Chaplaincy, Hauntings, and Racialized Healing: Navigating Spiritual Care Experiences Among Migrant Communities in American Hospitals

This study explores how the Christian-rooted framework of chaplaincy shapes spiritual care in American hospitals and its challenges in meeting the diverse needs of Asian and migrant communities. It examines how ethnicity, belief systems, and cultural understandings of healing inform experiences of life and death, highlighting tensions between Western care models and non-Western spiritual traditions. Migration histories, ancestral ties, and ghost narratives shape how patients experience fear and grief, aspects that conventional psychological treatments often overlook. By examining hauntings, this research positions hospitals as liminal spaces where ghosts materialize—representing unresolved trauma, displacement, and structural exclusion that continue to influence clinical encounters. Additionally, it examines interracial and interreligious encounters in clinical settings, highlighting how different racial and ethnic groups navigate shared spaces of healing. Through ethnographic fieldwork, this study advocates for structurally competent, culturally responsive models of spiritual care beyond dominant biomedical and Christian paradigms.