An unsettling seasonal tale of ghosts

Folklore, religions, and mythologies speak of many kinds of ghosts. Usually, at this time of year, in the run up to Christmas, I can be found blogging about the three ghosts of Christmas past, present and future in Charles Dickens’ Christmas morality tale “A Christmas Carol” (available as an ebook and in print at classmark 820.6 DIC). Dickens’ lessons on generosity of spirit and the inability of Man to carry material possessions off this mortal plane when he departs it are important. There are similar warnings about the fate of those whose cravings cannot be sated in Eastern philosophies, such as in the Buddhist cosmology, where hungry ghosts stalk the realms of sensory existence, a metaphor (or inhabit a literal plane of existence, depending on who you ask) for those doomed to perpetually feeling unfulfilled because they cannot turn inwards and notice what deep pain drives their continuous excessive consumption.

Today, the warning is about a very different kind of ghost – one more friendly but just as insatiable: the ghost writer. These friendly ghosts are said to appear online to tempt both the unwary student who is struggling with their assignments and the one who has discovered there is too little time left before their assignment is due. Like an update to a children’s fairy tale where a magical creature offers to spin straw into gold for some unknown future price, these ghost writers offer to turn money into completed assignments. Again, those who accept their services out of naivety or desperation all pay a terrible price.

It is all too easy for your lecturers to discover if an essay has been written by one of these ghost writers. Essay mills have been around for decades and are getting more streamlined and lazier all the time. What a relative expert might have spent weeks writing for money a few years ago is now cobbled together in uncritical fashion by someone with limited subject knowledge and a generative AI chatbot. Both are easy for an expert to spot as fraudulently produced but the very system you use to submit your work will detect AI generated scripts and essay mill content. The penalties for paying someone to do your work for you at university, as in the wider world, tend to be severe. Even if the University does not notice that your assignment was written by others, there is nothing to stop them blackmailing you afterwards. Ghostwriters are truly not your friend but are purely in it for themselves.

So, if you realise you’ve left it a little late, chat with a librarian and let us help you find the best evidence off which to build your arguments and then just do your best. You will be better off in the long run than if you deal with ghostwriters.