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A weekly show from the folks at East Lansing Info breaking down all the news and happenings in East Lansing, Michigan.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of East Lansing Insider. I'm Anna Liz Nichols, deputy editor over at East Lansing Info. And today, we have doctor Morgan Shipley, chair of the department of religious studies at Michigan State University on the podcast. And I'm at a little bit of a loss on how to introduce him this Halloween weekend slash election eve. That honestly is part of my intro of Yep.
Anna Liz Nichols:Each week on in East Lansing Insider, we talk to a variety of different people. We talk to elected officials. We talk to researchers. We talk to just individuals doing things in the community. And I actually had a hard time coming up with a summary of all it is that you look into, Morgan, because I think there's a lot of elements of this where I saw talks on witchcraft and and you look at, I think, an element of religious studies as the chair of the religious studies department that I think is an interesting topic for our modern age of, like, what does religion look like in in our modern society.
Anna Liz Nichols:But given that, you know, Halloween is this weekend and it's it's the end of October spooky season, I kinda wanted to talk to you about the fascination we all have with with the paranormal, with with the spiritual realm, and how that maybe plays into some of the classes and and actions you do at the university and the things that you look into.
Morgan Shipley:Yeah. No. Absolutely. I really appreciate you giving me this opportunity and having a chance to talk with you. And, yeah, I would say my interests are quite expansive, and I do a lot of different things.
Morgan Shipley:But what I tell people often is that what I study is what motivates humans to be humans and how they relate to one another, and I'm curious and always concerned with the role that religion plays in that. And so that takes me often into areas that are understudied or might be marginalized. And so always really happy to talk about those things that exist on the periphery or the sidelines of normal conversations. But when it comes to paranormal, you know, is also the faculty adviser for the MSU Paranormal Society. Shout out to my students out there.
Morgan Shipley:The paranormal is something that is truly fascinating, but I think it builds directly out of the same type of questions that we find within religion. Right? One of the things that we could say is that at its base, religion offers answers to questions that we often do not have answers to. Where did I come from? What is my purpose?
Morgan Shipley:And maybe the largest question, the greatest existential question we have is what happens when I die? And that leads us in this place of the paranormal. Right? I mean, definitionally, the paranormal just means not scientifically explainable. Relatively straightforward.
Morgan Shipley:Those things that we cannot explain. It might be a feeling, a sense, things like deja vu. But more broadly, if you think about the paranormal relation like ghosts or psychophenomenon or spirits, I would say that, actually, the interest in the paranormal is not really about ghosts. It is much more about us as humans. Right?
Morgan Shipley:When we study the paranormal, when we think about what people are doing with the paranormal, why they're watching films or dressing up, that it's actually telling us something really distinct about the human experience. It's about how we find meaning in the unknown, how we make sense of moments that seem to belie our imagination, whether that is a moment of beauty or a moment of loss. And so very much when we start thinking about, like, hauntings and psychic phenomena, I don't wanna say that there's not a realness to it. And, you know, there's people who will say that being a psychic, having telekinesis, those kind of aren't real. I think as a scholar, what I'm a little bit more interested in is to why people are so interested in it on one side.
Morgan Shipley:And on the other side, I'm really interested in how the paranormal becomes a a site by which we can think about what is normative or normal within society. Right? So we can use the ghouls and the ghosts and the witches in order to create a standard of what is evil and what is good, what is human and what is nonhuman, what belongs and does not belong. And so when I talk a lot about, like, Wicca and witchcraft or ghouls or ghosts or the paranormal, I'm really trying to invite in conversations about who we are as people, how we construct our identities, and how in that process of making meaning, we might come up against things we can't explain, and the paranormal provides a a tool that we can use in our efforts to do so.
Anna Liz Nichols:Yeah. That kind of... And it's a little different. But in this realm of things we don't understand and our explanations for them and how they more to human behavior. I remember...
