UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Ashleigh McDonald grew up binge-watching as much ghost-related TV as she could consume, including the Penn State-set “Paranormal State.”

The spirit world very much remains an interest to her — only now she’s examining it from a more scholarly perspective.

McDonald, a doctoral student and graduate assistant in the College of the Liberal Arts’ Department of Communication Arts and Sciences (CAS), has devoted her studies to researching the narratives and memories attached to mental institutions, prisons, hospitals and other “dark, unanalyzed places” commonly thought to be haunted.

This summer, she traveled to Sydney, Australia, to conduct research for her dissertation at two prominent and allegedly haunted sites that date back to the late 1700s, when Great Britain and Ireland first started using the country as a penal colony. The trip, which also included her attendance at the International Communication Association’s annual conference, was funded in part by the college’s Robert W. and Judi K. Droll Graduate Fund.

McDonald participated in a ghost hunt and historical tour at Q Station, a sprawling park complex that had its beginnings in the 1800s as a quarantine station for arriving colonists with potential infectious diseases. She also took part in a ghost tour at Cockatoo Island, which started as a prison before being converted into a reform school for girls and eventually a naval shipyard.

“Unlike here, Australia has done a bit of official memory work with their old institutions since they're so important to their past,” McDonald said. “And on these ghost hunts, there’s a lot of time for people to sit with their feelings and try to figure out what happened there. You feel sad or you feel claustrophobic, and through that you can feel to some extent the experience of a prisoner or a little girl who was stuck there.”

While studying for her master’s degree at the University of Utah, McDonald decided to devote her thesis to the topic of why former mental institutions are typically remembered as haunted and not historic places. A large part of her research was devoted to the former Pennhurst State School and Hospital near Philadelphia.

“Seven ghost-hunting shows have gone to Pennhurst, but there’s only been one documentary about it,” she said.

Once she finished her thesis, McDonald said she realized her work on the subject wasn’t nearly complete. It got her thinking more about former mental institutions, prisons, hospitals and other purportedly haunted places that “collect memories” but have “no structure to them, like there are for museums.”

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were more than 300 institutions in the United States, McDonald said. Now, they’re all closed, but there’s only one museum devoted to them — the Glore Psychiatric Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri.

“These big, old, abandoned buildings are everywhere,” McDonald said. “People are anxious about them, people are afraid of them. But we don’t talk about them as memory places. People don’t know how to navigate them, but they know that they’re scary. And my argument is that because we don’t have formal memory structures devoted to these places, people fill them with ghosts as a way to try and understand them.

“These memories matter, because the story we tell about these places influences the way we feel about mental health care now and also people with mental illnesses,” she continued. “That’s why so many have rallied against the horror movie trope of the homicidal maniac. Because people with mental illnesses are way more likely to be victims of violent crime rather than perpetrators of it.”

At Penn State, McDonald said she’s found a supportive group of CAS faculty members and graduate students who have encouraged her to “blaze her own trail,” given there aren’t many communication scholars devoted to researching ghosts. As an added bonus, a number of them have been happy to point out “the many haunted places that are here,” she said with a laugh.

McDonald said she is no longer sure if she still believes in ghosts. But that’s OK, she said, because they remain an incredibly potent source of rhetoric that will continue to guide her scholarship.

“Haunted places play an important role because we get to fill them with these ghosts that allow us to understand not exactly but in some way what the experience was like for the people who were there — and a way to navigate that experience and that history, because we lack that formal structure,” she said. “It allows us to work through feelings that we otherwise couldn’t, among them the anxiety and fear surrounding the institution itself. The stories that get told about these institutions matter, even if they’re only ghost stories.”