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My Own Experience in a Haunted House

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Updated: 6 December, 2023

Words: 686 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Works Cited

  • Bader, C. (2014). Paranormal America: Ghost Encounters, UFO Sightings, Bigfoot Hunts, and Other Curiosities in Religion and Culture. NYU Press.
  • Dickey, C. (2016). Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places. Penguin Books.
  • Hargrove, R. (2013). The Haunted House: A True Ghost Story. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
  • Holzer, H. (2017). Ghosts: True Encounters from the World Beyond. Black Dog & Leventhal.
  • Klinger, L. (2014). The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft. Liveright Publishing Corporation.
  • Michell, J., & Rickard, R. (Eds.). (2016). Paranormality: Why We Believe the Impossible. Overlook Press.
  • Radford, B., & Nickell, J. (2012). The Science of Ghosts: Searching for Spirits of the Dead. Prometheus Books.
  • Randles, J., & Hough, P. (2016). The Paranormal, the new guide to understanding and working with the unexplained. Watkins Media Limited.
  • Tucker, E. (2016). Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses. University Press of Mississippi.
  • Underwood, P. (2013). Haunted London. Amberley Publishing.

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ghost experience essay

The Existence of Ghosts Essay

In the traditional cultural beliefs, a ghost is universally thought of as the spirit or soul of a dead person. It could even be that of an animal, which can appear to the living in different manifestations. In every culture, people believe that ghosts exist, which is certainly true, except that their description differs. Ghosts may manifest in realistic, life-like visions or even as an invisible presence. They could as well be manifested as wimpy shapes.

Those do not believe in the existence of ghosts can only be thought of as living in an ideal world. We have witnessed or heard stories of ghosts haunting particular people or locations associated with them when they were still alive. Ghosts are known to exist because there have always been evidences of them communicating with people directly or even in dreams.

In the Bible, which forms an integral part of lives of all Christians, it is documented that spirits spoke to Jesus when he wanted to cast them, asked him why he wanted to interfere with them while his time was not yet, and begged him to drive them into a herd of pigs. Jesus answered them and said “Go!” and they left the two men whom they had controlled for years and instead went into the pigs. These scriptures, along with many other scriptures in the Bible, are a clear proof of the existence of ghosts.

They existed even before what we now call the modern world and they are still there since people die every day and transform into ghosts. It is something we just cannot assume that does not exist. They have powers in the spirit world, time and again, we have witnessed circumstances of spirits controlling certain aspects of life activities and our lives.

There have been several instances of ghost activities or people meeting and talking to ghosts. Although some people tend to dismiss such stories or events, I believe that it is just a matter of time before they experience such instances before they come to believe that ghosts exist.

Some people who have walked through cemetery lands in the dark have always had memorable experiences. Some of them have been chased by ghosts from the cemeteries or have heard voices of invincible beings talking to them or talking on their own. There have been instances of people who have encounters with ghosts being mentally disturbed or ill, and in some cases, developing complications which can not be diagnosed or explained scientifically.

Some people, who to me, pretend to be living in an ideal world, have tended to explain the existence of ghosts as being in the minds of people, and therefore to them, people react according to what they believe in their minds. Such perceptions are certainly not true. For example, in my Junior High School, students would wake in the morning only to find their pair of shoes missing from under their beds, but later find their well polished shoes in the lavatories.

According to the history of the school, a catholic nun had died while teaching in the mission school and therefore her spirits have returned to haunt those in the school. If anybody was to dismiss the existence of ghosts in my former school, how would they explain such instances? How do they explain the presence of over 20 pairs of well polished shoes in the lavatory, against the knowledge of their owners?

Again, we have always had black spots along the major roads. Most of the drivers interviewed after accidents in the black spot areas have always reported having seen somebody cross the road or standing in the middle of the road and in attempts to avoid hitting the person, the vehicle overturned or something like that. How do you explain such incidences?

We have also constantly witnessed pastors or men of God rebuke spirits out of ailing people. They sometimes speak to them, and while some spirits would reply, some would just go away, and in the event, the person gets healed. How then does anybody dispute the fact that ghosts exist? What would explain the sickness of such a person; obviously his or her sickness had resulted from the control by spirits.

It is under the same ideology that spirits exist that witchdoctors operate. Many people including patients have consulted witchdoctors to get healed or to seek some favors, which they have always found through the witchdoctors communication with ghosts.

People should therefore understand that ghosts are real and that they exist. They have even been recognized by God as demonstrated by works of Jesus. They have supernatural powers and can control our lives or events in our lives. They are able to see, communicate and control every being in the world, including those who pretend that ghosts do not exist.

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IvyPanda. (2018, October 10). The Existence of Ghosts. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-existence-of-ghosts/

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IvyPanda . 2018. "The Existence of Ghosts." October 10, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-existence-of-ghosts/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Existence of Ghosts." October 10, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-existence-of-ghosts/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Existence of Ghosts." October 10, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-existence-of-ghosts/.

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Science News Explores

The science of ghosts.

Here’s what may explain why some people see, hear or feel a spooky presence

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People love scary, spooky stories of spectral phantoms. While there’s no science to support the existence of ghosts, research does provide plenty of explanations for why we might genuinely sense a supernatural presence.

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By Kathryn Hulick

October 31, 2019 at 5:45 am

A shadowy figure rushed through the door. “It had a skeletal body, surrounded by a white, blurry aura,” recalls Dom. The figure hovered and didn’t seem to have a face. Dom, who prefers to use only his first name, had been fast asleep. Just 15 at the time, he panicked and closed his eyes. “I only saw it for a second,” he recalls. Now, he’s a young adult who lives in the United Kingdom. But he still remembers the experience vividly.

Was the figure a ghost? In the mythology of the United States and many other Western cultures, a ghost or spirit is a dead person who interacts with the living world. In stories, a ghost may whisper or groan, cause things to move or fall, mess with electronics — even appear as a shadowy, blurry or see-through figure.

ghost experience essay

Ghost stories are lots of fun, especially on Halloween. But some people believe that ghosts are real. Chapman University in Orange, Calif., runs a yearly survey that asks people in the United States about their beliefs in the paranormal. In 2018, 58 percent of those polled agreed with the statement, “Places can be haunted by spirits.” And almost one in five people from the United States said in another survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C., that they’ve seen or been in the presence of a ghost.

On ghost-hunting TV shows, people use scientific equipment to attempt to record or measure spirit activity. And numerous creepy photos and videos make it seem like ghosts exist. However, none of these offer good evidence of ghosts. Some are hoaxes, created to fool people. The rest only prove that equipment sometimes can capture noise, images or other signals that people don’t expect. Ghosts are the least likely of many possible explanations.

Not only are ghosts supposed to be able to do things that science says are impossible, such as turn invisible or pass through walls, but also scientists using reliable research methods have found zero evidence that ghosts exist. What scientists have discovered, though, are lots of reasons why people might feel they have had ghostly encounters.

What their data show is that you can’t always trust your eyes, ears or brain.

‘Dreaming with your eyes open’

Dom began having unusual experiences when he was eight or nine. He would wake up unable to move. He researched what was happening to him. And he learned that science had a name for it: sleep paralysis. This condition leaves someone feeling awake but paralyzed, or frozen in place. He can’t move or speak or breathe deeply. He may also see, hear or feel figures or creatures that aren’t really there. This is called a hallucination (Huh-LU-sih-NA-shun).

Sometimes, Dom hallucinated that creatures were walking or sitting on him. Other times, he heard screaming. He only saw something that one time, as a teenager.

Sleep paralysis happens when the brain messes up the process of falling asleep or waking. Usually, you only start dreaming after you’re fully asleep. And you stop dreaming before you waken.

A sitting woman looks down at her dreaming self

Sleep paralysis “is like dreaming with your eyes open,” explains Baland Jalal. A neuroscientist, he studies sleep paralysis at the University of Cambridge in England. He says this is why it happens: Our most vivid, lifelike dreams happen during a certain stage of sleep. It’s called rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep. In this stage, your eyes dart around under their closed lids. Though your eyes move, the rest of your body can’t. It’s paralyzed. Most likely, that’s to prevent people from acting out their dreams. (That could get dangerous! Imagine flailing your arms and legs as you play dream basketball, only to whack your knuckles on the wall and tumble to the floor.)

Your brain usually turns this paralysis off before you wake up. But in sleep paralysis, you wake up while it’s still happening.

Faces in the clouds

You don’t have to experience sleep paralysis to sense things that aren’t there. Have you ever felt your phone buzz, then checked to find there was no message? Have you heard someone calling your name when no one was there? Have you ever seen a face or figure in a dark shadow?

These misperceptions also count as hallucinations, says David Smailes. He’s a psychologist in England at Northumbria University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He thinks that just about everyone has such experiences. Most of us just ignore them. But some may turn to ghosts as the explanation.

We’re used to our senses giving us accurate information about the world. So when experiencing a hallucination, our first instinct is usually to believe it. If you see or feel the presence of a loved one who died — and trust your perceptions — then “it has to be a ghost,” says Smailes. That’s easier to believe than the idea that your brain is lying to you.

The brain has a tough job. Information from the world bombards you as a mixed-up jumble of signals. The eyes take in color. The ears take in sounds. The skin senses pressure. The brain works to make sense of this mess. This is called bottom-up processing. And the brain is very good at it. It’s so good that it sometimes finds meaning in meaningless things. This is known as pareidolia (Pear-eye-DOH-lee-ah). You experience it whenever you stare at clouds and see rabbits, ships or faces. Or gaze at the moon and see a face.

a wall with three bricks that look like they have faces

The brain also does top-down processing. It adds information to your perception of the world. Most of the time, there is way too much stuff coming in through the senses. Paying attention to all of it would overwhelm you. So your brain picks out the most important parts. And then it fills in the rest. “The vast majority of perception is the brain filling in the gaps,” explains Smailes.

What you see right now isn’t what’s actually out there in the world. It’s a picture your brain painted for you based on signals captured by your eyes. The same goes for your other senses. Most of the time, this picture is accurate. But sometimes, the brain adds things that aren’t there.

For example, when you mishear the lyrics in a song, your brain filled in a meaning that wasn’t there. (And it will most likely continue to mishear those words even after you learn the right ones.)

This is very similar to what happens when so-called ghost hunters capture sounds that they say are ghosts speaking. (They call this electronic voice phenomenon, or EVP.) The recording is probably just random noise. If you listen to it without knowing what was supposedly said, you probably won’t hear words. But when you know what the words are supposed to be, you might now find that you can discern them easily.

Your brain may also add faces to images of random noise. Research has shown that patients who experience visual hallucinations are more likely than normal to experience pareidolia — see faces in random shapes, for instance.

In one 2018 study, Smailes’ team tested whether this might also be true for healthy people. They recruited 82 volunteers. First, the researchers asked a series of questions about how often these volunteers had hallucination-like experiences. For example, “Do you ever see things other people cannot?” and “Do you ever think that everyday things look abnormal to you?”

a face that hidden in a busy black and white image

Next, the participants looked at 60 images of black and white noise. For a very brief moment, another image would flash in the center of the noise. Twelve of these images were faces that were easy to see. Another 24 were hard-to-see faces. And 24 more images showed no faces at all — just more noise. The volunteers had to report whether a face was present or absent in each flash. In a separate test, the researchers showed the same volunteers a series of 36 images. Two-thirds of them contained a face pareidolia. The remaining 12 did not.

Participants who had initially reported more hallucination-like experiences were also more likely to report faces in the flashes of random noise. They were also better at identifying those images that contained face pareidolia.

In the next few years, Smailes plans to study situations in which people might be more likely to see faces in randomness.

