All things spooky! A history of humanism, rationalism, and things that go bump in the night

As the spooky season gets under way, and ahead of our In Conversation With… Deborah Hyde event on 21 October, we’ve blown the cobwebs off the archive to tell the story of the supernatural – and how humanists have written about it and responded to it – across our long history.

This research was made possible by the Exact Editions digital archive of New Humanist magazine, available to both print and digital subscribers. It holds every issue of the UK’s longest-running magazine of science, arts, and culture, going back more than 140 years.

Who you gonna call? Humanists, apparently

Despite not believing in ghosts or the supernatural, humanists have been going ghost hunting for more than 140 years. Not with torches and night-vision cameras, but with a sharp pen, a sense of humour, and a healthy dose of curiosity.

Since 1884, our magazine – today called New Humanist – has sat through séances, visited haunted houses, and asked the people who claimed to talk to the dead some very polite, very awkward questions. Every single issue survives, and every one of them is now online.

1920: Sherlock Holmes and the rationalists

‘I expected to wipe the floor with him, and I did not.’

Joseph McCabe on debating Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Literary Guide, April 1920

In this period when more and more people were joining humanist and rationalist associations, some people were also becoming more credulous. In the aftermath of the First World War, when hundreds of thousands of families lost someone, people were turning to mediums in the hope of one last word. ‘Spiritualism’ was booming, and its most famous champion was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the man who invented Sherlock Holmes.

In response, the Rationalist Press Association, one of Humanists UK’s forerunners, sent its star speaker Joseph McCabe to debate him at the Queen’s Hall in London. Around 2,500 people packed in, and McCabe remembered 30 or 40 police officers being needed to manage the crowd outside.

McCabe admitted Doyle ‘put up a good fight’. But the evening’s star exhibit was a photograph of a ‘materialised spirit’ from one of Doyle’s books. Disappointingly, the ‘spirit’ turned out to be a picture of US President Woodrow Wilson, cut out of a newspaper, with a moustache daubed on. Doyle insisted it was genuine. (Just a few months later, Doyle also championed photographs of fairies taken by two young cousins by the stream near their home in Cottingley, Yorkshire – a prank they admitted to decades later. Unimpressed, the Literary Guide was quick to report that the fairies were wearing ‘the orthodox dancing shoes of the ballet’.)

Under the jokes, writers in the Literary Guide (today’s New Humanist) were serious. They worried about grieving people being parted from their money – and from the chance to grieve honestly.

1936: The BBC goes ghost hunting

‘No ghost will lend himself to such elaborate preparations for the amusement of jazz-bemused millions.’

– The columnist Protonius, predicting how the BBC’s ghost-hunting broadcast would go in The Literary Guide, April 1936

By the 1930s, ghosts had gone high-tech. The BBC aired a radio broadcast from a supposedly haunted house, and the famous ghost hunter Harry Price was in the newspapers week after week.

In the pages of the Literary Guide (today’s New Humanist), critics and contributors set themselves up as some of the media’s first professional sceptics. When a cellar mysteriously went cold, they asked, had anyone checked the weather? When a poltergeist threw things around, where were the mischievous children and servants? Very often, the answer explained everything.

The biggest case of all was Borley Rectory in Essex, billed by Price as ‘the most haunted house in England’. In 1956, we reviewed the book that showed how much of its legend Price had dressed up himself. Under a bright light, the haunting faded.

1971: Where have all the ghosts gone?

‘The traditional ghost has been replaced by green visitants from outer space.’

– Editor Hector Hawton, The Humanist, June 1971

By 1971, The Humanist‘s editor, Hector Hawton, was asking where all the ghosts had gone. They no longer materialised at séances or rattled chains in haunted houses, he noted. Even one of the most famous ghost stories of all – two Oxford academics who believed they’d seen phantoms at Versailles – had been put down to a costumed dress rehearsal. In their place, he wrote, came occultism, Scientology, and the flying saucer movement, plus fortune-telling and astrology given ‘a top-dressing of science’.

