Haunted house? These people are in isolation with ghosts ...
FOR THOSE WHO BELIEVE THEY’RE LOCKED DOWN WITH SPECTRAL ROOMMATES, THE PANDEMIC HAS BEEN LESS ISOLATING THAN THEY BARGAINED FOR
It started with the front door. Adrian Gomez lives with his partner in Los Angeles, where their first few days of sheltering in place for the coronavirus pandemic proved uneventful. They worked remotely, baked, took a 2-mile walk each morning and refinished their porcelain kitchen sink. But then, one night, the doorknob began to rattle “vigorously,” so loud he could hear it from across the apartment. Yet no one was there.
In mid-April, Gomez was in bed when a nearby window shade began shaking against the window frame so intensely — despite the fact that the window was closed, an adjacent window shade remained perfectly still, the cats were all accounted for, and no bug nor bird nor any other small creature had gotten stuck there — that Gomez thought it was an earthquake.
“I very seriously hid myself under the comforter, like you see in horror movies, because it really did freak me out,” he said.
Ghostbusters
Now, though neither he nor his partner noticed any unexplained activity at home before this, the couple can “distinctly” make out footsteps above their heads. No one lives above them.
“I’m a fairly rational person,” said Gomez, who is 26 and works in information technology support. “I try to think, ‘What are the reasonable, tangible things that could be causing this?’ But when I don’t have those answers, I start to think, ‘Maybe something else is going on.’”
They’re not alone possibly in more ways than one.
For those whose experience of self-isolation involves what they believe to be a ghost, their days are punctuated not just by Zoom meetings or home schooling but by disembodied voices, shadowy figures, misbehaving electronics, invisible cats cosying up on couches, caresses from hands that aren’t there and even, in some cases — to borrow the technical parlance of “Ghostbusters” — free-floating, fulltorso vaporous apparitions.
Some of these people are frightened, of course. Others say they just appreciate the company.
There is no scientific evidence for the existence of ghosts, a fact that has little bearing on our collective enthusiasm for them. According to a 2019 YouGov survey, 45 per cent of US adults believe in ghosts; in 2009, the Pew Research Centre found that 18 per cent of Americans believe themselves to have seen or otherwise encountered one.
Get attention
If you were to accept the premise that ghosts are real, it stands to reason that some tension would naturally result once their flesh-and-blood roommates start spending much, much more time at home together.
John E.L. Tenney, who describes himself as a paranormal researcher and is a former host of the TV show “Ghost Stalkers,” estimates that he received two to five reports of a haunted house each month in 2019. Lately, it’s been more like five to 10 in a week.
Tenney has seen something like this before: In 1999, immediately before Y2K, he witnessed a spike in reported ghost and poltergeist activity as well as UFO sightings (which, in his experience, are also on the rise in this moment). “It does seem to have something to do with our heightened state of anxiety, our hypervigilance,” he said.
Tenney has no doubt that the vast majority of these cases in his inbox are “completely explainable” in nature. “When the sun comes up and the house starts to warm up, they’re usually at work; they’re not used to hearing the bricks pop and the wood expand,” he said. “It’s not that the house wasn’t making those sounds. They just never had the time to notice it.”
Or did they? Janie Cowan believes she’s been haunted since college. The ghost she calls Matthew (a “good, biblical name” chosen in the hopes it would keep him on his best behaviour, explained Cowan, who is 26) has historically made his presence known in her Nashville, Tennessee, home through the sounds of
someone running up and down the staircase at night.
The noises are “not like a house settling or like our cat walking around,” said her husband, Will Cowan, a 31-year-old accountant. “It’s very clearly out to get attention.”
Self-isolate
Around the same time the couple began to self-isolate in March, Will Cowan started to use their guest bathroom so that his wife, a home health nurse who has been picking up more night shifts during the pandemic, could sleep in without the sounds of his morning routine disturbing her.
He has found that Matthew, who both spouses agree prefers Janie Cowan, doesn’t seem to appreciate these changes. On three separate occasions, while showering in the guest bath, Will Cowan has been unexpectedly blasted with cold water. But it wasn’t just a quirk of the plumbing: Every time, he said, he reached out to find that the hot-water nozzle had been turned off.
Madison Hill, 24, is riding out the pandemic with her boyfriend in her apartment in Florence, Italy. Hill, a writer and teacher, had always had her suspicions about her home, particularly the bathroom. There was the sense that someone was watching her.
A few weeks into quarantine, she woke up to find something on her nightstand that did not belong there. It was a camera lens, one she’d brought from the US but lost when she moved in. She had long given up on ever finding it. But here it was.
Since then, other small objects, including a set of keys, have moved to strange new places inside her apartment. The reappearance of the camera lens in particular struck her as a “mischievous,” playful gesture — perhaps even a thoughtful suggestion that this could be the perfect time for Hill, who majored in film in college, to pick her old hobby back up.
Side effect
Kurt Gray, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studies how we perceive and treat the minds of other entities, including animals, machines and the dead. Times of great unease or malaise, when there is an increased drive to find meaning in chaos, can lend themselves to perceived hauntings, he said — not to mention that disease itself shares certain psychological parallels with a “malevolent spirit,” creeping invisibly upon its unsuspecting victims.
This phenomenon could also be a side effect of the loneliness of our time. “In quarantine, you are physically confined and also psychologically confined. Your world narrows,” Gray said. “You’re trapped at home, you’re needing human contact; it’s comforting to think that there’s a supernatural agent here with you.”
If the idea of a paranormal identity can provide someone “a little bit of social sustenance” to help them endure their solitude, Gray said, then great — at least, as long as the ghost isn’t advising its hauntees to “go into emergency rooms without a mask and French kiss everybody.”
Are you troubled by strange noises in the middle of the night? Do you experience feelings of dread in your basement or attic? “Don’t panic,” said Tenney, the “Ghost Stalkers” host. Take careful notes on what you observe. You may soon find a rational explanation for your fears. What if that strange noise at 2:50pm every weekday is just the UPS truck clattering by?
But Tenney also offers this: One could argue that the ghost puttering around in your kitchen is not only there but has always been there. Maybe you’re what’s changed. Or maybe you’re listening more closely in the greater quiet all around us. “Perhaps we’re just now starting to notice that the world is a little bit weirder than we gave it credit for,” he said.
I try to think, ‘What are the reasonable, tangible things that could be causing this?’ But when I don’t have answers, ‘Maybe something else is going on.’”
Adrian Gomez | Los Angeles resident
You’re trapped at home, you’re needing human contact; it’s comforting to think that there’s a supernatural agent here with you.”
Kurt Gray | Associate professor
45% of US adults believe in ghosts; in 2009, the Pew Research Centre found 18% of Americans believe themselves to have seen or otherwise encountered one