Justin McDaniel, a professor of religious studies who teaches the popular University of Pennsylvania course called “Gods, Ghosts, and Monsters,” has long been intrigued by ghost stories and why they are fascinating to people. Aubrey Whelan conjured his story in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

After the onset of the pandemic, McDaniel noticed a significant rise in the public’s interest in ghosts and the afterlife.

He also realized that the class was beginning to take on deeper meanings in the students who took it. McDaniel conjectured that reactions were being shaped by students’ academic concentrations.

“A lot of students became much more viscerally interested in the afterlife,” he said. “I was really struck by my nursing school students. A large number of them started taking the course online, and they were dealing with death on the frontline every day.”

As millions of people confronted death up close during COVID-19’s spread, learning more about funerary rites and afterlife beliefs made it easier for his students to cope and understand what they were going through.

For skeptics, McDaniel emphasized that it does not matter if ghosts are “real.”

“Ghosts are socially real — people think and talk about them,” he said. Ghost stories “…resonate across cultures, religions, class, race.”

Read more about “Gods, Ghosts, and Monsters” in The Philadelphia Inquirer.