My School Was Not Haunted: How Instincts and Reason Can Mess with Your Brain

Before my career change to accounting, I taught eighth-grade math for eight years at Dixon Middle School in Provo, Utah. The school was crazy old. While I was there, it celebrated it's 70th anniversary. That means lots of dead people suffered the universally traumatic experience of seventh grade on that campus.

Regardless, my school was not haunted.

First off, let's be clear. Any self-respecting ghost wouldn't haunt a middle school. It's too easy. Thirteen-year-olds are tormented enough by each other. A ghost would just be one more in a long line of people telling particularly sensitive seventh grade girls to "get out."

Plus middle-schoolers believe anything. Haunt the faculty restroom at the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and I'd be impressed. Get an eighth-grader to think they saw a ghost standing behind them in the mirror, and you're more of an underachiever of a ghost than the eighth-grader is as an eighth-grader.

As a teacher, every now and then, I would have to go back to school at night to get some work done. The janitors were usually the last ones to leave the building, and they would turn off the hall lights with a breaker switch or one of those weird light switch keys. So if I came back late enough, the lights would be off, and I had no idea how to turn them back on. 

My classroom was about three-quarters of the way down a long hall, and if the lights were off, I would quickly become engulfed in darkness to the point where I would have to run my hand along the wall of lockers, counting the classroom doors to find my room. I would fumble with my keys in the dark to unlock the door, and then slap the wall inside my classroom until I located the light switch.

And every time I had to do it, it freaked the hell out of me.

I mean, I kept it together. But it would freak the hell out of me. I'd get real panicky, and I didn't know why.

Late at night, that school scared the crap out of me. It scared the crap out of me when I was a believer, and it scared the crap out of me when I was an agnostic.

I've never believed in ghosts. When I was a Christian, I believed in the Bible, which meant I believed in demons, but I never believed their level of influence or activity was inversely proportional to a room's lighting. 

So I knew I shouldn't be scared. But I was, and I couldn't help it.

But the school WASN'T HAUNTED. 

I realized through that experience that it may be possible that the human perception of a supernatural realm could be completely explained as a collision of instincts and logic.

My instincts were telling me that I was walking down the hallway of death. Makes sense. In prehistory, I would've had a better chance of surviving if I had an overriding visceral repulsion to places where I couldn't see that bear. The one that wanted to eat my face.

Our incessant determination to find causal relationships also aided our survival. If we were able to determine a cause-and-effect relationship, we could leverage it for survival. But if we misinterpreted mere correlation as causation, we were (generally) not any worse off for it. 

So in the hallway, my feeling of dread was real. I knew there was nothing in my physical environment to cause the feeling of dread, but my brain wanted to create a narrative to arrive at a cause-and-effect relationship. 

It's easy to see how early civilizations could arrive at the conclusion of a non-physical universe that coexisted alongside the physical. This would give rise to superstition which would lead to belief in the supernatural which could eventually be codified into religious belief.

Despite my first-hand experience of how spooky it feels at night, there are no ghosts at Dixon Middle School. Similarly, 2004 was the only year in the history of the school that the teachers lost the faculty-versus-student basketball game. Many students thought that was evidence of God's existence. But since that was the only year I ever played, it's merely proof that my basketball skills can ruin a 70-year winning streak.