I would call myself the skeptic who wants to believe. Histories of dragons that I believed without a hint of reluctance; carefully building fairy houses out of rocks, bark, and leaves; a firm belief that wizardry was something I could do if I worked hard enough with the right tools; a fascination with ghost stories and tales of spectral engagement with the living. I recall sitting in the designated computer room at my bulky desktop, watching with the highest level of focus my young brain could muster, YouTube videos of alleged paranormal activity before researching how to get my grubby little kid hands on whatever special wood I needed to make a wizard wand.

Nothing I watched or read ever proved anything and answered my questions to my satisfaction, but I was desperate to find the proof I wanted. I really wanted it all to be true, that I could work hard enough to get access to an otherwise unseen, ethereal world hidden among our own.

Even in college I found myself binge watching Buzzfeed Unsolved, getting fully behind the energy of the ghost-tale believer but ultimately siding with the skeptic. I was enamored by the simple question of what could be out there that we can’t see…yet. And I was quietly, secretly, a little bit frustrated that I had never had an “unexplainable” encounter. Despite all my childhood efforts! Despite growing up a rough 40 minute drive from St. Augustine, allegedly one of the most haunted cities in America! It felt almost insulting, how bad I craved it with no payoff.

What does it mean to long for the unseen, unknowable, and ethereal, and what can anthropology tell us about the power of absence?

Ghosts as Cultural Texts

When I was a kid, I wanted, needed ghosts to be real – desperately. But now I find myself more interested in the stories we tell about them than in whether they actually exist. Ghost stories aren’t just about creaky floorboards or flickering lights. They’re often about grief, guilt, or unfinished business. They’re ways of talking about what haunts us, even if we don’t believe in the paranormal.

Across cultures and across time, people have tried to make sense of death, and what might come after it, through story. And honestly, who can blame us? It’s unsettling to imagine just…stopping. Every known human culture has had rituals, myths, or beliefs about the dead. Not just because we miss people, but because there’s something deeply uncomfortable about absence and the very concept of non-existence. That discomfort shows up in how we talk about ghosts.

Some scholars argue that ghost stories are less about the dead and more about the living – about what we’re carrying, what we’ve lost, and what hasn’t been put to rest. Avery Gordon’s idea that haunting is a way the past presses into the present has stuck with me. Indeed, a haunting doesn’t always involve a shadowy figure at the end of a hallway. Sometimes it’s a silence that shouldn’t be there, or a story that never gets told.

That idea followed me into my work in museum anthropology, where I studied how institutions try to represent cultures and memories. Museums are full of objects, but as fascinating as they are, I often find myself drawn to the gaps – to the things that were missing from their spot in collections. Items that had been returned, like the empty space for Benin Bronzes left behind at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Sometimes, absence is louder than presence. And just like with ghost stories, those absences ask us to reckon with what’s been buried, or what’s been taken.

St. Augustine and Haunted Geography

St. Augustine markets itself as the oldest city in America, and if you ask any ghost tour guide weaving through its cobbled streets, or specifically the really enthusiastic guide who took my group through the Spanish fort, the Castillo de San Marcos, also the most haunted. Spanish colonial architecture leans into the myths; plaques talk about historical sieges and saints, but the tour guides talk about cold spots, phantom footsteps, and a headless soldier who roams the fort. I grew up about forty minutes from all this.

As a kid, it didn’t feel strange that the past clung to that place so visibly. It’s part of the charm, but it was easy to forget the wide draw the city has until I realize I’m surrounded by far more foreign tourists than locals. Looking back now, it’s clear how much of that hauntedness was crafted: a mix of folklore, tourism, and selective memory. The stories that get told again and again in those tours are rarely about the Indigenous Timucua people who lived there first, or the enslaved Africans whose labor shaped the city (unless it’s to tour their allegedly haunted quarters in the fort). It’s all colonial ghosts and romanticized pirate lore, the classic specters with economic value.

I was somewhere between 11 and 13 while on that memorable tour through the fort. Our guide was a bit overenthusiastic, or maybe I was just aging out of his brand of theatrics. Regardless, I was confronted with the reality that I had expected a higher degree of professionalism on this ghost tour and was met instead with a gaudy performance (no offense – we all have to pay our bills). This irked me; my childhood thus far was characterized by a deep desire for the ethereal to be taken seriously, and now this guy was making a whole joke of it and more fixated on trying to spook the other kids than actually inform us. It became clear that these ghost stories were more of an exhibition than a sincere paranormal historical tour. 

These facts are abundantly clear to any adult, and probably to any other middle schooler who didn’t desperately want academic validation for the paranormal. But I was deeply serious about it and frustrated that nobody would match my energy, nor was I finding anything supernatural on my own.

