AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The psychologist Coltan Scrivner just loves this time of year.
COLTAN SCRIVNER: Everything I do is kind of surrounded by the Halloween spirit, if you will, right? My research is on horror movies and true crime and people who sort of are interested in the macabre, and I organize events that are, like, a horror film festival and a zombie crawl.
CHANG: That's right, a zombie crawl, which happens every year where Scrivner lives in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.
SCRIVNER: Everyone dresses up as any kind of creative zombie that you could possibly imagine, and then they kind of go through the town. And there's a gelatin brain-eating contest and...
CHANG: Yummy.
SCRIVNER: Yeah. And then a big parade where the zombies are kind of all in the front, and then the...
CHANG: Eureka Springs also happens to be home to a famously haunted hotel called the Crescent. So his town sort of is the perfect home for a psychologist who studies the spooky and the scary. Scrivner has a new book about all that called "Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away." And I asked him to start by telling me exactly how he defines morbid curiosity.
SCRIVNER: Morbid curiosity is just an interest in or a curiosity about things that are potentially dangerous. So the morbid descriptor doesn't mean the curiosity is bad.
CHANG: Right.
SCRIVNER: It just means that the thing you are interested in is dangerous.
CHANG: Got it. Like, potentially...
SCRIVNER: Serial killers or environmental disasters...
CHANG: Ghosts.
SCRIVNER: ....Or ghosts or, yeah, bodily injuries. Any kind of thing that gives you information about something you wouldn't want to be exposed to.
CHANG: Right. And you argue in this book that morbid curiosity is a healthy part of human nature, right?
SCRIVNER: Yeah. It can be. Yes.
CHANG: How so?
SCRIVNER: Well, you know, historically, it helped not just humans but really any animal that is subject to dangers in their environment, which is every animal, right?
CHANG: Yeah.
SCRIVNER: I mean, nature's a very scary place. It helped them survive because in order to effectively avoid dangers in your local environment, you need to know something about them, right? That's how you learn how to avoid them, learn how to circumvent them. And in humans, we have a very particular kind of morbid curiosity because we have stories and we have transmissible culture. So we can remove almost all of the costs of learning about something dangerous 'cause in nature, it's very dangerous to learn about something dangerous.
CHANG: Right.
SCRIVNER: Now, if you're a zebra...
CHANG: To approach the predator. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SCRIVNER: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a cost with that. With humans, we can kind of remove all of the costs, and it makes us the most morbidly curious creatures of all.
CHANG: OK. I want to talk about the paranormal because you talk about it in this book. You have even gone on a paranormal hunt of sorts at some old haunted mansion in Savannah, Georgia. And what I want to ask you is, you say that you don't believe in ghosts. So why even go on a hunt like this? Like, why entertain something that you as a scientist don't even buy?
SCRIVNER: Well, I mean, a good scientist should be willing to change their mind if they're presented with evidence.
CHANG: OK.
SCRIVNER: You know, it would take quite a bit of shifting in my world view for that to happen, but I'm open to it. As a scientist, if I, you know, had the evidence, I'm open to that. I mean, I've seen things that are difficult to explain. So in this hotel in Eureka Springs, the Crescent, I was there on an overnight ghost hunt one time, and we had these two little plastic cat toys - like little plastic balls with a red button on top - and you push the button, and when the cat hits it, it lights up, right?
CHANG: OK.
SCRIVNER: So we put these two balls in - on a bed in the most - supposedly most haunted room in the hotel, and then we kind of shook the bed to see how much would it take to get them to light up. Like, how much movement does it take? And it took quite a bit. We really had to, like, kind of shake the bed.
CHANG: OK.
SCRIVNER: And then one of the paranormal investigators I was there with said, you know, we've heard that this room - there's a spirit in this room. So we have these two balls here. The one on the left, we want you to use that for yes, and the one on the right, we want you to use that for no.
CHANG: Oh, my God. You made a Ouija board out of two balls.
SCRIVNER: (Laughter) We made a Ouija board...
CHANG: Cat toys.
SCRIVNER: ...With cat toys. Yes.
CHANG: Oh, my God.
SCRIVNER: (Laughter) And so the investigator said we've heard that the ghost in this room is named Michael (ph). If that's true, would you light up the yes ball?
CHANG: And?
SCRIVNER: And there was, like, one beat and the yes ball lit up without anybody moving.
CHANG: Holy. OK, you...
SCRIVNER: And then - and nothing else happened the rest of the night. That was the first thing we did that...
CHANG: That's a significant thing.
SCRIVNER: But it was a significant thing.
CHANG: Coltan Scrivner...
SCRIVNER: (Laughter).
CHANG: ...How can you not believe in ghosts after that?