Anna Liz Nichols:I believe when I was at MSU, there was the how to survive the zombie apocalypse class, which was actually taught, I believe, by a social work professor because it was less about, you know, the eating brain zombies and more about what that does to a social structure, how human behavior works. I think human behavior was actually in the class title. Interestingly enough, like, in this Halloween kind of realm, as you might know, Lansing right now is is reckoning with the fact that they... There's a possibility they have a serial killer, but a lot of the story with that is, and it's impacting, specifically the unhoused population, is a broader story about human behavior towards the unhoused, how housing insecurity works in our state, all this stuff. And so I was wondering, I know that you you talk about witches, and and and we can practice.
Anna Liz Nichols:From my research, and this would just be the Michigan archives, on how dialogue surrounding this idea of witches plays out in Michigan. You know, in my research into this for previous coverage, it led me to reviewing reports coming out of the mining towns in the UP where there were reports that women who worked or owned brothels were being accused or maybe even just insulted because these are, you know, written accounts, insulted with this idea of being witches. And these would be women who owned businesses or were in business for themselves, women who had economic standing. I was wondering what you talk about when you talk about, witches in the in the Wiccan practice.
Morgan Shipley:Yeah. No. That... I mean, that's a... But that's a great example.
Morgan Shipley:I mean, I think you're pointing to the way in which we can study it. So on the one hand, you know, we need to recognize that, you know, Wicca is a specific new religious movement. Right? It emerges relatively recently out of the nineteen fifties with a guy named Gerald Gardner. Right?
Morgan Shipley:It's got rituals. It's got ideas. A lot of those are appropriated or borrowed from historical examples, what we would call witchcraft. Right? And witchcraft is really just a broad category of trying to understand a certain relationship between nature reverence, empowerment agency, and often femininity.
Morgan Shipley:Right? And so you captured a sense that a lot of the ideas of witchcraft, a lot of the demeaning of the witch is really about trying to create this dichotomy between good and evil. And really what I would argue is a patriarchal device. Right? That, to call someone a witch, even a kind colloquial term, is to say that they...
Morgan Shipley:There's something negative intuitively about them. So on the one hand, I think it is important that when we talk about witchcraft and Wicca, for example, that we understand those two things are not the same. As I tell my students, all Wiccans are witches, but not all witches are Wiccans. Right? That Wicca is a very specific type or expression or practice.
Morgan Shipley:There are various forms of witchcraft. You can look at Diana witchcraft. You can look at fairy witchcraft. You can look at the work of Starhawk. Someone I look at a lot because Starhawk thinks about that being a witch is really being empowered by a type of feminine energy that intercourses throughout all of existence and therefore makes us responsible to nature.
Morgan Shipley:So it is very much a place of environmental stewardship. It's a place of activism and injustice. So to your example, I think when we do think about historical things like witch hunts, it has nothing to do with the idea whether these people are witches or not. It has everything to do with the process of othering. And we can use these devices, the unknowing, right, the idea that witches are stealing people at night and eating them.
Morgan Shipley:Right? Kind of the classic Hansel and Gretel story. The way in which witches are transforming and changing people ignores how, from the perspective of most witches, magic is simply the idea of willing change into this world. And it's willing change in a reciprocal way, one that is mired in a sense of love and obligation. But we lose sense of that because the witch becomes a device that becomes either perfectly characterized.
Morgan Shipley:You know, we think about all the costumes. We think about, like, the darkness of witches. We think about the way that they look. Even in the remaking of The Wizard of Oz, right, we have this good witch, right, who's not actually the good character. We come to know this.
Morgan Shipley:Right? But the percent... The the perspective of it, the the coloring, her skin coloring, like her race, juxtaposed to historically a green witch and the, you know, the films, right, this idea that it's a racialized other. And so to your question, like, I... You know, it's it's complicated because on the one hand, I think it's important at times to really study these groups from what we would call, like, a classic religious studies perspective.
Morgan Shipley:How does Wicca and witchcraft manifest itself within the world of religiosity, and what does that tell us about human religion? And why are people drawn to those traditions, especially amidst a world that is so dominated by, like, monotheistic perspectives like Christianity? On the other hand, I am particularly interested, though, in more what those representations of witches within media tell us. Right? For example, we can look at something like, The Chilling Adventures of, Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
Morgan Shipley:I know I didn't get that title exactly right, but The New Chilling Adventures. The entire show is predicated on the idea that witches venerate and are subservient to Satan, which could not be more foundationally removed from the actual history of witchcraft. Right? Witchcraft is not a satanic device. Satan emerges out of a specific Christian milieu.
