Ghosts

Have you ever been ghost hunting? I have. But this wasn't at night in an old abandoned house using an electromagnetic field detector and a Ouija board. No, no, no. This was the middle of the afternoon and I was pulled over on the side of a highway just outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I wasn't here looking for lingering spirits of the dearly departed, but instead for real ghosts. Fossils.

The preserved remains of ancient animals that lived right here in my part of the world, back when it was an ocean floor millions of years ago. I stood looking at the dark stone of the foot of the cliffside. I wedged my chisel into the sedimentary rock, and after landing a few hits with my hammer, I pried away the pieces of shale and limestone and took a look inside. The first ghost I found...

the coiled shell of an ancient mollusk. Before fossilization, this would have been maybe something like a sea snail. and could have lived over 300 million years ago. Next, the remains of a crinoid, this strange marine animal that... when it was alive would have looked like a plant with long feathered arms sticking out the top. And finally, the most impressive ghost of them all.

part of a trilobite, an ancient marine arthropod. If it were around today, it might remind us of a scuttling crustacean. with its hard outer shell and many little legs. All in all, it was a pretty successful ghost hunting trip. Whoever says ghosts are hard to find, They're wrong. You just have to know where to look.

I'm Sebastian Echeverry. And I'm Grutendo Shackleton. And this is the BBC Earth Podcast. Only Boost Mobile. Boost Mobile. We'll give you a free year of service. Free year? When you buy a new 5G phone. New 5G phone? Enough. But I'm your hype man. When you purchase an eligible device, you get $25 off every month for 12 months with credits totaling one year of free service. Taxes extra for the device and service plan online only.

ghosts. We'll uncover the mysteries of some Peruvian ghost dogs. We'll visit a cemetery to observe some creatures of the night. We'll journey to Svalbard, one of the world's most desolate places. And we'll listen to some extinct voices which have been lost from our natural world.

You know, it's kind of weird to think of fossils as ghosts because... The word ghost likely conjures up images of see-through, creepy kind of poltergeist that you see in a ghost film, which, by the way, I do not enjoy at all. But, you know, a ghost is exactly what a fossil is, right? Fossils totally have ghost vibes. A fossil can be a lot of things, but...

Basically, it's the preserved evidence of life that was once here and living. That can be anything from the actual body that's left behind when an organism dies in just the right way, in just the right place. or something that left a fleeting impression. A fossil is the remains of ancient life reaching through time to have an effect in the land of the living. Totally ghostly.

I actually remember when I was in my last year of high school in South Africa, my class had a field trip to visit the cradle of humankind. which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it's home to the largest concentration of human ancestral remains on Earth. the planet. In fact, it is one of the first places where Australopithecus fossils were found. And Australopithecus is one of the ancient humans that started to walk upright like us.

and also started to use tools as well. Oh, that is fascinating. Such a cool fossil in our history. Do you know what makes the cradle of humankind so special? Why have we found so many human fossils there? So the area has a network of caves called the Sterkfontein Caves. And so what's thought is that, you know, these early humans may have accidentally fallen into the cave or maybe a flood may have carried.

the remains into the cave or some thoughts are that they would bury their dead there and the cave has the right type of minerals and rock to be able to preserve and fossilize the remains. Oh, that is so cool. The right place, the right time to preserve this part of our evolution. But yeah, that's the thing about fossils. One of the reasons they're so fascinating.

And mysterious is that they're so rare. You never know when you're going to find that one incredible specimen, or what answers it might hold if you do. And mystery plays a huge part in our understanding of the natural world too, right? Scientists often hear ghostly stories and folklore from communities about elusive species that have existed for years, but that so far science has not been able to trace or study.

Renata Leite Pittman heard tales of some mysterious ghost dogs in Peru. She made it her mission to try and find one. My ex-boss started talking about his 30 years research in the Peruvian Amazon. And he started to describe that other researchers saw this ghost dog. The short-eared dog, or ghost dog, is an elusive canine who is rarely seen, and at this point was completely unresearched.

And when I heard that, I said, that's impossible. Nobody sees this dog. They must be wrong. Renata wanted to investigate these potential sightings further, so she booked a ticket to Peru. It was a long trip because you need to fly to the capital of Peru, Lima, and then take another flight, then take lots of boats, and after three days I was in this place. One of the most isolated national parks in Peru. As soon as I arrived, I see tracks of short-eared dogs everywhere.

