





































27

“there’s an app For that”®:  
Ghost huntinG with smartphones

elizAbeth tuCker

Almost everywhere we go these days—airports, subways, highways, stores, 
and classrooms—we see people using cellphones. Many of these qualify as 
“smartphones”: tiny computers that perform an amazing variety of functions. 
With smartphones, we can send and receive messages, check the Internet, take 
pictures, and make videos. Because of their fantastic versatility, smartphones have 
their own kind of magic. Jeff Stahler’s widely-circulated cartoon shows the wicked 
queen from “Snow White” holding a smartphone on a selfie stick and gazing at its 
surface, asking “Smartphone, smartphone on a stick, who has the fairest profile 
pic?” (Stahler 2015). This cartoon wryly recognizes the smartphone as an arbiter of 
status and places it in the long tradition of oracle consultation that scholars have 
documented for many years (Stoneman 2011).

If the smartphone is a source of magic, its applications, downloadable 
programs for mobile devices known colloquially as “apps,” provide a cornucopia 
of wondrous possibilities. Apps, obtainable from “app stores,” offer access to 
delicious food, comfortable hotels, quick transportation, and other pleasing 
commodities. Unstinting in their provision of choices, they remind us of the 
genie that emerges from a bottle in the Arabian Nights (Mahdi 2008). There are 
apps for courtship, weddings, pregnancy, and other life crises. In 2010 the Apple 
Corporation registered a trademark for its slogan “There’s an app for that,” which 
appeared in its 2009 commercials. Gradually, this slogan has proved its validity. In 
June of 2016, Apple’s app store offered two million apps and Android’s app store 
offered 2.2 million (“Number of Apps” 2016).

Besides satisfying people’s practical needs, apps respond to their spiritual needs 
and interests. A few examples of spiritually-oriented apps are Archangel Oracle 
Cards, Buddha Mantra, Wicca Spells, and Dialing God. Ghost hunting is one of the 
many expressions of interest in life after death. A broad range of ghost-hunting 
apps—Ghost Radar, Phantom Radar, Spirit Story Box, Ghost Hunter, and others—
makes ghost hunting easier than ever for those who want to take legend trips to 
haunted places. 

This essay will explore how smartphone apps have influenced legend trips 
during the second decade of the twenty-first century. Since the late 1960s, 
folklorists have recognized that visitors to legend-related sites tend to follow a 
certain sequence: telling stories during travel to the site; participating in ritualistic, 
possibly rebellious behavior; and telling stories during travel home (Dégh 1968, 
Thigpen 1971, Ellis 1982-1983). When smartphone technology becomes dominant, 
does this sequence change in any way? Because it seems important to consider 
both long-established and more recent aspects of legend trip behavior, both will 
receive careful consideration here.

All the four legend trippers whose adventure I will analyze in this essay are 
college students. In Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses 



“There’s an app for ThaT”® Tucker

28

(2007), I explore reasons why late adolescents who are attending college may 
have a strong interest in taking legend trips. Intensely interested in learning, both 
in and outside the classroom, they may choose to enter “a mysterious realm filled 
with sensory stimulation and ambiguity” (2007:182). Older adolescents’ reasons 
for visiting legend sites include “desires to understand death, probe the horror of 
domestic violence, confront racism, and express the uneasy relationship between 
humans and technology” (2007:182). But of course, college students’ legend trips 
are not just attempts to learn; they also combine fear with excitement, allowing for 
thrills under safe circumstances. 

Important insight into late adolescents’ legend trips comes from Simon J. 
Bronner, whose Campus Traditions: Folklore from the Old-Time College to the 
Modern Mega-University (2012) analyzes college students’ folklore in depth and 
detail. In the “Legend Quests” section of his chapter about “Legendary Locations, 
Laughs, and Horrors,” Bronner notes, “On these playfully framed trips, students 
talk to one another about frightening scenarios under the cloak of legend, and 
they experience for themselves the reality of the spooky sites, even as they 
confront their own cloudy fears and doubts” (2012: 323). Emphasizing the 
centrality of late adolescents’ own fears and uncertainties, Bronner reminds us 
that play provides a frame for trips to legendary locations. Like other forms of 
play that late adolescents and young adults enjoy, legend trips are spontaneous, 
exciting, creative, and fun. After graduating from college, people tend to cherish 
their memories of legend trips, as Bronner does in recalling his trip to visit a rural 
graveyard with friends from Indiana University on a foggy summer night (2012: 
319). Both playful and meaningful, these trips offer intriguing ambiguities that 
provoke reflection long after the experience ends.

