Podcast: Play in new window | Download

To read the whole script and check the images please visit the link on the website: https://real-sciences.com/?p=30365

Kenny Biddle is a science enthusiast who investigates claims of paranormal experiences, equipment, photos, and video. He promotes science, critical thinking, and skepticism through his blog I Am Kenny Biddle. He is the chief investigator in Skeptical Inquirer. He frequently hosts workshops on how to deconstruct and explain paranormal photography. Email – parainvestigator@comcast.net

Notes:

• 17:00 – 18:30 I wasn’t very accurate here, as I mentioned a mix of pseudoscience and superstition in the Middle east and North Africa
• I heard and read the misinformation about Friday 13^th, the victory against the Crusaders, in the 90s before the internet became more accessible, and currently it’s not very famous, so it couldn’t be found in the internet anymore – thankfully.
• Correction in minute 32: the article is in Skepdic website and it doesn’t mention parasites, but it mentions other explanations that causes hallucinations
• The map from The Conversation which actually talks about the ‘UFO sightings’, not UFO beliefs, but it could still reflect the interests about this topic
• Links: https://real-sciences.com/?p=30365; Apple podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/kenny-biddle-from-a-ghost-hunter-to-a/id1685001905?i=1000618369527; Google podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9yZWFsLXNjaWVuY2VzLmNvbS9lbi9jYXRlZ29yeS9wb2RjYXN0L2ZlZWQv/episode/aHR0cHM6Ly9yZWFsLXNjaWVuY2VzLmNvbS8_cD0zMDM2NQ?sa=X&ved=0CAUQkfYCahcKEwiwzciNmOH_AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ

Thanks for having me, it’s good to be on. So, my journey has been a long journey, I started up as a ghost hunter. I grew up in a catholic household, so I had these spiritual beliefs going on that opened me up to the possibility of the afterlife. I was always interested in ghosts and monsters. I grew up watching shows in the U.S called In Search Of, and another one called Unsolved Mysteries. They were really interesting stuff to me growing up. I didn’t have any fact checking ability back then. So, when I watched these series, I just took it at face value. ‘You said there’s a monster in the lake?’ Ok, I am onboard.

So, as I grew up and I got married. I got married back in 1997, and as a wedding gift to ourselves, we bought ourselves our first home computer. The internet was brand new, so, the first thing I did is: I looked up ghosts. I wanted to see what was in the air, what was going on. I found a group that got together in my area and they went to haunted houses and they investigated the stuff and I was like: my mind is blown. We can really do this? I can just join the group?

That’s what I did, I joined the group. I went out with them to places like cemeteries, haunted houses or historical locations. But, the more I learned, the more I was like: well, you know, some of this stuff are really cool, and I thought that these anomalies photographs like balls of light or misty forms or shadows are all ghosts. That’s what I was brought up on.

One day we were out in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which, for US history, was part of the civil war. There were 51 thousand casualties, so, it’s a hotspot for any ghost hunters. Any ghost-hunting group in the area love going there. I go for history, but the majority of people go for ghost stories. So, I am out there with my group attending one of the earliest ghost conferences, and this is the early 2000s.

We went out to the battlefield and we heard from the local rangers that this is a place where all the park rangers wouldn’t go because they were afraid of it. They saw ghosts and shadows and all these kinds of stuff. So, we learned about it, that’s where we were going. Myself and a small group of people were in the woods. We were waiting patiently. It’s dark. It’s quiet. While we were waiting for something to happen, I look out past the tree line into an open field and there’s a road. I see three cars, driving down the road. I see their headlines, and I said that’s a big deal, then they called over, and the people went out, and they started walking in the open field and it wasn’t too far from us. I see flashlights, temperature guns, and laser pointers – they were playing with the laser pointers, and that’s what we do with the laser pointers – and they were making a lot of noise, and I started to get angry about this because they were disturbing what we were doing and we were serious.

They started getting closer, walking in my direction, I thought ‘They’re going to find us, they’re going to ask what we are doing, they’re going to join us’, I don’t want that. This is our territory and I don’t want to share. The closer they got, the madder I got, so I lost my temper, I walked out of the woods and I started screaming at them: ‘shut up, turn around and go away, this is our spot, leave us alone’. To my surprise, they all stopped, turned around, went back to their cars and drove away.