I made myself box traps from wood boards. I got like a different array of baits. You know, from banana, you know, meat and different things that could attract to the dog. And after a month, I didn't catch anything. I was totally frustrated. A month might sound like a long time, but it was just the start for Renata. She searched in the forest for two years without finding anything but tracks and droppings.

Renata decided it was time to change location with hopes that she might finally be able to meet a ghost dog. And it was the right move. Well, the first one we caught using bananas, I was with two of my favorite field assistants, and I remember him saying, El perro! El perro! in his entire life he saw only once and he's a very good field guide in Peru so he was completely amazed the ghost dog looked like a fox

It has like a very bushy tail. The color is brownish chocolate with a very funny nose, pointed nose. We deploy a radio collar on the animal to be able to track it, and then we let it go. After this, we caught two short-eared dogs. One was a mother and one was a baby. And this was the only time we followed more than one at the same time. After three days, the mother disappeared.

the baby stay in this area like you start to move around the tree when we get in there we saw a four meters long boa constrictor And the animals inside of the belly of the boa constrictor. That's the life of the ghost dog. So that's the reason they are ghosts. You know, they have predators. During her many years in the Peruvian Amazon, Renata did study and track some wild ghost dogs. But her most important breakthrough came just as she was about to go home.

When I was about to finish my study in Peru, one of my assistants found a ghost dog in the market for sale. It was a two-month-old baby. So we gave him the name of Osso, which means bear in Spanish. And we started to do walks on the leash to get him used to the forest. We did that for one year and we knew that he was able to find food and defend himself from predators.

and when we we finally released the short-year dog it moved away 50 kilometers in three years and it moved to an area where the non-contacted indigenous group lived So we are not allowed to study the species in there. We don't have a permit to enter in this area. Three years later, we found that the animal was alive. It was a big success because we know the animal, you know, survived too many threats he found in the forest. He continued to be a ghost dog.

It has been more than 10 years since I last saw Oso. I hope he's still running free in the jungle. Run on, also. Run on. Yes, go on. Be free. For Renata to go from having no sight or trace of any ghost dog to spending time with one for three years and rewilding it. before sending it back out into obscurity. That's pretty amazing.

Totally. I also really valued the use of the collar in this study. Once the dog had moved back into the protected area, the researchers just had to accept the fact that, you know... Their data collection was limited to until the caller's battery died. And then he became a ghost again after that. And that doesn't always happen in conservation because we want studies to...

continue for as long as possible, right? We call them longitudinal studies. And I have experience with that in my own research with elephants. We want it to be a lifelong study. But it was clear that this animal had given... in them more than enough data than they'd ever expected to gain and it was time for him to return to anonymity after that. He had to go back to his ghostly life. It's where he belonged.

But you know, Tendo, there are so many animal ghosts out there. Not just this ghost dog, but I'm talking elusive species without... much scientific research published about them at all. Singletons, for example, Not the kind that you're thinking about on dating apps. These are species that we only have one single piece of physical evidence for. Take the giant glow spot cockroach, Lucy Hormetica luke. Ooh. Kind of spooky looking.

It's got a pattern on its back that looks like a hooded figure with glowing eyes. Okay. And that pattern actually glows when exposed to light. Tendo, have you seen this? Do you know what I'm talking about? No, I've not seen it. Hold on. Let me have a look. Okay, I'm sending you a file called glowingroaches.jpg. Please open it. Okay, okay, okay, here we go. Oh my gosh. Oh my goodness. It's like a glowing mask face. Oh my goodness.

very impressive and I recommend everyone to look it up because you would not think that an animal would look like this. That really shocked me when I opened that. The wildest thing about this cockroach is that... This is all we know about it at all. One single individual of this species was collected from a volcano in Ecuador in 1939, and it's never been found

Oh, wow. Yeah, it is a singleton. And while each singleton species is by definition rare, singletons as a thing are actually really common. There was a research study showing that for arthropods, so generally anything that's an arachnid, insect, crustacean, in the tropics, about 30% of all species that we know about are singletons. And because most animals are arthropods, that means that a huge percentage of all animal life on Earth

are singletons. We know these ghosts have to exist or have once existed. We have physical evidence we can look at. But so much about them, what their lives are or were like, are massive mysteries.

