10 Supernatural Episodes Which Totally Broke The Mold
3. “Hell House” (Season 1, Episode 17)
Way back in the very first season, fans were treated to quite a strange turn of events. Sam and Dean investigate a haunting with no record of anything causing it. Furthermore, each time they enter the house, the characteristics of its ghostly inhabitant change drastically. They then discover a website featuring the titular Hell House, and each time the story is updated online, the haunting changes accordingly.
From this, the brothers discover that the spook is actually a “tulpa” – an entity created out of pure belief in its existence. As such, each time the website’s audience changes its beliefs about the house, the haunting adjusts to match. When the brothers are finally able to destroy the entity, Sam ends the episode with a philosophical quandary. “How many of the things we fight only exist because people believe in them?”
If you’ve read this list so far, you may have been wondering how pagan gods can coexist in a universe with angels and the Judeo-Christian big man himself. Well I believe we have our answer in this early episode: those pagan deities only exist because humans believed them into being, and they continued on regardless of whether or not their respective religions died out. But it does raise the same question: how much else in the Supernatural universe only exists on the basis of belief?