I was an inquisitive child who rejected simplistic answers — about magic, about God, about the way the world worked. I loved mysteries and the hunt for knowledge. Scooby Doo was a formative influence, which tells you something about the kind of kid I was: I wanted to investigate, to pull back the curtain, to find out what was really going on.
Growing up in Northern California gold rush towns, I was surrounded by ghost stories. Old hotels and abandoned mines and the kinds of places where history left its fingerprints. I believed in all of it. Deeply. Ghosts, for me, were not just spooky entertainment. They were proof of a life beyond death. They meant that the people I loved wouldn't simply stop existing when their bodies gave out. That comfort mattered enormously to me.
I didn't wake up one day and choose to be a skeptic. The belief eroded gradually, the way shorelines do — slowly, then faster. It started small: I learned that photographic orbs were almost always just dust particles caught by the flash. That was the first piece that fell. Then more followed. Through scientific reading and a growing habit of critical thinking, I eventually had to acknowledge that what I most wanted to believe — that consciousness survives death, that the dead linger — was not something I could find evidence for.
Rather than despair, I found something unexpected: urgency. If this life is all there is, then it matters more, not less. The people in it matter more. The moments matter more. I redirected the energy I had been putting into the supernatural and aimed it at the actual, immediate world around me.
I still enjoy ghost fiction. I still find the history behind supposed hauntings genuinely interesting — the real people, the real griefs, the real human stories that get compressed into legend. The difference is that now I respect those histories rather than using them as evidence for something I can't demonstrate is true.
As a skeptic, I continue to hunt. The quarry changed. The love of the chase did not.
Originally published in Free Inquiry magazine.