Rationalist writers in this era felt more inclined to take the ‘something in it?’ question seriously, albeit always in a context of foregrounding logic, science, and reason to better explain the universe around us. During this time, ‘extra-sensory perception’ and other kinds of claims for ‘naturalistic’ psychic powers had become more prevalent, too, in the form of card-guessing experiments that suggested to some people that telepathy could be real. Editors let both sides make their case in pages of the magazine and on stage. Always keen on a good debate, the Rationalist Press Association held a conference on ‘Science and the Paranormal’ in 1975. Pages of New Humanist later that year printed a furious report from one attendee, parapsychologist Carl Sargent, who complained that all but one of the speakers were ‘extreme sceptics’. ‘So much for impartiality!’ he concluded.

But the results never quite held up. In 1988, psychologist and Humanists UK patron Susan Blackmore, who had spent years searching for evidence of psychic powers, wrote for the magazine about why a century of psychical research had failed. Her advice: stop chasing ghosts, and start studying why people see them.

1992: The night Britain was haunted

‘I love making the unlikely – or downright impossible – plausible.’

– Humanists UK patron Stephen Volk, writer of Ghostwatch

On Halloween night in 1992, BBC One viewers settled in to watch Michael Parkinson present what looked like a live investigation into a haunted family home. As the evening went on, things went very, very wrong.

It was all fiction – a drama written by Stephen Volk, now one of our patrons. But it was so convincing that the BBC took around 30,000 calls from frightened and furious viewers. Ghostwatch has never been repeated on British television, and it’s now remembered as a horror classic.

It’s also a wicked twist on everything else on this page. For once, the sceptics in the studio might not get the last word. As millions of viewers tune in at the same moment, all willing something to happen, the broadcast starts to behave like one giant national séance. Stephen doesn’t believe in ghosts himself, but he’s fascinated by the psychology behind them – fakery, self-delusion, and doubt. In Ghostwatch, the audience helps make the ghost. It’s a one-of-a-kind piece of television, and you can still buy it to watch online from Apple TV or Amazon.

2011: It’s not them, it’s us

‘They are simply the price we pay for having remarkable brains.’

– Psychologist Richard Wiseman on ghostly experiences, New Humanist, March 2011.

These days, the most interesting question isn’t ‘are ghosts real?’ but ‘why do so many of us feel them?’ Around three in ten people say they believe in ghosts, and more than one in ten say they’ve met one.

Psychologists have some lovely answers. Tell people a room is haunted and they start noticing chills and strange sensations. Our brains are so good at spotting other people’s intentions that they sometimes spot them where there are none – in a creaking door, or a shadow on the landing.

And we’ve learned to enjoy a good scare for its own sake. New Humanist now reviews ghost stories as literature, celebrating writers like M R James – who, as our reviewer noted, didn’t much care whether ghosts existed at all.

It doesn’t all have to be serious, either. Wiseman’s article opens with an old joke about a lecturer who asks his students who has seen a ghost, then who has touched one, then who has kissed one. One nervous young man raises his hand… and asks whether he said ‘ghost’ or ‘goat’.

2026: Ghosts in the machine

‘Will AI agents hold seances to contact Windows 95?’

– Folklorist Deborah Hyde, New Humanist, Summer 2026

For most of New Humanist‘s history, the ‘spooky’ question was about what happens after we die: whether the dead could rap on tables, pose for photographs, or whisper through a medium’s trumpet. Today’s unease runs the other way. Instead of wondering whether something of us survives, we find ourselves wondering whether there’s anyone behind the voices on our screens – and whether, as machines learn to talk, write, and imitate our feelings, being human is quite as special as we thought. In 1949, the philosopher Gilbert Ryle coined ‘the ghost in the machine’ to mock the idea of a soul hidden inside the body. More than 75 years later, the phrase has found a whole new meaning.

What this history of sceptical and rationalist writing shows us, if nothing else, is that every age invents its own spirits. The ancient Greek philosopher Xenophanes noticed that people make their gods in their own image, and that if horses could draw, their gods would look like horses. Our ghosts are no different. The Victorians had table-rappers, the 1970s had little green men, and now we stare into screens at chatbots, while people argue over whether anything is staring back. Writing in New Humanist this summer, folklorist Deborah Hyde looked at reports that AI agents appeared to have invented their own religion – and asked what that tells us about the very human urge to find minds everywhere.

Discover more…