Hypermodern Ostension

As Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi explain in their article “Does the Word ‘Dog’ 
Bite? Ostensive Action: A Means of Legend-Telling,” ostension is “presentation as 
contrasted to representation” (1983:6). Dégh and Vázsonyi identify three forms of 
ostension: pseudo-ostension (hoaxing), proto-ostension (appropriating a legend 
as one’s own experience), and quasi-ostension (misunderstanding something that 
happens in a legend) (1983:18-20). In relation to Slenderman, the fictive bogeyman 
created on the Internet in 2009, Jeffrey A. Tolbert identifies reverse ostension, 
which “weav[es] together diverse strands of ‘experience’ (in the form of personal 
encounters with the creature, documentary and photographic evidence, etc.) into a 
more or less coherent body of narratives (2013:3). Tolbert’s recognition of reverse 
ostension on the Internet shows that this medium of communication is making 
further forms of ostension possible.

According to sociologist Avery Gordon, author of Ghostly Matters, some 
of the most “dominant and disturbing” aspects of American culture are “the 
commodification of everyday life, the absence of meaning and the omnipresence 
of endless information,” as well as “the relentless fascination with catastrophes” 
(1997:14). Gordon characterizes our information-overload era with eerie precision; 
during the years since her book was published, we have seen the rise of fake 



Tucker “There’s an app for ThaT”®

29

news and other phenomena documented by Russell Frank in his study Newslore 
(2011). The ubiquity of Internet rumors and legends about politics, health, and 
other important subjects makes ostension even more meaningful than it might be 
otherwise.

For legend trips involving significant use of smartphone and Internet 
technology, a new kind of ostension emerges. In Putting the Supernatural in 
Its Place: Folklore, the Hypermodern, and the Ethereal, Jeannie Banks Thomas 
introduces the term “hypermodern folklore”: “lore that emerges from, deals with, 
or is significantly marked by contemporary technology and media (including the 
omnipresent Internet) or consumerism (with all its accessible excesses and its 
ability to generate pleasure mixed with anxiety)” (2015:7-8). This term works very 
well for folklore related to digital technology. During legend trips influenced by 
smartphone apps, hypermodern ostension takes place. Presentation of legends 
during these trips relies upon smartphone technology and popular media, as well 
as consumerism.

“Accessible excesses” of consumerism appear during hypermodern ostension. 
People who want to use their smartphones to find ghosts can choose among a 
dizzying array of ghost hunting apps, including Phantom Radar, Ghost Radar, 
Ghost Hunter, Haunted House, Ghost Locator, Ghost Communicator, Ghost 
Detector, Ghost Observer, Spirit Story Box, and many others. App stores generally 
offer multiple versions of ghost-hunting apps that have become popular. Because 
such apps tend to cost very little, it is easy for people to download multiple 
apps to try out. Many ghost-hunting apps cost ninety-nine cents, and many 
are free. Evaluative articles on the Internet such as “We Tested Every Ghost-
Hunting App in the Haunted Buildings of NYC” (Crowley 2014), encourage 
consumers to try out new apps. As a result of low prices and high praise of new 
products, experimentation with numerous apps has become very common. This 
experimentation involves both hunting for ghosts with apps and posting videos of 
ghost-hunting experiences on YouTube.

The first ghost-hunting app for smartphones was Ghost Radar, introduced by 
Spud Pickles in 2009. Ghost Radar Free, developed for iPhones, became known 
as Phantom Radar later; Phantom Radar was the app that the four students used 
in the ghost hunt analyzed in this chapter (Phantom Radar 2017). Ghost Radar 
has an “FAQ” (Frequently Asked Questions) page that gives consumers helpful 
information. The question “Is Ghost Radar real?” is followed by the reply, “It is 
as effective as an EMF detector or a KII [electromagnetic frequency detector]. 
The theory of what is happening is that intelligent energy can be made aware of 
their ability to influence the sensors of the device. You must decide for yourself 
if the readings are indicative of actual paranormal activity” (Ghost Radar® 2016). 
It is important to note that the app developer encourages the consumer to trust 
his or her own judgment. As Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi demonstrate in 
“Dialectics of the Legend” (1973), a wide range of beliefs keeps legends alive; 
skepticism is one reaction that keeps both narratives and descriptions of legend 
trips circulating.

