The Ghost Notes Field Guide: Hauntings

Your taxonomy to the different types of ghost manifestations (and how they came to be.)

Photo by Shaylyn on Unsplash

Shakespeare famously wondered “What’s in a name? / That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” in his iconic tragedy Romeo & Juliet. As we all hopefully know by now — you’ve had more than 400 years to read the play, so if this is a spoiler, that’s on you — Romeo declares that should Juliet be from any other family, because their families hate each other, he would still feel the same about her.

By the play’s end, Romeo and Juliet are dead (again, if this is a spoiler, please stop living under a rock) and, as a result, their families tentatively come together with cautious cordiality. But as we modern people know, the world largely operates on shared definitions of places and names. It’s how we make sense of things.

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The horror genre and ghosts are no different. Think about your favorite ghost story. Do household objects go bump in the night? Can the living speak with the dead? Or does the ghost never fully reveal itself, preferring instead to be cloaked in the dark?

There is a reason for all of those phenomena in a haunting. And, what’s more, they all belong to separate categories of ghosts. This is an important distinction for a project such as Ghost Notes. How can I — or you, the wonderful reader — make sense of anything related to reappearances of the dead, if we cannot agree on what precisely we are dealing with?

With this in mind, the Ghost Notes Field Guide is meant to act as a Bible of sorts; the master taxonomy to which we consult and, if need be, update to include new information. Categories that are studied by present-day parapsychologists will be indicated. Unlike the subject at hand, this field guide is a living document.

The 20th century British parapsychologist Peter Underwood first set out a classification system of ghosts, according to author Roger Clarke in A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof. Since then, Underwood’s list has remained largely unchanged. To illustrate each example, YouTube clips of movies and TV shows featuring the corresponding ghost type are included.

Traditional ghosts

Clarke writes, “The category of traditional ghosts is straightforward: they are the souls of the dead, aware of the living and able to interact with them.”

Where Ghost Notes differs in this categorization is condensing two kinds of hauntings into subtypes of the traditional ghost: residual hauntings, and intelligent hauntings.

Residual hauntings, which Clarke and Underwood termed “mental imprint manifestations,” are ghosts that “repeat the same actions over and over again, such as opening a door and walking across a room.” They tend to appear on a date or fixed schedule. Another term for a residual haunting is the “stone tape theory,” named after a 1972 TV drama of the same name. “The premise of the stone tape concept is that bedrock or building stone of the location ‘captured’ emotional energy from a traumatic event,” wrote Sharon Hill for the Skeptical Inquirer in 2018.

My personal favorite residual haunting is The Haunting of Bly Manor’s Lady in the Lake (Kate Siegal). Every night, the Lady in the Lake walks the same path from the manor’s lake, to the primary bedroom, and back again to the lake. Anyone in her path is dragged back to the water with her:

Intelligent hauntings differ from residual ones in that the ghost has self-awareness and can speak with or otherwise interact with living people. This may be the first type of ghost that comes to mind for most folks.

The BBC’s Ghosts is a fantastic (and hilarious and non-scary) example:

And for my fellow elder millennials, 1995’s Casper:

Crisis apparitions

“People often see or experience someone with whom they have a close bond at the moment of their death, or at the moment they experience a life-threatening ordeal,” according to Clarke. The Society for Psychical Research, which Ghost Notes has previously written about, has a public summary of their 19th century publications on this kind of ghost.

A famous example is the blockbuster 1996 film The Sixth Sense, in which Cole (Haley Joel Osment) interacts with many ghosts soon after their (often violent) deaths:

Ghosts of the living

These are apparitions of people who are still alive. In parapsychology research, ghosts of the living are associated with astral projection. Per the Cambridge Dictionary, astral projection is defined as “an experience in which a person’s consciousness is believed to leave their physical body for a period of time and travel in the astral plane (a place believed by some people to be where a person’s spirit goes between dying and entering the spirit world).” According to Clarke, these phenomena “seem to suggest something of the brain function behind certain paranormal phenomena…somehow, using ESP and the ability of the brain to generate images, some invisible signal is accessed and processed.”

The 2010 movie Insidious features two characters using astral projection:

Poltergeists

Poltergeists are frequently mentioned in reported hauntings, and some researchers make a distinction between them and other types of hauntings. These are the ghosts where household objects mysteriously move on their own, while doors shut themselves, and knockings are heard throughout the building. According to Clarke, “Poltergeists present themselves as violent energies connected to a focus person, though there is some debate.”

1982’s Poltergeist is, of course, one example:

One of England’s most famous cases might be the Enfield Poltergeist, a 1970s reported haunting that featured in The Conjuring 2. For U.K. readers, Clarke notes, “The world of ghost stories is riddled with class, and the poltergeist is occasionally tagged as the ‘council house [public housing] ghost’.” The Enfield haunting did, in fact, occur in a council house.

Haunted objects

This does, as the British saying goes, what it says on the tin. Per Clarke, “It is not unusual for a bed to be haunted, or a chair where someone liked to sit. The ghost moves with the item.”

Another entry from the Conjuring universe makes an appearance as an example, with the legendary Annabelle doll (based on a real-life, allegedly possessed Raggedy Ann):

Cultural ghost traditions

People around the world observe specific customs based on tradition. In the Middle East, shoppers are expected to haggle at markets as a show of friendliness. In Spain, thousands of people annually pelt each other with tomatoes. The Germans wear lederhosen (some would say ill-advisedly). It stands to reason that different cultures would have their own approaches to death and the afterlife.

The most effective example, in my opinion, are the Japanese yūrei. They are restless spirits, in pursuit of unfinished business: a funeral, sometimes, or seeking revenge in their own violent death. They are not tied down to a single location, and are easily identifiable with long black hair, a white nightgown, and generally appearing in the most unsettling places.

You can see yūrei in Ju-on (The Grudge):

And in 1998’s Ringu (The Ring):

Watch for a future Ghost Notes story further examining how ghosts are perceived around the world.

Honorable mentions

The following classifications are not precise enough to merit standing in the Ghost Notes categories, but deserve mentioning for their longstanding appearances in folklore and parapsychology research.

Elementals and place spirits are connected to nature. Earth, fire, wind, or water. Sometimes, these spirits are located within burial grounds. They are less spirits of the deceased, and more an extension of Norse, Celtic, and Japanese folklore, among other traditions.

Netflix’s The Ritual is a recent example of this kind of nature horror:

Time slips are observed by living people who temporarily are transported to the past. Not to be confused with anything involving time travel, either. According to Clarke, they “are usually rather picturesque and decorative, almost like stepping onto a movie set, and they especially appeal to the imaginative with a sense of history.”

The ballroom scene in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is one of the best examples of a time slip:

Shadow people sightings have been reported by people who spot the phenomena in between wakefulness and sleep. They typically appear as the outline of a person. Sometimes the person is wearing a hat, around which an online urban legend has taken hold. Some psychologists attribute shadow people to sleep paralysis.

One of my favorite all-time horror films, The Babadook, revolves around a “shadow person” haunting a mother and her young son:

Overlapping categories

It should be noted that determining which category a haunting falls under can be difficult, as some show characteristics of multiple types of ghost. In the example above from The Shining, the ballroom party most tidily falls under the time slip category. But it could be a residual haunting, in which the hotel is reenacting the party, rather than the spirits being compelled to do so. In real-world ghost investigations, the Roman soldiers of York could be a time slip, a residual haunting, or an intelligent haunting.

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