The Cultural Significance of Ghosts with Shaily Patel

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Travis

I think one of things most cultures have in common are ghosts, or at least ghost stories. I think pretty much everybody grows up hearing tales of supernatural events, whether it be from friends or older relatives. Some of these tales are very much connected to the localities you're living in and events there, while others have a more universal appeal and some even make it right into mainstream culture. Take the Manhattan Cross-Rip of 1984. I've been fascinated with that for pretty much my entire life. So when I heard that Virginia Tech's Shaili Patel was teaching a class just called Ghosts, I'm not sure that I've ever sent a podcast invitation so quick. And thankfully, she was almost just as quick to accept. Shaili is an assistant professor of early Christianity in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. Her research explores the ways in which so-called magic was used to advance a number Theological and Early Christian Texts, she teaches courses in New Testament, Christian, Apocryphal Texts, Orthodoxy and Heresy, well as Demonology and Exorcism. So Shailene and talked a little about her course and she introduced me to a term called Hauntology. She explained how in the course they use ghosts as kind of a cultural metaphor, but also how ghost stories serve as a way of making meaning out of different past traumas and events. She also showed how ghost stories can be used to help us better understand societal value and our fears and how studying supernatural events really provide opportunities to explore individual meaning-making, and how that can help us better cultivate a sense of empathy for one another. So while we didn't get into an Egon Spengler-esque breakdown of the paranormal, we did talk a lot about how the paranormal can help us better understand us. I'm Travis Williams, this is Virginia Tech's Curious Conversations.

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Travis

And so I know that you are teaching this new course called Ghosts and it does focus on hauntology, which is a term that is new to me. And so I thought maybe we should start the conversation there. What is hauntology?

Shaily

Yeah, hauntology is a real thing. one of the things I want to sort of put up front is that we do real intellectual work in this course. But hauntology is a term that was coined by Derrida. And he was talking about how the things that we think as a society we have relegated to the past continue to haunt us. Now, he was talking about Marxism.

In my class, we're talking about things like individual or collective trauma, the legacies of mass violence, for example, these things that happen in the historical record that we try to relegate to the past, but that have lingering effects in the present, right? So, ontology is a way to think about how past events, ideas, aesthetics, impress upon the present.

Travis

And so where do ghosts enter the picture? Because that is the name of the course.

Shaily

It's the name, it's just ghosts. Yeah, so ghosts within this sort of larger theoretical framework are function as a cultural metaphor, right? So the reason that the ghostly figure is so useful to think with is because it is what we would call a liminal figure, that is, it occupies this in-between space. Ghosts are neither living really nor dead, right? Because they're still here.

They are neither here nor there. They're not physical or corporeal, but they kind of also are, right? So this ability for ghosts to straddle these divides makes them really, really useful conceptually.

Travis

Yeah, as far as I know about ghosts, they're stuck in the in-between. Like I think that's the, least, you know, pop culturally, maybe traditionally, that's the thought of what ghosts are. So I'm curious, when you teach the course, do you talk, do you explore actual ghosts connected to historic events or themes on the actual ghost stories?

Shaily

Yeah, I mean, so we are doing ghost stories. We're doing some classics like we're reading Oscar Wilde's, Kinnerville Ghost, right? This is a famous ghost story. We're reading local ghost stories from Appalachian writers. So we opened the class with a really wonderful story by Craig Dormini. I can send you a link if you'd like it. So we're using ghost stories and the figure of the ghost to sort of unpack what these stories tell us about what's important to us as a society, right? Like, why are we telling these ghost stories? What do we want this ghost figure to signify? What do we want this ghost figure to say to the audience, right? Derrida at one point, I think, said something like the ghost figure demands justice, right? And so in a lot of ghost stories, what we see is this...ghost figure demanding a kind of justice, right? Or some sort of remuneration or reparation for some harm.

Travis

So when you explore these ghost stories, do you get into kind of the origins of where they came from and are they connected to, I guess, real events?

Shaily

There, oftentimes ghost stories are connected to places that have witnessed things like mass violence, right? So we just closed a unit on the West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville, which is very famously haunted. And how Moundsville has been turned into this tourist attraction. So you can now take like ghost tours of Moundsville. And what that does, like touristifying for other...for lack of other term, tourists to find these attractions or these places where mass violence has happened allows us to reckon with that violence from a safe conceptual distance, if that makes any sense, right? Like it's a ghost story, it's entertainment now, right? And so it gives us a safe distance from this horrific thing that has happened, but it's still there, right? haunting is still there signifying this is a place where terrible things have happened. And so it impresses, again, it impresses upon the present.