Ghost Radar’s developer, Jack Jones, welcomes questions submitted online. 
When I asked him how successful his apps have been, he answered, “The apps 



“There’s an app for ThaT”® Tucker

30

have simply been more successful than we ever anticipated. The Ghost Radar® 
apps have been downloaded tens of millions of times.” Jones also mentioned that 
this app appeals to “people of all ages” (Jones 2016). He did not, however, answer 
my question about the role of stories in usage of Ghost Radar. Although his 
website does not emphasize app users’ stories, the websites of many other ghost-
hunting apps do. For example, Spirit Story Box’s website encourages app users to 
submit stories about their own experiences. Spirit Story Box’s homepage includes 
a running feed of users’ personal experience stories that describe their successes 
using the app (Spirit Story Box 2016). As Lynne McNeill notes in “Contemporary 
Ghost Hunting and the Relationship between Proof and Experience,” placement of 
personal experience stories on ghost hunters’ websites can make the website seem 
more persuasive (2006:105).

No personal experience stories appear on the download page for Phantom 
Radar, the app chosen by many college students I know. Available on iTunes and 
in other app stores at no cost, this app has been popular among young people. Its 
developer, Inner Four, Inc., understands the appeal of easy availability. Phantom 
Radar has received enthusiastic reviews in YouTube videos (e.g. Blast Process 2014).

There are, of course, other factors besides cost. How much does use of ghost-
hunting apps depend upon narration of legends and personal experience stories? 
Answers to this question vary according to the app and its user or group of users. 
People can use ghost-hunting apps anywhere, not just in places known through 
legends, but legends attract visitors to promising places and encourage hope 
for having a similar experience. In “The Commodification of Culture,” Diane 
Goldstein observes that in belief tourism, “the real sought-after experience [is] the 
potential for one’s own supernatural encounter” (2007:197). Although using one’s 
own smartphone to hunt ghosts is not the same as participating in belief tourism, 
the goal is the same: experiencing something supernatural that can become an 
exciting story to share with others.

Roots in Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism

Ghost hunting with smartphone apps derives from American Spiritualism, which 
began in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1848 two teenaged sisters, Margaret and 
Kate Fox, claimed that spirits were contacting them by making rapping noises in 
their home in Hydesville, New York. News of their claim spread rapidly through 
the media of that period: telephone, telegraph, and newspaper. The Fox sisters 
gave many lectures and psychic readings, becoming international celebrities. Even 
though Margaret admitted in 1888 that the spirit rappings had been a hoax, she 
recanted her confession afterwards, and most of the sisters’ followers remained 
loyal to them (Weisberg 2005:1-4).

By the 1870s there were Spiritualist churches in both the United States and Great 
Britain. Members of the Spiritualist church believe that the dead can send messages 
to the living through psychic mediums and by other means. Lily Dale Assembly in 
western New York, founded in 1879, is one Spiritualist village that has remained 
active up to the present. Visitors to Lily Dale consult psychic mediums, attend 
lectures, and view paintings and writings said to have been generated by spirits. 



Tucker “There’s an app for ThaT”®

31

They also hear stories about the Fox sisters’ experiences in Hydesville and see 
pictures of early mediums’ contact with spirits through table tipping (Tucker 2015).

The first efforts to record spirits’ voices involved long-playing records in the 
1940s; in 1982, Sarah Estes founded the American Association of Electronic Voice 
Phenomena. Frank Sumption created the Ghost Box, also known as Frank’s Box, 
in 2002. This box generates white noise and captures bits of sound from an AM 
radio receiver. Smartphone apps that are supposed to respond to sound patterns 
and electromagnetic frequencies belong to the tradition established by Frank’s 
Box. Through generation of words and symbols such as dots of different colors, 
these apps offer messages from nearby spirits.