Morgan Shipley:Right? Satan is mired in that Christianity, which just have nothing to do with that. But what happens in our imaginary if people are presented with kind of a traditional and consistent representation? So if they see the wizard of Oz and it's the evil witch. Right?
Morgan Shipley:They turn on Sabrina, and it's the witches venerating and working on behalf of Satan. It could... Creates this dynamic in which the witch is seen as that kinda evil other. And so historical witch hunts, whether we go to Salem or we come here to Michigan, are a reflection of a deep sense of insecurity. Right?
Morgan Shipley:In a world that is constantly changing, we wanna find a scapegoat to justify what that change is and maybe feel like we have a sense of control over it. So we find an object or a group to, act upon. But, also, in a world that was changing in terms of its patriarchal structure in which women were becoming empowered to be economically, viable on their own, in which they are creating spaces within civic orders and social society in order to be a person within that public space, that was a threat to men who felt that they should be in the ruling order. And so calling somebody a witch or making them label that was a way of instantly dehumanizing them and then creating the structure that what we needed to do is intervene. The same way The Wizard of Oz throws the water, right, on the witch in order to make the witch disappear.
Morgan Shipley:Witch hunts become a way of creating a spectacle of the other in order to often make people feel more comfortable in their own insecurities.
Anna Liz Nichols:Can I ask? I don't know how long you've been at Michigan State University. How long has it been?
Morgan Shipley:I've been here since 2008. So this is my eighteenth year at MSU, and I've taught across so many different classes and had so many different experiences. But, again, like, one of those is being the faculty adviser for the Paranormal Society. So I've had a lot of opportunity to be here in Michigan. Originally, I'm from the Chicagoland area, so it's a different kind of cultural setting, you know, both religiously and culturally.
Anna Liz Nichols:Since you've been here effectively since two thousand eight recession and now to 2026, that's a long time to witness any trends and and changes within the same student populate... Or a cyclical student population, but that same age group, and and you've had the paranormal Paranormal Society. I was wondering if you have conversations or have noticed anything that maybe has changed throughout the years of why students take religious studies classes, why they look into the paranormal, why they ask questions about aliens or about, religious structures that they've they've known. What... How have things maybe even changed?
Anna Liz Nichols:Because I I... Even just thinking about modern politics, religion is a huge topic in modern politics. I was wondering if there's anything in the last decade or so that you've witnessed that stands out to you.
Morgan Shipley:Yeah. I mean, think that's a great question. I think on the on the one hand, the... Just the broader interest in the paranormal is an effect, especially for those who are raised in American culture, is an effect of our culture. Right?
Morgan Shipley:That so many of our films and so many of our television shows are structured on this. And, when I teach my new religions class, like, one of the assignments is for students to do a film review or any film they'd have. And the consistent feedback I get is there's too many films about new religions and cults. So on the one hand, we're just in a culture that's, like, suffused and overwhelmed with this obsession with ghosts, the other, the TV shows, the paranormal hunters, the ghost hunters, all these things. And I think on one hand, students recognize that that butts up right against religion.
Morgan Shipley:Right? How do we understand spirits? How do we understand the idea that we're not just embodied material structures? Do we carry on after death? Right?
Morgan Shipley:Again, it goes back to some of those deep existential concerns. I So think on the one hand, that's always been there. I think that's one of things that draws students in the class. Right? We also have students who come into our religiousized classes who are interested in simply finding a new perspective on their own religion.
Morgan Shipley:Right? So they grew up in a Christian household. They're gonna take a class on Christianity. However, when I look at, like, the trends over the last decade, what I see are more students who are entering in a religiousized class who have a very complicated relationship with religion, right, who were born into or raised within a religious context, and the religious context no longer makes sense to them. Maybe it's because that religious context, religious teachings don't reflect the person that they actually know that they are.
Morgan Shipley:Right? So we think about a member of the LGBTQ plus community who finds themselves born into a religious community that says that that is a sin. You have... There's this challenge here. Right?