Now for a different type of ghost hunt. While Rutendo and I were in Bristol, we went to a local cemetery. The Land of the Dead. to go for a bat walk with former gravedigger turned bat specialist, or as he calls himself, goth ecologist Dan Flew.

So Dan, where are you taking us right now? I just thought we'd have a little walk through the cemetery through the woodland parts and we're heading up to the top of the cemetery that is hopefully where we see our first bats come out the sun's just gone down and there's still kind of some blue in the sky how long Do you think we'll have to wait until the bats are ready to come out? I think we've got another 10 minutes. Okay. And we should see some aerial action. There's still so much.

Awake so many birds that are still singing in my mind is kind of like they're they're getting ready for For nightfall and getting ready to sleep. Yeah for me it's the most magical part of the day because you can you kind of feel the air getting cooler yeah the damp rising you can hear all the birds settling down to rooster making her

nice little songs of telling everyone they're going to bed yeah and then yeah you get that kind of excitement that you know the bats are going to be coming soon yeah magic the house on the left with all the pictures on it's what they call the top lodge and it's where the grave digger used to live uh-huh back in the heyday at the cemetery live together in harmony rest together in peace

painted on the door of that beautiful little idea for For what we're doing now finding the bats that are living here alongside us get the kit out. So what kind of equipment are we going to be using today to find these bats? One is like old school where you have to tune in to the frequency.

one has a display on it and it will show you the calls going across the screen so what we do that top dial there you tune that and the idea is when you get a bat on there when you hear about you tune it up so that you can hear the most solid sound okay so different species have different calls yeah yeah

echo located at different frequencies. The common pips trail will be at 45, so it'd be coming across the screen there. 45 kilohertz. That's right. And the lesser horseshoe 110. That's a really big variation. in frequency. And we're going to be seeing both types of species today. Hopefully. Lesser horseshoes are really difficult to spot.

So what exactly do you do once I've turned it on? Just walk along with your arm out like that. Say like if you were watching a video on YouTube or you're walking along the street, just have it in that kind of position. And yeah, when you wear something, look up and see where it is. Yeah, cool. Hey, I'm Paige DeSorbo, and I'm always thinking about underwear.

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Something so that was a pair of noctuals. That's our biggest bat in UK like a durable size And I would say they've just come out of a tree. So they roost in trees. Yep And they come over from the woodland there. But you can see how high they were as well. Pipistrel would be a little bit lower than that. And hopefully we'll see one of them.

and i kind of think of the lesser horseshoes like they kind of cling to things they're they don't want to be out in the open right yeah so they're kind of like they'll hug walls they'll hug the trees they'll hug a hedge, anything. Oh, that was so cool. They're coming pretty close to us as well. Which I'm absolutely amazed by. Just like swooped in and then did like a U-turn back away from us. Oh, it's back. Oh, I heard that. Tune yours up to 45. That's it.

Oh my goodness, that's so amazing. There's another one. Listen to that. That's amazing, isn't it? The bat that just flew over us went and then picked up a bug just in the path behind you and then went back up. Yeah, when they have zoomed in on a bug, it will like be like that. And that's how you know that they caught something. Did you hear the feeding bus? Yes! Yes! We got it!

That was so cool. So the bat flew by and did this kind of like spiral right when it was swooping in to catch the insect. It was incredible to see. Now we're in tree cover proper. It's darker and there's no sunlight, barely any sunlight. We just can't see them. We're just hearing and trusting that they're there. Someone just got some food. I did just remember we are at a cemetery at night. I would say it's the safest place to be

As the Batman says, criminals are a superstitious lot. Yeah, that's true. And just keep an eye on the time. It's like an hour after sunset and a bit. so i think if we go in have a wander down here because a lot of the bats will start hanging up now because they've had a good feed yes and i'll have a little rest So, as you can hear, horseshoe bats sound a bit like alien adduction. Yeah, they do. That's incredible. It's so amazing. Yeah, so... It kind of felt like it stopped.

looked at us it was like probing like you know sending out a probe like who's these people yeah it's amazing people woke up in pasture all the time and they just wouldn't believe how important that little spot is for one of the UK's rarest bats wow that's incredible and it's amazing that a place that people come to, you know, pay homage to and remember loved ones is also a place where life is happening as well, right above their heads.