The next morning, we got up, and went down to the conference. We were in the lobby and we were talking to a bunch of people. Then we started to talking to a group of people who had seen a ghost last night. So, we started talking, asking questions, and we knew that they were in a place called the wheat field, and I said ‘that’s great, that’s where we were’. We were next to their field! Then I asked ‘at what time?’, they said it was eight o’clock or so. I said: ‘that’s great, we were there at that time’. Wait a minute, we were right there, why didn’t we see this? And then, the light bulb over my head went on: ‘I think you saw me!’

‘No, it was a real aberration’ they said. Then I asked if it ‘came out and started yelling at you’. They said ‘yes, but we couldn’t understand what it was saying and it wasn’t you’. That was me! And I described their flashlights, their lasers, how many people they were, how many cars. I described all this information to them. They were still insisting that it wasn’t me. Then, they were mad, and one of them told me ‘stop stealing our spotlight’, because everyone starting listening to them as they are the only ones who came from last night with aberration story. They were mad that I was stealing their thunder or their popularity.

Then it hit me: ‘we are all ghost hunters here, we are the same, and I am telling you exactly what happened. I was there and I am telling you all this information but you’re ignoring it and going with your belief.

In the next couple of weeks, I re-evaluated what I was doing. I realized that I did ignore many things because I wanted to hold on my belief. The more I realized that, the more I wanted to learn about science and the scientific approach to this.

So, I started reading skeptical literature, and I found Skeptical Inquirer magazine, which is a great circle, then I found the work of Benjamin Radford and Joe Nickell. They were doing excellent work, they weren’t just investigating. My term for investigating was just going out and sitting in the dark, waiting for something to happen. They were actually investigating claims, and then, coming to a conclusion based on all the information they had. I thought that was great so I learned more about them. Eventually, I transitioned over to the skeptical side, because I was also in the photography. I love photography. Then, I figured out how all these anomalies that we get that some people consider ghosts. I figured out how they were created and how you can get them by mistake or on purpose.

Then I started reaching out to different people, I reached out to Ben Radford and he suggested that I write for the Skeptical Inquirer newsletter, which was Skeptical Briefs. I wrote two or three articles for them. Then I started writing for Skeptical Inquirer, the online version, then Barry Kar, my boss now said: ‘Do you want to write a column?’ and I started doing that. They also wanted to know if I can do videos, so I started producing videos for them.

Then Joe Nickel, who was investigating claims as long as I’ve been alive, had stepped down from here, and there was a position here that they wanted to keep it. So, I applied, and they said: ‘yes, we love your work, we love what you do’ and here I am, I am in the office.

That’s a great story, and I think it would be more interesting if you can share some of your photos

[Kenny commented that he doesn’t publish his work, and his photos of recreating the ghosts’ photos are all on the website Skeptical Inquirer]

What’s your strategy when talking with someone who claims that he/she has seen paranormal things?

The first thing is to listen to them, not to dismiss them, because they experienced something, although we don’t know yet what is it. They interpret it as a ghost or a shadow or a monster, but do we really know that? I want to listen to their stories, and to ask and get clarifying details.

My follow-up question for someone who claims to have seen a ghost in a dress is to ask about the dress. I try not to give them any kind of descriptors. I don’t want to put my terminology on their mouths.

I try to have a discussion rather than me telling them, and maybe give hints over what I think it might be, and really make them to get to a conclusion. One of the exercises I do is to say, alright we talked about your experience, you think it’s a ghost, what if we set that aside and we think for other possibilities to explain it without invoking the paranormal. Once we get to this side, they come up with many explanations by their own. When they do it themselves, it makes more impact on their thinking, and that’s my goal: to improve the quality of their thinking.

It really comes down to listening, because so many times I’ve seen someone who have a weird experience, or strange experience they can’t understand it and they don’t know where to turn. Then, they reach out to someone in the skeptical community. Instead of having a conversation about, sometimes they just tell them they’re hallucinating or that they’re stupid. I can’t stand that, because it’s not building your relationship. It just makes them hate us more, and vice-versa.

My best advice is: be nice, talk about it, and see if you can reach a common conclusion based on really thinking it out. If you can’t come to a conclusion, the best answer is ‘I don’t know’, it’s as simple as that, rather than what some people from both sides do, to make up some explanation to justify their explanation or to justify their belief in ghosts. Stop making things up, when you don’t know, just say ‘I don’t know’.