Legends of Old Dickinson

Users of ghost-hunting apps tend to bring them to places that have a reputation 
for being haunted. Old houses and hotels make especially good legend trip sites, 
as do cemeteries hospitals, schools, colleges, and universities. Institutions whose 
existence began some time ago have an intriguing connection to the past. For 
college students, haunted places have a particular appeal. While pursuing their 
educations and preparing for future careers, students may feel a heightened sense 
of their environment’s possibilities. Legends that tell of statues coming to life and 
students walking through a gate that marks the mouth of hell or flunking out 
because they have stepped on the wrong spot contribute to the impression that 
the college campus is a strange, enchanted place. Many campus legends tell of 
hauntings in residence halls, viewed as liminal places because students both study 
and sleep there. In the liminal zone between alertness and sleep, ghosts become 
non-living residents of the campus environment. As I discovered when doing the 
research for my book Haunted Halls (2007), it is common for each campus to 
have its own haunted places. Simon J. Bronner’s Campus Traditions documents an 
intriguing range of haunted locations on college campuses (2012: 277-332).

A well-known haunted place on the campus of Binghamton University inspired 
the legend trip that four of my students took on May 2, 2014. Mike, Amy, Jack, 
and Simon, all of whom were residents of Newing College, decided to venture 
into the dark, semi-deserted basement of Old Rafuse, a former residence hall that 
now holds administrative offices and a couple of classrooms. Old Rafuse is part of 
Old Dickinson, a complex of eight former residence halls that has gradually begun 
to serve other purposes. Across the street from Old Dickinson stand the current 
Dickinson Community and Newing College. 

Old Dickinson no longer functions primarily as a residential area at Binghamton 
University, but it has an invisible network of legends about which students 
quickly learn. Many of these legends focus on the sub-basement, where a student 
supposedly hanged himself back in the 1970s. Students have told the story of this 
suicide with minor variations, including the names of two residence halls in which 
the suicide took place. In Haunted Halls, I explore several variants of this legend, 
one of which describes a female student seeing the face of a male student in the 
mirror of her room. After going down to the sub-basement with a friend to try to 



“There’s an app for ThaT”® Tucker

32

figure out what she has seen, she realizes that this was the face of the student who 
committed suicide by hanging from a pipe many years ago (Tucker 2007: 98-99). 

There have also been legends about a cleaning lady fainting in the sub-
basement and refusing to clean there again. This legend is based on an upsetting 
experience that a member of the custodial staff went through. When she was 
reaching up to clean a light fixture, she fainted and fell off a stepladder. Upon 
awakening from the faint, she declared that she had felt the spirit of a student 
named Michael pass through her body. Both students and staff members were 
troubled by the report of this incident, but staff members did not worry about it 
for long. Students, however, found stories about what had happened to be very 
intriguing. Some of them brought Ouija boards down to the sub-basement to see if 
they could find any ghosts there. Once a small group of students tried to summon 
spirits in the sub-basement with a Ouija Board and claimed that handprints of little 
baby ghosts had appeared on the surface of windows there. This claim would 
sound familiar to anyone who had heard a legend about a “gravity hill,” including 
the one that Carl Lindahl examines in his “Ostensive Healing: Pilgrimage to the San 
Antonio Ghost Tracks” (2005). As Lindahl explains, legend trips to the San Antonio 
train tracks inspire a sense of wonder; similarly, students who explore Old Rafuse’s 
sub-basement approach their destination with excitement and awe.

When Old Rafuse still functioned as a residence hall, the sub-basement 
contained a room full of washers and dryers. One legend tells of a demonic face 
appearing in the glass windows of washing machines, frightening students who 
had nervously come down to the subbasement alone, late at night, to do their 
laundry. A small room that contained an incinerator did not inspire legends while 
students still lived in the building but gained a reputation for being haunted 
once the students moved out. When people perceive a building as abandoned or 
semi-abandoned, ghost stories tend to multiply. The comforting routines of daily 
life no longer make the place seem familiar, so legends about ghosts become 
more common. Such was the case at Mansfield University, when a temporarily 
abandoned building inspired many rumors and legends (Glimm 1983:120-22).

Down to the Depths of the Sub-basement

At the beginning of their adventure in Old Rafuse on May 2, 2014, Amy, Mike, 
Jack, and Simon felt excited and curious. Their first attempt to enter the building 
failed, because the doors were locked when classes were not in session. On their 
second try, however, they entered the building holding two smartphones: one 
for making a video of the trip and the other for using the Phantom Radar app. 
Bright-colored dots appeared on the screen as they walked down the two flights 
of stairs that led to their destination: the sub-basement. Simon shouted, “We got 
a shiny blue dot and a big red dot! Oh, yeah! Red, that means something!” On 
Phantom Radar, red means a strong ghostly presence; yellow means the presence 
is less strong, and blue means it is weak. Going beyond those explanations, one 
of the male students wondered whether the color red showed how the ghost was 
responding to their visit: “Red on the thing, I saw it! Maybe it’s angry!” His mention 
of anger coincided with their arrival in the dimly lit, shadowy sub-basement, 