Morgan Shipley:It's how do I align with the trueness of my personhood with what my religion is telling me? And that can push people either further into fundamentalism, where they kind of reject their own sense of self in order to embrace what the religion's telling them, or it can lead them away from religion. And so this is where we see the rise of people who are often called spiritual but not religious. Sometimes they're also called the nones, n o n e s, not n u n s. Right?
Morgan Shipley:These are people who, like, on a survey will respond that I have no religion. Right? And it's a complicated category because they'll say something like, I don't have a religion, but I'm still a follower of Jesus. And, really, what they're saying there, right, is that they see a difference between the spiritual connection to a higher power than the way in which that has been institutionalized and, and turned into a system that doesn't align with their needs or their expectations. And so that's a growing category of people who have a very complicated relationship, who don't wanna identify as religion.
Morgan Shipley:Because like you said, religion can be too controlling. It can be too doctrineer. It can also be too politicized. Right? That it's used as a tool to justify who belongs and who does not belong, what religion is acceptable in our public space and what is not.
Morgan Shipley:Right? And so we think about, like, a group like the satanic temple, which is a group who claims to worship Satan, but they're actually a political organizing group who uses Satan as a symbol for actually religious inclusion. So their whole point is that in a nation of pluralism, either all religions should be represented in the public or no religion should be represented in the public. So they're concerned with the way in which, let's say, Christian norms are being imposed in governmental settings. And so the trends...
Morgan Shipley:You know, back to your main question is that students enter in the class often with a greater antagonistic relationship to religion, or they've fully embraced it, which creates for a very complicated classroom dynamic. But one in which I think students are very interested in trying to better understand. Right? Why these systems that are often so connected to morals, to values, the way that we treat others, do unto others as you want done unto yourself, how do those become aligned with exclusionary principles? How do they become aligned with, violent expressions of politics?
Morgan Shipley:And so they find a gap between maybe their experience of god or the sake, whoever it might be, and the way that's actually put into practice. And they find in our classes an opportunity to work through that, to think more nuance about beliefs and practices, but also to be presented with the idea that when we study religion, we are studying people. Right? And people are complicated, and they're not simply affected by religion, but they're affected by the culture that also surrounds that religion. Right?
Morgan Shipley:And that's especially true for people who find themselves in one setting that has maybe a very homogenous type of identity who are also thrown into a big 10 university with, you know, dozens and dozens of thousands of people who believe differently, who think differently, who see the world differently. And I think religion and religiousized classes create a space for a type of discourse to emerge in which we can better understand ourselves and our relationship to others. But, yeah, it's a big shift in the spiritual. And I think when we start talking about spiritual but not religious, it's a really quick slippery slope from, like, thinking spiritually to thinking paranormally. Right?
Morgan Shipley:Because there's still this interest of, like, okay. If I no longer believe in god, how do I make sense of the unknown? Do I simply embrace the fact that life is life and there's nothing else? What do I make of the idea that do I have a soul? What would that even mean if I'm just this being?
Morgan Shipley:And so these are the questions that draw it in, and I try to create spaces in my classroom that are very, welcoming and invitations for students to do that type of exploration for themselves and for others.
Anna Liz Nichols:You said it, but as you were talking about, like, some of the conversations and the mentalities people have coming into class, I'm just like, oh gosh. That must be combative.
Morgan Shipley:And, like, yes. It definitely it definitely can be. And I think, you know, the the the role of an instructor, which I... There's such a problematic, like, relationship, like, the hierarchy between instructor and students. But, you know, one role is to model what that looks like.
Morgan Shipley:Right? Because we live in a diverse world. We live in a world in which people navigate and see the world and have different values. And if we assume that we can impose our own, then we're actually missing opportunities to learn from one another to create more opportunities for inclusivity. You know, in a lot of my classes...
Morgan Shipley:And with this, I I tell my class at the end of every class, I say, continue to be beautiful human beings and act with compassion. And I think that those are the values that can come out of the study of religion. But, yes, it can be combative because as Bob Dylan once told us, if god is on my side, I can pretty much justify anything. And if you feel really firmly with that, how do you align with somebody who fundamentally offers a different opinion or says god doesn't exist? And that can really hit somebody at their core.