When people sense ghosts, he points out, “They’re often alone, in the dark and scared.” If it’s dark, your brain can’t get much visual information from the world. It has to create more of your reality for you. In this type of situation, Smailes says, the brain may be more likely to impose its own creations onto reality.

Did you see the gorilla?

The brain’s picture of reality sometimes includes things that aren’t there. But it can also completely miss things that are there. This is called inattentional blindness. Want to know how it works? Watch the video before you keep reading.

The video shows people in white and black shirts passing a basketball. Count how many times the people in white shirts pass the ball. How many did you see?

Partway through the video, a person in a gorilla suit walks through the players. Did you see it? About half of all viewers who count passes while watching the video miss the gorilla completely.

If you too missed the gorilla, you experienced inattentional blindness. You were likely in a state called absorption. That’s when you are so focused on a task that you tune out everything else.

“Memory does not work like a video camera,” says Christopher French. He is a psychologist in England at Goldsmiths University of London. You only remember things you’re paying attention to. Some people are more likely to become absorbed than others. And these people also report higher levels of paranormal beliefs, he says, including beliefs in ghosts.

How could these things be related? Some strange experiences that people blame on ghosts involve unexplained sounds or movements. A window may seem to open all by itself. But what if someone opened it and you just didn’t notice because you were so absorbed in something else? That’s a lot more likely than a ghost, French says.

In one 2014 study, French and his colleagues found that people with higher levels of paranormal beliefs and higher tendencies to get absorbed are also more likely to experience inattentional blindness. They also tend to have a more limited working memory. That’s how much information you can hold in your memory at once.

If you have trouble keeping lots of information in your memory or paying attention to more than one thing at once, then you risk missing sensory cues from the environment around you. And you might blame any misperceptions that result on a ghost.

The power of critical thinking

Anyone may experience sleep paralysis, hallucinations, pareidolia or inattentional blindness. But not everyone turns to ghosts or other supernatural beings as a way to explain these experiences. Even as a child, Dom never thought he had come face to face with a real ghost. He went online and asked questions about what might have happened. He used critical thinking. And he got the answers he needed. When an episode happens now, he uses a technique that Jalal developed. Dom doesn’t try to stop the episode. He just focuses on his breathing, tries to relax as much as possible and waits for it to pass. He says, “I deal with it far better. I just sleep and enjoy sleeping.”

Robyn Andrews is a psychology student at the University of South Wales in Treforest. She wondered if people with stronger critical-thinking skills might be less likely to believe in the paranormal. So she and her mentor, psychologist Philip Tyson, recruited 687 students for a study about their paranormal beliefs. The students majored in a wide range of different fields. Each was asked how strongly he or she agreed with statements such as, “It is possible to communicate with the dead.” Or “Your mind or soul can leave your body and travel.” The research team also looked at the students’ grades on a recent assignment.

a woman sitting on a chair looking at a ghost twin image sitting in front of a window

Students with higher grades tended to have lower levels of paranormal beliefs, this study found. And students in the physical sciences, engineering or math tended not to believe as strongly as those studying the arts. This trend also has been seen in research by others.

This study did not actually assess the students’ ability to think critically. “That’s something we would look into as a future study,” says Andrews. However, previous research has shown that science students tend to have stronger critical-thinking skills than art students. That’s probably because you need to think critically in order to conduct scientific experiments. And thinking critically can help you scout out likely causes for an unusual experience without involving ghosts (or aliens, or Bigfoot).

Even among science students and working scientists, though, paranormal beliefs persist. Andrews and Tyson think that’s a problem. If you can’t judge whether a ghost story or spooky experience is real or not, you may also get fooled by advertisements, bogus medical cures or fake news, says Tyson. It’s important for everyone to learn how to question information and seek reasonable, realistic explanations.

So if someone tells you a ghost story this Halloween, enjoy it. But remain skeptical. Think about other possible explanations for what was described. Remember that your mind may fool you into experiencing spooky things.

Wait, what’s that behind you? (Boo!)

Kathryn Hulick has been a regular contributor to Science News for Students since 2013. She’s covered everything from laser “photography” and acne to video games, robotics and forensics. This piece — her 43rd story for us — was inspired by her book: Strange But True: 10 of the world’s greatest mysteries explained. (Quarto, October 1, 2019, 128 pages).

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Chapter 4: Convincing Discourses

4.4 How to prove ghosts exist (synthesis)

Anonymous English 102 Writer

September 2020

From  The Exorcist  to  Paranormal Activity , there’s no denying that the success of these films was largely fueled by the crave of the audiences to be terrified by phantoms and ghouls alike. Hollywood understands that the supernatural sells, but do they know why? In contrast to other mythical creatures like dragons and vampires, phantoms are viewed upon much more seriously by most people. Whether it’s for religious reasons or from paranoia, millions of people consider the possibility of phantoms existing. It is for this reason alone that shows like  Ghost Adventures , which investigates sites famous for their history and witness accounts of supernatural occurrences, are viewed and binged the same as other hit shows. But isn’t there some good old-fashioned science to put this phantom scare to rest? Well, that depends what kind of “science” you’re looking at.

Credible science that is monitored and backed by the scientific community doesn’t really have any material evidence that suggests phantoms exist. But to pseudoscientists that simply means there’s no evidence that suggests phantoms  don’t  exist. On Ghost Adventures, the evidence the crew finds are not revered highly by certified scientists nor is it adequate to suggest the existence of phantoms. So if it’s considered pseudoscience by the community then how is it that viewers of these ghost hunting shows genuinely believe the evidence presented? This can be attributed to how paranormal investigators, or simply ghost hunters, gather and present their evidence so convincingly as if it was the real deal. Both televised and private ghost hunters share this approach to ghost hunting. It could be viewed as a method of keeping up the ruse, but that isn’t the case for some ghost hunters. This way that ghost hunters approach the supernatural is very much akin to the principles and standards credible scientists employ. Other pseudoscientific communities like the flat earthers would rather discredit factual scientists than adopting their standards, so why would ghost hunters have this kind of approach.

To understand why ghost hunters use this kind of approach means understanding the “identity” of the ghost hunter. But what do I mean by “identity”? Do I refer to the cultural and national identity of the ghost hunters? Something like that. In order to comprehend this idea requires, as random as it may sound, a more in-depth understanding of what literacy is. “What is Literacy” by James Gee explores how people define themselves through these “identities” they have formed, or rather “discourses” as Gee prefers. These “discourses” can range from, in Gee’s words, having a nationality, your gender, career and even your hobby (Gee 18). A “discourse” isn’t limited to the genetics nor the cultural identity of a person, it’s broader than that. Gee defines “discourse” as way of utilizing language and values that society is able to identify and distinguish (Gee 18). Gee also makes a distinction between a primary “discourse” and a secondary one. He states the distinction between the two as the primary being the one that acknowledges and operates with familiar people at a personal level and the secondary treating everyone, familiar or not, at an informal yet socially appropriate way (Gee 22). It is through this definition that ghost hunting is classified as a secondary discourse. So what is the ghost hunter’s discourse composed of? And could such a discourse be utilized for a different purpose? Well firstly, their discourse involves both some components of pseudosciences and regular sciences.

Of these components for their discourse is the array of technology and equipment used to capture evidence of phantoms. In “Contemporary ghost hunting and the relationship between proof and experience” by Lynne S. McNeill, overviews the vast amount of equipment used by ghost hunters while interviewing a few crews. McNeill states how these crews rely heavily on technology to capture these specters, tools like night vision cameras and electromagnetic field meters are a common sight for these ghost hunters (McNeill 97). These tools aren’t inherently illegitimate to credible scientists either, but ghost hunters do use these tools in a manner to detect anomalies they could coincide with evidence of ghosts. It is also worthy to note that while there are tools that could be considered as pseudoscientific, like dowsing rods, many of these ghost hunters, according to McNeill, bring along this equipment familiar to scientists in order to bring some degree of professionalism and credibility to their findings (McNeill 98). Ghost hunters take some principle ideas from the scientific discourse which is the importance of the equipment used for finding empirical evidence, to some extent.

McNeill also refers to the nature and approaches the ghost hunters he interviewed have that is more in relation with how scientists operate. McNeill suggests that ghost hunters really aren’t attempting to fabricate a ruse as he brings up the situation on the commodification of ghosts. He brings up how the hunters he is interviewing genuinely believes they are giving plausibility that phantoms could exist with the various investigations they have conducted (McNeill 99). While the stigma of ghost hunting shows may hold some merit, it would be largely misleading to invoke that same view on all hunters. The way ghost hunters approach their investigations and findings also acknowledges their close following with the scientific discourse. McNeill emphasizes how the hunters follow closely to the procedures and terminology which are developed from an adherence to science (McNeill 100). The level of professionalism ghost hunters have for their evidence is much akin to a scientist conducting an experiment. Unfortunately, this is where the line is drawn between the similarities towards credible scientific practices as ghost hunters employ techniques, for gathering evidence, not just from more credible resources but from pseudoscientific ones as well (McNeill 103). While the case may vary for some ghost hunters, there are still many that would consider psychic readings as valid testimonies to the evidence of ghosts (McNeill 103). It may have sound like ghost hunters were simply scientists trying to prove the plausibility that ghosts can exists, but their discourse still involves some pseudoscientific values to coincide with their evidence.

While they might use a level of scientific integrity in order to validate their evidence, that isn’t the sole reason they adopt a combination of both a false and factually scientific approach. Sarah J. Lauro and Catherine Paul’s “’Make Me Believe!’: Ghost-hunting technology and the postmodern fantastic” explores much more on the reason as to why ghost hunters, especially televised ones, rely on much more questionable explanations. The duo explains how the uncanniness works by introducing elements that are grounded enough to be seen realistically, which is how TV ghost hunters invoke the realistic and uncanny nature to their findings (Lauro and Paul 224). In retrospect, ghost hunters outside of television may not realize they are adding a feeling of uncanniness to their investigations but doing so is a core in their discourse. Back to Gee, he defines another term, “acquisition”, which is subconsciously taking something that correlates with the discourse (Gee 20). It is through acquisition that these hunters gain this skill, but it doesn’t explain why they do. This is since ghosts aren’t something that could be proven by scientists, since they are belong to a concept, according to Lauro and Paul, that is outside of empirical evidence (Lauro and Paul 224). Ghost hunters inherently acquire adopting uncredible sources like psychic readings because the idea of ghosts is already a pseudoscientific idea.

These pseudoscientific concepts merge with the professional and scientific stance ghost hunters take to validate their narratives. A device called the SPIRICOM, which produces sounds and radio signals, is an example of the merger between the two components that make up the ghost hunter’s discourse. The device is claimed to be able to speak with the dead by translating the voice of the deceased into radio waves, Lauro and Paul note that examples like these combine the supernatural with science (Lauro and Paul 227). The amount of evidence some ghost hunters claim as being valid is always seen as being dismissible, noted by Lauro and Paul, not all ghost hunters have the same look to their evidence since even the hosts of  Ghost Hunters  believe a majority of the evidence they have is debunkable (Lauro and Paul 229). Returning to Gee’s article, he claims that a discourse can be ideological which means they can have various perceptions and values relative to the discourse (Gee 19). For ghost hunters, their ideology would be the discussion around whether their evidence is good enough, but that largely hangs on their dependence to the supernatural.

