The Medium Who Wants You to Be Nicer to Ghosts

Rebekah Carmichael would like you to treat ghosts with a little more kindness.The author of The Not-So Scary Guide to Ghosts: How to Make the Paranormal Normal, which was published in July 2026, frequently shares tips and tricks for engaging with the spirit world online. In her guide, she offers an overview of her theory of what ghosts actually are, along with plenty of advice on how to handle spirits of the dead still lingering in the land of the living.Her main goal? To make people a little more open-minded towards the paranormal. “I realized that a lot of ghosts are just doing their thing, very similar to how we're doing our thing. The scariest part of that is when we just don't understand each other,” she tells Mental Floss. “It was really important to me to share the other side of ghost stories, and to be able to say—they can be scary, yes, but what if they didn't always have to be scary? What if we could meet them on a very human level? And what if we could learn something from them as a result?”A ghost guide's tips for engaging with ghostsRebekah Carmichael with 'The Guide to Ghosts' | Rebekah CarmichaelCarmichael claims to have encountered a lot of ghosts, many of whom she says have a lot to say about the historical time periods they lived in. In her view, ghosts are parts of the soul left behind in the living world. They’re “pieces of the soul, and they're doing very human things. Sometimes the human thing is that they go up the stairs at a particular time because that's what they did when they were alive,” she says. “Sometimes they might care about a loved one they left behind. They are remnants of some of the most powerful feelings that we have.”When engaging with ghosts, she advises, it’s important to remember that they were once human and are as deserving of compassion as any living being. It’s always a good idea to be polite to them, she says, and to talk to them like the people they once were. One might start a conversation by commenting on a detail in the place they're haunting, for example, instead of immediately confronting them about how they died. “What if we could just chat? What if it didn't have to be crazy and dramatic and scary?” she says. “What if it was just a really cool opportunity to talk to somebody like time travel to a different time?” Still, she notes that precautions are important, and says that it's vital to ground yourself before engaging with any ghost and to cleanse yourself afterward. Cleansing “starts with the mind saying, ‘Okay, I don't want to hold on to anything else that is not mine to claim,’” she says. It’s an important step—otherwise, she notes, you might find a lingering spirit clinging to you long after you depart a room. The future of human-ghost relationsTwo ghosts with sunglasses sitting on stoop | PedaltotheStock / EnvatoFor as long as humans have existed, death has been both an inevitable reality and a looming mystery—and people have been trying to understand and engage with the question of what happens after it.Many cultures and time periods have honored death in various ways, and ancestors are still actively venerated in many parts of the world. And though there's no scientific evidence for the existence of ghosts, a 2024 poll from New CivicScience found that 41% of Americans said they believed in ghosts or spirits.Carmichael’s views can admittedly be far on the out-there spectrum; she claims to have seen aliens, angels, and demons as well as ghosts. But in her mind, the question of whether the ghostly encounters she films and the stories she tells are actually real is not all that important. “One of the key things that I say to people, especially at the end of my skits, is it's not about believing if my interaction is real,” she says. “It's about the curiosity behind it. It's about enjoying the story. I am not out to preach. A lot of my book is about saying, ‘Hey, discover it for yourself.’”Ultimately, Carmichael hopes for a future where the lines between science and the spirit world blur enough to open space for dialogue among people with diametrically opposed beliefs. She also envisions a world where people treat spirits, and each other, with more understanding.“I think we're coming into a space where we all can get along. We all can learn from each other,” she says. “I think the only way to do that is to listen to one another, and to acknowledge that we may have differences and that we don't all have to believe the same thing. As long as we're not hurting one another, there's a lot that we can do and a lot left to understand. Of course, I'm talking about ghosts here, but I think there's also a message in that for humanity as a whole as well.”