“And I would have got away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids”: Experimentally falsifying Ghost Criminology

Abstract

Ghost criminology contends that places scarred by crime and atrocity emit a “spectral residue” that affects visitors to that site. To test whether unease stems from physical settings or from the stories told about them, I employ a preregistered 2×2 field experiment crossing two architecturally matched university buildings: one documented as a Civil-War hospital built with enslaved labor and used for mass amputations and temporary corpse storage, the other lacking any violent history. Narratives either truthfully described the hospital’s trauma history or falsely ascribed that same history to the nonviolent building; comparison conditions gave neutral architectural descriptions. When visiting one of the two sites, participants (N = 319) read a randomly assigned narrative, then completed scales of situational comfort, state anxiety, place attachment, moral gravity, and paranormal sensations. Across five preregistered outcomes, site history had no effect; narrative reduced comfort modestly whether true or fabricated, with no changes in anxiety, attachment, moral gravity, or anomalous sensations. The findings bound any environment-based “haunting” to negligible levels and locate unease in suggestion rather than setting.