Morgan Shipley:Right? And for those who struggle with that, again, they're looking for other answers and, you know, this kinda circles them into other areas, and that might be the paranormal or that might be just a full embrace of, like, pure rationalism and kinda pure material existence.
Anna Liz Nichols:So we talked a little bit about witches. Are there any other motifs or or characters in our mythology, folklore, all that that in terms of having these broader conversations of what that reflects onto humanity or what... How humanity has interacted with that?
Morgan Shipley:I... No. I think to your question. Right? Yeah.
Morgan Shipley:Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Right? I think folklore in general are the stories we try to tell ourselves to give us a sense of belonging and coherency to a world that is often beyond our control.
Morgan Shipley:Right? We're farmers who are responsible for growing the crop for our entire community, and a storm comes through and wipes out the entire crop. Right? It's not just that I'm affected by that, but my whole community is affected by that. I'm sitting in my room at night, and I hear a bump in the other space.
Morgan Shipley:Right? Like, how do we make sense of just that which does not have an immediate explanation to? And so I think on the one hand, like, folklore in general are the ways in which we start to make broader sense of what these moments tell us, that maybe it's because we didn't venerate the gods. So we think about, like, the the construction of Halloween. One of the sources of it is, was really just a harvest festival.
Morgan Shipley:Right? It was a transition from the harvest to the winter, and the winter brings long, you know, shorter days and longer nights. It's the the idea that it's also was a moment in which the portal between the living and the dead is kinda open, and you have to be concerned. And so how do... Is is that real?
Morgan Shipley:Again, I think that's actually kind of the wrong question because because what makes the paranormal fascinating is not whether any of these phenomena are real. It's rather like, what is the possibility actually tell us about our needs? So folklore in general does that, but we think about, like, specific others, whether that might be Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster. Right? We think about, like, the various kinda monstrous others that exist, even if that's Frankenstein or Dracula, what we're really doing is trying to ascribe meaning and coherency to aspects of the world that we can't often control.
Morgan Shipley:Right? So on the one hand, I see something in the forest. I look at them like, that's a big thing. That's just a big, bear. Right?
Morgan Shipley:But what would it mean if I suggest that it's Bigfoot? Maybe I'm suggesting that there's something more to this world than our material everyday eye can see. Maybe there's things that walk amidst us that we cannot always have access to. And why might that be appealing? Well, it's because we often can only control so little of our world.
Morgan Shipley:Right? We're not in control of the weather. We're not in control of nature. We're not in control of decisions that our politicians are making that we're feeling the effect of. So in an interesting way, like, folklore and paranormal actually give us some level of control because we can start identifying both the sources of things we think are good and evil.
Morgan Shipley:So therefore, we can start constructing morals, and we can start constructing ethics. But it also allows us to establish a a narrative that even if it is so outside the boundaries of rational thought, it is directly within our emotional needs as people who are struggling within this world. And so these kind of others that consistently emerge, you know, cryptids and and monsters, On one hand, just literary devices, there's tools. But even then, there's a reason why, you know, Bram Stroker wrote Dracula. There's a reason why Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.
Morgan Shipley:Like, these are things in which we are actually learning something about that cultural moment, about fear, about the unknown, about the, the desire to control. Right? So why do we wear masks on Halloween? Well, one of the folklore stories is that we needed to hide ourselves from the ghosts and ghouls who emerge when that thin veil between the living and the dead emerge. Right?
Morgan Shipley:So we're hiding ourselves. Right? Or maybe we're doing something different. Maybe we're inviting them in by putting food on our doorstep so they don't actually come into our home, which then leaves this idea of, you know, my kids in two days going out and putting on masks and going door to door to collect candy. And so, yeah, I think it it speaks to just the broader, desire on one hand to try to explain things that cannot be explained.
Morgan Shipley:But I think it also speaks more directly to the fact that we as humans find maybe our greatest joy in life by trying to understand life itself, which does not have a concrete beginning or end for so many people. And the paranormal simply expands that in such interesting ways that it's not about whether there are aliens at Area 51 or not. Right? What would the very idea, though, of aliens possibly tell us? If we're not alone, how does that change the way we think about ourselves?
Morgan Shipley:How does the way the way we think about our relationship to one another? How does that change the way we think about our relationship to the world? For some, it provides a justification to ignore this world. If there's something more out there, why am I concerned here? But for others, if there's something more out there, I need to be really concerned about the world I find myself in.
