Ghost Sickness
The Lakota and other tribes lost part of how they mourned in 1881, when federal prohibition reached several of those rites. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, a Lakota expert, proposes that the loss of those rituals may have left the Lakota further predisposed to developing pathological grief. Ghost sickness is a culture-bound syndrome recorded among some indigenous peoples of North America and among Polynesian peoples, and what it names is a person taken over by the dead: preoccupied with them, or held inside a grief that will not finish. That sequence, a mourning practice prohibited and a sickness of mourning arriving after, is the part worth holding onto.
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What gets reported is weakness through the whole body, no appetite, a sense of being unable to breathe, nightmares that keep returning, and terror that sits under everything. Ghosts are held responsible for it, and now and then witches or witchcraft instead.
Which cultures the syndrome belongs to
On the North American side the condition is documented among the Navajo, and among some Plains and Muscogee cultures. In Muscogee (Creek) understanding, everyone participates in an energy called Ibofanga, produced by the flow between mind, body and spirit, and illness results when that flow is obstructed. Medicine is accordingly used to prevent or treat the obstruction and restore the peaceful flow within a person, and the purification rituals for mourning are directed at preventing emotional and physical drain that has become unnatural or has gone on too long.
The traditional grief resolution process is qualitatively different from what is usually seen in mainstream Western cultures, which is the point at which the 1881 ban stops being an administrative detail.
What unresolved grief looks like
The manifestations recorded include seeking visions of the spirits of dead relatives, reminiscing about the dead obsessively, longing for a reunion with the dead and believing in one, fantasising about their reappearance, and believing oneself able to project into the past or the future.
What the mainstream readings say
Several psychological accounts exist. Putsch notes that spirits or ghosts may be regarded as linked, directly or indirectly, to the cause of an event, an accident or an illness. Erikson and Macgregor each found evidence backing a reading of it as trauma response, and the features they list would be recognisable in any trauma literature. The features they list would be recognisable in any trauma literature:
- withdrawal, and numbing of the psyche with it
- anxiety, with hypervigilance alongside
- guilt
- an identification with what ancestors suffered and how they died
- sadness and depression that do not lift
What the ceremonies do
Religious leaders among the Navajo perform ceremonies repeatedly to clear away the thoughts of the dead that have taken over. The remedy sits inside the tradition, the same place the ban of 1881 reached into.
Told apart
Often confused with Ghost Sickness
- Fear of GhostsPhasmophobia fears an encounter with the dead. This concerns being unable to let go of a particular dead person, with the ghost supplying the explanation rather than the threat.
- Fear of Death and Dead BodiesBoth attach to the dead and both have cultural forms concerning their return, but necrophobia is a fear of corpses and this is a disorder of mourning.
- Old Hag SyndromeBoth are culture-bound conditions in which a supernatural agent accounts for symptoms with recognised physiological or psychological descriptions elsewhere.
Common questions
Questions about Ghost Sickness
- What happened in 1881?
- A federal ban removed some of the traditional mourning rituals practised by the Lakota and other tribes. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart connects that removal to a later predisposition to pathological grief: a people deprived of the procedure for mourning loses the mechanism by which grief was completed, and what follows is grief that does not finish.
- Which peoples is it associated with?
- The Navajo, and some Plains and Muscogee cultures in North America, along with Polynesian peoples. Ghosts are held responsible for it, and now and then witches or witchcraft instead, which places the cause outside the person in every version of the account.
- What is Ibofanga?
- In Muscogee understanding, an energy produced by the flow between mind, body and spirit. Illness follows when that flow is obstructed, and medicine restores it.
- How do psychologists read it?
- Erikson and Macgregor each found evidence backing a reading of it as a trauma response, and the features they list would be recognisable in any trauma literature: withdrawal and psychic numbing, anxiety with hypervigilance, guilt, identification with how ancestors suffered and died, and depression that does not lift.
- What does the treatment consist of?
- Ceremonies performed repeatedly by religious leaders among the Navajo, directed at clearing away the thoughts of the dead that have taken over. The remedy sits inside the tradition, which is the same place the federal prohibition of 1881 reached into.
Added 2026-08-23 · Revised 2026-08-26
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Related entries
- Fear of GhostsWikipedia calls fear of ghosts very common and names no survey. What stands in for a research record: a Wari' spectre, a Papuan funeral racket, one philosopher.
- 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.
- 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.
- Fear of Being Cursed to DeathA man fell ill after a bone was pointed at him and recovered the moment he was told it was a mistake. Cannon argued in 1942 that fear alone can kill.
- Fear of Being HexedTwo colonial statutes, in 1748 and 1749, record a fear of hexing by Black folk practitioners. The tradition they targeted was mostly used for protection.
- Fear of GodIn every tradition here the phrase means awe and reverence. Catholic writers have spent a century correcting it: servile fear against filial fear.