Story highlights Colin Dickey: Ghost stories fill a timeless need, even in digital age

In American culture, ghosts help living deal with tragedies and loss

Colin Dickey is the co-editor (with Joanna Ebenstein) of "The Morbid Anatomy Anthology." He is also a member of the Order of the Good Death, a collective of artists, writers, and death industry professionals interested in improving the Western world's relationship with mortality. He is the author of "Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places." The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.

(CNN) Do we still need ghosts? The short answer is: yes. In a digital age, where science and logic rules, where all the information we need is at our fingertips, you might think ghost stories would have gradually died out by now. But it turns out I've found just the opposite.

Ghost stories are still very much a part of the 21st century world, and new ghost legends seem to be appearing all the time. When I began researching ghosts and haunted places for my book, I expected mostly to find stories dating to the 19th century and earlier: Civil War soldiers, cowboys, maybe some Puritans. But in addition to these stories, I found many that are modern: houses and buildings that are newly haunted, their ghosts having emerged only in the past few years.

Colin Dickey

I found contemporary ghosts in New Orleans, where the ghost of a woman killed during Hurricane Katrina is said to haunt a local burger restaurant.

I found a ghost in the wake of the September 11 tragedies: walking amid the collected rubble at the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island, dressed as a WWII-era nurse.

And I found ghosts in the mechanisms of the Internet itself. After a friend of mine died, Facebook continued to bring her face back up in my news feed, asking me to "reconnect" with her; Facebook's algorithms, after all, couldn't distinguish between someone who'd just left the site and someone who'd left us completely.

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