Justin McDaniel, a professor of religious studies who teaches the popular University of Pennsylvania course called “Gods, Ghosts, and Monsters,” has long been intrigued by ghost stories and why they are fascinating to people, writes Aubrey Whelan for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

After the pandemic started, he noticed that people’s interest in ghosts and the afterlife rose significantly. He also noticed that his class took on a deeper meaning for his students who came from different academic backgrounds.

“A lot of students became much more viscerally interested in the afterlife,” he said. “I was really struck by my nursing school students. A large number of them started taking the course online, and they were dealing with death on the front line every day.”

As millions of people confronted death up close, learning more about funerary rites and afterlife beliefs made it easier for his students to cope and understand what they were going through.

For skeptics, McDaniel emphasized that it does not matter if ghosts are “real.”

“Ghosts are socially real – people think and talk about them,” he said. Ghost stories “resonate across cultures, religions, class, race.” Read more about the course in The Philadelphia Inquirer.