Anna Liz Nichols:Taking this a little more local, Michigan State University has plenty of ghost stories. There have been throughout the years been these supernatural sightings, these stories that we've told about the buildings on MSU campus. What comes to mind is Saint's Rest because of the fire. Mary Mayo Hall, which I think is interesting because it's one of the buildings named after a woman that is haunted.
Morgan Shipley:Right. And it's got, the myth... The the folklore of being satanic, which again goes this idea, right, that there's satanic rituals that are there. And, you know, again, something about that interaction between, like, Satan, witchcraft, and femininity, which is really, again, much more of, I think, an insight into patriarchal thinking. But...
Morgan Shipley:Yes. Yeah. Absolutely.
Anna Liz Nichols:Yeah. There any elements of some of the ghost stories we have on Michigan State University campus or even in the local area that either you or maybe your students have really, you know, examined and... Or just... It's fun to talk about.
Morgan Shipley:Yeah. I think that... I mean, I think both. Right? So on the one hand, MSC Paranormal Society, has for a very long time done investigations.
Morgan Shipley:Right? They consistently both investigate, local areas, you know, anything that has a a spectral presence. Right? A suggestion that it might be haunted, they go to. And they use some of those tools.
Morgan Shipley:You know, some would call them pseudoscience tools, but the tools like a talk box and things like that that we might be able to use to break that barrier between the living and the unliving, right, or, the material and the spiritual. So we have the Paranormal Society, and they lead tours. And, you know, there's Beaumont, Tower, right, which has a history there too. There's College Hall, which used to be where Beaumont Tower was. So it was built in 1856.
Morgan Shipley:That's why they say Beaumont Tower might be haunted. Saint's Rest was the big one and then, Mayo Hall as well. So on the one hand, there's those, and I think that there are students who remain really interested. There's also, you know, the stories of, you know, a young person who passed away in the the steam pipes of MSU and, you know, the narrative there connected to satanic panic, which is something else we could talk about if you're interested. Right?
Morgan Shipley:This kind of, you know, the the the... It's another panic. It's another moral panic. Just like witchcraft, like, the witch hunts are a moral panic. Satanic panic is another one of those that, is incredibly problematic, but became directly connected to, you know, MSU.
Morgan Shipley:And it was connected to this, really problematic idea that things like Dungeons and Dragons were, you know, inaugurating people into kind of these satanic processes. And so, again, I think it tells us something about the deep moral concern that we have within our communities even here on a college campus, which the whole thing should be about the exploration of ideas. Right? And so what do you do with those ideas kind of exceed out of our our rational mind? What happens when they can't be measured?
Morgan Shipley:Why do we not study those? Because in studying those, we're actually learning aspects about kind of ourselves in different ways.
Anna Liz Nichols:So I wanna talk a little bit more about some of the ghost stories we have on campus, but I do think the steam tunnel incident is very pertinent to this conversation as it's... Most of the steam tunnel story is just what people who didn't know anything about what had happened were saying at the time. So, in terms of of talking about this concept of satanic panic, could you give us a rundown of of that story?
Morgan Shipley:So this... To the steam tunnels. Right? I mean, this is... You know, we talked about the witch trials, right, and and witch hunts.
Morgan Shipley:And witch hunts, again, are part of this broader category of things we call the moral panic. Right? That there's moments in which the structures of society, right, the the structures that establish, the moral contingencies that create power dynamics, who should be in control and who should not be in control, who should be making decisions and who should not be making decisions, that when we encounter changes, whether that's industrialization, globalization, coming in contact, it creates a panic among people that's really about the hierarchies of power and who's in control. And when those panics become palatable, we have to find a... Palatable.
Morgan Shipley:We have to find a way to respond to them. Right? We have to find a way to control that. And by saying we have to find a way, it's really those in power are seeking a way to maintain their power amidst changing dynamics. Right?
