Are the Dead Troubled?
The inspiration for this article came to me out of nowhere a few weeks ago. I was sitting in silence during a weekly group meditation, when a single phrase pierced my awareness: There are no hungry ghosts in spirit. Humans are the hungry ghosts. I made a note to return to this idea when I had the time to really sit with it, and here’s what came up.
The concept of hungry ghosts isn’t new to me. It has surfaced repeatedly in my ancestral medicine training and my broader spiritual studies. I have real respect for cultures and systems that believe not all the dead are settled. Yet as a practicing medium, I had always held it at a careful distance, assuming it belonged to a tradition entirely separate from my own. In my daily work, I rarely encounter unsettled spirits. Whatever a soul did in life (the good, the bad, and everything in between) doesn’t seem to linger once they cross over.
Those of us raised secularly in Western cultures aren’t taught to think of our ancestors as people who might still need our help. We tend to view the dead as finished, static, wiped entirely clean of their human struggles. But in many Indigenous and Eastern traditions (and older Western ones as well) the relationship between the living and the dead is active, fluid, and complex.
In Buddhist and Taoist cosmology, a hungry ghost is a spirit trapped in limbo by an earthly craving it can never satisfy. I find this spiritual belief incredibly interesting because it’s so different from the Western framework I operate from.
Across these ancient traditions, a handful of causes for this entrapment show up consistently:
Insatiable Craving: A life spent consumed by greed, envy, or addiction so all-consuming that the physical act of death cannot loosen its grip.
Traumatic Disruption: A sudden or violent passing that a soul never got the chance to process, understand, or release.
Neglected Obligations: A family or community that failed in its sacred duty to properly grieve, remember, or lay someone to rest.
Unresolved Harm: Actions taken against another person that were never accounted for while there was still time to make things right.
Notice what these causes have in common. Every single one of them is about an interruption. They describe something that didn’t get to complete its natural arc, whether that arc was grief, reckoning, connection, or peace. That, in my view, is the real definition of a troubled spirit. Not malevolence (though that can be a part of it), but incompletion. And I don’t think that definition only describes what happens to the dead. I think it describes what happens to the living too.
If there’s a hungry ghost in spirit, there’s a living person who carries a relationship to said hungry ghost and likely bears scars that are the result of the deceased actions.
I’ve spent years working as an evidential medium, and in that time, I have not encountered fragmented or unsettled spirits. The dead I meet are whole. When I work with a spirit communicator who did what most would consider bad things in life, they don’t come through disturbed or hungry. They come through aware of the consequences of their actions. What I encounter instead is fracture in the living.
Physician and addiction researcher Gabor Maté borrowed the hungry ghost concept for his work on addiction, using it to describe the internal void people try to fill with substances or certain behaviors. He’s not trying to describe spirits of the dead. He’s describing the living. And the context in which he applies the idea of a hungry ghosts makes sense to me.
Here’s an example. In some belief systems folks in the grip of addiction who die of an overdoes would become a hungry ghost. I think the living people impacted by that addiction, in some way, become hungry ghosts because they carry trauma from their loved ones addiction. Taking these ideas together, the hunger lives in both the living and the dead. Whatever you believe, there’s probably value in honoring that hunger through ritual, spiritual practices, self-exploration, and more.
Based on my experience: whatever someone did or didn’t resolve in life doesn’t seem to linger with them once they’ve crossed over. The hunger, the incompletion, the unresolved thread, all of it stays here, in the living, in the bloodline, in the body.
I want to be honest about where this puts me relative to my own training. I’ve taken Daniel Foor’s ancestral medicine coursework and read his book, Ancestral Medicine, closely and with real respect. His framework holds that not all the dead are beneficial guides, that some are stuck, confused, or even troubled, and that part of ancestral work is learning to tell the difference.
While I have deep respect for traditions that align with this belief, it’s never fit with my own experience. In my own work, the dead arrive whole. The confusion and sense of being stuck belongs to the living. That’s a real divergence from a teacher and framework I value. That said, I do believe that it’s not beneficial to work with all ancestors as doing some might be triggering and unhelpful.
There are hungry ghosts that live within my personal experience. Some were created in my lifetime (through personal experience), others I’ve inherited. I know what it is to crave something, to reach for relief and find the reach itself becomes the pattern. That’s part of why this concept landed the way it did in meditation. It wasn’t abstract. It was recognizable.
I also carry an ancestral hunger in a more literal sense. There are deceased people in my lineage who caused real harm, harm severe enough that I don’t tell their stories out loud. Not because I’m protecting them, but because I don’t want to hand anyone else the weight of carrying those stories. I know they’re there. I don’t need to describe them for others know what they cost me and my loved ones. But I do need to do my personal work around this trauma so that I don’t carry the ghosts of said trauma forever or pass in on to others. I want to add that in the right circumstances, sharing these stories is appropriate, but only in the right spiritual container.
