5 Things I learned from asking kids 20 questions about ghosts

By Rev Dan Catt: Ex-Flickr, Ex-Guardian, now playing at the intersection between data, code, journalism and art.

There is a theory that cats will gravitate towards the person in a room least likely to want to engage with said cat. That appears to be me, but with kids.

It’s worth noting at this point that I have Asperger syndrome. Not mild, not extreme, but firmly in the middle. Social interactions are tricky, and having face-to-face conversations, while fun, involve total concentration — looking for all the visual cues that I’ve taught myself to keep an eye out for. Cues that other people seem to pick up perfectly naturally and empathetically. Humans are a hard-to-read black box of weird emotions.

So naturally, tiny young humans at any social gathering will flock to me, demanding attention while ignoring all other adults.

I needed a plan. That plan was super simple magic tricks. Actually, just two tricks: making things disappear, and making them reappear. It was a terrible plan, so don’t do this — there are only so many times you can satisfy the demands for conjuring increasingly larger objects until suddenly you’re making Mr Snuggles the toy elephant vanish and amazingly return from behind an ear.

And by the end of it, you still have to talk to them.

This is when I resorted to constructing 20 questions to ask children about ghosts. I’ve written the list on Medium before, but, for reference, here they are again:

1. Do you believe in ghosts?
2. If there’s thunder and loads of rain, does a ghost get wet?
3. Can it get hit by lightning?
4. If the wind is strong, does it blow away?
5. Can a ghost breath underwater?
6. Are there human ghosts underwater?
7. Do monkeys have ghosts?
8. Do birds have ghosts?
9. Do bird ghosts get wet in rain or blow away in strong wind?
10. Do cows have ghosts?
11. Could you have a cow ghost underwater?
12. Do fish have ghosts?
13. Why don’t we see fish ghosts on dry land?
14. Can ghosts go on holiday?
15. If a fish died in a fishbowl, and then the fish bowl is moved, does the fish ghost haunt the area where the fishbowl was even if there isn’t any water?
16. Can you spray paint a ghost?
17. If you spray a ghost with stinky perfume will it smell?
18. What happens if two ghosts try to run through each other?
19. If you blow dry a ghost does it go fluffy?
20. Do you believe in ghosts?

…and now here are five things I’ve learned asking these questions.

1. It doesn’t matter if they believe in ghosts or not

Even if they answer “no” to question #1 — “Do you believe in ghosts?” — they’ll give the remaining ones a shot. I have yet to find a child stubborn enough to answer the rest with “No, because ghosts don’t exists”. Stubborn adult killjoys, though, I’ve certainly found a couple. (See Point #5 for more details.)

Kids are great at holding several different and often competing realities in their heads at the same time. Grown ups have the suspension of disbelief, “a willingness to suspend one’s critical faculties”. My observation of kids is that they have a distinct lack of critical faculties, often frustratingly so. I think that probably helps their imagination.

Adults can generally manage, at most, a duality of realities at once, and it often involves dimming some lights. However, even in bright light, a group of children can simultaneously be: escaped zoo animals; zoo keepers; and coordinators of the stories’ narrative, able to look after the little ones and obey the house rules of not climbing on the furniture too much. They are a frustrated zoo keeper, a carer, a storyteller, and an actual leopard who will eat you, aware of their surroundings and in a jungle all at the same time.

They have an innate awareness of being a character in their own story. When they lose that, the magic dies.

To them, not believing in ghosts while working out the practicalities of ghostly existence is as easy as believing I was pulling Mr Snuggles out of their ear, even as they knew I wasn’t really. Honestly, I wasn’t.

2. How to listen to kids

The important part of asking 20 questions is listening to the answers. I’ll be honest — it took me a while. Several goes, in fact, and I still don’t have it down. These are the rules: ask the question and then shut up; do not start thinking about the next question; do not start thinking about supplemental questions to ask based on what the child has said, and then start thinking about the right moment to dive in with it. The moment you start doing that is the moment you stop listening.

If you find yourself losing focus, repeat (in your head) the words they’re saying as they say them. When they stop talking, don’t dive in right away. Give them space to think. If the silence gets too uncomfortable, do say “go on”, and don’t say “is that it?”. Only when they’ve finished can you ask supplemental questions, but there’s a good chance they’ve already covered them, especially if there are two or three children.

Keep asking the questions in order, even if the next one contradicts what they’ve already just said. Doesn’t matter, ask it in full, because, as addressed in Point #1, they’ll give it a go anyway.

I have survived two hours of being stuck on a delayed train sat opposite a stranger’s kid with just these 20 questions. Dealing with parties full of other people’s children is easy now — and best of all, you don’t have to talk to the boring old adults.

3. Children enjoy being asked questions and being listened to.

Now I know this is a pretty obvious one, but as a parent, it’s not always that easy to do.

I’ve read all about the importance of listening to children, but when I’m doing some adulting and one of the kids marches into the room going “Minecraft…Roblox…Youtube…blah blah…” then marches out again, it’s hard to have the “I’m actually going to listen to you” hat on.

I try asking questions:

“Hey, how did school go?”

“…can’t remember”
“But I’ve literally just picked you up from school, it’s right there, we’ve walked 10 steps!”

Clearly the wrong question, at the wrong time.

There’s always time for ghosts, though, and the abstract nature of ghosts seems to work well. There isn’t a wrong answer, and they seem to instinctively know that adults don’t have the answer either. This makes it more of a level playing field, and you’re conversing as equals.

They are positively thrilled that I’ve a) asked a question, and b) listened to the answer.

4. It’s OK to be dead, it’s OK for other people to be dead, and death is (relatively) OK

Contrary to Point #2 about avoiding supplemental questions, there are two points where I sometimes do, and they are both to do with ghosts and locations.

Questions #6 — “Are there human ghosts underwater?” — and question #15 — “If a fish died in a fishbowl, and then the fish bowl is moved, does the fish ghost haunt the area where the fishbowl was even if there isn’t any water?”

It’ll usually be established in question #6 that indeed, if a boat sinks, the ghost will be stuck haunting the bottom of the sea, and we may decide that this is either very dull, or fantastic. But with question #15 there’s the concept of the ghost relocating.

Here’s the supplemental question which is roughly phrased thus: “Is the ghost actually physically at the location, or do we see the ghost in our own heads, triggered by a location, because we carry the memory of the person/animal around inside us?”

When I’m asking kids about these ghosts, what we’re really doing is talking about dead people or things. Kids really want to believe in ghosts, even when they know they most likely aren’t real. Kids don’t think of death as a dark finality. From their answers, it seems to me that they understand a person has a life beyond mortality, and that whoever, whatever is dead is still with them somehow. Death is not an end.

I haven’t branched out into ten questions to ask children about death yet, though. I’m not brave enough, even though they probably are.

5. In a pinch, these are useable on adults

The answers are invariably never as good, but it can get you out of a small talk tight spot.

Only on one occasion have I had a staunch adult strongly declare that “NO, GHOSTS DO NOT EXIST”, and therefore his answer to the following 19 questions was to repeat that in no uncertain (and more and more frustrated) terms. The man may well have been correct, and I may have been enjoying calmly asking the remaining questions a little too much — and he was certainly one of the most boring people I’ve ever met. You can safely never talk to that person again.

However, almost everyone else will give the answers a reasonable amount of thought — even if consistency between answers appears to be more important than imagination.

More importantly, it’s a good opportunity to practice Point #2. Turns out adults love being asked questions and being listened to, too, even beyond just the subject of ghosts.