TRavis

Yeah, well that makes a lot of sense to me because I almost every ghost, I don't know a lot of ghost stories that the origin stories for the ghosts are like really happy childhoods and well-developed adults that had, they married their high school sweetheart and they lived a long life. Like that doesn't become a ghost, right?

Shaily

does not usually result in a ghost story, right? There's usually something has got to ride and this is how we get a ghost story, yeah.

Travis

Why do you think we're so attracted to ghost stories?

Shaily

There are lots of reasons. think that there's curiosity. There are some of us who are just curious about the ways that people make meaning around things that you can't empirically prove, like that's me. So what I work on, I work on magic, demons, ghosts, things like that, and why they're so culturally significant. There are people who truly believe in ghosts and want to experience the haunting, right? And so they're fascinated by this. I think...people are often fascinated by the things that they cannot readily explain. And so the ghost becomes this sort of, you know, it haunts us, right? It haunts us intellectually in a way, because we're sort of fascinated by it and we want to unpack it and we want to try to figure out why are places haunted and what does that mean? And can we really empirically prove that ghosts exist, right? And so the course is really...It's called ghosts, but it's really not about ghosts and it's not about the dead. It's about the living really, right? Like how we make meaning out of these supposedly haunted places.

Travis

Yeah, so I know that your expertise and your focus is generally early Christianity. so I'm curious, what led you to this, this intersection of ghosts and hauntology and what drew your interest here?

Shaily

Yeah, so my area of expertise is early Christianity, but like what I study in particular is epistemology, meaning making. And so again, right, like my research, a lot of my research is about magic, Roman magic and the relationship between Roman magic and early Christianity. And so, you know, for me, it's natural to, if...If your area of expertise is how do we make meaning out of things, right? And particularly how do we make meaning out of things that may not have empirical proof, then it seems like a natural progression for me to go from like magic. I also teach a course on demonology, spoiler alert, not about the demons. And then, you know, so this ghost class sort of emerged from this larger intellectual trajectory that I've had in my.

Travis

Yeah, it sounds like maybe the through line there is figuring out how we as human beings make just meaning of things that we believe or disbelieve or just talk about.

Shaily

Yeah, yeah. And as a historian, like meaning making is important to me because meaning making is a predictor of behavior. And so, you know, how do we think about these large historical trends, right? For me, it starts in meaning making, right? Like how are people making meaning around particular events or ideas or values?

Travis

Yeah, well, I feel like the ghost stories have been around for a very, very long time. Like, this is not a new thing. And so I'm curious from your perspective and from your expertise and your studying of all these different things, what do you think our historic fascination with ghost stories tells us about ourselves?

Shaily

We are not as forward thinking as we think we are, right? We're not as done with the past as we think we are. We still have events, ideas, values. These things still affect us, right? The mass violence of a place like Moundsville affects. people who are living in that area, right? Like the tourist industry affects people who are living in that area. And so one of the reasons I study these things, right, is because it's not just that we can relegate these awful experiences or instances of mass trauma, mass violence, displacement, enslavement, all of those things. We cannot necessarily relegate them to the past because the effects linger like a ghost, right? And so for me, what, what meaning we get out of ghost stories is a demand for acknowledgement, right? Like something terrible has happened here. And it's also a way of, again, right? Like seeking justice, right? Like this terrible thing has happened. There's this ghost legend, right? The ghost legend, because these things never die, right? Like ghost legends don't die. We're still telling the same stories. So I grew not far from here. And there is a ghost story about a road called Cherry Creek Dip that we have been telling for literally decades, right? It's the same story. It changes a little bit over and over and over again. But what that story is drawing attention to is that this is a pretty dangerous part of the road to drive on. There have been lots of accidents there. And we tell that ghost story over and over again, right? don't go driving on Cherry Hill dip late at night. It's dangerous. You might get run over by a ghost car. But what that story is actually telling us is maybe be careful if you're driving on Cherry Hill dip late at night, right? The visibility is bad. It's a very steep hill. You're prone to get into an accident. So this is sort of how ghost stories work, right? There's always a sort of notion that there is some reaction that they want to provoke from the person who reads it or hears it. And that's what I mean by like the ghost stories aren't about us, right? It's really about how we make meaning out of this world.

Travis

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I'm curious as you've gone through your kind of studies and preparing for this class, have you, because you've been studying some of the ghosts here in Appalachia, has that helped you learn about some new layers of history to this region?