SCRIVNER: Well, yeah. So, I - you know, and I'm - my body got chills, right? I did.
CHANG: Sure.
SCRIVNER: I got goose bumps. You know, the hair on the back of my neck stood up, and...
CHANG: Yeah.
SCRIVNER: ...I didn't have...
CHANG: Physiologically...
SCRIVNER: Yeah.
CHANG: ...Your body was on high alert.
SCRIVNER: Yes, yes. And as, you know, I went in, obviously, not - I wasn't skeptical but not cynical, right? I was there to have fun. And nobody moved. It was dead silent, and there was just that one second beat, and then the yes ball lit up. And I don't have an explanation for that one (laughter).
CHANG: And yet you refuse to believe in ghosts?
SCRIVNER: Well, it's not that I refused to believe. It's that, you know, in science, you have these empirical findings that...
CHANG: Sure.
SCRIVNER: ...Add up to create a theory, right?
CHANG: Sure. And you need more findings?
SCRIVNER: Well, in order to create what's called, like, a paradigm shift into...
CHANG: OK.
SCRIVNER: ...A new way that the - that you understand the world, you got to have a lot of those findings that you can then tie together with string like a detective in a movie, you know?
CHANG: OK, so keep ghost hunting.
SCRIVNER: So keep ghost hunting. Yes, yes.
CHANG: All right. All right, all right. So you point out in this book that there is a rise in true crime as a genre. Like, there's more interest in it. We see it in books. We see it in podcasts, TV shows, et cetera. Why do you think that is? Like, what does that rise in interest in true crime tell us about humans or how society is changing? Does it tell us much?
SCRIVNER: Yeah. So we live in a world now where - I live in a small town, so I know almost all of my neighbors, right? But I've lived in bigger cities. I lived in Chicago for six years. I didn't know the people who were next to me. So you don't know much about the people around you in our more modern society. And, you know, the world is pretty divisive right now. It's been more divisive, I think, in the past five to 10 years than it's ever been.
And I think that leads us to be suspicious of people and suspicious of their motives, suspicious of conspiracy, suspicious of people who might be plotting or planning something. And that triggers in us an interest in learning about the kinds of people who do that. And so you're also seeing a rise not just in true crime, like, murder documentaries, but sort of conspiracy documentaries or people who maybe did something bad, but it wasn't violently bad. It was bad in another kind of way. They schemed someone or they conned someone.
CHANG: Yeah.
SCRIVNER: And we're kind of more interested broadly in these people who are potentially planning or plotting to do something that would harm us in one way or another.
CHANG: Gosh, now I'm thinking our rise in interest in true crime is just a symptom of a more divided, isolated, siloed society.
SCRIVNER: It could be.
CHANG: That's not a good sign, Coltan.
SCRIVNER: It's - that's not a good sign.
(LAUGHTER)
SCRIVNER: Fortunately, I think, you know, the interest in true crime itself and consuming it, you know, doesn't seem to be associated with anything bad. It's more of just like you said, a consequence of what's going on maybe.
CHANG: OK. So it's almost Halloween now. What happens at the Scrivner house on Halloween? My imagination's going wild now.
SCRIVNER: Yeah, yeah.
CHANG: What happens in Eureka Springs at the Scrivner house (laughter)?
SCRIVNER: Well, yeah. So Eureka Springs loves Halloween. And so last year, we bought 2,000 pieces of - I live in a town of 2,000 people, OK? So it's important to keep that in mind. We bought 2,000 pieces of candy and made sure kids only took two pieces when they came. And we ran out by, like - we ran out by, like, 5 p.m. It wasn't even dark yet.
CHANG: That's a lot of kids.
SCRIVNER: It's a lot of kids, so they - everybody comes in because it's a very, you know, old, spooky Victorian town. A lot of the houses are these big Victorian houses that...
CHANG: Oh.
SCRIVNER: And everybody, you know, goes all out. We have a couple of 12-foot skeletons, and we have a - we live on a dead-end road, and we have a skeleton up on the dead-end sign, you know?
CHANG: Looking very dead.
SCRIVNER: Exactly.
CHANG: (Laughter).
SCRIVNER: And so, yeah, this year, we bought like 4,000 pieces of candy. We tried to double it...
CHANG: Whoa.
SCRIVNER: ...To try to get to at least...
CHANG: Get to 7 p.m.
SCRIVNER: We'll get to - we'll get maybe to dusk, at least. Yeah.
CHANG: (Laughter) That sounds like a good time.
SCRIVNER: Yes.
CHANG: Coltan Scrivner is the author of a new book called "Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away." Thank you so much for coming in to NPR West today. This was so much fun.
SCRIVNER: It was a blast. Thank you.
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