Ghost criminology contends that places scarred by crime and atrocity retain a residue that indelibly marks the site. Are these putative “stains” contained within physical settings, or simply the result of telling ghost stories? I employ a preregistered 2 × 2 field experiment crossing two architecturally matched university buildings: one documented as a Civil War era locale built with enslaved labor and used for mass amputations and temporary corpse storage, the other lacking any violent history. Narratives either truthfully described the atrocity site’s traumatic history, or falsely ascribed that same history to its matched cousin with a boring past; 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. For ghost criminology to retain explanatory force, proponents must specify observations and thresholds whose failure would count against the theory; absent that, it is best read as an interpretive vocabulary rather than an empirical account.
Ian T. Adams (Mon,) studied this question.