Musical Spirits
and the Ultimate Question
This is my third official—as in, contracted and published—book that delves into ghosts and ghostlore. When I talk to the media and chat with readers, they generally have two questions in common. I’ll save the second one for a little later, because we’ll want to deal with the big question first. Ultimately, people want to know one thing: Is this stuff real?
I can tell you—after these three books and a hell of a lot of research, dozens of interviews with skeptics and believers alike, and hours dwelling on this stuff in the early morning—that this question has become harder, not easier, for me to answer. The supernatural is more layered than the binary—believer, skeptic—way of thinking about it that is portrayed in the media.
As a person who enjoys reading folklore and mythology, I recognize that there are elements of these ghost stories that resonate with certain mythical themes and reflect common motifs of folklore. Often the real reason we tell scary stories, pass on urban legends, and study other forms of folklore rests beneath the mere facts or the clever narrative of the tale. Folklore often carries important messages—life lessons and warnings, for example—and preserves them in the culture’s collective consciousness.
We have reviewed many examples of ghost stories-as-mythology in this volume of country music ghostlore. For example, Hank Williams’s ghost, who haunts just about every stop he and his young chauffeur made during his infamous last ride in that baby blue Cadillac back in 1953, not only helps us recount the last breaths, last steps, and last words of one of the country’s most pioneering superstars, but can also stand as a cautionary tale, warning us all about the high cost of fame and fortune.
Ghostlore may exist for another reason. In a fragile and transient world, these tales serve as a repository to forever preserve the memory of our favorite artists and celebrities.
This is how many skeptics—at least the more polite ones—respond to questions about ghost stories featuring Elvis, Hank, Patsy, and the rest of country’s pantheon of paranormal stars. Joe Nickell, a senior researcher for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, for example, writes in The Skeptical Inquirer that the ghostlore of Elvis and tales of the King faking his death are nothing but a mythical extension of the Elvis impersonation industry.
He writes: “The impulse that prompts Elvis encounters is the emotional unwillingness of fans to accept his death. This is the same impulse that has helped fuel the Elvis-impersonator industry, just as it made possible the impostors of an earlier time who claimed to be the ‘real’ death-surviving cult personalities of John Wilkes Booth, Jesse James, or Billy the Kid.”
In addition to the cultural motivations behind telling ghost stories, skeptics can come up with a range of natural explanations—including deception, hallucination, misidentified natural phenomena, etc.—for encounters, too.
But if we immediately dismiss all ghost stories as overzealous fan worship, mythological obituaries, or fraud without analyzing the facts of each story, we are not skeptics at all; we are cynics. Complete cynics are more like total believers than they care to admit. They are just total believers in the opposite direction.
As a journalist and research writer, I’m trained to avoid taking evidence of the supernatural—or evidence of any experience, for that matter—by faith alone. Journalists are conditioned to simply present the details, as best they can find them, and leave the speculations to the readers. In fact, some—certainly not all—of the accounts I have written about pass key tests of journalistic credibility. These stories detail how honest, thoughtful people have encountered events and phenomena that they could not attribute to natural phenomena. They have witnessed objects moving by themselves, heard the sounds of voices when nobody is present, and even saw the appearance of ghostly figures. Often, several witnesses encounter the same activity at different times but relay nearly the same account. More perplexing, some stories include groups of witnesses who experience the same phenomena at the same time. Any journalist will tell you that corroborating witnesses lend credence to the story.
But it’s not just the accounts that I have included in these books that make me wonder if there isn’t an anomalous basis for at least some of these ghost stories. As I give talks or go to book signings, I have met dozens of people who tell me personal stories about encounters with ghosts, spirits, and other paranormal phenomena. Some of these tales are related to the stories in my books, some are not. These folks, on the whole, seem smart and well-balanced, and, while I don’t know their entire psychological history, they don’t seem to be people who are prone to hallucinations. Certainly, they don’t seem prone to hallucinations at a specific time or place. Generally speaking, someone who is delusional doesn’t just see visions, or hear voices when they are in the Ryman Auditorium, or on a tour of Graceland, and be psychologically healthy the rest of their life, for example.
Some of these accounts have come from unexpected sources, too.
On more than one occasion I’ve chatted with some of the most hardcore, nonbelieving materialists and realists, who, in a comfortable setting, will drop their guard and tell stories that unveil gaps in their own rigid assessments of the paranormal. In one case, a scientist, who had only a few hours before joined in mutual derision of UFO kooks and Woowoo flakes (I think he called them) with his colleagues, began to tell a story that could only be described as a ghost story. He said shortly after his mother died, objects began to fall off shelves and glasses began to shatter—spontaneously. The weird events only ceased after the intervention of a family member.
Apparently, his estranged brother, who did not show up at the funeral, returned to make peace with his departed mother and the crashing and smashing quit. In a phrase that any Woowoo flake would have appreciated, he said that it was almost like peace had returned to the home. A few other scientifically-minded types joined in with their own stories, too, among bursts of nervous laughter.
Just like the scores of believers who have shared their accounts with me, these skeptics considered their own experiences with the unknown and bizarre to have deep, spiritual meaning, even if they refuse to allow these events to interfere with their day jobs.
So, let’s get to the second question. The other question I’m typically asked is: Do I believe in ghosts?
I still maintain my open-minded skepticism, which means I haven’t been completely convinced either way. Even the best witness testimonies of ghosts and spirits can have holes. But so do the scientific explanations that try to explain away anomalous phenomena. I’m also reminded that science is often caught off guard by the discovery of strange phenomena that doesn’t quite fit current paradigms. Einstein’s theory of relativity, black holes, quantum mechanics, and string theory all were once fringe ideas held by an extreme minority of the scientific population. Paranormal theorists, I might add, have almost as much physical evidence for the existence of ghosts as string theorists have for their own ideas on how the universe works.
To convolute my answer even more, it may turn out that the either/or thinking of both the scientists and the paranormal researchers are misguided. Stories of encounters with ghosts and other mysterious forces, along with scientific theories of quantum cats and vibrating subatomic strings, may point to a deeper truth: that our reality—the one we live, sleep, love, play, and work in—is just the tip of a much vaster smear of infinite possibilities.