That was crazy. We were like actual ghostbusters. And when those sounds... came through the speakers. I loved it. It was super outer-worldly. It was an incredible experience. There's something about having the bats fly around you. It's kind of like that... omnipresence that you can sometimes associate with ghosts the ability to be anywhere and see anything once the sun sets and the bats come out

You can't see them, but you know that they're there. Sometimes I would feel the wind of one flying right by my head. You can feel their presence in this kind of ethereal way. It was so cool. And since we met Dan, I've actually started, you know, paying attention to the bats in my neighborhood. And I can see them feeding from my window most nights, which is so cool. It's funny because that's the thing that I love and appreciate about bats. You know, they're all seeing, all knowing senses. But...

It's one of the main things that creeps me out about the idea of ghosts, too.

Well, I think the good news here, Tendo, for you and everyone listening, is that unlike the ghosts of scary movies, these bats are not looking to scare you. They're just going about their daily life. Bats are performing... their aerial acrobatics just to catch dinner. From the land of the dead to the land of the desolate, we're heading to a literal ghost town, Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago known for its icy tundra.

Local resident and TikToker Cecilia Blomdahl shows us around. What you often notice on Svalbard is that the silence is deafening. I'm right here now standing. on a very open barren plain with a huge mountain range to my left covered in fog and mist and on the right it's pretty open the ocean is just behind a few smaller kind of mountains on my right. And it's just silent. Far away, I can hear a fox scream.

It almost sounds like a bird of some sort, but it's a fox. During the summer, they are covered in their summer fur, which is grayish, to camouflage them perfectly against this kind of... gray and brown tundra and then in the winter they're white fully camouflaged by the snow they're very difficult to spot but outside you can hear them easily That's kind of how you know that they're around. You can rarely see them but you will hear them. So on today's hike it is me.

It's my boyfriend Christopher and our friend Einar. We also have the two laphounds with us, the two dogs Grimm and Fenris. The only way to explore the island is either by snowmobile in winter or by boat in summer. So today we're heading to one of my favorite places. It's called Tålmodsbukta. And we're going to stay there for a few days, see the beautiful views, maybe go fishing, go hiking, or just head out into the silence.

We have now started our walk towards the cabin that we're going to visit today. There is a mama reindeer to my left, maybe 200 meters away, with a little baby reindeer. And the baby reindeer is... drinking milk from the mom it's such a crazy moment to see they don't fear us at all they're kind of just minding their own business and we are just kind of walking past so trying not to

disturb them at all of course. The mountains are towering just in front of me. A thick layer of fog is almost all the way down to the start of the mountain. And they're jagged. It's very rugged and barren here on Svalbard. Nothing really grows, so there are no trees, no bushes. All you have is this tundra, which looks very much alive though. So we've walked about five kilometers. Dark clouds above me. Not like dark as in rain filled clouds, but definitely moody clouds.

all so quiet and eerie. You could record some scary movies here. It would be very convincing. We've just come across some polar bear tracks maybe a few weeks old but even though the tundra is pretty compact the prints from a super heavy polar bear are very noticeable in the terrain. They are bigger than my hand stretched out. You can see the claw marks at the top. You can just imagine the size of the polar bear. Thankfully they don't look new though, so it must have walked pretty far since then.

Okay, the guys are about 500 meters away from me now, so I need to catch up because I don't have the gun with me for polar bears. They do. So I need to make sure to stay close because right now I can't see everywhere. There are some... small mountains and hills and everything so you never know what's lurking behind them. I'm gonna go and catch up. Okay, I do have to admit something. The only reason I knew what Svalbard was before going out into the wilderness with Cecilia there...

was because of The White Vault. It's a horror podcast actually set in Svalbard at a research station, and the sheer remoteness of the place makes it so inherently spooky. It's the perfect setting. That sounds like a podcast that I would probably need other people in the room to listen to it with. It's a really good show, though, if you want some nice slow burn horror. Technically, I don't think there are any ghosts, but I can't promise that. That said, though...

