Provenance
Where this exact wording turns up
- Broadcast
- CNN, American Morning (transcript)
- Date
- 31 October 2006
- Segment
- Halloween report by Sumi Das from Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia
- Speaker
- Labeled “UNIDENTIFIED MALE” in the transcript
There’s that quote from Edgar Allan Poe where he says, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’ve been running from them all my life.
Spoken, 2006
In the broadcast, an interviewee offers the line as something Poe said. No work by Poe contains it. The closest older English wording is the line a 1919 newspaper column credited to Charles A. Dana: “I don’t believe in ghosts,” said he, “but I’ve been afraid of them all my life.” The 2006 version has “running from” where Dana’s has “afraid of.”
CNN American Morning transcript, 31 October 2006 ↗
How the quip traveled
- 1872 — In Recollections of Past Life ↗, Sir Henry Holland records Madame de Staël saying of les revenans: “Je n’y crois pas, mais je les crains.”
- 1919 — In the Chicago Daily Tribune, Bert Leston Taylor credits Charles A. Dana with “I don’t believe in ghosts,” said he, “but I’ve been afraid of them all my life” (Quote Investigator ↗).
- 2006 — On CNN’s American Morning ↗, an unidentified interviewee says the “running from them” version and attributes it to Poe.
- 2008–2014 — A “chasing me my whole life” variant credited to Poe spreads online. The Poe Museum ↗ includes it in its list of quotes falsely attributed to Poe.
No status is asserted. This English wording is an anonymous spoken paraphrase: it comes from an unidentified interviewee in a 2006 CNN broadcast, with no identifiable author or published work. Holland’s 1872 Recollections of Past Life is public domain, but it contains only the French remark, not this line.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Context
A joke that keeps changing hands
The joke works the same way in every version: the speaker denies that ghosts exist and then admits to being scared of them. Quote Investigator ↗ found it in French in 1872. It then appeared in English with an unnamed “famous woman,” a Central Park policeman and Charles A. Dana, and Poe’s name was added in the 2000s.
Poe’s name suits a ghost joke, and that is probably why it stuck. Here the credit came in a Halloween TV segment about a haunted prison. An interviewee there offered the line as “that quote from Edgar Allan Poe.”
Je n’y crois pas, mais je les crains.