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

Host Elise Hu introduces an October TED Talks Daily playlist built around five “haunting” talks, including subjects such as grieving crows and zombie roaches. She then presents Coya Paz-Brownrigg’s 2021 TEDx DePaul University talk, “The haunting truth of ghost stories,” describing it as an argument that ghost stories are crucial to human history and that academic research can explain why ghosts are, in an important sense, like us. The episode includes several sponsor messages before Paz-Brownrigg’s talk. TikTok frames discovery around the way physical environments can influence thought; Walmart Business presents procurement tools and logistics as ways to give organizational leaders more time to think; and Apple promotes 2% Daily Cash on Apple Card purchases made with Apple Pay. Paz-Brownrigg then begins with her graduate research into the lynching of Mexicans and Latin Americans in Gold Rush California. Because lynchings were public executions kept outside official records—and communities often denied that they happened—she found that local ghost lore could function as an alternative historical archive.

Paz-Brownrigg explains that stories about murdered, hanged, or lynched people returning to haunt a town often led her to newspapers, letters, diaries, and other evidence confirming that the violence, or something like it, had occurred. The ghost story therefore allowed communities to hold onto violent local history and pass it between generations. She does not claim that an actual ghost was present; instead, she says that even when the ghost is not real, the history certainly is, and the community’s belief that a ghost might exist deserves attention. She identifies an interdisciplinary academic field called “spectrality studies,” joking that it proves academics will study almost anything. This approach also changed her personal relationship with ghosts. She had once been afraid even to hear ghost stories because popular culture presents ghosts as vengeful, destructive presences. Once she shifted her concern from whether ghosts exist to what ghost stories reveal, she began viewing them as evidence about how people relate to death, memory, and place.

As both a historian and a performance maker, Paz-Brownrigg worked about five years before the talk with Free Street Theater in Chicago on a production called “100 Hauntings.” The project collected ghost stories from hundreds of Chicagoans, focusing on ordinary encounters rather than famous urban legends or ghost-tour attractions—for example, a ghost someone claims to find in the bathroom after moving into a new apartment. The team wanted to learn both what the stories might reveal about Chicago’s hidden history and what the ghost-story form does to a group of listeners. She says almost everyone has a ghost story, including people who insist they do not believe in ghosts but still describe an event with a rational explanation they cannot fully establish. Ghost stories bring people together to enjoy the possibility that something frightening happened while simultaneously insisting it did not. Their power lies in this uncertainty and in how directly they reach feeling. When Paz-Brownrigg hears or collects one, she asks two questions: “What do you think this ghost wanted?” and “What is it that you want from the ghost?” She argues that the ghosts in these stories generally want acknowledgment.

The first category is the “furious returned”: victims of murder, factory fires, deaths in jail, or other injustices who return so the living will remember what happened. She describes a teenager’s story about breaking into an abandoned mental hospital, complete with a following wheelchair, slamming doors, and creepy laughter. Researchers initially did not know the site, but city records confirmed a former poor farm and almshouse that became one of the largest carceral mental hospitals in the United States. Poor people and immigrants were often confined there for decades, and many were buried in unmarked graves; the Chicago Tribune reported as many as 38,000 graves. The ghost story points toward a neglected part of Chicago’s history. The second is the “leave-me-alone ghost,” experienced as bad energy or an unwelcome presence in a home. Paz-Brownrigg notices these stories especially in appropriated spaces, such as gentrifying neighborhoods or buildings supposedly constructed on sacred burial grounds. Whether or not a ghost is real, the story can express an unconscious question: do the current occupants really have the right to be there, and what happened to the people who came before? Her favorite is the “are still with us” ghost: a beloved relative, a child playing in a hallway, or an elevator operator continuing to work. At her theater, people repeatedly report seeing exactly half a man sitting in the lobby, doing no harm. Other stories involve children’s imaginary friends who seem to know chess or songs in another language, or deceased relatives returning through familiar acts—such as a sister supposedly operating a faucet as a prank. These tales show the desire to remain connected to the dead.

Paz-Brownrigg says ghost stories raise intimate questions: how people feel about death, what they fear, whom they loved enough to wish back, how they want to be remembered, and what they wish they could change. Beneath their chills, most stories reveal longing—for adventure, meaning, connection, a world beyond the visible, and the assurance that people and histories will not be forgotten. She places this argument in a difficult period marked by political division, the global pandemic, separation from loved ones and familiar places, and widespread mourning after untimely deaths. She says people are often poor at discussing loss, death, and the way history remains alive in the present. Her recommendation is practical: when trying to connect with someone and unsure how to begin, ask them for a ghost story. They may laugh, tell a frightening story, make you cry, or reveal something you did not know about a place, a history, a community, the other person, or yourself. She closes by repeating the two questions that matter most: what did the ghost want, and—more importantly—what do you want from the ghost?