Tucker “There’s an app for ThaT”®

33

where they saw pipes protruding from the walls. Mike said, “There’s a story about 
a guy hanging himself on a pipe” and Simon replied, “Oh God, creepy!” Then they 
took a quick look at the laundry room, where students had seen scary faces. With 
these reminders of the building’s invisible, inherited story structure, the legend 
quest moved forward.

As dots appeared on the screen, words also came up. The first two words, 
“Height” and “Introduce,” got no reaction from the students, but the next, 
“Maria,” fully engaged their attention. “Are there any stories about a ghost named 
Maria?” Amy asked. The others shook their heads as they entered one of the sub-
basement’s storage rooms, which contained old music stands, books, boxes of old 
clothes used by a group of performers, a few compact discs, and other castoffs 
jumbled together. 

Mike plunged his arm into a box of women’s clothes and blankets, shouting, 
“Oh, my God, it’s some girl’s bed stuff! It smells!” His reaction reminded me of a 
visit to the boys’ unit of a camp with my Girl Scouts in the late 1970s in southern 
Indiana; the sights and smells of the boys’ tents and bathrooms at the camp 
fascinated the girls. Although this group of students was much older, three out of 
four of them were young men who seemed eager to find clues about a mysterious 
female ghost, so gender was a factor in their quest.

One of the clues they discovered in the storage room was a video, “The Little 
Princess,” which Jack pulled out of the bottom of the box of clothes. Holding 
the video up, Jack asked, “Could this be Maria?” Amy had seen the movie, but 
the three male students hadn’t. As I watched their video I remembered that the 
1995 film A Little Princess, based on the 1905 novel by the same name by Frances 
Hodgson Burnett, shows the quasi-magical transformation of a dreary boarding 
school bedroom into a luxurious, delightful place to live. To some extent, that 
transformation resembled the one that these four students were experiencing: a 
change from a dull basement to a space haunted by significant ghosts from the 
building’s past.

The next two words that appeared on the screen were “July” and “Sunday.” As 
soon as they heard “July,” the students got excited. “I was born in July!” shouted 
Jack; Amy said, “So was I!” Mike commented in a sepulchral voice, “Jack, you’re 
going to die.” Amy added ominously, “It’s really cold.” With a little help from 
Phantom Radar, they were establishing the time frame of a possible story and 
predicting a grim denouement for their own legend trip. Their prediction may 
have been influenced by The Blair Witch Project, the 1999 film in which all three 
student filmmakers die, or, more generally, by the many horror films in which 
visitors to creepy places do not survive. One prototype for this expectation is 
the legend “The Fatal Initiation,” in which a fraternity initiate spends a night in a 
graveyard and dies of fright.

Right after Mike’s prediction of Jack’s demise, the four students walked into the 
scariest room in Rafuse’s sub-basement. They could see it was the scariest room, 
because a few years ago someone had written a message on its door: “Rumor 
has it that a ghost haunts this room.” Maintenance staff kept the door closed, so 
anyone brave enough to go into the room had to push the door open. The room 
was small and did not contain much: just a pile of trash, a plug surrounded by 



“There’s an app for ThaT”® Tucker

34

soot, a dirty sink with a red spot that looked like blood, graffiti, and an incinerator. 
Part of the pile of trash was a heap of broken glass. The room looked as if it had 
been abandoned and left to fall apart for many years, even though students had 
lived in the building just a few years before. 

No wonder someone had designated this creepy room with the closed door 
the haunted room! As Sylvia Ann Grider observes, basements of houses have a 
“subliminal association…with castle dungeons and torture chambers” (155). This 
association comes through even more strongly in the basements of residence 
halls, which belong to campus legend landscapes involving stories of suffering 
students who commit suicide, get possessed by spirits, and experience other 
kinds of misery. The longer a residence hall basement is left mostly unoccupied 
and the dirtier it gets, the better it works as a setting for a legend trip in which 
seekers confront decay, suffering, and the presence of a ghost. And a room within 
the basement that seems to be secret is particularly intriguing, as the well-known 
folktale “Bluebeard” suggests (Tatar, 2006).