While it can be summed up that ghost hunters use this mixture between the two, supernatural and natural, to allow some extent that ghosts exist, there is a quality to such a discourse that can help students understand how scientists speak and conduct. “Reasoning, Science, and The Ghost Hunt” by W. John Koolage and Timothy Hansel look to see if the literacy found in ghost hunting can be utilized as a way to help students understand and engage with the practices scientists do (Koolage and Hansel 202). For students, the activity of ghost hunting can be seen as a fun activity, due to the array of pop culture that surrounds it like films and shows, that could also potentially involve the students learning and acquiring scientific discourses (Koolage and Hansel 203). Let’s be honest, most students don’t look like they’re having a great time at chemistry labs. Koolage and Hansel implemented ghost hunting with their course in order to make a more accessible connection for their students, they would go to two sites and investigate the area (Koolage and Hansel 206). Most of the time there was nothing happening, but some strange things have occurred, but it was the critical thinking that Koolage and Hansel were looking for in the students to develop, not the ghosts (Koolage and Hansel 206). To their surprise the students did just that with the “evidence”, they analyzed every possibility of the cause of the occurrence and narrowed it down to the reflection of light, in the end debunking it (Koolage and Hansel 208).

Ghost hunting may not be apart of real science, but they do act like it’s one. In a way, ghost hunting is a way of introducing amateurs into the world of how science is examined, conducted, and finalized. It can even be utilized as a mock trial for students to acquire some skills that are found in science discourses as Koolage and Hansen have done. But there are many sides to ghost hunting and thus various ideologies that reflect pseudosciences. In conclusion, the approach ghost hunters have towards their craft is a mixture of both the natural and supernatural, either to persuade people or to validate their claims , but its natural aspect could help students develop skills for a science discourse.

Works Cited

Gee, James Paul. “What is Literacy?”  Journal of Education , Vol. 171, No. 1, 1989, pp. 18-25.

McNeill, Lynne S. “Contemporary ghost hunting and the relationship between proof and  experience.”  Contemporary Legend  n.s. 9, 2006, pp. 96-110.

Lauro, Sarah Juliet and Catherine Paul. “’Make Me Believe!’: Ghost-hunting technology and the  postmodern fantastic.”  Horror Studies , Vol. 4, No. 2, 2013, pp. 221-239.

Koolage, John W. and Timothy Hansel. “Reasoning, Science, and The Ghost Hunt.”  Teaching  Philosophy  40:2, 2017, pp. 201-229.

Understanding Literacy in Our Lives by Anonymous English 102 Writer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Life's Little Mysteries

Are ghosts real?

One difficulty in scientifically evaluating is ghost are real is the surprisingly wide variety of phenomena attributed to ghosts.

Black and white photo of wooden attic with cathedral-type windows and metal folding chair in center.

The science and logic of ghosts

Why do people believe in ghosts, additional resources.

If you believe in ghosts, you're not alone. Cultures all around the world believe in spirits that survive death to live in another realm. In fact, ghosts are among the most widely believed of paranormal phenomenon: Millions of people are interested in ghosts. It's more than mere entertainment; A 2019 Ipsos poll found that 46% of Americans  say they truly believe in ghosts. (The nation is discerning in its undead beliefs; only 7% of respondents said they believe in vampires ).

And about 18% of people say they have either seen a ghost or been in one's presence, according to a 2015 Pew Research study . Why do so many claim to have such brushes with the afterlife?

"One common cause may be pareidolia, the tendency for our brains to find patterns (especially human faces and figures) amongst ambiguous stimuli," Stephen Hupp, clinical psychologist and professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Told Live Science in an email. "One common example is when we see faces or figures in the clouds and another is when random shapes and shadows in a dark house look like a ghost," said Hupp, who is also the editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine.

Headshot of Stephen Hupp

Stephen Hupp is the editor of "Skeptical Inquirer" magazine. He is also a clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE). He has published several books including "Pseudoscience in Therapy "  (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and "Investigating Pop Psychology" (Routledge, 2022). 

But the idea that the dead remain with us in spirit is an ancient one, appearing in countless stories, from the Bible to "Macbeth." It even spawned a folklore genre: ghost stories. Belief in ghosts is part of a larger web of related paranormal beliefs, including near-death experience, life after death, and spirit communication. The belief offers many people comfort — who doesn't want to believe that our beloved but deceased family members aren't looking out for us, or with us in our times of need? 

People have tried to (or claimed to) communicate with spirits for ages; in Victorian England, for example, it was fashionable for upper-crust ladies to hold séances in their parlors after tea and crumpets with friends. Ghost clubs dedicated to searching for ghostly evidence formed at prestigious universities, including Cambridge and Oxford, and in 1882 the most prominent organization, the Society for Psychical Research, was established. A woman named Eleanor Sidgwick was an investigator (and later president) of that group, and could be considered the original female ghostbuster. In America during the late 1800s, many psychic mediums claimed to speak to the dead — but were later exposed as frauds by skeptical investigators such as Harry Houdini. 

Related: 10 Ghost stories that will haunt you for life

It wasn't until recently that ghost hunting became a widespread interest around the world. Much of this is due to the hit Syfy cable TV series "Ghost Hunters," which aired 230 episodes and found no good evidence for ghosts. 

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The show spawned dozens of spinoffs and imitators, and it's not hard to see why the show is so popular: the premise is that anyone can look for ghosts. The two original stars were ordinary guys (plumbers, in fact) who decided to look for evidence of spirits. Their message: You don't need to be an egghead scientist, or even have any training in science or investigation. All you need is some free time, a dark place, and maybe a few gadgets from an electronics store. If you look long enough any unexplained light or noise might be evidence of ghosts.

That vague criteria for ghostly happenings is part of the reason why myths about the afterlife are more alive than ever.

One difficulty in scientifically evaluating ghosts is that a surprisingly wide variety of phenomena are attributed to ghosts, from a door closing on its own, to missing keys, to a cold area in a hallway, to a vision of a dead relative. 

When sociologists Dennis and Michele Waskul interviewed ghost experiencers for their book " Ghostly Encounters: The Hauntings of Everyday Life " (Temple University Press, 2016 ) they found that "many participants were not sure that they had encountered a ghost and remained uncertain that such phenomena were even possible, simply because they did not see something that approximated the conventional image of a 'ghost.' Instead, many of our respondents were simply convinced that they had experienced something uncanny — something inexplicable, extraordinary, mysterious, or eerie." 

Thus, many people who go on record as claiming to have had a ghostly experience didn't necessarily see anything that most people would recognize as a classic "ghost," and in fact they may have had completely different experiences whose only common factor is that it could not be readily explained. 

"There are plenty of misunderstood phenomena that influence ghost sightings. For example, sleep paralysis in a recognized experience that leads to people feeling like they have seen a ghost, demon, or alien," Hupp said.

Personal experience is one thing, but scientific evidence is another matter. Part of the difficulty in investigating ghosts is that there is not one universally agreed-upon definition of what a ghost is. Some believe that they are spirits of the dead who for whatever reason get "lost" on their way to The Other Side; others claim that ghosts are instead telepathic entities projected into the world from our minds.

Still others create their own special categories for different types of ghosts, such as poltergeists, residual hauntings, intelligent spirits and shadow people. Of course, it's all made up, like speculating on the different races of fairies or dragons: there are as many types of ghosts as you want there to be.

There are many contradictions inherent in ideas about ghosts. For example, are ghosts material or not? Either they can move through solid objects without disturbing them, or they can slam doors shut and throw objects across the room. According to logic and the laws of physics, it's one or the other. If ghosts are human souls, why do they appear clothed and with (presumably soulless) inanimate objects like hats, canes, and dresses — not to mention the many reports of ghost trains, cars and carriages?

If ghosts are the spirits of those whose deaths were unavenged, why are there unsolved murders, since ghosts are said to communicate with psychic mediums, and should be able to identify their killers for the police? The questions go on and on — just about any claim about ghosts raises logical reasons to doubt it.

Ghost hunters use many creative (and dubious) methods to detect the spirits' presences, often including psychics. Virtually all ghost hunters claim to be scientific, and most give that appearance because they use high-tech scientific equipment such as Geiger counters, Electromagnetic Field (EMF) detectors, ion detectors, infrared cameras and sensitive microphones. Yet none of this equipment has ever been shown to actually detect ghosts. 

"If someone hands you an electronic device to sense a ghost, then they’re probably doing it to get your money during a ghost tour," Hupp said.

For centuries, people believed that flames turned blue in the presence of ghosts. Today, few people accept that bit of lore, but it's likely that many of the signs taken as evidence by today's ghost hunters will be seen as just as wrong and antiquated centuries from now. 

Other researchers claim that the reason ghosts haven't been proven to exist is that we simply don't have the right technology to find or detect the spirit world. But this, too, can't be correct: Either ghosts exist and appear in our ordinary physical world (and can therefore be detected and recorded in photographs, film, video and audio recordings), or they don't. If ghosts exist and can be scientifically detected or recorded, then we should find hard evidence of that — yet we don't. If ghosts exist but cannot be scientifically detected or recorded, then all the photos, videos, audio and other recordings claimed to be evidence of ghosts cannot be ghosts. With so many basic contradictory theories — and so little science brought to bear on the topic — it's not surprising that despite the efforts of thousands of ghost hunters on television and elsewhere for decades, not a single piece of hard evidence of ghosts has been found.

And, of course, with the recent development of "ghost apps" for smartphones, it's easier than ever to create seemingly spooky images and share them on social media, making separating fact from fiction even more difficult for ghost researchers. 

Most people who believe in ghosts do so because of some personal experience; they grew up in a home where the existence of (friendly) spirits was taken for granted, for example, or they had some unnerving experience on a ghost tour or local haunt. 

Belief in a spirit world may also fulfill a deeper psychological need.

"There’s still so much to this universe that we don’t understand, and it’s comforting to fill in the void with explanations. Supernatural explanations are often stated with confidence, even when there’s no actual evidence, and this confidence provides a false sense of actual truth," Hupp said.

For instance, some claim that support for the existence of ghosts can be found in no less a hard science than modern physics. It is widely claimed that Albert Einstein suggested a scientific basis for the reality of ghosts, based on the First Law of Thermodynamics : If energy cannot be created or destroyed but only change form, what happens to our body's energy when we die? Could that somehow be manifested as a ghost?

It seems like a reasonable assumption — until you dig into the basic physics. The answer is very simple, and not at all mysterious. After a person dies, the energy in his or her body goes where all organisms' energy goes after death: into the environment. The energy is released in the form of heat, and the body is transferred into the animals that eat us (i.e., wild animals if we are left unburied, or worms and bacteria if we are interred), and the plants that absorb us. There is no bodily "energy" that survives death to be detected with popular ghost-hunting devices.

Related: Top 10 most famous ghosts

Dark-haired girl in white nightgown standing in concrete hallway with eerie light

While amateur ghost hunters like to imagine themselves on the cutting edge of ghost research, they are really engaging in what folklorists call ostension or legend tripping. It's basically a form of playacting in which people "act out" a legend, often involving ghosts or supernatural elements. In his book " Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live " (University Press of Mississippi, 2003) folklorist Bill Ellis points out that ghost hunters themselves often take the search seriously and "venture out to challenge supernatural beings, confront them in consciously dramatized form, then return to safety. ... The stated purpose of such activities is not entertainment but a sincere effort to test and define boundaries of the 'real' world."

If ghosts are real, and are some sort of as-yet-unknown energy or entity, then their existence will (like all other scientific discoveries) be discovered and verified by scientists through controlled experiments — not by weekend ghost hunters wandering around abandoned, supposedly haunted houses in the dark late at night with cameras and flashlights.

In the end (and despite mountains of ambiguous photos, sounds, and videos) the evidence for ghosts is no better today than it was a century ago. There are two possible reasons for the failure of ghost hunters to find good evidence. The first is that ghosts don't exist, and that reports of ghosts can be explained by psychology, misperceptions, mistakes and hoaxes . The second option is that ghosts do exist, but that ghost hunters do not possess the scientific tools or mindset to uncover any meaningful evidence. 

But ultimately, ghost hunting is not about the evidence at all (if it was, the search would have been abandoned long ago). Instead, it's about having fun with friends and family members, telling stories, and the enjoyment of pretending to search the edge of the unknown. After all, everyone loves a good ghost story.

