The haunting truth of ghost stories | Coya Paz Brownrigg (re-release)

Elise Hu (0:00)

Where I live, October means pumpkins on porches and fake cobwebs stretched across just about every bush. My family has been planning their Halloween costumes for weeks. It's a holiday with ancient roots, and plenty of cultures around the world have their own traditions for honoring the dead and the mysterious. But whether or not you celebrate, it's a fun time to lean in to the strange and the spooky. For October's TED Talks Daily playlist, we have gathered five haunting talks covering everything from grieving crows to zombie roaches. They might give you a few chills, but they're also full of weird, wonderful discoveries that remind us just how fascinating our world is. Happy listening.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Today's talk is about taking ghosts seriously. No, really. In her 2021 talk from TEDx to Paul University, writer and director Coya Paz Brownrigg makes a case for why ghost stories are crucial to our human history, the academic work that addresses the complexity of ghosts, and why ghosts, in a key way, are just like us. But first, a quick break to hear from our sponsors.

And now, our TED Talk of the day.

Coya Paz Brownrigg (1:30)

15 years ago, I was doing my graduate research on the lynching of Mexicans and Latin Americans in Gold Rush, California, and I was having a very hard time finding the evidence I needed to make my claim. I don't know how much you know about lynching, but they are by definition public executions that happen off the official record. These deaths aren't technically sanctioned by the state, and often towns and communities would deny they even happened, which made it harder to prove that they did. Still, even when the official record refused an act of violence, local lore often served as an alternative archive, a different way of recording history. A ghost story about someone being killed and coming back to haunt the town was an important arrow, a sign to look more deeply into the history of a place. Very often, if local legend featured a story about a ghost who had been hung or murdered or lynched and came back to haunt the town, digging through the archive, newspapers, letters, diaries would reveal that the event, or something like it, had actually happened. So the ghost story was one way that communities were holding the violent history of a place, passing down the story from generation to generation. Now, I don't know if an actual ghost was haunting any of these places, and what their history certainly was. And this is pretty much my stance on it. It doesn't matter whether or not a ghost is real. The ghost story is, and the fact that we may be kind of sort of believe a ghost might be real is significant and we should pay attention to it.

I'm not the only one who thinks this, by the way. There is a whole field of interdisciplinary research called spectrality studies, which is proof that academics will think of anything. So this idea was transformative for me and not just in my research. For most of my life, I was terrified of ghosts. I didn't even want to hear a ghost story because I didn't want to entertain the possibility that a ghost might exist. And why not? In popular culture, ghosts are portrayed as mean, vengeful, destructive forces. They're terrifying at worst and unsettling at best. Unexpected presences who show up and demand your emotional attention at any cost. We are taught to be afraid of dying and death. And to the dead.

But when I stopped worrying about ghosts and started worrying about ghost stories, I found myself in a new relationship with the world around me. In addition to being a historian, I'm also a performance maker. And about five years ago, I had the great honor of working with Free Street Theater in Chicago to create a performance called 100 Hauntings. To make this performance, we asked hundreds and hundreds of Chicagoans if they'd ever encountered a ghost. We were interested in what I call ordinary ghost stories. So not the kinds of ghosts who show up in urban legends or on a city's ghost tour, but the kind of ghost people say they've just found in the bathroom right after signing the lease on a new apartment. Following my research, we were interested in what these ghosts might tell us about Chicago's hidden history, but we were also interested in the ghost story as a form. Like no other kind of storytelling, ghost stories asks us to gather around, lean in, and thrill at the possibility that some very scary, very chilling thing actually happened while at the same time being sure, so sure that it didn't, right? Right? I have found that almost everyone has a ghost story. Even people who say they don't believe in ghosts usually have a well story about something they're sure has a rational explanation, even if they're not quite sure what it is. And this not knowing has left them unsettled with a feeling they can't quite explain. And this is what I love about ghost stories, how so often they get right to feeling. Underneath the fun and chill of it are complex relationships with life, with death, and with each other.