There’s an Arabic pre-Islamic version of ghosts, where Arabs used to be afraid of going into some area in the desert where there are empty old houses because they believed they were haunted by Jinns. That belief later became the Islamic version of ghosts. But I can’t claim that this is the most common superstition in the region. I remember having a conversation about a full moon with an American woman who talked about that belief in the American culture, but I told her then that it’s not the same here, nothing bad will happen because nobody believes in that. So I can say in the middle east and Northern Africa, medical superstition and pseudoscience are the most common form of non-scientific beliefs. There is a whole industry of alternative medicine: from healers to medications. That could be a reason why there’s a difference in the distribution of these beliefs. I can also mention – I mentioned our version of ghosts – the wide range of beliefs about the evil eye as well. So, if I want to make a list of these beliefs, I would say that there’re things that are related to medicine, things that are related to religion such as claiming that religion agrees with science and things that are related to the evil eye. Can you make a similar list of the most common superstitious beliefs in the West or at least in the United States? [17:00 – 18:30 I wasn’t very accurate here, as I mentioned a mix of pseudoscience and superstition in the Middle East and North Africa].

There are so many cultures in the United States, there are different beliefs and different superstitions in the different parts of the country. Some of the common ones that we have, you mentioned the full moon, where people believe that more injuries will happen at the full moon, or people become crazy or crazier depending on the full moon. There’s a popular belief that things happen in threes, so if something bad happens, people would expect at least two more things to happen, but they don’t really count if you got four then they start another one, so there’s always a justification.

You mentioned medicine and stuff, we have a huge problem with Homeopathy here, which is not medicine but people love using this, and promoting it as something that cures anything from the common cold to cancer, and basically, it’s all the same, it’s water dropped on a sugar pill and they sell it for extremely a lot of money. It usually costs more than the actual cost of medicine. But there’re claims that it cures people and it’s all-natural, so people believe in that.

We have things like the 13^th floor, there’re a lot of buildings that don’t have a 13^th floor. They have it, but when you get into the elevator, it goes from 12 to 14. So, you get out on the 14^th floor, but technically you’re on the 13^th.

We have also the superstition about bad luck of you can’t walk under a ladder. That’s a big superstition, don’t walk under a ladder, you can’t have a black cat cross your path because that’s bad luck. People counter the bad luck by knocking on wood.

I am not immune to superstitions, I have superstitions when it comes to technology, whenever I go to the store, if I got to the store and I am buying something new of any kind of technology, I can’t take the first box. In my head, all what I can picture is that there’s someone else picked that, they’ve shaken it, maybe looked inside, maybe messed with it. So, I don’t do that, I usually pick the last.

If you want to talk about religion, I still see people wear crucifixes and if the were in a wearied or scare situation, they hold it and they say a prayer, a common phrase is that the power of Christ compels you, which they believe it will stop the evil or the fear and make them feel better. I wear the hammer of Thor, my wife bought it for me because I crush the hopes and dreams of ghosts hunters everywhere, that’s why she got me Thor’s hammer.

You mentioned number 13 and I think there’s something similar with Friday 13^th, right?

Yes, we have Friday 13^th here, the popular movie.

There’s a similar misinformation in the middle east, there are those who say that the Westerners just hate Friday 13^th when the moon is full, because it’s the day when Saladin made a victory against the crusaders, but if you check the date of the battle in Google you’d find that it’s 4^th July, but I haven’t checked if it was a Friday or not. [Note: I heard and read this misinformation in the 90s before the internet become more accessible to people, and currently it’s not very famous, so it couldn’t be found in the internet].

When I grew up, we had a series of films called Friday 13^th, the first one came at 1976 or 1977 and that’s all what I know about Friday 13^th. It was all about a character called Jason, and he goes around and he murders everyone. That’s how I see Friday 13^th. You also see many Americans who see it as a bad luck day.

In the Center for Inquiry (CFI) had Friday the 13^th Party, on Friday the 13^th one year, and there was a sign on my window that says: ‘Please, step on the cracks because apparently stepping on cracks is a superstition that brings bad luck. We also set ladders up so that you can walk underneath them all day long. We had fun with it.

Kenny, have you come across the story of Carpathian Castle or Le Château des Carpathes which is a novel by Jules Verne?

I have not.

This was a novel by Jules Verne about a haunted castle in the Carpathian Mountains in eastern Europe. It was a good experience for me in childhood to read about a story of a fearful haunted castle which later gets discovered by a few people who decide to go there, and they find that everything was made up and there’s nothing supernatural. There was someone who intentionally do all the tricks.

