You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. Today's talk is about taking ghosts seriously. No, really. In her 2021 talk from TEDx DePaul University, writer and director Koya Paz Brownrigg makes a case for why ghost stories are crucial to our human history. The academic work that

addresses the complexity of ghosts and why ghosts in a key way are just like us.

Fifteen years ago, I was doing my graduate research on the lynching of Mexicans and Latin

Americans in Gold Rush, California, and I was having a very hard time finding the evidence I needed to make my claim.

I don't know how much you know about lynching, but they are by definition public executions that happen off the official record.

These deaths aren't technically sanctioned by the state, and often towns and

communities would deny they even happened, which made it harder to prove that they did. Still,

even when the official record refused an act of violence, local lore often served as an alternative

archive, a different way of recording history. A ghost story

about someone being killed and coming back to haunt the town was an important arrow, a sign to

look more deeply into the history of a place. Very often, if local legend featured a story about a ghost who had been hung or murdered or lynched and came back to haunt the town,

digging through the archive, newspapers, letters, diaries would reveal that the event, or something like it, had actually happened.

So the ghost story was one way that communities were holding the violent history of a

place, passing down the story from generation to generation. Now, I don't know if an actual ghost was

haunting any of these places, and what their history certainly was.

And this is pretty much my stance on it.

It doesn't matter whether or not a ghost is real.

The ghost story is, and the fact that we maybe kind of sort of believe a ghost might be real

is significant, and we should pay attention to it.

I'm not the only one who thinks this, by the way.

There is a whole field of interdisciplinary research called spectrality studies,

which is proof that academics will think of anything.

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