Fear of Ghosts
Phasmophobia
Phasmophobia is the word for a persistent fear of ghosts, and English Wikipedia carries it while naming no survey and no clinical source for it. The encyclopedia hedges even the naming, saying that a persistent fear of ghosts is sometimes phasmophobia, which leaves it an optional label rather than one any clinician must reach for. The article behind it runs to roughly five hundred words, and most of them describe what particular peoples believe about the dead.
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Where the word phasmophobia comes from
Phasma is Greek for an apparition, phobia is Greek for fear, and the compound means exactly what its parts say. That is the whole of the word history on offer. No coiner is named, no date of entry into English is given, and no first attestation is quoted. No revision of the article read for this entry, current to August 2026, supplies any of it.
The single onward pointer the article offers a reader is Wikipedia's list of phobias, which is the company the word keeps.
Why phasmophobia depends on what a culture believes
Most phobias take an object a person can point at. This one takes a proposition. Wikipedia rests the fear on the idea that some ghosts mean harm to the living, and it is careful to set that inside a range: a culture can equally hold its ghosts to be mischievous, benign or indifferent. The fear follows the belief. Where the dead are thought harmless there is nothing for it to attach to, which is not a condition heights or dogs impose.
The article ties the fear to fear of the dark without saying which way the dependency runs. The distinction worth holding is that darkness is a state of a room and ends when a light is switched on, while a ghost is an agent that wants something. Fear of dying is the other neighbour, and it faces the opposite way. Ghosts in many traditional accounts are the dead seeking vengeance, or kept on earth for what they did while alive, and the sight of one has long been read as a portent of death. One fear is of stopping. The other is of someone who did not.
Why no survey has counted the fear of ghosts
In the version read for this entry, retrieved in August 2026, Wikipedia states that the fear of ghosts is a very common fear and that it remains widespread in post-industrial societies. Neither sentence names a survey or a country. The same article says the fear often begins in early childhood and produces panic attacks, again naming no study. Those are the strongest claims the page makes, and they are assertions rather than findings.
That is why the label on this entry reads documented rather than studied. A reference work carries the term and no clinical literature consulted here does. Any percentage found beside this word elsewhere is unsourced until whoever repeats it names the survey.
Ethnography standing where a literature would be
The most detailed material in the article is anthropological. The Wari', a people of the Amazon rainforest, hold that the dead may return as frightening spectres called jima, whose hands are cold, poisonous and very strong, and which try to drag a living person's spirit away. That is a named agent with a described method, which is more than any clinic has recorded under this word.
A nineteenth-century missionary quoted in the article describes Papuans reluctant to walk past a grave in daylight and unwilling to do it at all after dark, since the dead were abroad then, hunting for tobacco and gambier and liable to take a canoe out to sea. Heroes of the community, the Mambrie, were feared above the rest. For some days after a burial, at about sunset, every house in every village raised a deliberate racket, yelling and beating sticks, until the ghost went away. He had been given his grave, his funeral banquet and his ornaments; what was asked of him now was that he stop making himself noticed, and that he neither sicken the living nor carry them off.
A philosopher who knows better and feels it anyway
The philosopher Peter van Inwagen is quoted in the article on the distance between what a person believes and what a person feels:
I am perfectly aware that the fear of ghosts is contrary to science, reason and religion.
He then imagines being sentenced to spend a night alone in a graveyard: he would know in advance that twigs snap and that half-seen movement happens in the dark, and would feel a thrill of fear each time one of them did anyway. It is the only description of the experience from the inside on the page, and it comes from a philosopher rather than from anyone who treats the fear.
Told apart
Often confused with Fear of Ghosts
- Fear of the DarkThe source relates the two directly and does not say which depends on which. Darkness is a state of a room and ends when a light is switched on; a ghost is an agent and is understood to want something.
- Fear of DyingGhosts are the dead, and the sight of one has long been read as a portent of death, which puts both fears in the same accounts. One fear is of stopping, the other of someone who did not.
Common questions
Questions about Phasmophobia
- Why does Wikipedia say a persistent fear of ghosts is sometimes phasmophobia?
- The hedge is the encyclopedia's own. It introduces the word as a name the fear sometimes goes by, not as a diagnosis the fear has been given, and it attaches no clinical reference to it. That wording is a fair reflection of the record: the term is available to anyone who wants it and required of nobody.
- Does a person have to believe in ghosts to be frightened of them?
- The article's own example says otherwise. Peter van Inwagen describes himself as fully persuaded that the fear is contrary to science, reason and religion, and expects that a night alone in a graveyard would still produce a thrill of fear at every snapping twig. Belief and reaction are treated as separable there. Nothing in the article tests how often the two come apart, or in how many people, so the observation stands as one philosopher's report rather than as a finding.
- What is a jima?
- Among the Wari' of the Amazon rainforest, a jima is a frightening spectre that the dead may return as. Its hands are described as cold, poisonous and very strong, and it tries to pull a living person's spirit away. It is the most concrete account of a feared ghost anywhere in the source, and it comes from ethnography.
- Where does the claim that this fear starts in early childhood come from?
- Nowhere the reader can check. Wikipedia states that the fear is often brought about by experiences in early childhood and that it causes panic attacks, and names no study, no cohort and no clinician for either half of the sentence. No source consulted for this entry follows children over time, so the age of onset for this fear is recorded here as unknown.
- Is the age of the word phasmophobia known?
- Not from the article. It gives the two Greek roots and stops, with no coiner, no year and no quoted first use. The word is plainly older than any date this entry could support, and putting an invented one on the page would be worse than the gap.
Added 2026-08-22 · Revised 2026-08-26
Nearby in the catalogue
Related entries
- Fear of the DarkThe object of this fear cannot be produced, which is why reassurance fails. Two real prevalence figures exist for it and they are constantly quoted as one.
- Fear of DyingSixty years of named death anxiety scales and not one prevalence figure. What the record holds on thanatophobia, and the places where it holds nothing.
- Fear of Death and Dead BodiesNeolithic and ancient Greek burials come up with stones and broken amphora fragments laid over the corpse, placed there to keep it from rising.
- Fear of MirrorsTwo current sources disagree about whether eisoptrophobia, spectrophobia and catoptrophobia are one condition or three. One patient gave up a driving licence.
- Ghost SicknessA federal ban removed traditional mourning practices, and a Lakota expert connects that loss to a later predisposition to pathological grief.
- Old Hag SyndromeThe weight on the chest, the paralysis, the presence and its hostility all have physiological accounts. Up to half of people experience it at some point.