The Scientists Who Believe in Ghosts

It's Halloween,  the most haunted day of the year. A day in which scientists around the world presumably dress up as "mad scientists" and tell their children, who have inevitably dressed up as as astronauts or paleontologists, that there is no such thing as ghosts, before teaching them how to whip up pop rocks in a test tube. But not all of them do this (it's bad to generalize!). Some scientists, do, in fact, believe in ghosts and the paranormal*.

*Time for a very quick disclaimer: Defining "scientist" is difficult—are parapsychologists, the people who study the paranormal, scientists? Are psychics, scientists? What journal articles count as "scientific?" As I mentioned, it's Halloween, so there's no reason to be a buzzkill: Anything relating to real scientific investigation of the paranormal ( but not vampires) that I could find on PubMed or Google Scholar that seems not-completely-batshit qualifies.

That being said, this is not an extensive list. There are paranormal research societies that have been around since the 19th century that publish all sorts of journals and literature and case studies.

With that out of the way, what even is paranormal activity? The question is important: An  admittedly old survey from 1982 of 339 top scientists associated with the American Association for Science found that 29 percent of the world's top scientists believe that extrasensory perception is an "established fact or a likely possibility."

That's  markedly lower than the American average of 40ish percent, but it's not insignificant.

But believing people can read minds or bend spoons or whatever doesn't mean they believe in ghosts. In a  1993 paper in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, Harvey Irwin wrote that scientists are likely to scoff at people who believe in anything paranormal are all whackjobs, which is not necessarily true.

"This type of gratuitous assumption is most common among skeptical commentators who act as if belief in ESP, belief in God, and belief in the unluckiness of the number 13 all are tarred with the same brush," he wrote.

In fact, there are at least seven different "dimensions" of paranormal beliefs, he figures: "traditional religious belief, parapsychology belief, witchcraft, spiritualism, superstition, extraordinary life forms, and precognition."

Earlier this year,  Etzel Cardena, a psychological researcher at Lund University in Sweden, put out a "call for an open, informed study of all aspects of consciousness," that noted that "increased experimental controls have not eliminated or even decreased significant support for the existence of parapsychological phenomena" and suggested that the study of the paranormal shouldn't be dismissed outright.

And, well, some scientists haven't. There are a smattering of published scientists who are willing to go on the record about paranormal experiences.

In the British Medical Journal in August of 1980, a then-attending physician at Cook County Hospital noted that two psychiatrists at the University of Virginia were baffled by a "37-year-old Marathi woman who has never left Nagpur [India] but who during trance-like states becomes transformed into a Bengali woman of the early 1800s, thus moving not only 725 miles to the east but also 180 years back in time. Able to speak Bengali only during her trances her language is of the period, pure and unadulterated with modern English words; and she displays an amazingly detailed knowledge of the people, places, and prevailing conditions of her time."

More recently, AJ Crisp, a rheumatologist, tells the horrible story of the death of his young son in a car accident in a story published in BMJ in 1992.  He says that in the days after, he saw his son:

"I awoke at home two days after the accident and felt [my son's] knees in my back, nestling up warm and solid, as he sometimes did on weekend mornings even at 12 years old," he wrote. "I turned to cuddle him but as I turned the knees disappeared. This was not a dream sequence."

This, obviously happened to a distraught father; that he felt like musing about it years later in a scientific journal, however, seems notable.

"Could there be an afterlife and could he be searching for us, worried and confused?" Crisp wondered.

Finally,  in a paper also published in BMJ in 2011, Armin Gadit, a psychiatrist at the Memorial University of Newfoundland tells the story of one of his patients, who appeared to be completely normal and without psychological problems—except for the fact that he talked to (and saw) his dead mother, every day, for years.

"The patient firmly believes that his mother appears to him in the real world; he does accept that dead people do not return to earth but attributes this exception to his strong bond with his mother," Gadit wrote. "This vision cannot be defined as pseudo hallucination or as a true hallucination and hence (in the author's opinion) might be a paranormal experience."

Gadit concluded that "hallucinations can occur in normal people," and that "hallucination can be a paranormal phenomenon."

Perhaps the most famous current scientific believer in the paranormal, however, is Rupert Sheldrake, a former Cambridge University cell biologist who has since gone on to be a parapsychological researcher.  Among his most controversial claims is that "natural systems, such as termite colonies, or pigeons, or orchid plants, or insulin molecules, inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind."

If you do want to freak yourself out a bit, you should check out Sheldrake's TED talk, which was banned by the organization and roundly criticized by "real" scientists. And, if you're still looking for a Halloween costume, perhaps you could go as the ghost of a pigeon or an insulin molecule.