Longing, and the Frustration of Not Being Chosen

By college, I’d mostly given up on finding ghosts in the wild. But that didn’t stop me from binge-watching Buzzfeed Unsolved, rooting for Shane and Ryan to finally catch a shadowy figure on camera or have something slam a door in their faces. I loved the dynamic: the wide-eyed believer paired with the lovable skeptic. I was, and still am, the skeptic who wants to believe. The one who’s always hoping for just one unexplainable moment, a sign from something of another plane or realm, and quietly frustrated I’ve never had one.

It’s not for lack of trying. I was raised Catholic, but even as a kid it felt more like mythology than belief. Saints and angels lived in the same part of my brain as Zeus and Hera. I wanted it to be real – I even tried praying, especially when I was being bullied and didn’t know who or how else to ask for help. I remember praying hard, wanting some kind of sign, some flicker of cosmic attention. But nothing came. When bolder students in Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD) class asked too many questions, the answer was always the same: just have faith. It never sat right with me.

For a brief, anxious phase, I was terrified I might go to hell for thinking the wrong thoughts, for still having these questions – forever in Hell is an awfully long time. But then I started learning about the vast history of our world – billions of people over thousands of years, practicing and passing down countless traditions, all convinced they had the truth. It made Hell seem a little less plausible.

Still, the desire for contact stuck around. Even after I stopped believing in a god who could hear me, I kept hoping some other invisible, ethereal force might. And for some reason, the paranormal – ghosts, spirits, haunted places – felt more available. Like maybe if I just stood in the right place or stayed quiet long enough, the world would finally whisper back, and maybe listen to whatever I had to say.

I’ve since learned that this kind of spiritual exclusion isn’t uncommon. Across cultures, people describe trying to connect with spirits, ancestors, or the divine, and feeling like no one’s picking up on the other end. I speculate that ghost stories are partly about longing. Not just for the dead, but for proof that we’re not alone. That someone, or something, is still paying attention, and can be reached if you try a little harder.

Giving Space to the Unseen, But On Whose Terms?

St. Augustine loves its ghosts. If you’ve ever taken one of the night tours, you know the drill: flickering lanterns, dramatic pauses, reenactments of tragic deaths, whispered names of the dead, getting all up in your face if you don’t seem amused enough. You might hear about a bride who died before her wedding, or a soldier sealed into a coquina wall. The stories could be spooky for a younger crowd, sure – but they’re also safe, sanitized, and, most importantly, marketable. I didn’t notice it much as a kid, but even when these ghost stories involve enslaved people, Indigenous histories, or the deeper violences baked into the foundations of “America’s oldest city,” it still feels more like narrative background than places of somber tragedy to connect with the dead.

They weren’t meant to make you uncomfortable. They were meant to sell t-shirts.

This isn’t unique to St. Augustine. Across the world, ghost stories are often told on behalf of the dead, but rarely in service of them. Truly, a haunting and its legacy isn’t a neutral occurrence. Who gets to decide which stories are remembered? Which ghosts are invited into the narrative, and which are shut out, and how are they characterized in modern narrative?

During my time in school studying museum anthropology, I learned to really start paying closer attention to what wasn’t being shown. Sometimes the absences are loud, like an empty display where an item was returned to its community or is otherwise in transit to new observers. Other times, the silence is quieter: a vague label, a missing name, an exhibit that skips over an uncomfortable truth. These curatorial choices – what to include, what to exclude, and how to frame absence – aren’t so different from ghost stories. Both ask us to reckon with presence that isn’t fully visible. Both are shaped by power. And both can either challenge erasure, or reinforce it.

When I think about what it means to give space to the unseen, I can’t help but ask: whose unseen? Is it the bride in the white dress? Or the ancestor whose name was erased from the record? The ghosts we remember shape who we become. But so do the ones we’re never told about.

Conclusion: Still Wanting to Believe and Living with the Unseen

I never got my ghost story. No doors slammed, no shadows darted across my bedroom wall, no disembodied voices whispered my name. No mysterious orbs in my St. Augustine photos, said to represent meandering spirits. Despite all my hoping, my quiet waiting, my hours of ghost-hunting content and awkwardly sincere middle school tours through “haunted” forts, the supernatural never reached out. And yet, I can’t seem to let it go.

But maybe that’s the point. Maybe we’re not chasing proof so much as possibility. Not answers, but affirmation that the things we feel but can’t explain still matter. That our griefs, our longings, our unanswered questions aren’t just personal. They’re part of something bigger, something shared.

Anthropology taught me how to trace the shape of absence. How to recognize when something is missing, and how to listen for what’s been silenced. And the more I’ve done that, the more I’ve come to see haunting not as a rare supernatural occurrence, but as a fact of life. We are all haunted, in small ways. By memories, by history, by stories we were never told but still carry.

I’m still the skeptic who wants to believe. Maybe I always will be. But now, I think I’ve made peace with not being chosen. After all, absence can be just as powerful as presence. And if there’s any magic to be found, maybe it lives in that quiet space – where what’s missing still shapes us, even if we never get to see it for ourselves.