Who was the ghost in this strange, uncomfortable room? As they stood there, 
the four students saw two new words pop up on Phantom Radar: “couple” and 
“forget.” At this point they did something they had not done before: they started 
talking to the smartphone as if it were a Ouija board. Jack asked, “What does 
Sunday mean, and who is Maria? Are you Maria? Do you have anything to do with 
a Sunday in July?” Mike asked, “What do you want us to forget? What does this 
word mean?” 

No more words appeared on the smartphone, but something else happened: 
the students heard noises that scared them. Some of them heard water dripping, 
and others heard broken glass crunching on the floor. Maybe a ghost was 
signaling its presence, as it did in so many folktales, including those that contained 
the motif E402, “Mysterious ghostlike noises heard.” “Run!” said Jack. “Run for your 
lives!” They scrambled up the two flights of stairs and exited the building.

Once they were safely outside, Mike summed up what had happened: “Looks 
like this was a pretty productive ghost hunt. We found out something about this 
girl, Maria, and a Sunday in July. It was probably in the sub-basement, where it 
said there was a ghost and something having to do with a couple. It could have 
been a summer program when they were in high school. Maybe Maria was a 
girlfriend with a boyfriend. That’s all we know. There were a bunch of noises in 
that room. It sounded like water dripping, something on the floor. There was a 
lot of broken glass. We are NOT going back there!” Feeling good about having 
made it through their descent to Rafuse’s sub-basement, he and the other students 
posted their video of the trip on YouTube (Old Dickinson 2014).

Conclusions

This exciting ghost hunt followed the classic legend trip sequence identified by 
Dégh, Thigpen, and Ellis in many respects. The four students discussed Dickinson 
legends before choosing Old Rafuse Hall and making their way down into its dark, 
spooky sub-basement. With some trepidation, they entered the laundry room, the 
storage room, and finally the furnace room that earlier students had identified as 



Tucker “There’s an app for ThaT”®

35

a haunted place. When they heard strange noises, they got scared and ran back 
up the stairs, exiting the building as fast as they could. Immediately after the hunt 
they told a story about what had happened; then they ambled across the street to 
their well-lit, comfortably-furnished residential community.

There was, however, an important change in the older pattern. Besides 
recalling details from the stories they had learned from oral tradition, the students 
used a smartphone app as their guide for the hunt. Phantom Radar supplied a 
tantalizing series of colored dots that told them where ghosts might be; it also gave 
them words that became a story. To some extent, these words facilitated reverse 
ostension, defined by Jeff Tolbert as creation of a story through combination of 
digital elements. The words that appeared on Phantom Radar’s screen could be 
recognized as a narrative, although this narrative’s disjointedness made it seem 
unlikely to become part of Old Dickinson’s enduring legends. 

The most significant change was the students’ use of hypermodern ostension: 
representation of legend elements that demonstrates reliance on the contemporary 
era’s “accessible excess” (Thomas 2015:7). Using one smartphone to record their 
trip and another to run Ghost Radar, Amy, Simon, Jack, and Mike made constant 
use of digital technology. They used Ghost Radar as both a guide and an oracle to 
which they could speak directly, as people would speak to a Ouija board. They 
planned to upload their video to YouTube and did so immediately after their ghost 
hunt ended. Because of this plan, they were aware of performing for an audience 
throughout their search for ghosts. Their video might have “gone viral” and 
reached many viewers; most YouTube videos do not become that famous, but one 
never knows which way the fickle finger of fame will point.

Mike’s summary of his group’s hunt shows that he wanted it to be “productive.” 
The students would have been disappointed if nothing much had happened and 
they had simply left the building. Using the Phantom Radar app helped them 
put together a scenario in which something exciting would take place. A name, 
a month, a day of the week, and other information gave them ingredients from 
which a narrative could grow. 

Significantly, the story about mysterious “Maria” did not matter as much to 
the students as their own experience did. Mock-seriously predicting their own 
death, hearing scary sounds, and feeling uncomfortable in the dirty, haunted 
room scared them enough that they ran away from the basement. Although the 
dots and words on Phantom Radar intrigued them, what they saw, heard, and felt 
in the sub-basement affected them more deeply than messages received on the 
machine. They were proud of having experienced something frightening in that 
spooky place underground and enjoyed posting their video for others to view on 
YouTube.

