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America has a very big problem with the supernatural. There seems to be always a case to investigate , and I don't understand how the wider world could still be oblivious that something weird is going on.

For instance, in the last episode of season 11, Sam and Dean go into a haunted house full of ghosts in order to give Dean enough souls to destroy the Darkness. There just happened to be a haunted house lying about that they easily picked up on. And this one had quite a lot of ghosts. What are the odds that absolutely nobody had stumbled upon it before and spread the word to a number of people?

Additionally, when Sam and Dean (and presumably other hunters) do investigate a case, it sometimes ends up involving a third party realising the supernatural exist. Does every single one of them really keep their mouths shut about what is probably one of the biggest experiences of their lives (and definitely the biggest in terms of perception of reality, bar maybe birth), for the rest of their lives?

We've also seen that the supernatural and hunters precede Sam and Dean, so it's not as if it’s anything new.

Now, peoplehave connected the dots (otherwise there wouldn't be hunters), but my argument is that surely more people should have picked up on this, thereby spreading the world, and making it a largely-documented thing?

If similar stuff happened in our universe at the same rate, would we really not have moulded the existence of the supernatural into society by now?

The situation in the UK seems somewhat believable as they did mention how the supernatural is virtually non-existent there (although how the British Men of Letters have gone largely unnoticed given their influence — such as having access to thermal imaging satellites — is another question).

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    I think this is a common problem for shows with a Big Secret like this, that run for ~11 seasons. Given the need for subsequent adventures to be bigger and bolder than anything which came before, you eventually reach a point where so many world-threatening crises have come and gone that it becomes hard to imagine the general public is still unaware. The writers can try to explain it, but eventually the evidence outweighs the excuses. We the viewers just have to turn a blind eye in order to keep watching.
    – Steve-O
    Commented Jan 28, 2017 at 0:33
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    I think MiB gave an entirely plausible explanation for this. At one point, the senior agent starts 'looking for leads' in a trashy American newspaper (The National Enquirer?). His younger partner raises an eyebrow at this, because the paper contains so many obviously false & sensationalist story that it is not believable to many people. But the senior agent spots exactly the lead he is after, which leads them to the farm where the alien 'took the skin' of the misogynist gun lover. The thing is, such things could be reported in 'the press' quite often. Most ppl would reject it without thinking.
    – Andrew Thompson
    Commented Jan 28, 2017 at 1:04
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    Elsewise, I think I remember the brothers making the point @AndrewThompson describes once or twice - essentially, "Fine, go public. Hope you like living in an asylum."
    – Izkata
    Commented Jan 28, 2017 at 1:58
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    @Izkata I don't think the asylum argument is convincing, as it seems it isn't really hard to get evidence of the supernatural in the supernatural, like the haunted house example I provided in the question. There was also another episode (S2 ep. 4)where a random teenager managed to resurrect his dead friend (a girl) into a zombie. What are the odds only one person manages to do that? And what about that random town where everybody was infected by croatoan and subsequently disappeared? The supernatural really doesn't seem to be so supernatural
    – Logan545
    Commented Feb 9, 2017 at 16:21
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    We don’t see what we don’t want to see. That’s what Buffy went with.
    – Paul D. Waite
    Commented Mar 23, 2017 at 20:02

2 Answers 2

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This is a fantastic question and I was stumped for a while, but I realised that I think it's purely a case of writer's coincidence; sure, this is a flimsy answer but if you think about it, the majority of cases that Sam and Dean work on involve kids, old people or just dumb people, I think this was done on purpose by Jeremy Carver and Ben Hedlund as a way to justify that humans are oblivious to the supernatural. This made it easier for Sam and Dean to explain away any weird goings-on.

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The simplest, and therefore most likely explanation, is that it is simply a plot hole. Given that you are required to suspend your disbelief for the entire premise of the show, what's one more item?

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