While ghost-hunter shows call forth a range of phenomenological questions, they wrestle with metaphysical ones as well. The concepts implicitly advanced by ghost-hunter shows about relationships between good and evil, heaven and hell, and the living and the dead draw upon millennia of theological and philosophical argument and speculation. For instance, let us reexamine Jason and Keith’s conversation, which presents the troubling idea that “negative energy” can call forth the demonic or “bad spirits” of sorts. How are they conceptualizing the nature of ghosts? How do they frame our relationship to the diabolic? If the diabolic exists, is this evidence that God exists as well?
Paranormal State and, to a lesser extent, Ghost Hunters sometimes will posit
that this “negative energy,” which can be a demonic entity or a disturbed spirit who was once touched by evil in life, either as victim or perpetrator, has manifested itself because of an absence of “positive energy,” a Neoplatonic notion that conceives of evil as a privation of good.
Curiously, these shows put together this idea of privation with the bibli- cal notion of Lucifer’s fall and the “free will” hypothesis for the “problem of evil.” On these shows the demons are really out there, functioning as a force opposed to good, which can be connected to the Manichean dualistic conception of darkness and light. Demons (who were never human) show up from time to time, especially on Paranormal State. Evil entities also seem capable of tethering spirits to the earth, preventing them from “going
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to the light,” as it were. This seems like traditional biblical stuff, in which God and Satan battle over souls. However, Satan and his minions usually lose once again when some religion is applied to the situation, either as an expressly Catholic ritual or some other kind of cleansing that is associated with holiness.
But how does this evil make its way into our world to harass the living and the dead? Is God not paying attention? Did we do something wrong? These questions relate—at least obliquely—to the “problem of evil,” a massive and incredibly intricate debate in the philosophy of religion which, at its heart, attempts to reconcile contradictory premises: How could God—who is all good, omniscient, and omnipotent—allow evil to happen? One answer to this problem is the free will defense, or greater good defense, which has been taken up by countless philosophers throughout the centuries. As Alvin Plantinga, a contemporary defender of the free will defense, argues, evil in the world exists because God gave us free will; as such:
A world containing creatures who are sometimes significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. Now God can create free creatures, but he cannot cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if he does so, then they are not significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, he must create creatures capable of moral evil; and he cannot leave these creatures
free to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing
so. God did in fact create significantly free creatures; but some of them went wrong in the exercise of their freedom: this is the source of moral evil. The fact that these free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God’s omnipotence nor against his goodness; for he could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by excising the possibility of moral good. (1974, 30)
The possibility for evil, then, allows for creating more “good” because it provides the opportunity for us to pursue what is a moral good.
Paranormal State tacitly subscribes to these notions of free will and
evil, since the show often suggests that humans, though their bad choices, dysfunction, and ungodly ways of living, often create a space for evil to enter. Then, too, the haunted bear witness to the poor deployment of free will from the past, as evil seems to collect around sites of trauma—places where evil rather than good was chosen or experienced. Usually, the haunted and the
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spirits can be set back on the path to moral good by choosing reconciliation, love, care for others, or, in the case of the spirit, “going to the light,” and evil is vanquished by good with relatively little trouble.
However, A Haunting presents a more terrifying conception of the demonic and hell itself. By far the scariest of the ghost-themed shows, A
Haunting deals almost exclusively with cases of demonic possession or
harassment. Presenting itself as a documentary on past events, A Haunting mingles hair-raising reenactments, testimony from those involved with the case, and a narrative voice-over. The bad news in A Haunting is that we do not have to use our free will poorly to attract the demonic. Rather, evil preys upon the innocent and vulnerable, as it does in episodes in which a child is possessed (“The Demon Child” and “Spirits of the Dead”), another in which a mentally disabled young girl is the target of a demonic entity (“The Diabolical”), and yet another in which a pregnant woman is physically harassed and terrorized (“Gateway to Hell”). And the worse news? This evil is much more pesky to shake. The story arc will often feature the victims acquiring a talisman of sorts or procuring a quick blessing that might result in some temporary abeyance of the haunting but will ultimately prove to be inadequate protection. Then, even after a lengthy ritual cleansing or exor- cism, an uneasy peace ensues, though the victims sometimes experience a recurrence of the haunting or a feeling of foreboding that the evil entity is plotting its return. Some episodes end with the victims simply abandoning their homes. On A Haunting you can never really beat the devil.
A Haunting and Ghost Adventures also present the idea that certain
portals to hell exist. The voice-over introduction of every episode of A
Haunting affirms this conception of our relation to all things hellish: “In
this world, there is real evil in the darkest shadows and in the most ordinary places. These are the true stories of the innocent and the unimaginable. . . . Between the world we see and the things we fear, there are doors. When they are opened, nightmares become reality.” As we know, these doors are not necessarily opened by our bad use of free will: we are more or less “in- nocent.” In a sense, though, humans are culpable on A Haunting when they naively get in over their heads, inviting in the demonic by messing around with Satanic ritual, playing with a Ouija board, or uttering a curse. While humans can create these portals, these doors can also exist “naturally,” an idea that Ghost Adventures floats by claiming that a particularly haunted site, Goldfield Hotel, is said to be built on certain “lay lines” to the seventh portal of hell (Ghost Adventures: A Raw Documentary into the Paranormal 2006). And on these two shows doors to hell are tough to close—or, at best, let in quite a draft.
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