A Q&A with USC’s ghost scholar

Some people turn to religion to learn more about the human soul. Tok Thompson, an associate professor of anthropology and communication at USC, turns to ghosts.

At USC, Thompson has helped develop many courses, including his arts and letters course, “Ghost Stories: Throughout Time and Around the World.” Thompson sat down for an interview with the Daily Trojan about his course and the role of ghosts in contemporary life. Thompson will be giving a talk, “Ghosts of the Past, Ghosts of the Future,” on Tuesday from 12 to 1 p.m. at the Social Sciences Building, with Halloween candy and apples included.

Daily Trojan: What got you interested in teaching a course on ghosts at USC?

Tok Thompson: I started off teaching in arts and letters, which was before the freshman seminars, and I primarily identify as a folklorist. I’m always following folklore and I tried to think of something that could appeal to students —  that they would have some sort of familiarity with but could bring in international perspectives and historical perspectives as well as sort of contemporary American perspectives, and I just thought: You know what — ghost stories. You know, so many different cultures around the world have ghost stories. It was just sort of a good way to organize something that would be a good point of conversation for a lot of students, to get the conversation flowing.

When you start talking about ghost stories, you start talking about ideas about the soul, about different religions, about different cultures across the world. But you don’t have to go in saying, “OK, we’re going to talk about religion and ideas of the souls.” So, I think it’s an easier way to start the conversation of some really compelling matters without starting right at the hot points.

DT: How is the class structured?

TT: We start off with a little bit of a historical glance, looking at a few ancient civilizations like ancient Egypt or ancient Greece and showing how their beliefs of ghosts work. Then we move to the contemporary and look at Native American ghosts, which are very fascinating. We go on to sort of East Asian cultures where ghosts are huge. We look at, “What are we haunted by?” We’re haunted by ethical failures, by moral failures, so when looking at ghost stories of different societies you’ll see: What are different societies haunted by?

America’s most common ghost stories are those of Native American burial grounds — real common — ghosts of African American slaves … so that tells you something about American history right there. That we are still haunted by those ethical failures in the past, that somehow these haven’t been resolved. On the other hand, the most common experience of ghosts in America is seeing or having a visitation by a dead loved one.

Whether or not you want to believe in ghosts, I leave that up to you. But psychologically, of course, that tends to be a soothing quality to us: That idea that you haven’t quite lost them plays a real important human role in the process of losing people.

DT: What do you hope students take away from the course?

TT: I’m an anthropologist, so I hope that they come away from the course with an understanding of how different cultures think about things differently and think about very important things, like life after death, the divine qualities of the universe, what it is to be a person, what it is to have a soul, what it is to be moral or ethical — and understand the ways that different societies are all trying to work with these very compelling issues and some of the various ways societies have tried to provide answers for those.

DT: What do you believe the significance of ghost stories, and folklore in general, is in our culture?

TT: Huge! One word is huge. I’m a folklorist, and so obviously, I think it’s important. Going back to my idea that most Americans believe in ghosts, it’s clear they don’t derive this belief from science, and it’s clear that they don’t derive this belief — at least directly — from religious authorities, so what it seems to indicate is that the beliefs are derived from folklore. So there’s a tremendous amount of ways we build knowledge socially and communally.

Our everyday artistic activity, whether it’s just a joke we tell at a party or a traditional toast you do at your sibling’s wedding, I think there’s a tremendous amount of personal meaning that people derive from folklore, and for me that’s what makes it special.

DT: Do you have any particular favorite ghost stories? 

TT: I’ll give you this one — it’s a story that I’m going to set at USC because it’s folklore and we can update it. So, these two guys are hometown buddies and both going to go to USC. So they’re driving together to go attend college and the dorms aren’t quite open yet, so they’re going to stay in a hotel for a couple of days. Now, one of them is a little wealthier than the other, comes from a better off family, so the poorer kid basically stays in kind of a sleazebag motel and his friend feels kind of bad, but the hotel he arranges is much nicer. He drops his friend off and worries because it doesn’t feel right.

He goes to sleep and he has this dream where his friend is all bloody and saying, “help me, help me,” and he wakes up and freaks out and tries to call his buddy on the phone but — no answer. Tries to text him — no answer. Finally he drives over to the motel in the middle of the night, wakes up the manager, goes to the room and his buddy is not in the room. He’s freaking out and trying to figure out what to do. The next day comes along — no word, no nothing — calls the cops and tells them about the dream and they do the whole search and they finally find his friend’s dead body mutilated all bloody in the dumpster in the back.

I just updated that — that’s actually in Roman literature, the same ghost story, so I’ve heard it in a contemporary setting but you can also find it in Roman literature. OK, without the cell phone, but everything else is basically the same. A lot of these stories have sort of been recycled throughout our culture for hundreds of years sometimes.

DT: Ghosts also play a large role in Halloween and celebrating Halloween, so what do you think about the relationship between the two?

TT: Our modern Halloween is derived from the Celtic world… Interestingly enough, in the Celtic realm, this was the beginning of the new year. The ancient Celts divided the year between a dark half and a light half, so this was the beginning of the dark half and the beginning of the light half was in May. In ancient Celtic traditions, the dead would be hosted by the she spirits as in the banshee, which you may have heard of, and they would be hosted by this — this was sort of the other world of the dead. It overlaps with our world but in an invisible sense, but there’s a couple of nodes, you might say. There’s a temporal and a spatial node.

The temporal nodes are exactly that, Halloween and May Day, and temporal nodes in Celtic tradition would’ve been these great megalithic sites. But basically, the idea is that these are the times when the lines between these two worlds are the thinnest, so the dead could walk amongst the living, and the living likewise are walking in the world of the dead. So all of our sort of Halloween traditions derive from these sorts of festivals, which is why you see the dead so much. So, as for how this came to American culture, it was pretty much with the big Irish immigration after the big Irish potato famine. Before that, they didn’t really have Halloween in America.

DT: Is there anything else you’d like to share?

TT: So, a personal research interest that I’ve been doing on my own that I think is kind of fascinating is — I make students collect ghost stories as part of the class, and one thing I’ve noticed over the years is that there are more and more ghost stories with technology. Cell phone texts from the beyond, haunted servers, these sort of things are becoming more and more a part of what we see, which is fascinating.

We’re moving into this cyborg realm where our very souls are being located within the internet and the cyber discourse. So, this idea of cyborg ghosts is continuing to be a growing development, so I’ve been looking a lot at that. I’ve also been looking at this idea of androids, and as a sort of prognostication I anticipate that as androids have become more and more a part of our environment, which they already are in Japan, what happens when they die? Will they become a beloved part of your social network or are we going to have android ghosts? And I think the answer is probably yes, we will be haunted by androids. Especially if we don’t deal with that situation in an ethical manner.