The Supernatural in Society, Culture, and History
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Edited by Dennis Waskul
and Marc Eaton
The Supernatural
in Societ y, Culture,
and History
Temple University Press
Philadelphia • Rome • Tokyo
Temple University Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122
www.temple.edu/tempress
Copyright © 2018 by Temple University—Of The Commonwealth System
of Higher Education
All rights reserved
Published 2018
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Waskul, Dennis D., 1969– editor. | Eaton, Marc A., 1980– editor.
Title: The supernatural in society, culture, and history / edited by
Dennis Waskul and Marc Eaton.
Description: Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2018. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017056012 (print) | LCCN 2018006621 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781439915264 (E-Book) | ISBN 9781439915240 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781439915257 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Supernatural.
Classification: LCC BL100 (ebook) | LCC BL100 .S87 2018 (print) |
DDC 130—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017056012
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992
Printed in the United States of America
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction: The Supernatural in Society, Culture,
and History • Dennis Waskul and Marc Eaton 1
1 Toward a Cryptoscience • William Ryan Force 18
2 On Researching the Supernatural: Cultural Competence and
Cape Breton Stories • Jeannie Banks Thomas 35
3 Ghosts and Hauntings: Genres, Forms, and Types
• Dennis Waskul 54
4 Paranormal Investigation: The Scientist and the Sensitive
• Marc Eaton 76
5 The Allure of Dark Tourism: Legend Tripping and Ghost Seeking
in Dark Places • Rachael Ironside 95
6 “The Spirits Tell Me That You’re Seeking Help”: Fortune-Telling
in Late Capitalism • Stephen L. Muzzatti and Emma M. Smith 116
7 Reading Tarot: Telling Fortunes, Telling Friends,
and Retelling Everyday Life • Janet Baldwin 136
8 Twentieth-Century Voodoo: Black Culture, Cultural
Geographies, and the Meaning of Place • I’Nasah Crockett 152
vi / C on t e n t s
9 Vampirism: Modern Vampires and Embattled Identity Claims
• Joseph P. Laycock 171
10 Cryptozoology: The Hunt for Hidden Animals and Monsters
• Tea Krulos 190
11 Alien Abduction Narratives: A Proposed Model and Brief Case
Study • Scott R. Scribner 210
Contributors 233
Index 237
The Supernatural in Societ y,
Culture, and History
INTRODUCTION
The Supernatural in Society,
Culture, and History
Dennis Waskul
Marc Eaton
I n 1966, anthropologist Anthony Wallace confidently predicted that “belief
in supernatural beings and in supernatural forces that affect nature without
obeying nature’s laws will erode and become only an interesting historical
memory” (264). Over half a century later, it appears Wallace could not be
further from the truth. In all fairness, though, Wallace simply articulated a
long-standing academic position regarding the supernatural, a subject that
many scholars regard as, in the words of historian Keith Thomas, “rightly
disdained by intelligent persons” (1971: ix). Since the Enlightenment era,
philosophers and other scholars have assumed that irrational supernatural
beliefs will give way to the rational endeavors of scientific experimentation
and empirical observation. Despite such confident predictions, supernatural
beliefs and reported experiences persist and even flourish in the current era.
Perhaps these scholars have failed to recognize that it is “far harder to kill a
phantom than a reality” (J. Thomas 2007: 81).
In the twenty-first century, as in centuries past, stories of ghosts, vampires,
and monsters of all kinds both thrill and terrify us, inviting us to imagine that
our familiar surroundings may be more enchanted than we thought. Despite—
or perhaps because of—advanced scientific understanding of the natural world,
people continue to report beliefs in and firsthand experiences with supernatural
phenomena. The supernatural remains a part of everyday life, and the time has
come to acknowledge that such beliefs and experiences are not doomed to ex-
tinction. We are past due for a concerted effort to understand supernatural be-
liefs and experiences—and that is precisely the main objective of this volume.
