Ghostly interest returns, and what is their significance?

Good thing I read The Guardian, otherwise I would have no idea that (according to one person, at least), discussion of ghostly experiences is in vogue again, probably due to a podcast series.   (In fact I had been meaning to comment here in recent months that I really miss reading about any good, spooky, real life stories of ghosts or similar experiences.  It seemed to me that interest in the supernatural was in fact at a particular low point, perhaps crowded out by some pretty stupid and gullible stuff on UFOs that has been dominating Twitter/X.)

From The Guardian article in question:

Everybody seems to be talking about ghosts right now. I turn up to dinners with friends, we’re talking about ghosts. I sit in the office, the conversation is dominated by ghosts again. I’m scrolling through Facebook groups and reading ghost stories that I then try to tell my boyfriend about (he ignores me). It feels as if ghosts are suddenly having a moment, a strange little resurgence into the mainstream. I think ghosts may be in vogue.

As for how and why ghosts have started to creep into polite conversation, there is a clear culprit. A few months ago the Amazon-owned podcast network Wondery published Ghost Story, a seven-part series hosted by the journalist Tristan Redman. Ghost Story focuses on a murder that occurred two generations ago in Redman’s wife’s family and, by absolute coincidence, took place in the house next door to where Redman grew up.

Redman details unnerving and inexplicable experiences that he had in his childhood bedroom and explains that his investigation into his wife’s family story was launched by news that two families who had lived successively in the house after his own family moved out had also experienced similar – seemingly paranormal – activity.

Apparently Redman tries to take a rational approach to it all and is all the more convincing because of that.   Certainly sounds like something that I should listen to.

The article writer then considers generally why ghosts have appeal:

Stress can increase our awareness of the little bumps and quirks of life that we may have previously walked past without a second thought. And of course it is entirely possible that talking about ghosts with friends primes us to pay attention to the dark corners of our apartments that previously felt perfectly comfortable and didn’t have to contain malevolent spirits or anything. This could be a rather self-perpetuating cycle.

But it’s also fair to say that telling ghost stories can be a simple comfort and form of escapism that we shouldn’t completely denounce. After all, many of us grew up in cultures where ghosts were part of the spiritual landscape and, in the vast universe of bizarre things to believe in, ghosts have to be among the most benign and least politically bothersome. They don’t lend themselves particularly well to the construction of conspiracy theories, they don’t have any troubling racist undertones and they’re not going to lead people to attempt an insurrection at the Capitol Building any time soon.

We should always remain vigilant about the emergence of pseudoscience and perhaps Carl Sagan would argue that even humouring ghost stories is a slippery slope towards a total collapse of scientific knowledge. But I think we can all agree that people can be much more discerning than that and, in the troubling year of 2023, maybe we all deserve a few ghost stories, as a treat.

Fair enough, I guess.

But I think it underplays the actual significance that any proof of a supernatural realm would entail.

I mean, I have always felt that given the way the scientific materialist view of the world has no explanatory framework at all for the existence of supernatural events, whether they be ESP, psychokinesis, reincarnation or an un-embodied entity (be it poltergeist or someone's soul), this makes any credible evidence that anything paranormal or supernatural exists incredibly significant.  It would blow a gigantic hole in the current scientific (and psychological?) way of understanding the universe.

I mean, the absolute most that science can try to squeeze into its current framework is retro-causation and the weird nature of time as possible explanation of what might otherwise be considered ghostly events.   (See the movie Interstellar - that aspect was the only thing I thought somewhat interesting and  novel in that grossly over-rated film.)

Because it (scientific materialism) has no framework at all for explaining how a personality could survive death and live in an invisible world and sometimes appear within ours (the multiverse ideas really don't allow it either - given their absolute quarantining of the different universes), this is actually a great incentive to pay attention to any evidence of ghosts.   And while an Occam's Razor approach to personal anecdotes (to conclude that a ghost story is more likely an invention or mistake than something "real") is generally very wise, I hate the way that it means (for many people) that they simply refuse to believe that there could ever be anything to personal experiences that seem inexplicable without something supernatural.  

I did try explaining this in a conversation with an old (atheist) girlfriend decades ago, and her response was "well, if ever there was proof of life after death, it still wouldn't be supernatural - it would just mean that there is a part of nature that we didn't realise was there.  So it still doesn't mean that there's a God or anything."    While this is technically true, especially on the point of God (see Buddhism), this still struck me as a massive attempt at "cope" for how mindblowing proof disembodied personalities should be for the scientific materialist.

I have the feeling I may have made a similar explanation to this before, but perhaps in not as much detail.   But it is why any credible sounding story of a paranormal or supernatural event gives me a bit of a thrill to this day, and why I feel somewhat disappointed when it seems there that parapsychology had hit a dead end in terms of convincing proof of anything that can't fit into the current paradigms.

Now, to find that podcast....