  • The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry promotes scientific inquiry, critical investigation and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims.
  • Experiments suggest that c hildren can distinguish fantasy from reality , but are tempted to believe in the existence of imaginary creatures, according to an article published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology.

Benjamin Radford

  • Brandon Specktor Editor
  • Tia Ghose Managing Editor

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ghost experience essay

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Essay on Scary Experience

Students are often asked to write an essay on Scary Experience in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look


100 Words Essay on Scary Experience

What is a scary experience.

A scary experience is something that fills you with fear. It can make your heart beat fast, your hands sweat, and sometimes, you might even want to cry. This can happen when you see a scary movie, get lost, or face something new and unknown.

Feeling Scared

When we get scared, our body reacts. You might feel shaky, or find it hard to speak. It’s normal to feel this way. Being scared is part of how we learn about danger and how to be careful.

Getting Over Fear

The good thing about scary moments is they usually end. After, you might even laugh about how scared you were. Talking about it and learning why we got scared can help us feel braver next time.

250 Words Essay on Scary Experience

A scary experience is something that makes you feel afraid or nervous. It can happen when you are not expecting it and can make your heart beat fast. Sometimes, it can be an event like seeing a ghost or getting lost. Other times, it might just be thinking you saw something in the dark.

My Scary Experience

One night, I had a very scary experience. I was alone in my room, reading a book, when suddenly I heard a strange noise coming from the closet. It sounded like someone or something was there. My room was dark, except for the small lamp beside my bed. I was too scared to move or to check what it was. I felt like the noise was getting closer, and my fear grew bigger.

During that moment, I felt my heart beating very fast. I wanted to shout for help, but I couldn’t. It felt like my voice was gone. I was sweating and shaking. I had never felt so scared in my life. The fear of not knowing what was making the noise was the worst part.

Finally, after what felt like hours, I gathered my courage and turned on the main light. To my relief, it was just a stray cat that had somehow gotten into my closet. Even though it turned out to be nothing dangerous, that night taught me how powerful fear can be. It showed me how our minds can make things seem much scarier than they really are.

500 Words Essay on Scary Experience

A scary experience is something that makes you feel frightened or nervous. It can happen when you are not expecting it, and it can make your heart beat fast. Sometimes, you might even feel like you want to run away or hide. Scary experiences can be different for everyone. For some, it might be seeing a scary movie, while for others, it could be hearing strange noises in the dark.

My Own Scary Experience

I remember one time when I had a scary experience. It was late at night, and I was in my bed trying to fall asleep. Suddenly, I heard a loud noise coming from outside my window. It sounded like someone was knocking on the glass. At first, I thought I was imagining things, but then it happened again. I was too scared to look, so I covered my head with my blanket and hoped it would go away. That night, I barely slept, jumping at every little sound.

How it Feels to Be Scared

Being scared is not a nice feeling. Your body might start to shake, and you might feel cold all over. Your mind starts to think of all the bad things that could happen. It’s like your body is getting ready to run away or protect itself. Even though it’s a natural reaction, it doesn’t feel good at all. After my scary experience, I felt jumpy for days. Every time I heard a noise, I would remember that night and feel scared all over again.

Learning from Scary Experiences

Even though being scared is not pleasant, we can learn from these experiences. After what happened to me, I learned to be braver. I also learned that sometimes, our minds can make things seem scarier than they are. The next time I heard a strange noise, I was a little less scared because I remembered that nothing bad happened the last time. Scary experiences can teach us to face our fears and to understand that sometimes, things are not as bad as they seem.

Support from Others

When you go through a scary experience, it helps a lot to have someone to talk to. After my scary night, I told my family about it. They listened and helped me feel better. They checked around the house to make sure everything was safe, which made me feel protected. Knowing that you have people who care about you and who will help you can make a big difference. It can turn a scary experience into a chance to learn and grow stronger.

In conclusion, a scary experience is something that can happen to anyone, and it can make you feel very frightened. But it’s also a chance to learn about yourself and how you deal with fear. Talking about your fears and getting support from others can help you overcome them. In the end, facing our fears is how we grow braver.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

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I Am Haunted by My Mother’s Ghost Story

She told us to help us understand her, but what does she want us to know.

ghost experience essay

By Oscar Villalon | October 29, 2015

The story comes unbidden. Unbidden? I mean to say that I never set out to tell it. Still, I’ve told it many times. There’s usually drinking involved, low lighting; it’s always toward the end of an evening. And so, the story unfurls. Not always, because I’ve seen its effect. I’ve lived with the story for so long—37 years, give or take a year—that I know what it can do to a listener upon hearing it, even though I feel nothing when relating it. I could just as easily be telling the plot of an old Twilight Zone episode. But the story chills people. The guests go quiet. Things get still.

The story isn’t mine. It belongs to my late mother. She was a teenager, living with her family in La Puente, when one night she heard a gentle rapping on her bedroom door. The door opened and her aunt, who was living with them, let her know in a whisper that she was getting up to make breakfast and what would she like to eat? Then she left the room. My mother went rigid with fright, because her aunt had only days before left for a trip to Yucatán. She was trying to make sense of what she had seen when she heard sobbing. It was her older sister, who shared the bedroom with her, crying in the twin bed next to hers. One of them asked the other (my mother couldn’t be sure who spoke), Did you see that? , and the answer was a crashing wave of grief, wailing that woke up my grandfather, who ran to their bedroom to find his daughters repeating over and over, She’s dead, she’s dead. Mi tía está muerta!

There’s more to the story. After my grandfather chides his daughters for being ridiculous, for believing in what they think they saw, just a short time later there’s a phone call, well before the sun has come up. Cut to my grandfather, hurriedly getting ready to leave the house, dragooning my mother—who, at 16, had just earned her California driver’s license—to take him from La Puente to LAX, amid early morning traffic, so he could fly to Yucatán where his sister had been killed in a grisly car accident. Not till many years later did it occur to me that for my mother, an inexperienced driver, having to trek all the way to LAX may have been as terrifying as what she’d seen that night. But when your mother is first telling you her ghost story in your for-whatever-reason darkened apartment, at night, and you couldn’t have been older than eight, that sort of detail can escape you.

There’s more. Soon, the home in La Puente is haunted, or at least the hallway leading to the bedrooms is. First they hear pacing, a padding of “feet” in that hallway behind them as they sit in the living room trying to watch My Three Sons . Then it’s the hallway saturated in perfume, the aunt’s perfume, an unbearable reek. Finally, their priest is consulted and he believes what they tell him, and he agrees to perform an exorcism. He sprinkles the holy water, he recites from the Bible, and he tells the ghost, You don’t belong here anymore. You’re dead. You need to leave. There’s no longer any need for you here. And she goes. No more haunting. The end.

After the sighing, after the blinking, an occasional head shake, someone will ask, When did your mother tell you that story? Of course, when I told this story as a boy, and then as a teen, nobody (or at least no one that I can remember) ever asked that, but I would volunteer that I had heard it when I was a kid, as a way of saying, If you think you’re freaked out, imagine how freaked out I was when I first heard it! It was bragging, like saying I’d ridden on this coaster a bunch of times, so no big deal. But then I’d tell this story in my 20s, 30s, and now 40s. And when revealing the age I first heard it, there’s no comment but certainly an unspoken question: Why would your mother tell you this? Why would she bequeath me her haunting?

I don’t know, and I’ll never know. Over the years, though, I’ve tried to guess. If my memory isn’t completely betraying me, my mother seemed pensive that night. I dare say she seemed sad. I don’t remember my father being in our apartment, though he may well have been shut away in their bedroom. But he certainly wasn’t in that dark living room, the only light coming from our porch light when, sitting on one end of our sofa, she told us about what had once happened to her. I think she forgot we were there, me and my younger brother and baby sister. Maybe she was telling, aloud to herself, this incredible thing from her life, as if to reassure herself her existence wasn’t what it seemed. She had seen a ghost at 16, was married at 19, and had three children by the time she was 26. Her life was circumscribed by taking care of us, taking care of the house, and working a job. But this amazing thing had happened.

Then sometimes I think she knew we were listening, but didn’t mean to terrify us. She just wanted us to know our mother had seen things. That she had been a girl who once drove her bereft father on a busy freeway because her mother and older sister didn’t drive, drove him all the way out to LAX, where she’d never driven to before, palms sweating on the steering wheel, then drove all the way back to La Puente by herself, with probably not so much as a Thomas Brothers in the car to help her if she got lost, and did this and more—had lived with a ghost. That this is the story she meant to tell but couldn’t articulate. That she was brave. That she confronted mystery. This is what she couldn’t say—didn’t know how to say—but only that she had seen the newly dead at her bedroom door, and what does it mean, children? what does it mean?

    *An earlier version incorrectly referred to Villalon’s mother as having three children by the age of 24. She was 26 at that time.

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School Essay

Essay On My Encounter With A Ghost

  • Post category: Essay
  • Reading time: 5 mins read

Last year I had a scary experience while returning home from my grandfather’s place. I was horrified and shocked forever.

It was late past twelve at night. I was walking along a lonely street with my daddy on way home from a railway station. Our home was just at a distance of half an hour from the station. As it was late, we could not find any transport. As my dad was getting late to join his night duty, he accompanied me for twenty minutes, and then I had to reach home all alone.

The distance that I had to cover was just two streets. There was no one along the road. Bravely I continued walking. After a few minutes, I saw a strange shape giving out white smoke. It was coming towards me. The strange shape was covered with a white long coat. The figure was tall. It grew taller and taller as it came closer. My heart was beating faster and faster. I thought that I was just about to face a strange experience of my life, by encountering a ghost.

When the ghost was a few feet away from me, I was about to scream loudly for help. The ghost stopped in front of me and said in a calm voice, “Do not get scared, young boy. I shall not harm or hurt you. It is good that you have come along this way at this time.”

Then he asked me to follow him. My feet were trembling with fear, but I had no other choice than to follow him. The ghost took me to a certain spot. We stopped. He told me that on this very spot he was hit by a speeding truck that led to his death. The ghost said that he hated the drivers of cars and trucks but had no problems with the people walking along this road.

The ghost requested me for his help. He wanted to see his parents once to talk with them. When I nodded my head, he gave me their address and suddenly disappeared.

I hope that this unique encounter with the ghost was the first and the last one. Its memory scares my mind like a bad dream.

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How To Come To Terms With A Ghostly Experience

Paranormal experiences make more sense when viewed through the lens of haunted people syndrome..

By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | June 23, 2022

A new study published in Spirituality in Clinical Practice explains that an individual experiencing hauntings and ghostly experiences may have 'Haunted People Syndrome.'

Haunting phenomena are complex intertwined phenomena involving personality , ideology, culture, and previous experience towards making sense of an event or series of events deemed 'haunting'", explains psychologist Brian Laythe.

Collaborators Jim Houran and Brian Laythe, along with other colleagues, recently finished a five-year research program which culminated in twenty peer-reviewed research papers and their recent book "Ghosted."

Their goal was to use research to build a better understanding of hauntings and related paranormal phenomena.

Haunted People Syndrome was one of the primary theories built out of this research.

Laythe and Houran propose four core features of Haunted People Syndrome, namely:

  • Distress and unease facilitates anomalous experiences
  • Anomalous experiences tend to be contagious, i.e, anomalous experiences can spread to others
  • The meaning-making or narrative created around haunting experiences is influenced by personal backgrounds and beliefs
  • Anxiety and distress regarding hauntings is a function of the nature, closeness, and spontaneity of anomalous experiences

According to the researchers, Haunted People Syndrome recognizes that much of the reports of hauntings and the people involved in them can be successfully understood by treating the events of hauntings as "symptoms" purely in a labeling sense.

