren't paralyzed in bed. They were wide awake going about their normal day. Well, it turns out that science has a say here too. They say that our brains are actually playing tricks on us all the time and we don't even know it.

Did you know that you can see your nose at all times in your field of vision, but your brain just ignores it, so you don't actually see it. But that doesn't mean it's not there. In a similar vein, scientists have discovered that our brain is a habit of finding patterns in random things. It's called paradolia. You experience it when you look at a cloud and see an elephant or face, or when you're sure that tree branch outside your window looks exactly like a person. Our brains are literally wired to create meaning from chaos, to the point where we might see faces or figures where none exist. You know what?

This could explain a lot about ghost sightings, at least partially. You ever notice how no matter where the stories come from or in what century, ghosts always look like people? Even when it's known deep down, they aren't seeing an actual person. Somehow, it still has a human shape. It's never a floating triangle or giant cube. It's always a figure, a shadow person, something with arms, legs, and a head. Our brains being hardwired to look for human shapes and faces is part of how we've been able to survive for hundreds of thousands of years. It's like we've got a built-in person detector that sometimes goes into overdrive.

When it does, it turns that weird shadow in your hallway into a figure, or that pile of clothes on your chair into a person sitting there in the dark. That also explains away many instances of ghost sightings. But what if objects are actually moving in your house, or there are real footsteps being heard when no one's there? And what if multiple people in the home are all experiencing the same terrifying things? How do you explain that? Back in 1921, a real-life haunting of a family was reported in the American Journal of Optomology.

The story all began in an old house that by gas lights, with servant quarters and hidden passageways, the perfect setting for something creepy to go down. The morning, the head of the household, Mrs. H. heard footsteps in the room above her when nobody was at home but her. She ran up there with her heart pounding, only to find every room empty. And this was just the beginning. Night after night, she started hearing loud noises from the basement, like furniture being thrown against the door, and China being moved around and sometimes most terrifying of all, a long, fearful whale. Walking down the hallway of the home to check on the noises became an exercise in terror.

Every time she looked down there, the noises stopped and nothing was out of place. She began to feel like someone was following her around the house, always about to reach out and touch her. She thought she was going crazy, but then her four-year-old son started having experiences too. And one morning he came into her room with fear in his eyes asking why she'd been calling him. I didn't call you, she said. But who was it then, he insisted. His eyes wide with terror. The haunting got worse, Mrs. H. would feel the bed covers being yanked off her at night.

Sometimes she'd feel a sharp smack on her shoulder. One evening she even woke up to see two figures sitting at the foot of her bed, a man and a young woman in a large hat. where she lay there, paralyzed with fear, unable to move her scream. The family was exhausted by all this. Their plants started dying for no reason, and they felt weak, confused, sometimes unable to move. Whatever was haunting them wasn't just scaring them. It seemed to be draining their life force.

And just when they were about to flee that home, another diagnosis stepped in, one that wasn't supernatural. The people in that home had slowly been being plaited. poison by carbon monoxide. What happened was their furnace had malfunctioned, floating their home with combustion gases. This invisible, odorless killer was actually behind every single haunting symptom they experienced. The sounds, the figures, the feeling of being followed, all of it was caused by their brains being starved of oxygen. But now here's where things get really interesting. While science can explain many ghost sightings over the years, there's still

still something else going on. In cases that can't be explained, so matter-of-factly. With all of these ones, we're left with a remarkable pattern. And that's the connection between hauntings and emotional trauma. Energy is so strong that it never goes away. When you look at almost any famous haunting, you'll always find a traumatic event at its core. The White House, met supposedly haunted by Abraham Lincoln's ghost,

I mean, what could be more traumatic than a president's assassin? The White House has to be haunted, right? I mean, maybe again, that's us thinking it has to be haunted. But so many, yes. But my phone rang. It woke us up in the middle of the night. We had a fireplace in our room. And all of the sudden, we started hearing like 1920s piano music as clear as day. Coming out of the fireplace. The RMS Queen Mary, now a floating hotel in California, is said to be haunted by those who died aboard during its service in World War II. This is it. This is the room. Room B340. This was completely gutted out back in the 80s. Now you can see it's completely redone and ready to go. By the way, this is the ship's call or the log with a lot of the paranormal activity. As you know, the Queen Mary is known as a haunted ship. That's been known worldwide. The Chelsea Hotel in New York City. Lots of artists and musicians have died and even been murdered there.

And the list goes on. So what if hauntings are less about actual spirit? it's more about emotional energy imprinted on places. I mean, think about it. We already know that trauma changes us physically. The PTSD can literally alter brain structure. Adverse childhood experiences can reduce life expectancy by up to 20 years, and we can measure these effects. But what about the emotional energy we can't measure?

When someone experiences intense fear, grief, or pain in a place, Well, could that emotion leave some kind of residue? We're not talking about anything supernatural here, just energy we don't yet have the tools to detect or understand. In 2021, a U-Gov poll found that 41% of American adults believe in ghosts. And that's not a fringe belief. It's nearly half the population. These aren't just gullible people being fooled.

A study at the University of South Wales found that even among science students or working scientists, paranormal beliefs persist. And what's particularly fascinating is how ghost experiences often cluster around places with dark history. Take Salem, Massachusetts, side of the infamous witch trials. The markings on this map. That 72-year-old Thomas Brophy has kept in his family. And this area here shows what was, as it says here, Gallus Hill.