Shaily

Yeah, absolutely. Right. So one of the things that even being from Appalachia, one of the things that I was frankly ignorant of is all the damage done by the coal industry, for example, in terms of just economic devastation, environmental devastation, things like that. Right. A lot of the ghost stories that we have in Appalachia have to do with the dangers of the mines. So people get lost in the mines, right? Their mind collapses, right? People die in the mines. And so these ghost stories are bringing up this layer of tradition about coal mining in Appalachia, right? Something that has been sort of incredibly critical to the development of Appalachia, right? Economically, it's given people jobs. It's still giving people jobs like good paying jobs too. I guess what I'm trying to say at the end of the day is like, I have learned about more about mining in terms of the things that it has brought to the area and the things that it has devastated within the area based on like these ghost stories that I'm reading, right? I hope that's true for my students too, but what's true of Appalachia is generally true of lots of places where these legends emerge, right?

We're going to be reading indigenous ghost stories, for example, that talk about the sort of horrors of displacement, forced displacement. So again, right, ghost stories are telling us something about us, the things that matter to us, the things that we're still upset about, the things that still linger and have effects on us as people.

Travis

Yeah, that's I think that's fascinating. One of my favorite things to do when I was a kid was we always would vacation in and around the Outer Banks of North Carolina and we would go to the aquarium. But I would always get to go to the aquarium and then look at the books on the ghosts of the Outer Banks because the

Shaily

You know what, I imagine Hatteras is haunted, right?

Travis

There's a ton because there's a ton of shipping mishaps and scene mishaps and there's Blackbeard and there's other different types of parrot tales. I was always just fascinated about those because thinking about it now, it told me, guess it made me feel a little bit more connected to that region's history and to some things that happen there. So I think that sounds very similar to what you're teaching about in your course.

Shaily

Yeah, I think so. mean, I think so when I pitched the course, I was thinking about ghosts as a way to talk about a few intellectual trends, right? One is how do we think about parts of the past that continued to haunt us? Another is how do we think about concepts in between, right? Like, how do we think about the those things, the uncanny, the supernatural that we can't conclusively define or we can't put in a neat tidy little box, right? How do we talk about those? How do we understand those? And then the third sort of large trend in this course is just how do humans make meaning out of things? Right? Why do humans make meaning out of certain things? So for me, right, the course is really about lifting up the processes of meaning making that we've had, not just regionally, but also in general, right? Like how do humans make meaning? So I'm trying to teach the course both on this abstract level of meaning making, but also like make that more concrete by focusing on Appalachia as a region.

Travis

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. What's the value you think to people in exploring, maybe collectively or even individually, in how they go about making meaning of these types of stories and things we believe?

Shaily

It's like I said, I think meaning making is a predictor of behavior. Meaning making also influences the things that we value. It influences our morality, our ethics, it influences whether or not we have empathy with other people. Like good humanities training is about building intercultural competency and empathy. I think that this course does that. I think that this emphasis on meaning making can help us do that because it helps us see that The ways in which we make meaning may not be how other people make meaning. And that's okay. We care about how other people act on the meanings that they make, right? And so I'm trying to get students to see, it's a hard thing to do if you don't think about the ways in which you are making meaning out of this world. It's a hard thing to then understand that other people are making meaning in different ways, right? We think everybody thinks like us. It is difficult to step out of that. And so one of the things that, you know, teaching about the uncanny or the supernatural or these things that don't have empirical proof always, one of the things that teaching about these things does is it forces us to reckon with a form of meaning making that might be unfamiliar to us. And so if I can get students to say, I personally don't believe in ghosts, but I can see why ghost stories are culturally significant. Then that to me is a successful course this term, right?

Travis

Well, I guess maybe to kind of wind this interview down, what's your favorite ghost story or ghost movie?

Shaily

Do you know, I love, have you seen the devil's backbone?

Travis

No, I have not.

Shaily

It's a Spanish language movie. It is beautiful. It's a beautiful ghost story. Yeah. I also like the orphanage. Also another really lovely ghost story. I think my favorite ghost story has to be a show though. It's gonna be haunting of Hill House. Have you seen this?

Travis

I have not.

Shaily

It's fabulous. It's fabulous. Yeah. I highly, highly recommend. And it's not about the ghost either, right? It's about family and bonds and trauma.

Travis

Yeah, that makes sense. mean, I feel like most ghost stories are actually just about the people, just like your class.

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Travis

And thanks to Shaleigh for helping us better understand how ghosts and ghost stories can help us better understand ourselves and how we make meaning of the supernatural and the other things we believe. If you or someone you know would make for a great curious conversation, email me at traviskw at vt.edu. I'm Travis Williams, and this has been Virginia Tech's Curious Conversations.

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