Now, if we can move deeper on what are the most common scientific explanations of ghost phenomena, we know that there’re hallucinations, and we know that there are some chemical effects that can induce hallucinations. Can you make a list of the top causes of this phenomenon of believing in ghosts?

I find number one cause is misperception. People don’t understand what they’re looking at or what they are experiencing, and they jump right to a belief. Because most of these people that I engage with are ghost hunters who are basically hobbyists. This is their hobby, it’s not their career or business, even if they’re on TV, but it’s a hobby. So, when they’re going out, they already have this idea in their head that a location is haunted, and that’s going on with a bias honestly. They’re already believing that this place is haunted. They heard stories, they heard other groups going there and they want to get the same experience. A lot of these locations now have papers that lists all the ghosts that are supposed to be there, what they do, what their names are. So, you get all this priming, and the people are ready to believe, there’s no science or whatsoever.

I think the biggest problem there is perception, they go there with a false idea of what’s going on. When they look at a photograph that has a glowing form of light or a misty form in it or even a shadowy figure. First, they’re primed, they already think that the place is haunted, they are going to say naturally that this picture has a ghost. The second issue is there’s a lack of knowledge.

There’s a severe lack of knowledge and critical thinking. You have people who are not photographers, giving expert analysis of photographs, you have people who never did video editing, giving expert analysis on videos. The same thing with audios, experts opinions on audio, and none of them have been in front of a mixer before.

So, you have a lot of self-proclaimed experts in fields that they have no knowledge in. So, I think that’s your two big issues: misperception, and lack of knowledge.

There’s a lack of scientific controls. If we want to perform an experiment, we have to have some controls on that to control for the known variables. So, if I shine a light down the hallway, I can predict that it’s going to look this way, but if I put filters in front of it, it change the color. So, I have the controls and I have to be sure I put the right filters in front of it, and I have to be sure that there are no other light sources in that hallway, because that would affect it. If I am holding a red light and someone forgot to turn off the ceiling light which is yellow, that’s going to give different color. So you have to be sure you control the lights. Basically, you have to be able to control everything that’s going on during your experiment, and when these haunted houses being investigated, there are no controls.

They leave a recorder or another device in the room by itself for hours and there’s no control. Nobody knows what’s going on, there’re no monitoring, nobody knows anything if somebody walked in by mistake or walked out. They don’t know if an animal came in from outside through a hall in the wall. No controls whatsoever. So, those are the three biggest.

Then, we go into analysis, if you’re not expert in something, you shouldn’t give expert analysis on something like photographs or video. But, they do, for some reason, when you become a ghost hunter, you suddenly become an expert in everything, you automatically know everything about forensics, photography, biology, chemistry, physics, space-time continuums, you know it all because you suddenly call yourself a ghost hunter.

So, you don’t give a huge window in the explanations for something like the hallucinations. I thought that maybe the first story is coming from someone who’s really seeing hallucinations. There’s an article in skeptical Inquirer, about parasites that grow in these old houses and when you smell them they may induce hallucinations, you don’t give so much value to these explanations. [Correction minute 32: the article is in Skepdic website and it doesn’t mention parasites, but it mentions other explanations that causes hallucinations]

Well, they’re important too, but the examples I gave are the most common ones I came across. I don’t normally come across people who are hallucinating. Once in while it does happen, and it is still in the running, that’s still something you have to consider. But the most common thing for me, is the items that I listed. Because you can also go into how your perception is altered and one way is through hallucinations because your perception is altered through that state of mind. But if someone watched a horror movie, I can guarantee the rest of the night they’re going to be jumping. Any little creek that happens any light in the hallway, they’re going to jump at it ‘what’s that! What’s down the hallway? We’re going to get possessed, I can see all that happening’. You take that same person, and you set them in front of a Disney family movie that all nice and everybody is happy and everything is good in the end, they’re not going to jump at every noise.

Drugs, alcohol, medications can also induce hallucinations whether visual or auditory.

Illnesses also, the mother of a friend of mine was experiencing ghosts. She was seeing people from her family like her husband who died 20 years prior. She was seeing little children running around, or people that she didn’t know breaking into her house. When I talked to him, I told that this is kind of a medical issue and you need to talk to a doctor. Next day, they found that she was suffering from urinary tract infection, and that’s one of the most common causes for people having hallucinations.

There’s a lot of common things. I listen to the stories and I ask questions and I clarify few things, then I start making a list of all the possibilities that I can come up with. Medications is always on there, have you talked to your doctor, have you talked to a psychiatrist or a psychologist?