"Just like symptoms of the flu, the severity of the diagnosis is a function of the degree and rarity of symptoms and their length," explains Laythe.

Apart from believing in the paranormal, the second most important predictor of anomalous experiences is 'transliminality.'

As a concept, transliminality represents a thin boundary between the conscious self and unconscious self, as well as the outside environment.

"Information from any of these three sources tends to pass more easily with a person high in transliminality," informs Laythe. "The state and trait nature of transliminality have documented relationships with creativity , imagination, fantasy traits, disassociation , and temporal lobe lability."

In parapsychology research, Laythe adds, it has been previously associated with extra-sensory perception, out-of-body experiences , and visionary-like experiences in general.

When trying to understand the factors that prime an individual for a haunting episode, the researchers found that hauntings were almost always a mixture of the right people within the right environment.

Interestingly, they also found that the core experiences associated with a haunting have also been found in accounts of imaginary friends and gang stalking.

This means that the core phenomena experienced by an individual can be the same and yet can be interpreted differently (as either haunting, spooky imaginary friends, or a gang stalking account) as a result of the person's worldview and belief system.

The researchers also draw attention to the pressing need to recognize and treat ghostly or paranormal experiences as real.

Laythe points out that ghostly episodes, shamanic experiences, and general high strangeness have been well documented throughout history. Furthermore, over 100 years of modern empirical psychology show they are not going away despite changes in society's zeitgeist.

Therefore, the people who experience them should take the experiences seriously (and should be taken seriously), as the Haunted People Syndrome model suggests the nature of such experiences can be shocking and sometimes anxiety-provoking to the individual. Any denial of such experiences is not beneficial to an individual's well-being.

" Clinical professionals certainly do not tell people with anxiety or depression that their experiences are not "real" or valid," highlights Laythe. "At the very least, Haunted People Syndrome is a valid cross-cultural commonly experienced phenomenon and should be treated as such."

For anyone who has experienced a haunting and might be struggling to come to terms with it, Laythe has the following advice:

"In these sorts of experiences, knowing that your experience is actually not uncommon, and has some predictable components is often helpful," he explains.

According to Laythe, whether people choose to interpret anomalous experiences as 'paranormal' or not, they do not have to feel alone or crazy for having gone through them due to the following reasons:

  • Having just one paranormal experience is extremely unlikely . According to previous research, long histories of a variety of subtle and sometimes overt paranormal experiences are common.
  • Anomalous phenomena tend to be both subjective and objective . The internal aspects of the experience include sensed presences, or somatic touches or marks whereas external aspects include objects moving, or apparitions caught by technology.

"Obviously, this is the most controversial characteristic of Haunted People Syndrome, but we would note that our model remains predictive regardless of the reader's personal preference for mainstream or paranormal explanations," clarifies Laythe.

For the future, the researchers hope to start exploring transliminality in the context of religious and ritual practitioners, who regularly and purposely invoke these types of phenomena.

"We strongly suspect these groups have developed significant mental processes and methods for facilitating their transliminality towards spiritual/experiential goals," Laythe explains. "Further, we hope to test and further confirm the Haunted People Syndrome model, both in case studies, as well as collaborating with clinical psychologists to address how to include and incorporate haunting and religious experiences into meaningful and beneficial therapeutic experiences."

A full interview with Brian Laythe discussing his research can be found here: Here's what you need to know about seeing ghosts and other haunting experiences

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My walk in autumn morning: a narrative.

8:30am: I remember waking up to the soft orange glow filtering in through my curtains and the gentle hum of birdsong that fluttered in to my room. This weekend alarm makes a welcome change from the usual head splitting shriek from my phone. It was...

Ghosts in Different Cultures and Mass Media

To say ghosts do not exist would be ignorant because there have been many sightings of them and have been spotted in multiple countries. This idea is based on the ancient tale of a person’s spirit existing separately from their body and continue until death....

  • Multiculturalism

Ghost Stories in Science Fiction Literature and Movies

As a young kid, I have always enjoyed the thrill of hearing a ghost story. Whether it was from a movie, TV show, or comic, the suspense factor embedded in the stories always kept me wanting to find out more. Ghost stories don’t have to...

  • Science Fiction

Ghosts in Maxine Hong Kingston's Novels

Maxine Hong Kingston, born to Chinese immigrants, was born and raised in Stockton, California. In The Woman Warrior, we get to see up close the experiences she had growing up as a first-generation Chinese-American girl and how both cultures shaped her. Kingston uses ghost throughout...

Implementation of Gothic Themes in The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit

In “The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Process of Abjection,” Jerrold E. Hogle argues that the eighteenth century gothic emergence from fake imitation of fake work is the foundation of what is defined as modern gothic today. He maintains that Horace Walpole’s 1765...

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The house stood at the end of the city street, all alone and separated like a rock in a sandy desert. A large hulking monstrosity, that many would call a tree accompanied the house. The house was all dark, except for a bright little light...

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Short horror story essay

Short horror story essay 8 Models

Last updated Friday , 15-03-2024 on 11:35 am

Short horror story essay is one of the popular intimidation methods that help parents in correcting children and improving their behavior in many educational aspects.

Through this article, we will provide you with many models that talk about stories of horror and intimidation that may help or influence the behavior of children, show the goals of horror stories, and the extent of the impact of these stories on improving children’s instincts, and strengthening their personality.

Short horror story essay

The school plays an important and significant role in educating children and improving their behaviour. In a similar article that talks about horror stories, the student can learn about the dimensions of these stories, the extent of their impact and why they are used.

The student can talk about his fears and terrifying situations he went through. The teacher can take advantage of these events and try to address these fears by guiding him and talking to him, or by making him research more about the dimensions of the problem and the benefits that he benefited from despite going through a terrifying situation.

At the beginning of the article we will put several points that show the goals that must be present within the topic, and several models will be created using these points inside them, so that the articles are useful for the student in case he wants to present them to the school, or if he wants to know the aspects that he should talk about inside a similar article he talks about the horror stories and the bad situations he was exposed to.

Objectives of the article

1- To obey orders.

2- Giving up bad behavior.

3- Repressing the evil instincts that are inside every human being.

4- Controlling the child in the safety zone next to the parents.

5- Planting correct means and methods through intimidation.

Several years ago, my father told me a story about a boy  who went out without telling his family where he was going. And this was late at night. After he left, he met some children and played a little with them and enjoyed this, but because of the late time these children left him, some of them returned to their home alone, and some of them their families came to to pick them up, and he found himself alone in the end.

He decided to walk around for a while, so that he might encounter other children and continue playing with them. But after walking for a long time, he found that all the streets were empty, and it was dark everywhere, and he could no longer discern where he was, and that he was far from home and lost his way.

And whenever he tried to return from where he came, he found himself in dangerous areas with street dogs, and in order to avoid them, he kept entering other streets, until he lost the way completely. So he sat crying and did not find anyone to bring him home because all the people of the town were asleep.

The time at night was getting hard for this naughty little boy. Every minute that passes feels like it’s a long time and he’s so afraid of darkness and loneliness. And whenever he heard the sound of dogs howling, intensified in crying. And whenever he called his father, he did not come to take him, because he was far from the house and did not tell them that he was going out, and did not tell them where he was going.

Then he learned that he had made a big mistake and that his father would not come to look for him because he thought he was asleep. And he decided to try to call for help and search for any place where there are people and tell them what happened.

And he kept walking in the dark crying for a long time until he found some people, and told them his name, where he lived, and the name of the neighborhood in which he lived. Fortunately for him, they weren’t bad guys, and they brought this guy home.

The father was very angry with him for this behavior and punished him for a week for this behavior. But the boy was happy that he came home and learned the lesson well and knew that this wrong behavior was dangerous and could have lost his family for life.

While hearing this story, I was very afraid and put myself in the place of this boy, and I found myself learning from him what to do. And that I must tell my family where I am going, and watch the time, and take care of myself and not stay away from home. When I finish playing, I go home.

In the early morning, I was very careful to memorize my full name, the name of the neighborhood in which I live, the name of my mother, and the house number.

Although the story was scary for me, I learned a lot from it and had a reaction to every event that takes place in it.

Dear student, a basic form was submitted for the topic on short horror story essay, In addition to many other models such as, horror short story essay, creepy short horror story essay, a short horror story essay, short ghost story essay, short ghost story essay, scary short story essay, scary experience essay.

If you prefer to add any other topic, you can contact us through the comments of this article and we will study your request and add it as soon as possible.

horror short story essay

At the weekend I went on a trip with my friends to the forest. We took camping equipment, some food and water. The weather was nice, the trees were leafy, the birds were flying from tree to tree, the landscape was beautiful.

We wandered in the woods and ate the fruits on the trees, and as we wandered, a huge bear appeared in front of us, looked at us and prepared to attack us.

We were all very terrified, but the instructions reminded us not to run, not to scream, and to act calmly. I took out of my bag a self-defense spray bottle, which should be used in this case. But the bear left quietly and none of us were hurt.

creepy short horror story essay

I get up early and sit in the garden of the house, enjoying the fresh air, listening to the sound of birds, watching beautiful flowers and other beautiful landscapes, but yesterday something terrifying happened to me.

When I sat on the bench in the garden and was enjoying nature I felt something moving under the chair.

I quickly looked under the chair and found a large black snake.

It moves slowly, I felt very terrified and could not move, I remained frozen in my place, the snake crawled slowly and I looked at it with horror, until it moved away several meters, I called the competent authority immediately and a trained man came and caught the snake.

a short horror story essay

Last week I went with my family to the zoo, the weather was nice, and we were enjoying the nature, where there are a lot of green leafy trees and decorated with beautiful flowers and large areas that allow us to run and play, everything was beautiful.

Then we went to the animal cages and watched the animals from a distance.

But there is a person who got very close to the lion’s cage, even though there is a sign on it that says Do not go near the animal cages.

He was not satisfied with that, but he extended his hand into the cage, and the lion grabbed his hand with force, and this person was unable to rid his hand of the lion’s fangs.

The man screamed loudly from the severity of the pain, and the guard came quickly and tried to give the lion a piece of meat to leave the man’s hand, but to no avail.

The veterinarian quickly intervened and gave the lion an anesthetic injection, and the man was able to get his hand out of the cage, but it had many wounds and was taken to the hospital. It was really terrifying moments.

Short ghost story essay

There are many people who feel terrified in the dark, and my brother is very afraid of the dark and feels terrified and imagines frightening things.

So when the electricity went out and the house became dark. I went to his room quietly without feeling, and stood in front of him, making some strange sounds.

My brother jumped quickly and came out of the room saying a ghost of a ghost, but he hit the wall and cut his head and bled a lot, it was a big wound.

At that time I was telling him don’t be afraid, I am your brother, but he was very frightened. I was very sorry for him and regretted that I had caused him to feel terrified and made him crash into the wall.

And I told him I was just trying to joke with you and I wouldn’t do it again but you should train yourself not to be afraid of the dark.

A Short Scary Story Essay

Last weekend I went with my friends on a fishing trip. We chartered a fishing boat with all our fishing gear and went into the sea for a long distance, so that we could see neither the beach nor the city.

We started fishing and we were very happy because there are many fish and they are also big, and the weather was nice.

Suddenly strong winds blew and the waves rose, and the fishing boat was swinging with us over the water, up and down, and we couldn’t control it.

At this time we felt so afraid that we would drown.The fishing boat cannot withstand these bad weather conditions.

But after a while the wind calmed down a bit and we miraculously survived.

Scary short story essay

Last weekend I went with my colleagues on a school trip to one of the archaeological sites, and we had some teachers with us organizing the trip and supervising our transfers.