Morgan Shipley:So the Salem witch trials in a world of changing religiosity, in a world in which we're moving away from this kind of vision of a Puritan, blissful place, and people are finding new religious avenues, the witch became a way of scaring people back into that homogeneity and back into that identity. And those moral panics have emerged at different times, and I think one of the more interesting ones in our time have been the satanic panics. Right? The satanic panic broadly were these moral concerns that emerged out of the nineteen sixties. You had all these new religious movements that were connected to often charismatic figures who were often combining different religions.
Morgan Shipley:They were taking aspects of, you know, Asian religions with mindfulness and meditation. They were connecting it to indigenous traditions. They were often using things like psychedelics and thinking differently about the body. They were often involved in things like... Called sex magic, for example.
Morgan Shipley:Like, the body becomes a mechanism for actual ritual, and that is a deep threat to, let's say, normative Christianity. Right? And so how do we respond to that? Well, on the one hand, it turned into what we call the cult craze. All these new religions were cults, and cults are things we have to be scared of, we have to control, and, you know, go on to any streaming device, and you will find as many documentaries about cults as probably anything else.
Morgan Shipley:And there are all these really kind of stories about people being scared, deep down people being scared about their identity, their comfort, their belonging, and I would say their power. The satanic panic emerges out of a lot of that cult fear. Right? Because the idea was that these cults, these new religions are being driven by Satan. It's that we have given the world too much over to Satan, that we've not Christianized ourself in a much...
Morgan Shipley:As much. Nineteen fifties, again, is where we get things like in god we trust put on our currency. It's where we stood the pledge of allegiance. All these things that try to return or position America as a Christian nation are complicated by the rise of these religions that are pushing for new values, and that produces that moral panic. Satan became the great source that we could put that upon.
Morgan Shipley:And that carried through the seventies into the eighties. And in the eighties, you know, in the late seventies or the eighties, it manifested in really weird ways connected to things like dungeons and dragons, that there's actually these cultural artifacts or these cultural practices that exist who are designed in their very, role is to pull people away from what is morally normative and into the realm of Satan. Right? So at MSU, there's this story, and it's a folklore because, you know, it's about James Dallas Egbert. He was a 16 year old child prodigy and computer science student who disappeared in 1979.
Morgan Shipley:Right? Almost immediately, there was this media frenzy that he had had been participating, like, in a live action version of Dungeons and Dragons, and he was in the steam tunnels as part of that. Well, we now know he went in there, with the idea of taking his own life. Right? And that was...
Morgan Shipley:It was unsuccessful. And then he went into hiding. Right? I think he ended up being, like, in a safe house in East Lansing and then ended up in New Orleans for a while. Right?
Morgan Shipley:But it didn't matter. It didn't matter. We we lost sense of him as an actual person and the struggle he was going through, and rather he became another example of what we do when we allow Satan to run amok within our cultural milieu, when we allow people to play in games in which they are playing as a sorcerer or a a a mage in which they are using magic and participating in the realm of the paranormal. Right? Dungeons and Dragons is a game.
Morgan Shipley:It's a space of imagination. It's a space where people have often been marginalized because mainstream society says that you should be this way or you should be an athlete. You should be like this. For any of you listening who, you know, watch... What is, stranger things.
Morgan Shipley:Right? The whole presence there. Right? It's a perfect example, right, where they even play on that by having their... The shirt have, like, Satan head on it, and it's all pushing there.
Morgan Shipley:But if you watch all the the seasons of it, right, they get... They are, you know, they are accused of essentially being satanists. And, again, what that is telling us is nothing about Dungeons and Dragons. It's telling us nothing about James Dallas Egbert. It's telling us everything about what the cultural moment was about.
Morgan Shipley:And that cultural moment was that we have a deep fear that by actually expanding who and what we understand identity and people to be, that we lose our power as the privileged group. And so to maintain that privilege, let's produce a panic. Let's talk about Michelle Remembers, this book about lost memories that come out, and it galvanizes people being kidnapped from their homes and forced into these deprogramming. It it leads to people, losing their lives in a real way because we assume that these things are happening. And what we're not actually attending to is why one group of people claim to have the power and ability to dictate to another not only what is viable, but what should exist.
Morgan Shipley:And it creates that align between The Us and the other in another way. And so, you know, MSU's own connection to this, I think, has galvanized kind of the broader interest on campus about the paranormal. Right? We have the story. And whenever I talk about the story, right, you know, the the truth is what we don't know is that ends up committing suicide a year after this.