There are also ghosts I don’t have names or stories for at all. When I trace my own lineage, I carry both the oppressed and the oppressor within it. My Scottish ancestors, on my father’s mother’s side, knew what it meant to have their culture suppressed, their language forbidden, and their land seized by English colonizers. That trauma lived in their bodies and moved through their bloodlines alongside whatever survival instinct and resilience got them through it.
But when they arrived on Turtle Island (North America), they engaged the same playbook that was used on them to commit a genocide and steal land. The oppressed became the oppressor. I don’t hold only the inheritance I’d choose or prefer. I hold all parts of it, the culture that was stolen from my ancestors, and the land my ancestors helped steal from someone else. That’s not a contradiction I can resolve by picking a side. It’s a hunger that runs both directions, it flows through my veins, and it’s mine to sit with.
I don’t know the names of these ancestors. But I do know what moved through them likely didn’t end with their death. That’s how lineage works, whether I can trace its exact shape or not. When I sit with the idea of hungry ghosts, I’m not only sitting with a cultural concept I respect from a distance. I am sitting with my own lineage. The people I know caused harm, and the parts of myself that still hunger and yearn because of that harm.
The same conditions that create a troubled spirit in traditional cosmology are, in my view, the conditions that create unresolved trauma in a living person.
Whatever we don’t finish, we pass on. Whatever our ancestors and deceased loved ones don’t finish, we carry in our bodies. A family that never processed what one generation did to another passes the unfinished thread down; the same way the traditions describe an unsettled spirit passing its hunger forward if nobody tends to it.
This is why I don’t think the metaphysical question (are the dead literally hungry or is it the living) needs to be settled. Either way, something interrupted needs tending. Either way, the work falls to the living.
Whether you believe the hungry ghost exists separately from you in spirit, or lives within you as inherited or personal trauma, the tending happens the same way, and it happens through the practice of feeling and sensing what’s there through self-work, group ritual or communal practices, and carrying forward the medicine of good deed and action to improve not only personal circumstances but community circumstances.
So much of spiritual practice gets treated as a means to transcend suffering, to rise above the body and its discomfort into something calmer and more distant. But the deeper work, the work that tends to the hunger instead of just soothing it on a surface level, asks the opposite of us.
It asks us to drop into the feeling and sensing realm rather than run away from it.
It’s asks that we notice where the craving lives in the body.
It asks us to to let grief move through us instead of managing it from a safe distance.
It asks us to sit with an old family pattern long enough to feel its shape instead of just naming it.
This is slow work, and it’s not glamorous.
It looks like sitting in silence and letting whatever surfaces surface, the way it did for me in meditation.
It looks like noticing a craving in real time and asking what it’s reaching for, rather than immediately satisfying or suppressing it.
It looks like feeling anger toward someone who’s gone, fully and in the body, rather than skipping straight to the tidier work of forgiveness or ritual release.
However you understand the hunger, the resolving of it happens through honest, embodied attention, given over time and with real care.
There’s no shortcut that bypasses the feeling itself and I believe very strongly that having a steadfast relationship with intuition is extremely supportive to this practice. In fact, developing as a medium has really helped me do this work, not just for clients, but for myself.
Principles for Tending the Hunger
These are drawn from my ancestral medicine training and reshaped through my own experience. They apply whether you understand the hunger as belonging to a spirit, to yourself, or to your lineage.
Conscious boundaries. You don’t owe direct spiritual engagement to every ancestor, living memory, or unresolved relationship in your life. If connecting with someone, living or dead, would mean bringing your own unhealed triggers into the exchange, it’s not spiritual avoidance to set that boundary. It’s wisdom. This is especially true with anyone recently deceased who you have unresolved conflict with. I’ve had to set this boundary myself with ancestors whose stories I still don’t tell; choosing not to engage them directly hasn’t slowed my healing, it’s protected it.
Emotional safety first. Whatever tending work you do, it should be done from a place where you can stay present, not from a place of activation. If a practice sends you into shutdown or spiral, it’s not the right practice yet.
Naming without endorsing. Acknowledging harm, in a spirit, an ancestor, or in yourself, is not the same as forgiving it or condoning it. You can name exactly what happened and exactly what it cost and still choose to set it down. Those are two different acts. This is the distinction I keep coming back to when I sit with my own lineage, the Scottish ancestors who were both harmed and harmful. Naming what they did to others doesn’t require me to excuse what was done to them, and naming what was done to them doesn’t require me to excuse what they did.
Repair happens here. Whatever container you use, an altar, a letter, an act of service, the actual repair is happening in you, in your nervous system, in your choices going forward. You are where the healing lands. You are the sacred vessel. I believe that the healing we experience from this deep work weaves backwards and forward in time and through our lineages.