2 / I N T RODUC T ION
A recent Chapman University survey (2015) indicated that approximately
half of all American adults hold at least one supernatural belief, by which we
mean a belief in abilities or beings whose manifestation transcends accepted
scientific understandings of the natural world and conventional religious
doctrine. Of these believers, 41.4 percent believe places can be haunted by
the spirits of deceased humans, 26.5 percent believe the living can com-
municate with the dead, 18.1 percent believe aliens have visited earth in
modern times, 13.9 percent believe fortune-tellers and psychics can foretell
the future, and 11.4 percent believe Bigfoot is a real creature. Other sur-
veys report even higher percentages, between 68 percent (Bader, Mencken,
and Baker 2010) and 73 percent (Moore 2005), of Americans believe in at
least one supernatural phenomenon. Regardless of the precise percentage, the
conclusion is obvious: it is normative for contemporary Americans to report
beliefs in the supernatural. In fact, more contemporary Americans believe
in the supernatural than scientific evidence that global warming is caused
by human activity (Leiserowitz et al. 2012) or that humans evolved through
natural processes (Pew Research Center 2015). Furthermore, most of these
supernatural beliefs have increased over the last quarter century. According
to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (2009), belief in contact with
the dead and witnessing the presence of a ghost doubled between 1996 and
2009. Newport and Strausberg (2001) found less dramatic but nonetheless
consistent increases since 1990 in reported beliefs in hauntings, alien visita-
tion, clairvoyance, and channeling.
Americans are not alone. A recent U.K. poll, for example, found that 52
percent of Britons believe people have experienced ghosts and that 38 percent
believe people have witnessed alien spacecraft visiting Earth (YouGov 2013).
Likewise, Lyons (2005) reports that the populations of the United States,
Canada, and Great Britain generally hold similar levels of belief in astrology,
extraterrestrial visitation to Earth, and the ability to communicate mentally
with someone who has died. Christopher Bader, Joseph Baker, and Andrea
Molle (2012) indicate that rates of belief in astrology, communication with
the dead, and telepathy among the Italian population are higher than those
reported by David Moore (2005) in a Gallup poll of adult Americans. On
the other hand, American teens and college students are less likely than U.S.
adults to believe in extrasensory perception, telepathy, alien visitation, com-
munication with the dead, astrology, and several other supernatural abili-
ties (Farha and Steward 2006). Another poll (Pollack 2016) showed a less
consistent generational decline in supernatural beliefs: American teens are
less likely to believe in UFOs (29 vs. 35 percent) but more likely to believe
in ghosts (44 vs. 41 percent) relative to their adult counterparts. Despite
minor cultural and generational differences, survey data consistently show
I N T RODUC T ION / 3
that large proportions of people living in scientifically and technologically
advanced nations continue to believe in phenomena that cannot be explained
by established science.
These beliefs may be both fed and reflected by the plethora of supernatu-
ral books, television shows, and movies that crowd our shelves and screens.
Sales for the Harry Potter books top 400 million copies (Scholastic, n.d.),
while the Twilight saga has sold over 155 million copies (McClurg 2015).
In addition, the film adaptations of these book series have grossed a respec-
tive $7.7 billion (Nash Information Services, n.d.a) and $3.3 billion (Nash
Information Services, n.d.b) in global sales. Aside from these fantasy fiction
novels, our televisions are full of dramatized and reality-style supernatural
story lines. Dramatic shows like the aptly named Supernatural draw nearly
two million viewers each week (Porter 2016), and reality-style paranormal
investigation shows like Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventures each average ap-
proximately one million weekly viewers (Hibberd 2014; D. Holloway 2014).
The supernatural is also hot at the box office, where “found footage” horror
films such as the Paranormal Activity series capitalize on our fear that those
bumps in the night may be a demonic presence (Box Office Mojo, n.d.).
More recently, zombies have taken over the silver screen (Rutherford 2013).
In fact, Mikel Koven found that “more zombie movies were produced in
the dozen years after 9/11 than the sixty-two years before” (2015: 93). This
post-9/11 zombie fascination has spilled over to television, where AMC’s The
Walking Dead consistently ranks as one of the highest-rated television shows
in recent history (Kissell 2016). These patterns of media consumption reveal
a voracious contemporary appetite for supernatural stories of all sorts.
