Why Smart People Still Get Spooked by Nothing
Even my most rational friends—people who dismiss astrology and mock paranormal investigators—will quietly entertain supernatural thoughts when they hear tapping on a window late at night. They know exactly what really taps on windows. And in a world of billions of people across all of history, nothing has ever been proven to be caused by ghosts.
I’m the same. I don’t believe in ghosts. But when I walk upstairs to bed and the house is too still, I sometimes remember a story my cousin told me as a child: she looked back down the staircase and saw the apparition of an old woman staring up at her. I know it’s nonsense, yet the memory can still send a shiver down my spine.
As a young man, I noticed the same effect happening in the opposite emotional direction. I would look at certain high‑status people and perceive them as inherently special—not just talented or accomplished. Status symbols also felt similarly charged, as if they carried a deeper, authentic meaning. I could see, rationally, that this ‘glamour’ wasn’t real, but the perception persisted with the same stubborn authenticity as the fear on a dark landing.
Understanding what’s happening in these moments is incredibly helpful. Spookiness and glamour feel like opposites—one makes you withdraw, the other pulls you in. One whispers “danger”, while the other whispers "significance". But they’re produced by the same mechanism: an ancient system for generating perceptions that aren’t strictly true.
This is hagioptasia (meaning 'holy vision'): our evolved tendency to perceive certain things—people, places, objects, memories—as charged with extraordinary meaning. We experience its negative form as spookiness and the uncanny. Its positive form as sacredness, glamour, and nostalgia.
Your mind isn’t malfunctioning when it does this. It’s doing exactly what natural selection designed it to do. Long before humans were human, the animals that survived were the ones that avoided hidden or incomprehensible threats: dark caves where predators slept, misty marshes that swallowed the unwary, forests where silence meant something was stalking. Natural selection favoured nervousness around mysterious phenomena—an abstract sense of dread that said “watch out!”, when nothing specific could be identified.
But once you have a perceptual system that alerts you to unknown threats, you can have one which detects unknown or incomprehensible opportunities. The wiring is identical. If your mind can whisper "something dangerous might be here", it can just as easily whisper "something meaningful might be here". This crude instinct—a sensitivity to hidden significance—kept our ancestors alive. Missing danger was fatal. Missing opportunities, alliances, or status cues was costly. The feeling didn’t need to be accurate. It only needed to be compelling.
When humans formed complex and highly creative cultures, this raw bias quickly became shared beliefs. Because the feeling seemed to point toward something real—something present but hidden—it was naturally interpreted as supernatural forces. The eerie presence in a cave became a spirit. The charged feeling in a woodland glade became a god. The allure of high‑status individuals or objects became ‘glamour’—a word that originally meant enchantment or deceptive spell.
Ancient religions grasped this intuitively. The Romans spoke of numen—a supernatural presence in places, people, objects, or even concepts like 'victory'. In Shinto, the same spirit can protect one day and terrify the next. These traditions recognised that the same sense of presence underlies both the sacred and the spooky. Modern psychology has lost this insight. It treats sacredness, nostalgia, artistic profundity, glamour, and the uncanny as separate phenomena—as if the awe of a sacred temple has nothing to do with eerie dread in a graveyard at night.
But the phenomenology shows their unity. Both positive and negative hagioptasia share the same signature:
Perceived inherent significance – The feeling seems to emanate from the thing itself.
Luminosity or shadow – An aura of presence: glowing in the positive, oppressive in the negative.
Noetic authenticity – The sense that something real has been revealed, not imagined.
Ineffability – “There’s just something about it,” or “something felt wrong but I can’t say why.”
Motivational compulsion – Approach and desire on the positive side; avoidance on the negative.
Transient but lasting – The moment passes, but its afterglow (or aftershadow) remains.
Anyone who has hurried across a dark landing, or felt strangely moved by a childhood object, or felt the magnetic pull of a high‑status person, recognises this pattern. These aren’t separate experiences but the same system firing in different directions.
A key aspect of hagioptasia is that it functions on mystique. It needs the unknown, the ambiguous. When the veil lifts, the spell fades. If the eerie rustle in the garden turns out to be a dog, the uncanny evaporates. When you watch the manufacturing process of a luxury handbag, its glamour diminishes. When an abstract painting—once felt profound—is revealed as a forgery, the aura collapses.
Understanding this can be transformative. When I realised that the 'specialness' I attributed to high‑status people was hagioptasia (my own evolved perception rather than their inherent quality) my status anxiety dissolved. The glow vanished. It hasn’t returned in more than a decade. The enchantment lay in the idea that something 'more' was there. Once you see the mechanism, you can’t unsee it.
This doesn’t render the feelings meaningless. Hagioptasia exists because it was useful. Your ancestors survived because they felt dread in ambiguous situations and reverence toward valuable things. The system worked precisely because it felt authentic.
But we no longer live in the environment that shaped this instinct. Our dark staircases don’t hide predators, and high‑status celebrities aren’t going to become powerful allies. Revered works of abstract art aren’t imbued with hidden cosmic truths.
The system still runs, generating perceptions of significance where rational analysis finds none. Your mind keeps lying to you—not maliciously, but because that’s what it evolved to do. Understanding this doesn’t eliminate the feelings entirely. I still sometimes get spooked on my way to bed, but I know what it is: an ancient alert system firing in a world it wasn’t built for.
That sensation of being ‘spooked’ isn’t evidence of the supernatural—it’s evidence of hagioptasia. If we can understand this irrational tremor, we may finally understand the strange human capacity to sense deep meaning, presence, and importance even when nothing is actually there.
The lies your mind tells you aren’t failures of reason. They’re features of an ancient system that kept your ancestors alive. But once you see them as lies—compelling, authentic-feeling, but ultimately perceptual illusions—you gain something remarkable: the freedom to choose which ones to believe.
Daniel Laidler developed hagioptasia theory and co-authored its empirical validation with Professor John A. Johnson in a 2020 study of 2,943 participants.
Johnson, J. A., & Laidler, D. (2020). Measuring hagioptasia: A case study in theory-testing through Internet-based personality scale development. Personality and Individual Differences, 159, 109919. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886920301082
Laidler, D. (2025). Hagioptasia: Convergent Evidence for a Unified Construct of Perceived Specialness. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17474804
Source: Why Smart People Still Get Spooked by Nothing
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