This map shows that there could be some correlation between being in the English-speaking world and UFO beliefs. Do you have any conclusions about demographics or any information about the education or age of those who believe in supernatural phenomena? For example, I can say that those who believe in pseudoscience in the Arabic-speaking world usually have some education, but those who put a child inside a dead animal to cure it of a disease, they’re totally not educated.

So what do they do? Do they put the child inside a dead animal?

Yes, so when the slay a cow or a sheep and they take the guts from inside, they then put the child for a few seconds inside [see the link below]. It’s not common, but you can see some doctors talking about it when they treat a child in a bad condition, and they may ask, what did you do to the child? Oh, we did nothing, just we did this and that. And it’s all superstitions.

You can classify the people who believe in these things by their education level, or where they live, or their language, we also talked about the full moon. So, what’s your view about demographics, education, or any other type of segmentation?

Personal experience, there’re different education levels, from high school degrees, up to college. Even among academics, I saw those who believe in religious miracles, or ghosts. I don’t see much though, I do see it with religion though, because I used to be around Catholics. So, the majority of people that I deal with are some kinds of Christian and there are a lot of beliefs that come from that. I see a lot of them wearing crosses, but they also invoke prayers before and after they do a ghost hunt. So I see that association with beliefs.

I pulled up a graph here (from a survey from 2022), it shows that on the top of the list when it polled Americans, there are 37% Catholics and that’s the top tier, the top demographic that believed in supernatural events or superstitions, 30–40-year-old were next, a family income of 100 thousands dollars or more. That doesn’t surprise me because psychic people and mediums is like a hundred-million-dollar industry. When you’re selling crap, like cold-reading and hot-reading techniques. I’ve seen psychics who charge 40-50$ for 15 minutes for people to talk to them. Most of that time, they ask you questions, you give them the answer, and they give it back. I don’t get the value in that money, but that’s what people do and they keep coming back. So, I can understand that.

We also have the people who live in the north-east of the country. People who are spiritual, which doesn’t surprise me. Then, people with a college degree have more superstitious beliefs that those who are without a college degree. Republicans more than Democrats, women more than men.

I think it’s definitely like you how you grew up and who influenced you and then later in life. If you’re willing to accept those stories, and you if you want to learn critical thinking or not. If you want to start looking at things in more detail. So, I think it’s really across the board although that that thing with the college degree really surprised me.

Another thing about haunted houses, I remember there were three stories of three haunted houses in the neighborhood where I lived in Baghdad. Two of these houses were sold and they became fancy houses, something that makes me believe that there could be some real estate conspiracy behind the ghost stories. I don’t know if you agree with that or not or if it is possible or common or not. the third house I can’t remember if it was sold and was refurbished or rebuilt and remade in a beautiful way or not, but with time all the stories about The Three Houses have gone so how old could a story about a haunted house go? and also, could it be related to someone who wants to sell the house and lower the price so that they give such stories? I remember hearing the stories about one of these houses and the house had a statue of an eagle on the top of it. The children were talking about it, and someone said ‘I went there to take the ball and I heard someone shouting’, Here I remember the Carpathian castle of Jules Verne that there could be someone staying there and shouting and doing these effects sometimes if the house is going to be sold with something like a hundred thousand dollars (maybe that was the price of the house). I think these are two questions or two topics.

So, there’s really no time limit on how old a house could be or has to be in order to have a ghost story associated with it, because it’s not always the house. Sometimes it’s just the land. I’ve had several stories come my way where the house that’s on the land now is like the second or third house that was built there. So, it was like previous houses where something happened.

But when you have an older house that provides more history, you know that provides a longer time period in which to set your spooky events or horrible events that would lead up to a haunting.

But I mean I’ve had people tell me that brand new houses that are only like five years old have something going on, and there’s no history associated with it. There’s nothing about the land, it’s newly developed land, and all of a sudden that’s haunted so then it transfers over, or the blame transfers over to maybe an object, perhaps they brought something home, they went to a haunted house somewhere else and when they came home, they brought a spirit with them. They brought an extra guest, or maybe they brought on an object at an antique store that’s supposed to be cursed or possessed or something like that, and now that’s the cause of it.

So, there really is no time limit because there’re other factors involved that people will bring into the story that narrative can go anywhere at once really.