Morgan Shipley:Right? And so what we don't talk about is the struggle of a young prodigy who's thrust into a university and maybe so overwhelmed by the expectations placed upon him that he takes his old life. And we're unconcerned with the broader realities that this person was facing, which he felt that that was the only avenue he had to go. Instead, we reduce it to a story of the fear of the other, the fear of the unknown. And, therefore, it allows us to gain more control over our own sense of being.
Morgan Shipley:And if I'm being really candid for a moment, it also allows us at times to be indifferent to the suffering of others because we don't need to be concerned what James is going through. What we have to be concerned with is the presence of these satanic forces that suggest... That essentially create a divide between those who we want in our midst and those who we do not want in our midst. And, again, I think Stranger Things' entire play on this is that itself. Right?
Morgan Shipley:They're playing on who belongs and who does not belong. So that's part of my answer to your question. The other part is is that I think that there's, again, this unique idea that everywhere we go, people have been there before. Right? We're not the first presence in this space.
Morgan Shipley:And whether there are ghosts or spirits or not, the presence of them carries on in different ways. Right? Their memories hold. There's buildings named after them. Right?
Morgan Shipley:There's the history connected to it. And sometimes these stories, these ghost stories, actually about trying to just recover some of our historical past. Right? It creates a a narrative and an interest and an invitation to think differently about who we are and where we've been. But I think it's also just those really small moments.
Morgan Shipley:Like, I imagine potentially with Saint's Rest, right, which is over by the MSU Museum if people aren't familiar. You know, what happens that first time you look out a window and you see what I might say is just a piece of fog going across, but there's no other fog. Maybe that wasn't fog. Maybe that was a specter. A specter of what?
Morgan Shipley:Well, maybe it's a goat... A ghost of what? Well, there was workers. There was a fire. Maybe it's a fire.
Morgan Shipley:So now all a sudden, you're mired, like, in learning about your history. Right? Or you you construct other things. So one of the things connected to Saint Tourette, if you're familiar with that story, is this, artifact, Mabel, which is this porcelain doll, which is said to be possessed by an ominous spirit. Is it?
Morgan Shipley:I'm... I would never say it's not. I think I'm always open to possibilities. Right? But what I would ask my students is, why are you interested in that?
Morgan Shipley:And why does that become a common motif in so many movies where you see the doll come to life? Right? What is being communicated there, and why do we consistently kind of fall into that trap of finding that interesting when they're essentially, like, the same story? A spirit takes hold of this object. The object then interacts with us, and then the human comes out in the end on top.
Morgan Shipley:Well, maybe that is the story. Maybe this is about kinda human agency, human sovereignty, human capabilities. In a world in which we all know that, the line between, you know, the living and the dead is a very nebulous line, and it's it's very tenuous. Right? And it's also a way, therefore, for us to maybe look back on the life that we're living now and embrace it more fully because we don't know what is to come next.
Morgan Shipley:Right? So that mystery of the paranormal, the ghost stories, the interest on this campus is something about, you know, students who are often being introduced to new ideas, and they're being invited maybe for the first time in their life to cultivate an identity that is their identity. And that is a very scary invitation for a lot of people. And so when you start willing away all those other structures of who we are as a person, and I might move away from this, and I might move away from that, there's now these pretty big gaps. And those gaps can feel invigorating for some and overwhelming for many.
Morgan Shipley:And so I think, like, the obsession with ghosts and ghouls and spirits and the paranormal is not so much about what is scary out there. It's actually much more what is scary in here, inside ourselves. But we project it out because it's something then that we can share, we can study, or we can make safe. Because, you know, the joy of going to a haunted house knowing that it's fake is that we know that it's fake. What happens when we go into, like, Saint's Rest and try to do a paranormal investigation if we hold open the potential that this is real?
Morgan Shipley:And by real, it doesn't necessarily mean that there are ghosts, but that we are there as people in that moment trying to understand in a deeper way.
Speaker 2:East Lansing Insider is brought to you by ELI on Impact eighty nine FM. We are on the web at eastlancinginfo.news and impact89fm.org. Thanks for listening.