My first glimpse of the spiritual side of Jane Goodall came from her unexpected reaction to a ghost story told over dinner at her camp in Tanzania.

It was January 1974 when I arrived at the research station in Gombe National Park. I was twenty-one years old, a student volunteer helping collect data on chimpanzee behavior. There were about a dozen of us students living at Gombe, half studying chimpanzees and the other half studying baboons. Our days were long and demanding. From sunrise until sunset we followed our subjects through the steep, tangled forest, meticulously documenting their behavior.

Each evening we gathered at the Mess, a simple building that served as kitchen, dining room, and lounge. After exhausting days in the forest, dinner was our time to relax and share stories. Jane joined us once or twice a week, and whenever she did the conversation became even more lively.

One evening in late January, a student passed along a strange story she had heard from one of Jane’s Tanzanian staff members. Someone — perhaps a staff member or a relative — had reportedly seen a ghost walking through the forest along a trail at night. The eerie detail was that the ghost appeared to be wearing only a pair of white pants. There was no head, no torso — just white pants moving silently through the moonlight.

“I’d like to see this ghost,” she said calmly. “And I wouldn’t be afraid at all.”

Her response stunned me. Did a world-famous scientist actually believe in the supernatural? For a moment the table fell silent. Then Jane added thoughtfully, “Ruth had a pair of white pants. This might very well be Ruth’s ghost.”

I was dumbfounded. Jane wasn’t kidding. Soon I learned the tragic story behind her comment. Five years earlier, one of her students, Ruth Davis, had died in a terrible accident after falling from a cliff beside a waterfall in the forest. Jane ended the conversation by saying that it gave her comfort to imagine Ruth’s spirit still roaming the hills of Gombe.

Comforting or not, the story terrified me.

When dinner ended and everyone grabbed their flashlights to hike up the dark forest trails to their huts, I made sure to stick close to a group heading my way. The huts were scattered across the hillside beyond the Mess, and mine was the farthest — a steep twelve-to-fifteen-minute climb to the edge of the impenetrable Plum Tree Thicket. One by one the others peeled off toward their huts until, inevitably, I was left alone for the final sixty yards.

For days I repeated this nightly ritual, walking with others as far as possible before facing the last stretch by myself. I never told anyone why. I wasn’t worried about bushpigs or snakes. My real fear was that one night I might encounter a pair of ghostly white pants floating through the darkness. Had that happened, I probably would have left Gombe on the next water taxi.

A couple of weeks later the story resurfaced again at dinner. There had been no sightings, though Jane still expressed a genuine hope that she might see the ghost one day. Meanwhile the idea continued to haunt me whenever I walked alone at night.

A few months later, while following chimpanzees with one of Jane’s Tanzanian researchers, Hamisi Matama, we descended a ridge called Sleeping Buffalo. We stopped in a clearing with a beautiful panoramic view of Lake Tanganyika. My Swahili was limited, but I understood when Hamisi slowly explained that this was where Ruth was buried.

I finished my eight-month stay at Gombe in September 1974. It was truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience — and thankfully I never encountered any ghosts.

In the book Jane describes a profound experience she had in April 1974 while visiting Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. As the organ music filled the cathedral, she suddenly felt a powerful sense of ecstacy and a connection to something larger than herself. Later, in the days following the death of her husband Derek Bryceson, she sometimes sensed his presence so vividly that it strengthened her belief that life may extend beyond what we can see.

Many years later I saw this firsthand. In 2009 my wife Arlene and I spent more than an hour sitting with Jane at a picnic table in the tropical San Juan Botanical Garden, reminiscing about Gombe while admiring the surrounding flowers and lush vegetation. At one point Arlene asked her directly whether she believed in God. Jane slowly raised her arms and gestured to the magnificent gardens.

“Just look around us,” she answered.

Instead, Peterson told the remarkable story of a quiet, determined young woman who helped pioneer the practice of following chimpanzees deep into the forest rather than observing them only at the feeding station. He described the hardship and the sense of adventure that Ruth and her colleagues experienced exploring Gombe. Reading it, I understood why Jane found comfort in imagining Ruth’s spirit still roaming those hills.

Then, a few years later, I stumbled upon a video of a lecture Peterson gave at Harvard while promoting his book. During the presentation he showed photographs that hadn’t appeared in the book. One image showed Ruth sitting on the ground at night with two fellow researchers (30:01).

At first I didn’t notice anything unusual. Then suddenly it hit me. I rewound the video and looked again. There was Ruth wearing a pair of light-colored pants that, in the moonlight, could easily appear white. Jane’s memory had been right all along.

And looking back now, that strange ghost story from the dinner table at Gombe over 50 years ago was my first exposure to how Jane Goodall saw the world: a place where science, nature, and spirit quietly intertwine. Her view of life has always been larger than science alone, a belief that the natural world is filled with wonder and meaning for anyone willing to pause and notice it.