Is that a decaying corpse in the closet, or are you just happy to see me?

Chris Mooney and PZ Myers are both irritated by what Mooney calls "the skeptic conversion narrative" in supernatural films.  There is a "rationalist" tradition in Gothic, descended from the work of Ann Radcliffe, in which all of the spectral and gory horrors turn out to have perfectly reasonable explanations--the terrifying corpse in The Mysteries of Udolpho being one of the most notorious examples.  But this tradition has never been very popular; even at the time, readers like Sir Walter Scott complained that it was really much more effective, from a literary standpoint, to have the ghosts et al. be real.  (Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor, which tries to steer a middle ground between the post-Scottish Enlightenment historical novel and the "irrational" Gothic, inadvertently suggests the difficulty of doing both at once.  In a very astute review, the econonomist Nassau W. Senior pointed out that the novel's mental landscape, as it were, was entirely incoherent.)  Skeptic conversion narratives are especially popular in the Victorian Gothic tradition, although it's worth noting that such "conversions" do not necessarily do much good: while converting to the reality of the supernatural may help the skeptic remain alive, as opposed to becoming inconveniently dead, it doesn't necessarily solve the minor problem of having a ghost wandering about your house, killing people as it goes.  J. S. Le Fanu's great "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street," which is explicitly a skeptic's conversion narrative--"I had never pretended to conceal from poor Tom my superstitious weakness; and he, on the other hand, most unaffectedly ridiculed my tremors. The sceptic was, however, destined to receive a lesson, as you shall hear"--suggests some of the narrative's complexities: the narrator, who is the "superstitious" one, nevertheless is also the character who apparently soldiers on with his medical studies, whereas Tom "preferred the Church, poor fellow, and died early, a sacrifice to contagion, contracted in the noble discharge of his duties."  The reader suspects that there's a connection between Tom's conversion to the supernatural and Tom's entry into the Church ("poor fellow"), but the narrator's own pre-existing "superstitious" leanings do not lean him towards a religious vocation. Indeed, if the narrator has anything in the way of religious sentiment, it's difficult to detect it in this tale.