Information flows constantly from Phantom Radar, Ghost Radar, Spirit Story 
Box, and other ghost-hunting apps that we can buy for low prices or download 
for free. These images and sounds not only offer guidelines for locating ghosts; 
they also represent our current era of semi-reliable electronic communication. At 
the center of each college ghost hunt stand young people whose eagerness to 
confront their own fears motivates them to move forward. As long as they keep 
daring to undertake such quests, their stories deserve to be told. 



“There’s an app for ThaT”® Tucker

36

WORKS CITED

The Blair Witch Project. Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. 1999. 
Haxan Films. DVD.

BlastProcess 2014. App Review: Phantom Radar the Ghost Detector. 24 March. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJGyShMdF4w/. Accessed November 
26, 2016.

Bronner, Simon J. 2012. Campus Traditions: Folklore from the Old-Time College to 
the Modern Mega-University. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Burnett, Frances Hodgson. 2013. A Little Princess. New York: Oxford University 
Press.

Dégh, Linda. 1968. The Haunted Bridges Near Avon and Danville and Their Role 
in Legend Formation. Indiana Folklore 1: 77-81.

Ellis, Bill. 1982-83. Legend-Tripping in Ohio: A Behavioral Study. In Papers in 
Comparative Studies 2, eds. Daniel Barnes, Rosemary O. Joyce, and Steven 
Swann Jones, pp. 61-73. Columbus: Center for Comparative Studies in the 
Humanities, Ohio State University.

Frank, Russell. 2011. Newslore: Contemporary Folklore on the Internet. Jackson: 
University Press of Mississippi.

Glimm, James York. 1983. Flat-Landers and Ridge-Runners. Pittsburgh: University 
of Pittsburgh Press.

Goldstein, Diane E. 2007. The Commodification of Belief. In Haunting 
Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore, eds. Diane E. Goldstein, 
Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas, pp. 171-205. Logan: Utah 
State University Press.

Gordon, Avery. 1997. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. 
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Grider, Sylvia Ann. 1999. The Haunted House in Literature, Popular Culture, and 
Tradition: A Consistent Image. Contemporary Legend, new series 2:174-204.

Lindahl, Carl. 2005. Ostensive Healing: Pilgrimage to the San Antonio Ghost 
Tracks. Journal of American Folklore 118: 164-85.

A Little Princess. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón. 2006. Warner Home Video.
Mahdi, Muhsin, ed. and trans. 2008. The Arabian Nights. New York: Norton.
McNeill, Lynne S. 2006. Contemporary Ghost Hunting and the Relationship 

between Proof and Experience. Contemporary Legend 9: 96-110.
Number of Apps Available in Leading App Stores as of June 2016. 2016. Statista: 

The Statistics Portal. https://www.statista.com/statistics/276623/number-of-
apps-available-in-leading-app-stores/. Accessed November 21, 2016.

Phantom Radar—The Ghost Detector. 2017. Cnet. http://download.cnet.com/
Phantom-Radar-The-Ghost-Detector/3000-2094_4-75186987.html. Accessed 
March 18, 2017.

Stahler, Jeff. 2015. Smartphone, smartphone on a stick, who has the fairest profile 
pic? 2015. [Cartoon]. Universal Uclick for UFS.

Tatar, Maria. 2006. Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives. 
Princeton: Princeton University Press.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJGyShMdF4w/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/276623/number-of-apps-available-in-leading-app-stores/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/276623/number-of-apps-available-in-leading-app-stores/
http://download.cnet.com/Phantom-Radar-The-Ghost-Detector/3000-2094_4-75186987.html
http://download.cnet.com/Phantom-Radar-The-Ghost-Detector/3000-2094_4-75186987.html


Tucker “There’s an app for ThaT”®

37

Thigpen, Kenneth A. 1971. Adolescent Legends in Brown County: A Survey. 
Indiana Folklore 4:2 (1971): 141-215.

Tolbert, Jeffrey A. 2013. The sort of story that has you covering your mirrors: 
The Case of Slender Man. Semiotic Review 2 (November). http://www.
semioticreview.com. Accessed 23 November 2016.

Tucker, Elizabeth. 2007. Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses. 
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

http://www.semioticreview.com
http://www.semioticreview.com

	Pages from CFR_2017_Part6
	CFR_2017_Part7
	CFR_2017_Part8
	Pages from CFR_2017_Part9