These supernatural manifestations in popular culture are worthy of
scholarly attention because of their symbolic significance alone: they rep-
resent our worst fears in an age of terrorism, global warming, and other
large-scale changes that threaten to destabilize or destroy life as we know it.
However, in an era when interactive media and reality television blur the line
between fantasy and real life, these media representations have also fueled
the growth of organizations and identities that are rooted in fictional—or at
least dramatized—portrayals of supernatural phenomena. Some simply seek
to live out fantasies, like the nearly two hundred teams in the United States
that play quidditch, a fictional game depicted in the Harry Potter books and
movies (US Quidditch, n.d.). Others fashion themselves as researchers seek-
ing empirical evidence for ghosts, lake monsters, UFOs, and other such phe-
nomena (Krulos 2015). In fact, 20 to 25 percent of Americans have actually
investigated ghosts, haunted houses, astrology, UFOs, or any one of the cryp-
tids within the field of cryptozoology (Bader, Mencken, and Baker 2010). A
third group, known as Otherkin, do not engage with the supernatural in a
4 / I N T RODUC T ION
playful or scientifically intended manner but actually believe themselves to
be supernatural, in that their identities as “real” vampires, elves, and other
such beings place them outside the bounds of humanity and scientifically
recognized biological categories (Laycock 2009, 2012). Although such groups
may seem odd at first glance, research shows that participants are usually mo-
tivated by common human interests like spiritual enlightenment, the hope of
scientific discovery, or the desire to feel special in some way (Bader, Mencken,
and Baker 2010; Denzler 2001; Northcote 2007). In other words, people who
personally engage with the supernatural are no kookier than the rest of us.
This nonjudgmental stance relative to supernatural beliefs and partici-
pation contrasts with earlier sociological work, which theorized that dis-
advantaged and marginal social groups—such as racial/ethnic minorities,
women, and the less educated—would report higher levels of supernatural
beliefs because they had less to lose in terms of social standing by adhering
to such beliefs (Bainbridge 1978; Wuthnow 1976). It also runs counter to
the majority of psychological research, which argues that supernatural beliefs
result from cognitive defects or psychoses. For example, Emilio Lobato and
colleagues report positive correlations between “epistemically unwarranted”
beliefs and “ontological confusion,” which they characterize as an inability
to distinguish between psychological, physical, and biological domains of
reality (2014: 618, 620). Likewise, Ken Drinkwater, Neil Dagnall, and An-
drew Parker (2012) found that supernatural believers exhibited lower than
normal levels of critical thinking, while Matthew Sharps, Justin Matthews,
and Janet Asten (2006) concluded that tendencies toward dissociation (feel-
ing disconnected from the everyday world) predisposed study participants
to make perceptual errors that increased their beliefs in ghosts, aliens, and
cryptozoological creatures. Other psychological studies (French and Stone
2014; Irwin 2009) show consistent relationships between fantasy proneness,
schizotypal behaviors, and supernatural beliefs.
In contrast, folkloric researchers have highlighted the cultural value of
such beliefs and practices. Bullard (1989) and Dewan (2006) show, for ex-
ample, how people who believe they have encountered UFOs and aliens rely
on established folkloric narrative structures to make sense of this potentially
traumatizing experience. Similarly, Diane Goldstein, Sylvia Grider, and Jean-
nie B. Thomas (2007), and a more recent volume edited by Jeannie Thomas
(2015), explore how contemporary ghost lore serves moral functions by warn-
ing the living of the evils of things like violence, slavery, and persecution.