Coensides with what the city of Salem confirms this week. to be the exact site of the infamous hangings of 19 people. It's the probable place of executions. From the 1692 Salem Witch Trial. The Howard Street Cemetery there, where Giles Corey was pressed to death with weights in 1693, has been associated with haunting stories for centuries. But is it actually Corey's ghost walking the grounds, or is it the residual energy of that horrific event as a whole still echoing through time?

The Lurie Mansion in New Orleans is another one. Unexplained scratches on visitors' arms, the overwhelming feeling of sadness that hits people when they walk inside. The phantom screams at echo through the slave quarters. Are these really the ghosts of tortured slaves walking the halls? Or did their pain and terror somehow imprint itself into the very walls of that mansion? The concept of residual haunting suggests that traumatic events can somehow imprint themselves on a location. And like a record player needle stuck in a groove, these events replay themselves

under certain conditions. This might explain why so many ghost sightings involve seeing the same scene play out repeatedly, a figure walking down a hallway, a child crying in a specific room, footsteps following the same path, and this theory aligns with what we know about trauma in the living. Traumatic events can root people in time, causing them to repeat. patterns over and over, unable to move past the pain. And just as a person with PTSD might relive their trauma through flashbacks, perhaps places can hold on to and replay their own traumatic memories. And when you go into a place that has a certain vibe, in this case a bad one, well, that vibe you feel is an actual thing, not just in your mind. Fort Mifflin and Philadelphia,

which served as both a revolutionary war fort and a Civil War prison is another example. Fort Mifflin is always ranked in the top ten most haunted sites in the United States. Fort Mifflin actually predates the founding in the United States of America. It was commissioned by the British in 1771 to protect their wealthy colonial city of Philadelphia just a few miles. The trauma of war, imprisonment, and death seems to have left an indelible mark on the location. The visitors report unexplained phenomena, but likely what they're really sensing is the residual energy of the suffering that occurred there. Some researchers suggest that certain buildings or materials might be better at storing this emotional energy than others.

Limestone and quartz, for example, are thought to act as natural recording devices for intense emotional events. While this hasn't scientifically been proven, it's interesting to note how many allegedly haunted locations are built from these materials. And the idea that emotions can leave lasting imprints isn't entirely without scientific basis. But we know that emotional states can affect the electromagnetic field around our bodies, and we can measure these changes. What we don't know is whether these fields can persist after we're gone, or whether they can accumulate in a location over time. Some ghost hunters use electromagnetic field meters to detect a supernatural presence,

While their methodology might not be scientifically rigorous, they're on to something interesting. The idea that energy we can't see might be detectable through its effects on the environment around us. The vibes live on longer, and many more people can feel them. According to a Pew Research Center survey, almost one in five Americans say they've been in the presence of a ghost. That's a lot of experiences to dismiss entirely. Rather than jumping to supernatural conclusions, perhaps we should consider that we're detecting something real, just not what we think it is. This would explain why haunting experiences often feel so personally and emotionally charged,

and people report feeling sudden sadness, anger, or fear, and allegedly haunted locations. These emotions might not be coming from a ghost, but from the residual emotional energy still present in the space. It's worth noting that many cultures have true. traditional practices for cleansing spaces of negative energy. From Native American smudging ceremonies to Chinese feng shui, these traditions suggest an ancient understanding that places can hold on to the residue of past events. Some researchers have suggested that certain emotional states can create standing waves of energy

that can be detected by sensitive individuals. And this could explain why some people seem more prone to ghost experiences than others. they might simply be more tuned. And so if we look at famous hauntings through this lens, we can see patterns emerge. The Stanley Hotel became haunted only after Stephen King's novel created a narrative of trauma. But maybe the hotel always had an unusual energy about it,

something that King picked up on and translated into his story. Now, with visitors paying attention, well, they too have picked up on the energies inside. The RMS Queen Mary's hauntings are concentrated in areas where traumatic deaths occurred, the engine room where a worker was crushed, and the pool where a young girl drowned. These aren't random hauntings. They're tied to specific emotional events. Even the White House hauntings follow this pattern.

Lincoln's ghost is most often reported during times of national crisis, as if the emotional energy of his assassination resonates more strongly when the country is under stress. So if emotional energy can imprint itself on locations, why don't all places where trauma occur become haunted? This is where the theory gets really interesting. Just as some people are more resilient to trauma than others, well, some locations might be better at dissipating emotional energy. Mothers might act like emotional capacitors, storing and occasionally releasing this energy. So in the end, what really are ghosts and hauntings? Well, maybe we haven't been finding the answer because that's not even the right question.

Perhaps they're not spirits of the dead at all, as most think, but rather the echoes of intense emotional experiences imprinted on the physical world. And this would explain why ghost stories are universal across cultures and throughout history, because human emotional experiences are universal. This doesn't make ghost experiences any less real or significant. If anything, makes them more. more profound. And every haunted location becomes a record of human emotional experience, a place where the present can't let go of the past. And if we pay closer attention to the feelings

we get rather than forcing some sort of understanding on them, we might discover that the line between the emotional and physical worlds is more blurry than we ever suspected. And in that blurry space, perhaps we'll fully understand what people have been experiencing for thousands of years. So that's it for this week's episode of Everytown. Hope you all enjoyed it. Check us out at patreon.com slash scary mysteries for exclusive podcasts and an entire library if you're in need of some more true crime stories. Remember to come back next week for another episode filled with scary, strange, and mysterious tales.

Because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.