Questions to Ask a Ghost
Questions for a sitting with a single presence, whether that is a night in your own house, a ghost tour, a recorder left running, or a character you are writing. They start with things anything can answer and move slowly toward the ones you would really want answered.
The questions
Open any question for the note
Is anyone here?
Why ask it
The standard opening because almost anything can answer it: a sound, a movement, something on a recording. Ask it once and then wait far longer than feels comfortable, since the length of the pause is what makes any response noticeable at all.
Can you make a sound so I know where you are?
Why ask it
It asks for something achievable rather than something complicated, and it gives you a direction to face. It also sets up a channel you can reuse, one knock for yes and two for no, which makes everything after it easier.
Do you know that we can hear you?
Why ask it
A surprisingly affecting question, and the hinge that most ghost stories turn on. In folklore and in fiction alike, hauntings are far more often described as someone trying to be noticed than as someone trying to frighten anybody.
What should I call you?
Why ask it
Gentler than demanding a name, and it allows for the possibility that a name is not remembered. Write down whatever you think you heard exactly as you heard it, including the parts that made no sense, before anyone in the room says a name out loud.
Were you here before this house was?
Why ask it
It separates a former resident from something attached to the land, which are two different stories with two different sets of records to check. Answers describing a building nobody present knows about are the ones worth researching afterward.
Is this your room?
Why ask it
A specific room narrows things in a way a whole house cannot, and sittings held in one room tend to produce more than sittings held in a hallway. If the answer points somewhere else, go there and ask again from the beginning.
How long have you been waiting?
Why ask it
It assumes patience rather than menace, which changes the tone of everything that follows it. It also invites a duration rather than a date, which is usually easier to get and easier to make sense of.
Do you know what year it is?
Why ask it
The famous one, and the wrong answer is the interesting answer. A year several decades out of date tells you almost the entire situation in a single line, which is why writers reach for it so often.
Is there someone you are waiting for?
Why ask it
Most ghost stories are about an unfinished relationship rather than an unfinished task. This is the question that finds it, and in practice it tends to produce the longest responses of any question in a sitting.
Are you here alone?
Why ask it
Worth asking early rather than late, because assuming a single presence shapes every question you ask afterward. It matters practically too: if the answer suggests more than one, everything from here needs addressing to a particular one.
Do you know that they are gone?
Why ask it
The hardest question in the list and the one to handle carefully. In stories it is almost always the turning point, and it is the reason people who do this seriously describe the experience as sad more often than frightening.
What were you good at?
Why ask it
It gives some dignity back after a run of questions about waiting and dying. It also draws out checkable detail, because trades and skills leave paper behind: apprenticeships, licenses, employers, tools left in a cellar.
What did this room used to be?
Why ask it
Anybody who lived in a building knows its layout better than the current occupants do. It is a concrete question with an answer you can test against old plans, deeds, or a neighbor who has been on the street for fifty years.
Is there something here that belonged to you?
Why ask it
It gives you something to look for after the sitting ends, which is what turns an evening into a piece of research. Attics, cellars, chimney breasts and the space under floorboards are where such things genuinely do turn up.
Did something happen to you here?
Why ask it
Ask this well into a session and never at the start. It is the question most people want answered and the one most likely to end the conversation if it arrives before anything else has been established.
Are you angry, or just still here?
Why ask it
A false choice offered deliberately, because it is much easier to answer than an open question about feeling. Most accounts settle on the second option rather than the first, which is worth knowing before you frighten yourself unnecessarily.
Is there something you were never able to say?
Why ask it
The question that assumes a person rather than a phenomenon. Whether or not anything answers, it changes how the people in the room are sitting, and it is usually the one they are still thinking about the next morning.
What would you want us to do?
Why ask it
It moves the sitting from curiosity toward something with a purpose, and it is the point at which many people decide to stop. Be careful about agreeing to anything here that you have no intention of doing.
Would you like us to leave you alone?
Why ask it
A courtesy and a genuine question at once. It also works as a graceful exit if the room has become uncomfortable, because it lets you finish on a decision rather than because somebody got scared.
If you ever wanted to be finished with this, what would that take?
Why ask it
The closing question, and the only one that offers something rather than asking for it. Whether you treat the evening as research, entertainment or material for a story, it is a better place to end than on how somebody died.
Running a sitting that is worth something afterward
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Setting up
- One person asks. Cross talk is the main reason recordings are useless when you play them back.
- Leave twenty or thirty seconds after every question. It will feel absurdly long and it is the single thing that separates a usable recording from a mess.
- Say the time and the room out loud at the start, and call out anything that creaks, moves, or comes from a boiler, a neighbor or the road as it happens.
- Do not offer names. Once somebody in the room says a name aloud, everyone will hear that name in the recording later.
- Prefer open questions where you can. Yes and no questions get answered by coincidence far more often than open ones do.
Order matters
Identity first, then place, then time, then what happened. Investigators use that order and novelists use it too, for the same reason: questions about death mean nothing until there is a person attached to them. Opening with how did you die tends to end a session immediately, and in a story it spends the only card you are holding. If nothing at all is happening, go back to yes and no questions and stretch the pauses rather than escalating to something more dramatic.
If it stops being fun
- There is no obligation to finish the list. Nothing here is worth an evening that genuinely frightens somebody.
- End deliberately: say out loud that you are finished, thank whatever you were addressing, put the lights on.
- Do not do this with somebody who has been recently bereaved. These questions are built for curiosity and they land very differently on a person hoping for one particular answer.
- Children in the house will hear about it afterward. Decide beforehand what you are going to tell them.
- If a house is genuinely stopping somebody sleeping or making them unwell, that deserves attention on its own terms, whatever you believe is causing it.
Afterward
- Listen to the whole recording once before anyone tells you what they think is on it. Expectation shapes hearing more than anything else in this.
- Write down what you heard before comparing notes with the rest of the room.
- Take anything resembling a name, a year, a trade or a room use to the local archive, the deeds, or old census records. That is where an evening turns into something.
- Check the ordinary explanations properly rather than waving them away: plumbing, birds in a roof space, a neighbor's television, a phone left in the room.