You aren't alone. In fact, for some people, this feeling translates into a full-blown phobia that makes it difficult or impossible to live or sleep alone. This fear of ghosts may be much more common than usually believed, said Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, a psychiatrist at The D'Or Institute for Research and Education (IDOR) in Rio de Janeiro.
"It is possibly as common as the common phobias that we meet with every day, such as fear of heights or certain insects," Oliveira-Souza told Live Science.
Ghostly fears
Shame and embarrassment, according to Oliveira-Souza, probably prevent many people from mentioning their fears to medical professionals. Oliveira-Souza became interested in the phenomenon after a patient he treated for depression happened to mention that the depression treatment had also cured him of his lifelong fear of ghosts, which had once made him frightened to sleep alone. To Oliveira-Souza, the patient's description matched the criteria for a phobia, a term in psychology used to describe overwhelming fears triggered by a certain situation — in this case, being alone or thinking of horror movies or other supernatural scares. He began to ask around and found that many friends, patients and relatives also reported getting spooked by the notion of ghosts.
In a paper published in November 2018 in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry, Oliveira-Souza highlighted a few of those cases. In one case, a 46-year-old hotel attendant who lived with her parents her whole life was bereft after her father died and her mother decided to move away; the woman was terrified to stay alone in the family apartment. When her mother left for a weekend trip before the planned move, the woman lurked in a nearby nightclub and wandered the streets of her neighborhood rather than face sleeping alone. Intrusive memories of her father's funeral haunted the woman when she did try to sleep.
In another case, a 54-year-old lawyer was hesitant to leave a bad marriage because he was afraid to live alone; he'd slept in the same room as his older brother as a youth and had married hastily after his brother left home because his supernatural fear made him terrified of sleeping alone. The lawyer reported that even when alone in his office, he felt like someone was watching him, or that something would materialize out of nowhere in front of him. This feeling of being watched is also known as "Anwesenheit," a German word that means "presence."
Being alone, especially at night, triggered fears for all of Oliveira-Souza's patients. One 19-year-old college student slept with her parents out of fears of spirits breaking through her bedroom window. A 63-year-old widow was so terrified that someone or something was in her living room at night that she sometimes wet the bed rather than get up and walk to the bathroom. An 11-year-old girl reported fears that hands would drag her under her bed if she dangled her legs over the floor or that a terrifying apparition would appear in front of her in the darkness.