We entered a museum that houses great antiquities and stood listening to the tour guide talking about the history of these antiquities.

I was fascinated and listened to the tour guide with great interest, so that I did not feel the departure of my colleagues and teachers, as they left the museum and got on the bus and left this place and did not feel my absence.

When I found myself alone in the museum, I felt very afraid and searched for them all over the museum, but I could not find them, so my fear increased and my crying became louder.

Suddenly I found one of the teachers entering the museum and looking for me, so I ran towards him and grabbed his hand and felt safe.

Scary Experience Essay

At the end of the year I had a frightening experience. I went to the beach and decided to snorkel, so I bought wetsuits, put them on, and dived into the sea. But it was not what I expected and almost drowned.

I was so scared when I found myself unable to dive, and could not swim to the top.

It was a difficult situation but one of the lifeguards on the beach saw me, knew I was going to drown and ran to save me.

Therefore, I advise others to learn before we do anything that might endanger our lives.

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Jul 13, 2018

ghost experience essay

A Stormy Night with a Ghost Experience Essay

ghost experience essay

A ghastly experience is a memory which stays in your life forever. It’s a story worth telling and can also be the reason which changed your life and perspective forever.

Over centuries, there have been many cults and groups who believe in ghosts and some have also experienced the unfortunate event with their own eyes. Some experiences were terrifying while others were fatal.

A stormy night with a ghost experience Essay

My experience, on the other hand, was not only terrifying but also unique. It was a usual cold night of autumn when I decided to take a stroll in the dark alley and all that could keep me warm was the puff of smoke from cigars which was inhaled by the smokers in desperation and anxiety. There was something ominous about that night which made my toes tingle.

As I walked by, I couldn’t help but contemplate about the legends which were sung in my town, which spoke about the ghost who had a tragic end because he was rumoured to be engaged in witchcraft. It was believed that the ghost would ride on his broomstick and cast a green light on the entire town. Some people would die seeing that green light and some people would turn into ash when they would have an encounter with the ghost. For many years, a lot of people witnessed that incident, but it slowed down a few years ago and the ghost seemed to have disappeared. The ghost now only remained in the murals and in the oral tradition but the soothsayer prophesied that it would never be an end for the ‘emerald ghost’.

Suddenly I stumbled upon a rock and fell as soon as I got up the wind started blowing and in no time I was stuck in a storm. I clung to a branch for support but a faint smell filled my nose and all I could see was the green light before my eyes. In the distance, I could see a shadow figure and it was none other than the emerald ghost who grew closer and closer to me. Suddenly I felt a thump on my head before I closed my eyes. When I woke up the next morning in my bed, I learnt that a person had died while saving me. When I looked in the mirror, all I could see was the green light in my eyes, for now, I knew that the ghost had returned and it was rumoured to stay forever.

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Ghostwriting: 10 Tips on How to Become a Ghostwriter

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Hannah Yang

Ghostwriting title

You might have heard that ghostwriting is one of the most well-paid writing careers. It’s true—being a ghostwriter can be a lucrative option.

So what exactly is a ghostwriter?

The short answer is that a ghostwriter is a writer whose name doesn’t appear on the final work .

In this article, we’ll give you a rundown of what this industry requires and ten tips on how to get started as a ghostwriter.

What Is Ghostwriting?

What is a ghostwriter, benefits of ghostwriting, 10 tips on how to become a ghostwriter, is ghostwriting for you.

Ghostwriting is the act of one person writing under the name of another person or brand.

Ghostwriting might be more common than you think. For example, the bestselling Nancy Drew series was published under the made-up name Carolyn Keene, but was actually written by a team of ghostwriters working together.

The popular Jason Bourne series was continued under Robert Ludlum’s name until 2017, even though Robert Ludlum died in 2001.

Ghostwriting definition

Ghostwritten non-fiction books include My Side by the English soccer player David Beckham, Profiles in Courage by U.S. President John F. Kennedy, and Living History by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Clients hire ghostwriters to help them create all types of work, from simple blog posts to full-length novels and memoirs.

Most clients fall into the following categories:

Books written by ghostwriters

  • Bestselling authors whose books are so popular that they no longer have time to write them all on their own
  • Industry leaders (such as business owners and health gurus) who want to share their expertise without needing to learn how to write
  • Celebrities (such as athletes and actors) who want to share their life stories without writing them themselves
  • Bloggers, brands, and businesses that want to post regular content online under their own branding
  • Publishers who want to publish more books based on the notes left behind by bestselling authors who have passed away
  • Anybody who has a great story to tell , but doesn’t have the writing experience to tell it by themselves

People who use ghostwriters

A ghostwriter is someone who writes for a client under the client’s name.

You can think of a ghostwriter as a type of co-author, except unlike a typical co-author a ghostwriter isn’t given public credit for their contributions to the project.

A ghostwriter’s duties might include:

  • Interviewing the client about their vision for the project
  • Reading the client’s notes, outlines, or journals
  • Drafting an article, story, or book using the client’s ideas
  • Revising and polishing a rough draft alongside the client
  • Writing in a style that feels like the client’s voice

Ghostwriting tasks

Why would you want to be a ghostwriter? There are several benefits that might draw you to this career.

Benefit #1: Make Money

Most ghostwriting pays better than general freelancing does.

Clients will often pay a large flat fee upfront, rather than paying you hourly for your time. As a result, you can make a large amount of money very quickly. According to Reedsy, ghostwriters can make a flat fee of $2,000-$70,000 per project.

Fees vary depending on the client. If you can land a ghostwriting gig with a large brand or a well-known author, you’ll probably be on the larger end of that spectrum.

If you’re a freelance writer and you typically set your own rates, you can increase your normal fee by a significant amount in exchange for not attaching your name to your work. After all, you’re charging not just for the writing but also for the credit.

Benefits of ghostwriting

Benefit #2: Build Relationships

Ghostwriters get to work closely with their clients. You might have long conversations together about the project you’re collaborating on. If you’re working on a memoir or autobiography you might even get to read your client’s journals.

Building these close client relationships can give you a strong professional network. Past clients might call on you again in the future or refer you to other people they know who need a ghostwriter.

Benefit #3: Learn About Interesting Topics

Ghostwriting gives you the opportunity to cover interesting topics you might not otherwise get to write about, and to learn things about those topics from an insider’s perspective.

Whatever your field is, you can learn a lot about it by ghostwriting.

For example, you can learn a lot about the tech industry and how it functions if you ghostwrite a memoir for a Silicon Valley engineer. You can learn a lot about the publishing industry if you ghostwrite a novel for a bestselling author.

Benefit #4: Gain Writing Experience

As a ghostwriter, you can practice your writing skills in a very effective way.

Under the name of a well-known client or brand, you’ll be able to reach a wide audience very quickly and see how they react to the way you write. This will make you much better at the craft if you decide you want to build your own brand later on.

It can be helpful to practice writing something you’re not emotionally involved in because you’ll have a clear perspective about the work’s strengths and weaknesses. That way, you can develop editorial skills which will also serve you well in the future.

Ghostwriting allows you to hone your craft without spending time on the other duties that come with creating your own work, such as marketing and publishing. All these tasks are left to the client while you can move straight on to your next project.

It can be hard to figure out how to become a ghostwriter, especially since the position is one of the least transparent in the writing industry.

Every ghostwriter begins somewhere. It’s just a matter of knowing how to get started.

Here are some tips for breaking into the industry.

Tip #1: Practice Your Writing Skills with Freelance Writing Jobs

The best way to become a ghostwriter is to practice writing as much as you can.

Usually, ghostwriters aren’t amateurs—they’re experienced writers who have created content in their own name in addition to writing for others.

Start by writing in your own voice. Great writing skills will get you noticed by people who are looking for ghostwriters.

One option for gaining writing experience is freelance writing. As a freelance writer, you’ll meet new clients, which will expand your writing network. Writing for clients under your own name will also help to build your credibility because you can demonstrate your writing skills.

If you take on the task of freelance writing, you can use a grammar checker like ProWritingAid to make sure you deliver clear and professional work to your clients.

Another option is blog writing. Blog posts are a great addition to your writing portfolio and can help you develop expertise in a specific topic.

You can also pitch articles to magazines and editors. There are magazines that allow anyone to pitch to them, so keep an eye out for their submission calls. By writing for magazines, you can add some reputable publications to your portfolio.

You can even work on writing books . Many ghostwriting gigs are large projects such as autobiographies, non-fiction books, and novels. Finishing a long work of your own will give you the skills you need to work on one with someone else.

Ways to build a ghostwriting portfolio

Ultimately, if you’re already an experienced writer or author, clients will naturally gravitate toward you when they need a ghostwriter. Building your writing portfolio is a great way to get started.

Tip #2: Practice Different Writing Styles

Ghostwriting clients will expect you to write in a style that sounds like theirs, rather than like your own. If you want to be a ghostwriter, you should practice becoming a writing chameleon.

Some jobs will require you to write in a conversational, chatty voice. Others will require a formal, informative voice. Still others will require lyrical, poetic prose. If you can master multiple styles, you’ll be able to nail all of these future ghostwriting jobs.

One way to work on this skill is to read widely and pay attention to the styles of the authors you read. Practice imitating the styles of your favorite authors.

Pay attention to the specific words and lexicons each author uses, the length of their words and sentences, and the rhythm and flow of their writing. How formal is their tone? How long are their paragraphs?

These exercises will equip you with the skills needed to create work in your client's voice when you need to.

Tip #3: Hone Your Interviewing Skills

To be a great ghostwriter you don’t only need to be a great writer, you also need to be a great listener.

When you land your first ghostwriting job, you will need to familiarize yourself with the project and the client.

You’ll need to have long, deep conversations with your clients about what they’re looking for and what their ideas are for the project.

You’ll need to practice active listening and ask questions about anything that isn’t clear, so that what you write can match up with the client’s vision as closely as possible.

You’ll also need to read everything they’ve written, whether that’s books, articles, or blog posts.

If you can find any jobs or volunteer work that involve interviewing and research, those skills will set you up to be a successful ghostwriter in the future.

Tip #4: Create a Website for Your Ghostwriting Business

When your future clients are considering hiring you, the first thing they’ll do is look you up online.

You want to make it as easy as possible for all your future clients to figure out who you are, what you do, and how to hire you. How do you do that? You create a writer website.

If you’re on a budget, you can start with a free or low-cost website using a platform like Squarespace, Weebly, or WordPress . Later down the line, you can invest in a website designer to make sure your website reflects your brand.

What to include on a ghostwriting website

Make it clear on your website that you’re a ghostwriter for hire. Mention the specific topics you’re experienced at writing about, so everyone can see your brand.

Your website should include some writing samples from your portfolio, such as blog posts or novel chapters. Make sure your samples relate to the type of ghostwriting work you hope to do.

Include a headshot and a short bio so clients can connect with you on a more personal level. You should also include your social media handles, if you have any, and make it clear how potential clients can contact you.

Finally, you can mention the rates you charge or say that rates are available upon inquiry. If you’re a freelance writer you can increase your rates for ghostwriting since you won’t be able to take credit for what you’ve written.

With a clean and professional writer website you’ll be able to reach clients much more easily.

Tip #5: Reach Out to Your Network for Opportunities

Once you’re ready to start ghostwriting it’s time to reach out to anyone you know who might need a ghostwriter.

If you’re an experienced freelance writer you might have a network of clients you’ve worked with in the past. Don’t be afraid to reach out to them and ask how they’re doing, and if they know anyone who has ghostwriting needs.

Even if you don’t have a client network, there are still other people you can reach out to. Maybe you know someone who has a great book idea but doesn’t know how to write it. Pitch your skills to other writers you know, and even to your friends and family.

