Experimentally falsifying ghost criminology: exercising rigor, exorcising residue

Overview

This study experimentally tests the theoretical proposition of ghost criminology, which posits that physical locations marked by historical violence and atrocity retain a perceptible residue that affects individuals visiting the site. The research investigates whether purported environmental 'stains' from past trauma constitute genuine physical or psychological phenomena or instead reflect narrative construction through storytelling. Two architecturally equivalent university buildings served as experimental contexts: one with documented Civil War-era history involving enslaved labor, mass amputations, and corpse storage; the other with no recorded violent history.

Methods and approach

A preregistered 2 × 2 factorial field experiment manipulated both site history and narrative framing across 319 participants. Participants visited one of two matched buildings and received randomly assigned narratives that either truthfully described the atrocity site's history, falsely ascribed that history to the control building, or provided neutral architectural descriptions. Dependent measures included situational comfort, state anxiety, place attachment, moral gravity perception, and paranormal sensation reports, all preregistered as primary outcomes.

Key Findings

Across all five preregistered outcome measures, site history produced no statistically significant effects. Narrative exposure reduced comfort modestly regardless of whether narratives were truthful or fabricated, with no corresponding changes in anxiety, place attachment, moral gravity, or anomalous sensations. The findings bound any putative environment-based haunting effects to negligible magnitudes and indicate that unease originated from narrative suggestion rather than environmental properties.

Implications

The experimental evidence challenges the empirical basis of ghost criminology as conventionally framed. The null effects across multiple psychological and phenomenological outcomes suggest that theorized residual effects of historical violence lack detectable manifestations in participant experience. The results indicate that narrative framing drives subjective responses independent of actual site history, questioning whether place-based trauma effects constitute observable environmental phenomena. For ghost criminology to maintain theoretical viability, proponents must articulate specific, falsifiable predictions regarding observable phenomena and establish explicit thresholds whose violation would constitute evidence against the theory. Without such specification, the framework functions primarily as an interpretive or rhetorical apparatus rather than as an empirically grounded explanatory model capable of generating testable predictions about environmental effects.