If you’ve recently seen a ghost, you could be in line for $100,000 – just so long as you caught your supernatural sighting on a Ring camera. With Halloween around the corner, the home surveillance company is offering a hefty sum to anyone who can capture footage of paranormal activity, with a Ghostbusters actor, Finn Wolfhard, helping to choose the winner.
But while Ring’s competition might be a PR stunt, ghostly experiences can feel very real, especially for those who are grieving.
Although there’s burgeoning research into the science of dying, there’s not so much about death itself. But there is one peer-reviewed study that investigated the probability of seeing the dead. More than a half-century ago, a doctor in Wales took on the topic. In 1972, the British Medical Journal published a paper titled the Hallucinations of Widowhood, in which the doctor, Dewi Rees, interviewed almost 300 widows and widowers in Wales about whether they had experienced the presence of a dead spouse. Almost half said they had, but most said they hadn’t disclosed their experiences to friends or relatives.
When asked how they felt about these experiences, most people said they had been helpful, about a quarter said they felt neutral about them and just 6% said that the experiences had been unpleasant. In most cases, the “hallucinations”, as they’re described throughout the paper, weren’t one-off cases but rather lasted for many years. Rees found that the likelihood of seeing the dead didn’t seem to change whether the widowed person was a woman or a man, or whether they were depressed or socially isolated.
The factor that seemed to make the biggest difference was time. The likelihood of witnessing a dead spouse increased if a couple had been married for a long time, had been happy and/or had children together.
This time element might offer a rational explanation to some – namely that the longer you see something, the more likely your brain is to tell you that it’s still there. Rees concluded his research by looking at two other widow studies – one in England (where half of widowed people encountered their dead spouse) and one in Japan (where 90% of widowers ‘hallucinated’) and concluded that this was a widespread phenomenon, though he noted: “It is generally considered that the Celtic character is highly imaginative and perceptive.”
Rees died in 2018. His obituary describes his long career in bereavement research, his commitment to his Christian faith and that he died a widower, his wife having departed 12 years before him.