I think Cecilia does such a wonderful job of helping us appreciate the experience of the life that really does live out there in Svalbard. It's not an easy life, but that just makes it all the more impressive. Yeah, just that marked lack of noise from... Humanity, you know, like human noise sometimes can be distracting and the busyness of life can be stressful as well. And, you know, Sebastian, I'll be honest, the forest is my escape from that a lot of the time.

I will go on a walk and just allow myself to just be... immersed in the natural sounds and when I'm super stressed I've also been known to sit in a field of sheep and find solace with a herd of sheep It's nothing like what Cecilia lives in on Svalbard, but, you know, I can resonate with that.

Throughout this episode, we've been introduced to some ghostly components of our natural world. And similarly to our ghost dogs from earlier, There are a number of species on Earth that also have ghosts in their common name. Tendo, I would like to introduce you to one of those. This is my ghost mantis. Ooh, look at that! For those listening who don't know what a ghost mantis looks like, or even what a praying mantis is...

Mantises are a type of insect, which means that they are an arthropod, a small animal with a hard exoskeleton with a segmented body that has six legs. Ghost mantises are special in that in addition to having one of these dark brown hues most of the time, their bodies are shaped. like dead leaves, and they use that as their camouflage to sneak up on prey and to avoid predators, like a ghost.

Such a cool specimen. So how did you come across this one? This is actually one of my pets. I had this one a couple years ago. And so once I passed away of old age, I decided to preserve it so that I could show other people. how cool these animals are even after it was no longer here with me. And you know, a quick trip to the internet... told me that my ghost mantis is not alone. There's a lot of other really cool ghostly animals, like the ghost spiders.

which tend to be pale in coloration, very fast and elusive, and only come out at night. And there's also ghost sharks, which are also known as, and I think this is a better name, spook fish. Yeah. Due to the fact that they live in extremely deep water and are rarely, if ever, seen. Also, in the plant world, there is the ghost pepper, which is one of the hottest chilies on Earth. And it's called the ghost pepper because the heat...

sneaks up on you like a ghost. Honestly, I am way more scared of eating a ghost pepper than seeing a ghost. The suspense would kill me alone. I not want to run into one of those in my meal. Exactly. So I guess we figured out what it takes to have enough ghost vibes to be called a ghost in the natural world. You've got to be elusive. pale, dead-looking, sneaky and creepy, nocturnal, or even just really good at camouflage. Yeah, that makes sense. But you know, on one hand, I do believe that...

Being elusive is cool because many animals thrive in seclusion. And I really do think that we as humans don't actually need to see every single species with our own eyes. But it is true that when we know the health of our ecosystems, we can actually help prevent many species from reaching extinction. Research tells us that 99% of all species that evolved on Earth are now gone. Not just elusive and hard to find, but truly gone. Real ghosts. It's a frightening fact.

And the truth is that thousands of species continue to be at threat from extinction. Martin Stewart has made it his life's work to record the sounds of our natural world. Many of these sounds can no longer be heard in the wild. He was the last person to capture this, the ghostly sound of the functionally extinct northern white rhino in Kenya.

have collected over 30 000 hours of natural soundscapes and two-thirds of that library now is extinct the northern white rhino in kenya i had this chance to go to this conservancy place and I was introduced into these two, three rhinos that were there, two females and a male, but the two females were kept together in this enclosure.

The guys there they let me set up a couple of microphones. It was surreal. You're in the presence of something that you know is not going to exist in the near future. Well, they say a picture tells a thousand words, or sound tells a thousand pictures, you know, forever when I'm listening to stuff that I've recorded in my life, and you reflect on these.

humbling kind of situations that you're allowed to be in the presence of something so beautiful as like the northern white rhino. It is a spiritual... feeling completely.

The BBC Earth podcast was hosted by me, Rutendo Shackleton. And me, Sebastiana Treveri. Our interviewees were Renata Leite-Pittman, Dan Flew, and Cecilia Blumdahl. With thanks to Martin Stewart for the Northern White Rhino soundscape. Our producers are Jeff Marsh and Rachel Byrne. The researcher is Seb Masters. The podcast theme music was written by Axel Kakutie.

with mixing and additional sound design by Peregrine Andrews. The production manager is Catherine Stringer, and the production coordinator is Gemma Wutton. The associate producer is Kristen Kane, and the executive producer is Deborah Dudgeon. The BBC Earth podcast is a BBC Studios production for BBC Earth.

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