Tip #6: Pitch Your Ghostwriting Services to Businesses and Brands

It might not seem obvious but many businesses and brands have writing-related needs, even if their services have nothing to do with writing.

At the very least, almost every large company has their own website with descriptions of the company’s services.

Many companies have blogs where they post about their work to attract more customers. Some release their own eBooks to establish themselves as thought leaders within their industry.

So who writes those websites, blogs, and books? Chances are, that’s a perfect job for a ghostwriter.

Start with businesses you’re familiar with, maybe ones you’ve been buying from for years or ones in industries that you have expertise in. Send them an email mentioning that you love their products, and tell them about your ghostwriting services.

Don’t be afraid of rejection. The worst case scenario is that the company says no, in which case you can respectfully accept that decision and move on to the next potential client.

At the end of the day, finding clients can be a numbers game. If you pitch to enough brands with a strong writing portfolio, sooner or later one of them might say yes.

Tip #7: Utilize Social Media

In the age of information, social media is one of the best places to find freelance writing opportunities and that includes ghostwriting opportunities, too.

Update your Facebook profile, Twitter profile, and any other social media profiles to include your ghostwriting skills. Make sure everyone can see that you’re a ghostwriter for hire.

On sites like Twitter, you can search for specific hashtags, such as #ghostwriting and #ghostwriter. Sometimes, people will post opportunities under these hashtags, or stories about their own ghostwriting experiences.

Joining these communities will help give you a foothold into the industry.

Tip #8: Join a Job Board or Publishing Marketplace

There are plenty of websites that offer different writing jobs, some of which include ghostwriting opportunities.

Many job boards don’t explicitly offer ghostwriting gigs, but they offer many freelancing gigs by brands and businesses that might also need a ghostwriter.

Here are some job boards you can consider:

  • All Freelance Writing is a free job board that has fully vetted gigs.
  • Contenta is a job board that tracks companies that hire writers. You can reach out to the companies that have posted ads and ask if they need a ghostwriter.
  • Upwork lets you create a profile and advertise yourself. You can also see the profiles of other ghostwriters and compare your rates to theirs.
  • Freelancer.com is a site where you can bid for freelance writing opportunities.

Where to find ghostwriting jobs

Tip #9: Understand Your Contracts

When you start signing ghostwriting contracts, have a lawyer look at your legal paperwork if possible. Taking that precautionary step will help you protect yourself from any possible legal ramifications.

In some cases, ghostwriting is transparent and the client will make it publicly known that they have a ghostwriter.

In most cases, however, a ghostwriter must sign an agreement not to reveal the project they’re working on or take any credit for the completed work.

Often, contracts will allow you to speak about your projects in general terms so you can tell future clients about your previous ghostwriting experience.

For example, you might be able to say, “I helped a client write a 300-page memoir which hit the New York Times bestseller list.”

Read your contracts carefully, and never share information about your projects publicly if your contracts tell you not to.

Tip #10: Be Patient

Ghostwriting is a job that often takes a long time to pay off.

Don’t worry if it takes a while to make it big! Success as a ghostwriter depends on two factors: luck and preparation. You can’t always control the luck factor. All you can do is make sure you’re prepared for the next time a ghostwriting opportunity comes your way.

How to be a successful ghostwriter

If you’re trying to decide whether being a ghostwriter is the right path for you, ask yourself some questions about what you hope to gain out of it.

First, ask yourself what you want to accomplish as a writer. If you’re trying to build your own platform and writing brand, ghostwriting might not be the right choice for you.

If however you want to make some good money and create a stable income stream, ghostwriting can be a great option.

You should also ask yourself if you have the right personality for ghostwriting.

If you hate the idea of someone else taking credit for your work, or the idea of giving up creative freedom over what style you’re allowed to write in, ghostwriting might be difficult for you.

On the other hand, if you’re very flexible and love collaborating on projects, you might be very successful as a ghostwriter.

Could you be a ghostwriter?

Do you think ghostwriting might be a good option for you? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments.

Now is a wonderful time to be a copywriter. Download this free book to learn how:

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With the advent of the internet, the copywriting industry is exploding. content is now seen as critical for all online businesses., this guide breaks down the three essential steps you must take if you think copywriting is the career for you..

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Hannah Yang is a speculative fiction writer who writes about all things strange and surreal. Her work has appeared in Analog Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, The Dark, and elsewhere, and two of her stories have been finalists for the Locus Award. Her favorite hobbies include watercolor painting, playing guitar, and rock climbing. You can follow her work on hannahyang.com, or subscribe to her newsletter for publication updates.

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Plant Studies in Indian Literature

                                                                       Plant Studies in Indian Literature             Indian literature is a rich and diverse tapestry woven from the threads of countless languages, cultures, traditions, and encompasses a vast array of literary forms, genres, and themes, reflecting the complex tapestry of Indian society, its history, spirituality, and cultural heritage. From the ancient Vedas to contemporary works exploring modern Indian identity, Indian literature offers a window into the soul of a nation characterized by its diversity and complexity. Stretching back thousands of years, Indian literature is marked by its pluralism and inclusivity, drawing inspiration from a wide range of philosophical, religious, and cultural influences. Indian literature has served as a medium for the expression of diverse voices and perspectives, reflecting the myriad experiences of people. Currently, Indian literature occupies a prominent place on the global stage, with Indian writers garnering international acclaim and recognition for their contributions to world literature. Through its diversity, complexity, and depth, Indian literature continues to captivate and inspire readers around the world, inviting them on a timeless journey through the heart and soul of one of the world's ancient and most vibrant civilizations. Objective            This Call for Proposals (CFP) endeavours to compile a comprehensive and interdisciplinary anthology that delves into the intricate representations of plants and flora across various genres and time periods within Indian Writings in English. This publication seeks to facilitate a nuanced exploration of the profound role played by botanical imagery in shaping the emotional, cultural, and environmental landscapes depicted in Indian literary works. By fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and critical examination, this project aims to provide fresh insights into the multifaceted relationship between humans and plants, as portrayed in Indian Literature. Through this endeavour, we aim to enrich our understanding of the diverse botanical heritage embedded in Indian literary traditions and its relevance in contemporary discussions surrounding nature, culture, and ecology  Target Audience              In this Call for Proposals (CFP), the primary focus is on Indian writings in English. We seek contributions from scholars, researchers, and academicians specializing in the analysis of Indian literary works, both classic and contemporary. By delving into the profound interplay between humans and the natural world depicted in Indian literature, this CFP aims to attract individuals passionate about exploring the intricate relationship between plants and the cultural, environmental, and emotional aspects woven into various literary traditions, particularly within the realm of Indian writings in English.   Recommended topics include, but are not limited to, the following:  Plant metaphors and symbolisms in Indian Writings in English Comparative analysis of plant representation across different Indian literary periods The ecological and environmental perspectives in Indian literature through plant imagery  Cultural, social, and emotional dimensions of plant representations in     Indian literary texts  Plants as objects of allegory, metaphor, or fable in Indian literary contexts Depiction of flora in mythological narratives  Plants as symbols of love, longing, or spirituality in Indian literature Representation of plants in Indian folk tales, oral traditions, and folk songs Botanical gardens, herbal medicine, and plant cultivation practices depicted in Indian literary texts  Plants as markers of identity, belonging, or displacement in diasporic Indian literature Gendered perspectives on plant imagery and botanical metaphors in Indian literary discourse    Peer Review : All the accepted manuscripts will undergo a double-blind review before publication.    Submission Procedure Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit an abstract of 150 to 250 words with a brief note on the author's bio and contact information (including full name, affiliation, official e-mail address, and mobile number) on or before April 21, 2024. At least one author contributing to the chapter should possess a Ph.D. Send your abstracts to [email protected] or [email protected] .   Note : There are no submission or publication fees.   Publisher: This book series is associated with Dr. Douglas Vakoch’s ‘Critical Plant Series’ published by Lexington Books, a renowned publisher committed to advancing scholarly research and intellectual discourse across various fields. Lexington Books has established itself as an excellent platform for academics, researchers, and authors to disseminate their work to a global audience. It continues to publish high-quality peer-reviewed monographs and edited collections by established and emerging scholars who contribute to the humanities and social sciences. For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit https://rowman.com/lexingtonbooks .  Editorial Advisory Board Members  Jaishmitha Riny R, Research Scholar, Christ Deemed to be University, Bangalore, India. 

Prof. Nirmal Selvamony is former founding professor and Head of the department of English Studies, and Dean, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Central University of Tamil Nadu. His major areas of interest, in the last four decades, have been alternative ( ti áč‡ai ) lifeway,  ti áč‡ai  studies,  tolkāppiyam , ecocriticism,  tami áž»  musicology, poetics, and theory. Among his many endeavours to pioneer the  ti áč‡ ai   movement ,  some significant ones are the launching of the group called " ti áč‡ ai " in 1980 in Chennai, offering the first-ever ecocriticism course (then called "Tamil Poetics") in the Indian university system in the 1980s, and the formulation (in the 1980s) of a theory now known as " putti áč‡ ai "  (formerly, Oikopoetics).

Dr. A. Edwin Jeevaraj, Associate Professor, Christ Deemed to be University, Bangalore, India. 

N. Depak Saravanan, Assistant Professor, Christ Deemed to be University, Bangalore, India.   

GameSpot may receive revenue from affiliate and advertising partnerships for sharing this content and from purchases through links.

Ghost Of Tsushima PC And Cross-Play Requirements Revealed

If you've got the right hardware, you can expect a pretty sharp experience on PC for Ghost of Tsushima.

By Darryn Bonthuys on April 17, 2024 at 6:14AM PDT

Ghost of Tsushima is making its PC debut on May 16, and ahead of its release, Nixxes Software has revealed more details on the system and cross-play requirements for this port.

For the hardware requirements, there aren't any big surprises here. An SSD with 75GB of storage capacity is recommended, and for a decent 1080p 60fps experience, you'll be just fine with an Nvidia 20-series GPU and 16GB of RAM. If you're looking to play the game with all the visual details cranked up to the max and at 4K 60fps, you'll naturally need to have some top-tier hardware like an Nvidia 4080 or Radeon RX 7900 XT GPU.

Ghost of Tsushima PC requirements

As a reminder, Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut on PC is fully optimized for ultra-wide monitors and also supports upscaling technologies like Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR to help you get the most out of your GPU. Like the PS5 version, DualSense features like haptic feedback and adaptive triggers are also included, but only if you use a wired connection to your PC.

This is also the first PlayStation title for PC that makes use of a new overlay to give you a quick look at your friends list, trophies, settings, and profile.

The new PlayStation overlay on PC

For cross-play, Nixxes says you'll need to sign into your PlayStation Network account to access Legends mode and in-game voice chat, and once you do so, you can team up with PS5 and PS4 players in that multiplayer mode. If you're looking to score a quick deal on a preorder, Green Man Gaming has slashed the price on Ghost of Tsushima: Director's Cut to just $51, down from its PC launch price of $60.

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Woman wheels corpse into Brazil bank to sign for loan

RIO DE JANEIRO — A woman brought a 68-year-old man in a wheelchair into a bank branch and tried to get him to sign for a loan, but he had been dead for hours, Brazilian police said on Wednesday.

Erika Vieira Nunes wheeled the cadaver into the bank in a Rio suburb on Tuesday and told the teller the man wanted a loan for 17,000 reais ($3,250), security camera video showed.

She held a pen and moved his hand forward to no response.

“Uncle, are you listening? You need to sign,” she said, according to the security video, suggesting she sign for him.

“He doesn’t say anything, that’s just how he is,” she said, adding, “If you’re not okay, I’m going to take you to the hospital.”

Bank staff became suspicious as the man’s head kept falling back and they called the police who arrested the woman on the spot and charged her with fraud. The corpse was taken to the morgue.

