Can Buddhists Believe in Ghosts?

By Tim Yu · Updated 2026-06-27

Can Buddhists believe in ghosts? Yes — and in a way Buddhism takes them more seriously than the modern world does. The scriptures describe hungry ghosts (petas), gods, and many unseen beings as entirely real. But a Buddhist “ghost” is not quite the Western one: a peta is a being reborn into a realm of unquenchable craving, not simply a dead person’s spirit haunting a house. Understanding that difference is the key to the whole question — a corner of Buddhist cosmology that is more precise, and stranger, than it first sounds.

Hungry ghosts are in the scriptures

Far from dismissing ghosts, the Pali Canon devotes an entire book to them: the Petavatthu, or “Stories of the Departed.” The peta — the “hungry ghost” — is a being reborn, as a result of intense greed, stinginess, or clinging in a former life, into one of the six realms of existence (five, in some early schemes). Tradition pictures them with enormous bellies and needle-thin throats: beings consumed by a hunger they can never satisfy — a vivid image of what a life ruled by craving becomes. Buddhism, then, does not ask whether such beings exist; it takes their existence for granted and asks what we can learn from them. (We explore them in full on our page about hungry ghosts.)

Feeding the departed

One of the most touching early texts is the Tirokuṭṭa Sutta — “Hungry Shades Outside the Walls” (it appears in the canon twice, as Khuddakapāṭha 7 and Petavatthu 1.5). In it, relatives who have died and been reborn as hungry ghosts return to their old homes and stand outside the walls, hoping to be remembered. The Buddha teaches the living to make offerings and dedicate the merit to them — traditionally by giving to the Saṅgha in their name — and this merit, like water flowing down to fill the valleys, reaches and relieves the departed.

From this root grew some of the most widely observed practices in the Buddhist world: festivals of the dead such as the Ullambana (the Hungry Ghost Festival) and the Japanese Obon, in which families make offerings for their ancestors. Belief in “ghosts,” here, is inseparable from love and gratitude for those who have gone before.

A canon full of unseen beings

Petas are only part of a crowded unseen world. The scriptures are populated by devas (radiant gods of the higher realms), yakkhas (powerful nature-spirits, sometimes fierce, sometimes protective), nāgas, and more. Buddhism is emphatically not materialist: it does not claim the visible physical world is all there is. Where it differs from popular superstition is that these beings are not worshipped as saviours and hold no ultimate power — they too are caught in the round of rebirth, and even a long-lived god will eventually die and be reborn.

But not quite the Western ghost

So when someone asks “do Buddhists believe in ghosts?”, the honest answer needs one clarification. A Western ghost is usually imagined as a dead person’s disembodied spirit lingering at the site of their death. A Buddhist peta is something else: a complete being with its own karma, reborn into a particular realm — a mode of existence, not a haunting. The two overlap in the popular imagination, and folk Buddhism across Asia is indeed full of local spirits, protective charms, and rituals for the restless dead. But at the level of doctrine, the Buddhist “ghost” is a lesson in the machinery of rebirth: a being made by its own craving — and a mirror in which we are meant to see, and loosen, the grasping in ourselves. (For the realms of rebirth, see Buddhist cosmology and the six realms; unfamiliar terms are in the glossary.)