Transformation, not erasure. The goal isn’t to pretend the harm didn’t happen or to sever yourself from a lineage that includes it. It’s to take what was unfinished and consciously decide what you’ll carry forward and what stops with you. That’s the work I’m doing with my own inherited hunger, not erasing where it came from, just refusing to hand if forward unchanged.
Three Practices to Try
Here are three practices you can try. I offer them because these containers do something real regardless of what you believe.
The Threshold Offering: If having a difficult person, living or dead, present in your main spiritual space feels unsafe, do this at a back porch, doorway, or the edge of your property instead. Pour a small cup of water onto the earth and light a single stick of incense or a candle. Say clearly, out loud or in your mind: “I acknowledge you. I see what drove you, and what wasn’t resolved. I give you this, and I ask you to turn away from my door. My life goes on from here without you disturbing it.”
The Empty Chair: Set a chair facing away from you in a quiet room. Place a small offering, bread or fruit, on the floor in front of it. Speak directly to the chair. Say what happened. Say what it cost. Say that their actions end with them, not with you. Finish with something like, “I am letting you go to find your own peace.” Walk away and don’t look back at the chair for a few hours.
Merit Transfer: This one requires no direct address at all, which makes it the gentlest option if speaking to the harm feels too activating. Do something genuinely good in your community, volunteer, give, help a neighbor. Afterward, sit quietly, light a candle, and direct the energy of what you did away from yourself. Say, “I dedicate this to what wasn’t finished in my line. May it settle something that never got the chance to settle.” Blow out the candle to close the ritual.
None of these require you to believe in a literal unsettled spirit for them to do something real. They give you a structure for naming harm, setting it down, and choosing what happens next, which is the actual work, whether the hunger you’re tending belongs to someone who’s gone or to the part of you that’s still here.
Reflection Questions
What craving or unresolved pattern in your life feels older than you, like it started before you did? What would it mean to trace where it began?
Is there grief in your family that never got witnessed properly? What would it look like to witness it now, even decades later?
Guilt keeps us stuck in our own feelings about what happened. Responsibility asks what we do with the knowledge now. Where in your own lineage does this distinction apply? What’s one thing you can name, without guilt, and one thing you can do about it?
What pattern, harm, or unfinished thread are you willing to tend? Not erase, not pretend away, but finish.
I don’t think the metaphysical debate here needs a winner. Maybe the dead really do carry unsettled hunger forward, the way so many traditions across so many cultures have described. Maybe, as I’ve come to believe through my own work, the hunger belongs entirely to us, the living, and the dead are simply waiting for us to notice. I suspect the truth includes some of both.
What I know for certain is that something in most of our lineages went unfinished. Whatever you call it, hungry ghost or inherited trauma or simply the weight you’ve been carrying without knowing why, the invitation is the same. Name it. Don’t excuse it. Decide what you’re willing to finally let end with you.
I’ve written a new poem inspired by my exploration of hungry ghosts. I’ve placed it below. Have a read and let me know what you think! I always love to hear from you.
Hungry Ghosts
By Emily O'Neal
I’ve been sitting with hungry ghosts.
They arrive in dreams, a persistent craving,
origin unknown, mouths gaping soundless,
they can’t find words; language sits on the tip of tongues.
And yet I know they speak my name.
I feel them in my heart, as much as in my belly,
their spiritual famine running through my veins,
knocking at doors, fists hitting walls.
The house my body makes, stoic and stark,
for the hearth holds no flame
and the cauldron sits empty.
Someone once told me
hungry ghosts must be fed.
But how do you
feed the dead?
I see people walking around,
doing what people do,
and I realized there are
hungry ghosts everywhere.
The factory of life
creates them every day.
I see the pain and suffering in the world
and wonder where it goes when someone dies.
Is it wiped clean?
Do the dead get to rest in peace?
Is that why we offer that prayer
when someone’s gone?
Rest in Peace.
Rest in peace.
Are we also pleading
that we might receive that same mercy
when our heads hit the pillow each night?
Resting tired bodies, only to find in the quiet,
a cavern of yearning where wind blows
and thunder rumbles, echoes tracing
the belly of time.
Are we just hungry ghosts
who don’t know
we are hungry ghosts?
When I die, I know my body will go,
but I’ll leave something behind
in the hearts of those who remember me.
Memory is a braid that weaves through generations,
crisscrossing from death to life and back again.
It lives in the bones and blood of the living,
our body the loom on which threads intertwine.
We tell ourselves the weaving stops at death.
What an awful betrayal that is.
It’s funny how they ask us
to remember how Jesus lived and died,
but not our own ancestors.
They carry our medicine, we need them.
We carry their medicine, they need us.