So in addition to writing a weekly column for the Beacon, I’m currently working as an intern at The Commercial Appeal newspaper in Memphis. My second week, I finally forced myself of out my anti-social behavior and decided to meet the other interns.

I usually have a hard time remembering names, but one intern’s name stuck in particular.

For common courtesy, I’ll give her the pseudonym Sarah.

Okay, so Sarah is a ghost hunter. She has equipment, she performs exorcisms and ghost hunts, and she can even feel the “presence” of the dead.

I’ve always held a slight curiosity toward the supernatural, whether it be ghosts, monsters, or unicorns.

So when Sarah began to divulge all the secrets of her unorthodox hobby, I began to think about how much society is fixated on the paranormal.

The media has been in a sensational frenzy lately, gathering stories of cannibalism spanning from the Miami “zombie” to the pornstar-killer cannibal.

We’re perpetually intrigued with these subjects, yet there is a practical side of us that dismisses such information as a complete hoax. It’s a masochistic relationship we have with the paranormal and fantasy, and consequently, fear and what’s wrong itself.

I was interested with everything Sarah had to share about her ghost hunting adventurers, but I was particularly intrigued with her experiences with the “bad ghost”.

“Have you ever encountered an evil spirit?” I asked. My eyes widened with anticipation as I waited for her answer.

She explained to me that she’s had experiences with the not-so-good spirits, and exorcisms are often performed to remove them.

“But what if they don’t leave? Have you ever seen a possession? What do they say? Why are they there?” My flurry of questions was soon halted when another intern changed the subject, which was probably good for me.

Later before I went to bed, I checked my closet door for the boogieman and slept with an extra light on. I even left my television on the Food Network because I thought the neutrality of the programming would fend off any malicious spirits.

Growing up, my mom often shared the story of her and my uncle using a ouija board when they were kids. They would ask a general yes or no question, and she swore the board moved on its on. Shortly afterwards, my uncle supposedly took an ax and hacked the board into shreds. They later burned the remains.

Because of that incident, my mom has always been weary of us “opening center doors and portals” that could unleash bad spirits. She still watches re-runs of the show “Paranormal State”, which follows a group of Penn State students as they investigate various hauntings around the country.

There’s a paradox here. On one hand we crave the unknown. It’s a type of rush believing that something beyond our physical world exists; however, we still want to remain grounded. So we feed off of this fear for a certain amount of time and then quickly dismiss the notion that we actually believed in the fantasy at all.

What simply started as a crime headline in Miami turned into a massive string of stories that has now created rumors of an impending zombie apocalypse. I’m sure most people would never want a zombie doomsday to occur, despite the myriad of zombie survival guides, including the Central for Disease Control and Prevention’s fake guideline for a zombie attack (which actually isn’t so funny anymore).

But the information keeps us on our toes. It’s a break from a bleak reality where people die and we really don’t know where the go and the dead haven’t really come from the grave. In the end, we really do want to blame face-eating on bath salts and an unexplained bump in the house on the wind.

I haven’t asked Sarah anything else about ghosts since our last discussion simply to avoid sounding annoying, but the curiosity is still there. Recently, I’ve been sent on assignments that coincidentally all involve the dead: the auction of Elvis’ prior resting place at the Forest Hill mausoleum, an unknown cemetery in the middle of a quiet suburb, a man who found 20 tombstones in his backyard. In all these cases, nothing was truly supernatural. They were just news. But wouldn’t it be interesting if there was something more to them.

— Victoria Wright is a junior in journalism and electronic media. She can be reached at [email protected].