I recently game across a fantastic tweet:

pic.twitter.com/f9Jtw07csi

— Mac Smith (@MacSmithArt) April 15, 2026

If it disappears, the text is:

Scooby-Doo is a devastating commentary on the prejudices of the Moderns. In their single-minded, one might almost say fanatical, desire to unmask all supernatural phenomena as the products of cranks and criminals, the Gang blinds all they encounter, and are indeed blinded themselves, to the supreme supernatural phenomenon which their enterprise – in point of fact, their collective ontology as such- is actually predicated upon: they are in the company of a talking dog.

This is both hilarious and true of moderns. The only thing is, it’s not actually true of Scooby Doo and the gang. At least in the original show—Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!—the gang always accepted the supernatural explanation at first, and only changed their mind once they were presented with evidence which made the supernatural explanation impossible, or at least highly improbable. “Wait a minute, what does a ghost need with…” was the response to more than a few clues.

The only real exceptions to this are the episodes in which the alleged phenomenon was entirely natural, such as the ape man in Never Ape an Ape Man or the beast in The Beast Is Awake In Bottomless Lake.

I’ve watched all of the episodes of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! at least a half-dozen times in the last ten years with my children, and I must confess I’m not sure why people remember it as being out to inculcate naturalism or to debunk the super-natural. Yes, the explanations always turned out to be something that a detective could detect, but everyone in the episode always took it for granted that the explanation could have turned out to be a ghost, or a phantom, or a mummy, or a headless specter, or whatever the creature was. It just turned out to not be, this time. But the gang always took a very reasonable attitude—just because the last 23 ghosts turned out to be fake doesn’t mean that this one is fake. Every one of those ghosts was fake in a different way.

I can only think of one instance where anyone doubts the existence of ghosts, which is in Haunted House Hangup:

Shaggy, the nonmaterial embodiment, or essence or organism that’s seen as a specter, wraith, or apparition has been scientifically proven to be a sheer myth. In other words, ghosts don’t exist!

Of course, Shaggy immediately replies:

Yeah, but does the ghost know that?

And about two minutes later, Velma is running away with the rest of the gang from a ghostly floating candle and before the halfway point Velma exclaims, “Yikes! There is a headless specter!” before running away from it, too.