Through a practice Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi (1983) refer to as
“ostention,” individuals sometimes reenact ghostly or other macabre legends
in hopes of experiencing contact with the supernatural. While ostention can
arguably be connected to murderous acts (Ellis 1989; Radford 2014), it more
I N T RODUC T ION / 5
often takes the form of “legend tripping,” as in the pilgrimage many residents
of San Antonio, Texas, make to the site of an accident involving a train and a
bus full of schoolchildren. As Carl Lindahl (2005) recounts, legend trippers
park on the train tracks and wait for the ghosts of the children to push them
to safety. Much like participants on ghost tours (Gentry 2007; J. Holloway
2010; also see Chapter 5), these pilgrims experience the excitement of possibly
encountering the spirits of the deceased even as they are exposed to tragic
tales that remind them to appreciate and live a moral life.
Sociologists have also begun to acknowledge the social and cultural value
of the supernatural. As self-reported religious beliefs and church attendance
decline in the United States and Europe (Bruce 2002; Pew Forum on Reli-
gion and Public Life 2009), supernatural beliefs can serve as a functional al-
ternative (Emmons and Sobal 1981; Hergovich, Schott, and Arendasy 2005)
or supplement (McKinnon 2003) to mainstream religious beliefs. A recent
series of studies indicates that supernatural beliefs are highest among people
who do not regularly attend church but nonetheless do not identify as athe-
ists (Bader, Baker, and Molle 2012; Baker and Draper 2010; Glendinning
2006; Mencken, Bader, and Kim 2009; Mencken, Bader, and Stark 2008).
It seems that the supernatural’s marginality to religion provides believers
with the freedom to develop their own metaphysical worldviews without the
baggage of doctrinal authority, proscriptive rituals, or paying of literal and
figurative dues. This flexibility allows believers to mix and match aspects
of supernatural and conventional religious belief systems, as when paranor-
mal investigators draw on their religious or spiritual beliefs for protection
and interpretation of events during a ghost hunt (Eaton 2015; Fitch 2013).
Moving the focus from belief to experiences of supernatural phenomena,
Dennis Waskul’s (2016) study of ghosts and hauntings illustrates the social-
psychological processes by which strange happenings are made into ghosts.
Most often, the people who conclude that they have experienced a haunting
are “rational believers” (Goldstein 2007: 66) and also have settled on this in-
terpretation reluctantly after eliminating other sensible explanations through
systematic, deductive processes. Collectively, a small but growing body of
literatures in the social sciences and humanities are starting to illuminate
the many valuable social and cultural functions performed by supernatural
beliefs and practices.
It may be fair to claim that the supernatural is experiencing a renais-
sance. Not only are media representations nearly ubiquitous, but increases in
reported beliefs and personal experiences suggest that the supernatural has
also colonized everyday life. At the very least, the popularity of the supernat-
ural in our era rivals the enormous popularity of séances and the Spiritualist
movement in the United States and Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth
6 / I N T RODUC T ION
c entury (Leonard 2005; Weisberg 2005). Although scholarly research has
lagged behind this cultural trend, an emerging body of literature by academics
and journalists treats the supernatural as worthy of serious study. However,
these investigations of supernatural phenomena are often separated by disci-
plinary boundaries within academia as well as divisions between what are con
sidered scholarly and popular treatments of the supernatural. We believe that
these barriers hinder understanding of the supernatural as a social and cul-
tural product that has real significance for believers in such phenomena. Our
aim in this book is to compile research from experts trained in the social
sciences and humanities into one reasonably comprehensive volume that il-
lustrates, as our title suggests, the social, cultural, and historical significance
of the supernatural.
Supernatural Definitions and Parameters
Though the word “supernatural” is common in casual conversation, it is
rarely if ever defined in its everyday usage. “Supernatural” is a word fre-
quently used to refer to religious phenomena in addition to being a catch-all
category for fantastic nonreligious phenomena: ghosts, vampires, Sasquatch,
aliens, UFOs, fairies, witchcraft, and so on. Moreover, “supernatural” is fre-
quently used interchangeably with “paranormal,” whose meaning includes
extrasensory perception, clairvoyance, telekinesis, and other alleged psychic
abilities. We believe that both tendencies are a mistake, and we call for dis-
tinctions that are more precise.