When we’re talking about price manipulation, I’ve seen it go both ways. To be honest, I’ve seen people lose money because their house was allegedly haunted. I mean we have a case here and in New York, that is called the Ghostbusters case, because it went to court because so many tried to buy the house and found out like before they purchased it completely, they were on their contract to buy the house. But then they found out that there was a magazine article that came out from the former owner that told ghost stories that allegedly happened in the house. It wasn’t told to the new owner, so they went to court and the buyer was able to get out of the contract because of this.

We have another one. I don’t know if you’ve known that the movie, The Conjuring, Have you heard of that? [No]. Okay that’s good it sucks, you don’t need to see it but it’s based on a true story, I say that very loosely, it was in Rhode Island, and it’s a farmhouse, and it’s known for the story to be haunted. I knew one of the owners or the previous owners, she was a very nice lady. As soon as the movie came out, people started going to her house, like on her property, trespassing it, not asking for permission, just going on, banging on the door, trying to look inside the windows, it made life really hard for her, so she sold the house. She sold it to a couple that turned it into a tourist attraction. That couple only paid about 400,000 dollars for it, but because it became so popular, they sold the house again, they resolved the house a year later for 1.5 million dollars. So, over a million-dollar profit because of the reputation of that house being haunted. So, that’s definitely manipulation but in a way we wouldn’t expect. It can really go either way.

I’ve come across two people already in the last year who wanted me to come out to investigate their house in order to get evidence so they can show it off to a TV shows and get on TV because they want to either open it up to rent for ghost Hunters every weekend, or they want to sell it for a Higher price. So, they were actively seeking out someone, and if this someone is the wrong person for that, like you don’t want that, because I’m not going to find your ghost! I’m gonna find out what what’s going on. But they were actively looking for people to come in and promote this haunted activity in order to get more money out of it. So, it really can go either way.

I can understand small towns too if you don’t want to be bothered because there is a downside to it. Once people know that your house has a reputation for being haunted, everybody wants to go and nobody is respectful. They don’t care that you’re the owner. They don’t care about your peace and quiet. They don’t care about your privacy. They want to come on to your land because most of these tourists or ownlookers think they have a right to just walk onto your property, and that’s why my friend that owned The Conjuring house first sold it, because she couldn’t take it anymore people were just pounding out all hours of the night just breaking into our her barn trying to get into the house. I mean it was terrible.

As far as you know, is there any culture that doesn’t have ghosts’ beliefs?

I’m sure there is, I don’t know of any often and I did a quick search I couldn’t find any culture that popped up. But there may be, but I kind of think supernatural or paranormal beliefs is a wide net. Like when you talk, when you say paranormal, that covers a lot of things that doesn’t describe one particular thing in detail. It’s a wide net. So, when you throw that, when we throw that word out there it can mean anything from seeing a shadow float around and scream get out of your house to some cultures that take their deceased loved ones back out of their graves and prop them up and celebrate their lives, they’re talking about the ancestors or praying to thier ancestors that’s to me a supernatural belief.

Yes, but what if we talk about ghosts only?

Ghosts only, so I guess it would go in the same category. I don’t know of any culture that doesn’t have some form of Ghost, and again does that mean the ghost of your parents? ghost of your children coming back? or just that ghost in general? I’m not trying to derail your question is just like even when you say ghost it’s such an open-ended term that like what does that mean? I don’t know it’s just when I come across ghost hunters and they’re like ‘well you know. what I saw is ghost and it did this’, and my first question is what do you mean by Ghost? like what are you talking about? did you see a person? because for us, like you could say, I had a ghost experience and that could mean I saw a figure that looked solid just like you and me I saw somebody they walked into a room I went down to the room nobody was there. You can also have someone see a flutter of light like shine around or zip around, that’s a ghost you could also have. Someone that is sitting there like working one day in their office and their and they hear what they think is their name being called from down or from outside. They think their wife or their husband is calling their name and they go out, nobody called them that’s a ghost. That can be described as a ghost. So, we had no idea what it really means but so to get back to your actual question I don’t know personally of any cultures that do not have some kind of Supernatural belief or ghost belief so that’s the best I can do for you.

Links:

Stories of Jinn pre-Islam (Arabic), realistic stories, 4^th December 2021

Analysis of the traditional superstitions in Iraq (Arabic), Real Sciences, 9 November 2019

Kenny Biddle, Is my mother seeing ghosts? A friend asks for advice. Skeptical Inquirer

حقيقة البيوت المسكونة، العلوم الحقيقية