Books | How JosĂ© Vadi’s essay collection…

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Books | how josĂ© vadi’s essay collection ‘chipped’ explores the skateboarder’s experience, the author grew up in pomona and spent his youth skating around southern california's san gabriel valley and inland empire..

ghost experience essay

To a skater, the board is an extension of the body. And like a skateboard, an aging body can show life’s hard knocks.

“Skateboarding is truly rebellious and punk in its ethos,” said author JosĂ© Vadi . “Nobody should care how old someone is just as much as someone shouldn’t care about their sexual orientation, gender, economic background. None of those things should be the determining factor of your ability to enjoy yourself on a skateboard.”

Vadi explores these ideas and more in his sophomore collection of essays, “Chipped: Writing from a Skateboarder’s Lens,” out on Tuesday, April 16.

SEE ALSO : Sign up for our free Book Pages newsletter about bestsellers, authors and more

“Having an active relationship with skateboarding means having an active relationship with your body – but also the realization of your own mortality,” Vadi said in a recent phone interview from his Sacramento home. “That happens every time you try a trick, whether or not you’re gonna land or get injured, and as your body changes over time.”

As a skater, he has been keenly aware of his changing body with each passing decade. The book’s second essay documents a bad fall he had in 2019 and the excruciating pain that lingered on for weeks. His description of the experience, like much of the collection of essays, is written with sharp prose.

“As an older skater who is graying, you definitely feel self-conscious, not just because of your age but your ability at your age, or lack thereof,” he said.

Vadi grew up in Pomona and began skating in the mid-’90s, on the cusp of his teenage years. The book transitions between skating around Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley and Inland Empire and skating the streets of San Francisco and Berkeley. He also looks at how much has changed since he began.

“In the wake of all these new skate parks that have developed over the past 20 years, these kids are so good out of the gate. The baseline barometer of what is considered proficient in skateboarding today is what we would consider pro in the ’90s,” He said.

The book provides insight into what it’s like for kids skating out of suburbia to find themselves – or other like-minded skaters who are also exploring the freedom the board bestows.

“You’re so bound to a car, and skateboarding gives you a vehicle, metaphorically and literally, to re-explore your world,” he said. “Growing up in the suburbs, things can get very dull, very quick, and skateboarding allows you to reenergize and reimagine an environment.”

That reimagining can be literal, such as turning an empty industrial space into a landscape bursting with creative possibilities. “It’s turning a loading dock into a skatepark,” says Vadi.

The essays also illustrate the impact that skating had on popular culture, touching on MTV, skating publications such as Thrasher Magazine, and videotapes of riders that got passed around skating scenes and shops around the country.

Music also plays a large role in the book. Vadi writes about how skating incorporated punk, hip-hop, heavy metal, and other genres that helped redefine its culture. In one essay, he investigates the connections between jazz and skating, arguing that the musician and composer known as Sun Ra is a skater despite never stepping on a board.

“If I’m writing through skateboarder’s lens and am really going to try to own that perspective, it has to be inclusive of as much of those different strands as possible,” he said.

As much as the book is about skating, it also reminds readers of the beauty in the documentation of ourselves and the interests we acquire through our lived experiences.

“I feel like ‘Chipped’ is a redocumentation by way of articulation,” he said. “It reflects this larger need to document … and to articulate the many ways that this thing that we care about can impact someone.”

“The point is not to be better than anyone else, or to necessarily compete,” he said. “The point is to enjoy the act itself and in comradery with others.”

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Books | ‘Sleeping Giants’ novelist Rene Denfeld explores the harm done in the name of helping

A new book, 'The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels' by Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans, traces the lives of four such lost souls.

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  1. My Own Experience in a Haunted House

    Dark clouds always seem to hover over the house, situated on a dead end street. And then there are the stories. A man went mad and murdered his whole family in the house. One night, the house suffered a fire and a baby died in it. On and on, with a tragic death at the center. Because then come the other stories.

  2. The Existence of Ghosts

    The Existence of Ghosts Essay. In the traditional cultural beliefs, a ghost is universally thought of as the spirit or soul of a dead person. It could even be that of an animal, which can appear to the living in different manifestations. In every culture, people believe that ghosts exist, which is certainly true, except that their description ...

  3. The science of ghosts

    But he still remembers the experience vividly. Was the figure a ghost? In the mythology of the United States and many other Western cultures, a ghost or spirit is a dead person who interacts with the living world. In stories, a ghost may whisper or groan, cause things to move or fall, mess with electronics — even appear as a shadowy, blurry ...

  4. 4.4 How to prove ghosts exist (synthesis)

    1.3.1 Argument from experience essays by theme; 1.4.1 Essay 2: synthesis essay walkthrough and instructions; 1.4.2 Synthesis essays by theme ... , noted by Lauro and Paul, not all ghost hunters have the same look to their evidence since even the hosts of Ghost Hunters believe a majority of the evidence they have is debunkable (Lauro and Paul ...

  5. Essay on Ghost for Students

    Some individuals think in ghosts because of personal experiences or stories told by others. They might feel a ghost's presence through cold air, strange noises, or moving objects when no one is there. Ghosts in Culture. Ghosts appear in many books, movies, and TV shows. They are often shown as scary, but some stories present them as friendly ...

  6. Are ghosts real?

    For example, sleep paralysis in a recognized experience that leads to people feeling like they have seen a ghost, demon, or alien," Hupp said. Personal experience is one thing, but scientific ...

  7. Essay on Scary Experience

    A scary experience is something that makes you feel frightened or nervous. It can happen when you are not expecting it, and it can make your heart beat fast. Sometimes, you might even feel like you want to run away or hide. Scary experiences can be different for everyone. For some, it might be seeing a scary movie, while for others, it could be ...

  8. I Am Haunted by My Mother's Ghost Story

    But when your mother is first telling you her ghost story in your for-whatever-reason darkened apartment, at night, and you couldn't have been older than eight, that sort of detail can escape you. There's more. Soon, the home in La Puente is haunted, or at least the hallway leading to the bedrooms is. First they hear pacing, a padding of ...

  9. Primer on the Construction of a Scary Story Essay

    In this narrative essay, we will show you how a ghost story works. From a list of writing prompts, we have selected one for this sample essay, and though it doesn't feature serial killers stalking children during Halloween through flickering streetlights, we hope you will enjoy the roller coaster regardless. Scary Experience Essay Example

  10. Essay On My Encounter With A Ghost

    Essay On My Encounter With A Ghost. Last year I had a scary experience while returning home from my grandfather's place. I was horrified and shocked forever. It was late past twelve at night. I was walking along a lonely street with my daddy on way home from a railway station. Our home was just at a distance of half an hour from the station.

  11. The Scary Encounter in the Story of My Experience in the Ghost Town

    A dark, gloomy mist flooded the air as I entered the town. "Its like a ghost town". I said to himself, wondering where everybody was. I stumbled out of my car and peered curiously into a shop window, no one was there. No one was in any of the buildings, "No wonder this town i...

  12. How To Come To Terms With A Ghostly Experience

    Laythe and Houran propose four core features of Haunted People Syndrome, namely: Distress and unease facilitates anomalous experiences. Anomalous experiences tend to be contagious, i.e, anomalous experiences can spread to others. The meaning-making or narrative created around haunting experiences is influenced by personal backgrounds and beliefs.

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    Implementation of Gothic Themes in The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit. In "The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Process of Abjection," Jerrold E. Hogle argues that the eighteenth century gothic emergence from fake imitation of fake work is the foundation of what is defined as modern gothic today. He maintains that Horace Walpole's ...

  14. My Haunted Experience Research Paper

    Improved Essays. 755 Words. 4 Pages. Open Document. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. Show More. My Haunted Experiences at University of Indonesia. Most people just believe with the thing if they can see, feel, and hear that thing immediately. But believed or not there is another substance in this world which most people can't feel, it called ...

  15. Ghost Essay Examples

    Research Papers and Essay On GhostđŸ—šïž More than 30000 essays Find the foremost Essay About Ghost Ideas and Topics to achieve great results! Browse Categories; Essay Examples ... produce complex audiovisual metaphors that elucidate affective and physical experiences."(Fahlenbrach, 2008) Sound design has the incredible ability to evoke ...

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    Essay On My Encounter With A Ghost. Post category: Essay; Reading time: 5 mins read; Last year I had a scary experience while returning home from my grandfather's place. I was h

  17. Short Horror Story Essay 8 Models

    1- To obey orders. 2- Giving up bad behavior. 3- Repressing the evil instincts that are inside every human being. 4- Controlling the child in the safety zone next to the parents. 5- Planting correct means and methods through intimidation. Several years ago, my father told me a story about a boy who went out without telling his family where he ...

  18. Disembodied Spirits are Responsible for Ghost Experiences

    Because of the many experiences recorded in the United States and outside borders regarding ghost experiences, scholars have been compelled to understand the underlying reasons for people narrating experiences with a ghost. In particular, the most sought aspect is the revelation that disembodied spirits are responsible for ghost experiences.

  19. My Ghost Experience

    My Ghost Experience. Improved Essays. 785 Words. 4 Pages. Open Document. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. Show More. I remember the time when I was scared to the death for the first time in my life, it was during the winter vacations of my school after the 1st semester exams of 3rd grade that our family decided on the fact of visiting our ...

  20. Complete Guide to Ghostwriting: 4 Types of Ghostwriting

    Complete Guide to Ghostwriting: 4 Types of Ghostwriting. Ghostwriters tackle projects for people who don't have the time or skills to bring their idea or lived experience to life on the page. Learn about ghostwriting and the different types of ghostwriting projects that interested freelancers can take on.

  21. A Stormy Night with a Ghost Experience Essay

    A stormy night with a ghost experience Essay: A ghastly experience is a memory which stays in your life forever. It's a story worth telling and can also be the reason which changed your life and perspective forever. Over centuries, there have been many cults and groups who believe in ghosts and some have also experienced the unfortunate event with their own eyes.

  22. Ghostwriting: 10 Tips on How to Become a Ghostwriter

    Tip #2: Practice Different Writing Styles. Ghostwriting clients will expect you to write in a style that sounds like theirs, rather than like your own. If you want to be a ghostwriter, you should practice becoming a writing chameleon. Some jobs will require you to write in a conversational, chatty voice.

  23. Ghost Of Tsushima Will Recreate PlayStation Experience On PC

    Use of the in-game PlayStation overlay is optional for both the single-player and Legends experiences of Ghost of Tsushima, but it signals a big step forward for PlayStation on PC.We will likely ...

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    Plant Studies in Indian Literature Indian literature is a rich and diverse tapestry woven from the threads of countless languages, cultures, traditions, and encompasses a vast array of literary forms, genres, and themes, reflecting the complex tapestry of Indian society, its history, spirituality, and cultural heritage.

  25. Ghost Of Tsushima PC And Cross-Play Requirements Revealed

    Ghost of Tsushima is making its PC debut on May 16, and ahead of its release, Nixxes Software has revealed more details on the system and cross-play requirements for this port.. For the hardware ...

  26. Woman wheels corpse into Brazil bank to sign for loan

    A woman in Brazil brought a 68-year-old man in a wheelchair into a bank branch and tried to get him to sign for a loan, but he had been dead for hours, Brazilian police said on Wednesday.

  27. How José Vadi's essay collection 'Chipped' explores the skateboarder's

    The book's second essay documents a bad fall he had in 2019 and the excruciating pain that lingered on for weeks. His description of the experience, like much of the collection of essays, is ...

  28. Ghost Of Tsushima Will Recreate PlayStation Experience On PC

    Ghost of Tsushima—the 2020 samurai RPG developed by Sucker Punch—isn't the first PlayStation exclusive to come to PC, but it will mark the first time non-console gamers will get something ...