According to common cultural assumptions, there is a fundamental dif-
ference between two college students conversing with a spirit via a Ouija
board and an evangelical Christian who has been taken by the spirit of the
Holy Ghost. Likewise, having a conversation with the ghost of a former resi-
dent of your home is considered odd, but communicating with a deity via
prayer is perfectly normal. But what is the difference? The main difference
is that institutionalized religious beliefs have what David Hufford (1995: 18)
calls “cultural authority.” These beliefs are transmitted through social insti-
tutions that, through historical power struggles and intergenerational trans-
mission of values, are vested with the authority to declare certain worldviews
more valid than others. By virtue of being embedded in these legitimated
and legitimating institutions, evangelical Christians possess the power to
conventionalize their beliefs as valid religious phenomena while discrediting
nondoctrinal beliefs and rituals as invalid supernatural phenomena. Hence,
it is not the essential qualities of a phenomenon that make it religious or
supernatural but rather the dynamics of cultural authority that determine
which of these seemingly equivalent phenomena achieves legitimacy. Thus,
I N T RODUC T ION / 7
while nonhuman entities such as demons certainly fit the objective criteria
of supernatural creatures, they are nonetheless religious beings according to
our definition to the extent that their existence is asserted and legitimated
within the context of conventional Christian teachings. Conversely, despite
the subcultural growth of Wicca and goddess religions (Griffin 1995; Jensen
and Thompson 2008), witchcraft itself has not been integrated into domi-
nant religious discourse. Therefore, witches remain supernatural beings even
though some people embrace some forms of witchcraft as a new religion.
By disentangling the supernatural from religion, we are better able to
understand the supernatural as a modern concept, even though we see simi-
lar representations of the supernatural throughout history and across cul-
tures. As Émile Durkheim points out, the “supernatural” refers to “all sorts
of things which surpass the limits of our knowledge; the supernatural is the
world of the mysterious, of the unknowable, of the un-understandable” (1915:
39). Or at the very least, the supernatural refers to everything that we cannot
make understandable using socially legitimated means of knowledge produc-
tion—especially, in our era, the application of science, technology, and rea-
son. Hence, as Durkheim insightfully argues, the supernatural is necessarily
a modern idea simply because there can be no “supernatural” without “the
sentiment that a natural order of things exists, that is to say, that the phenom-
ena of the universe is bound together by necessary relations, called laws” (41;
emphasis in original). Durkheim further elaborates:
When this principle has once been admitted, all that is contrary to
these laws must necessarily appear to be outside of nature and, con-
sequently, of reason; for what is natural in this sense of the word,
is also rational, these necessary relations only expressing the man-
ner in which things are logically related. But this idea of universal
determinism is of recent origin. . . . [I]t is a conquest of the positive
sciences. . . . In order to arrive at the idea of the supernatural, it is not
enough, therefore, to be witness to unexpected events; it is also neces
sary that these be conceived as impossible, that is to say, irreconcilable
with an order which, rightly or wrongly, appears to us to be implied
in the nature of things. Now this idea of a necessary order has been
constructed little by little by the positive sciences, and consequently
the contrary notion could not have existed before them. (1915: 41–43;
emphasis added)
Thus, it is correct to claim that throughout recorded history people have
allegedly encountered things we might now interpret as supernatural phe-
nomena. However, it is incorrect to label these events in historical accounts as
8 / I N T RODUC T ION
supernatural if the experiences were interpreted and acted on in the context of
a religious worldview that framed the events as evidence of religious teachings
(as, for example, a sign from God). Likewise, it is historically inaccurate to
refer to these encounters as supernatural if they occurred before the develop-
ment of a modern paradigm in which the universe is understood as operating
according to immutable laws of nature. For these reasons, we must apply the
supernatural label carefully when comparing cross-cultural or transhistorical
accounts of such phenomena.
We reserve the term “paranormal” for alleged psychic abilities that defy
accepted scientific understanding of human mental capabilities.1 There are
several important differences between supernatural and paranormal phenom-
ena. One difference concerns testability. A person who claims to be clairvoy-
ant—that is, able to gain information about remote places, people, or events
using no known sensory medium or physical interaction—can be subjected
to laboratory tests designed to determine if such abilities are present. Such
methods are scientific in that they rely on falsifiable hypotheses that are
tested using controlled conditions that may be replicated by other research-
ers. In contrast, alleged supernatural phenomena such as ghost encounters
or alien abductions are fundamentally untestable. These phenomena do not
occur in a replicable fashion, the conditions in which they occur cannot be
controlled, and the evidence presented is generally anecdotal. While some
investigators of the supernatural, such as paranormal investigators and Big-
foot hunters, collect an enormous amount of empirical evidence, even the
clearest audio or video recording cannot prove the source of what we are
hearing or seeing. Although believers assert that evidence of even one excep-
tional case—one “white crow,” according to William James (1896: 884)—is
enough to disprove established science, the presence of one or two cases that
appear to deviate from expectations is insufficient to overturn centuries of
accumulated knowledge about the natural world. Absence of evidence is not
necessarily evidence of absence, but this inability to establish scientific meth-
1. This distinction parallels that made by parapsychologists between psi phenomena that
they attempt to test in laboratory settings, such as telekinesis or remote viewing, and other
phenomena generally labeled paranormal, such as ghosts and cryptids. While such a distinc-
tion is important for parapsychological research, we use “supernatural” and “paranormal” here
because these terms are more widely known to a general audience. In addition, we distinguish
“supernatural” from “paranormal” to emphasize that supernatural phenomena are presumed to
go against natural laws, whereas paranormal phenomena are assumed to violate social standards
of what is considered normal. We make one exception for ghost hunters, who prefer to be called
“paranormal investigators.” While this terminology does not adhere to our definition for people
who seek to accumulate evidence for the existence (or nonexistence) of ghosts—what we call
“supernatural” phenomena—we respect the descriptor they choose for themselves.
I N T RODUC T ION / 9
ods of investigation distinguishes supernatural phenomena from paranormal
abilities.
A second difference is that paranormal powers are presumed to originate
in the mental capabilities of otherwise ordinary human beings rather than
from nonhuman sources or manipulation of one’s environment by means of
magic. If someone believes he or she possesses the ability of psychokinesis—
moving objects purely with the power of the mind—then, for our purposes,
that is a paranormal phenomenon. However, if this person claims to move
objects by use of a spell or some other form of magic then, for our purposes,
that is a supernatural phenomenon. Equally, the power of telepathy—the al-
leged ability to send and receive messages simply through mental transference
between two or more living humans—is paranormal, but the claimed ability
to communicate with the dead or with otherworldly beings is supernatural.
Like distinctions between religious and supernatural phenomena, the differ-
ence between paranormal and supernatural phenomena lies not in the ways
these alleged abilities manifest themselves. Both psychokinesis and magic
could move objects in similarly astounding ways, for example. Rather, the
distinction between paranormal and supernatural phenomena rests on how
those who claim such abilities account for the origin of these powers. In the
former, such powers are presumed to be rare (but not superhuman) mental
capabilities that need no additional outside influence to be effective. The lat-
ter, on the other hand, requires some external source of power or information
to manifest what, on the surface, looks like the same phenomenon as that
produced through paranormal means.
A final difference concerns the inclusivity of the two terms. Using our
above definition, “paranormal” applies only to abilities, while “supernatu-
ral” encompasses abilities as well as entities. Because our goal in this volume
is to highlight the social and cultural functions of beliefs and practices
associated with both supernatural abilities (such as fortune-telling or com-
municating with the dead) and entities (such as ghosts or Bigfoot), use of
the more inclusive term “supernatural” is more appropriate. This focus on
personal experiences with or the historical effects of both supernatural abili-
ties and entities distinguishes this work from others that frequently empha-
size popular culture representations of the supernatural. The contributing
authors in this volume place an array of supernatural phenomena in their
appropriate historical, social, and cultural contexts. In doing so, they chal-
lenge the reader to not dismiss the supernatural as an unfortunate remnant
of some imagined irrational past. Such a dismissive attitude simply obscures
the important roles that supernatural beliefs and practices have played in
Western history.
