“Grief hallucinations are a normal reaction to bereavement but are rarely discussed, because people fear they might be considered insane or mentally destabilised by their loss,” Bell wrote for Scientific American.10 “As a society we tend to associate hallucinations with things like drugs and mental illness, but we now know that hallucinations are common in sober healthy people and that they are more likely during times of stress.”
This type of hallucination is just one of the many reasons that we can’t always trust our own sight, especially when it comes to unverifiable visions of deceased loved ones, but that doesn’t mean these experiences can’t be valuable. If you have seen something like this before, the important question is: what will you do with the knowledge that it wasn’t a product of supernatural intervention? Will you let it devalue a potentially unforgettable or beneficial experience? I hope not. I hope that you look at your past through a new lens—a naturalistic one—that allows you to learn and grow from it without relying on paranormal forces as the catalyst.
HAUNTINGS AND POLTERGEISTS
There’s never been a place that has been shown, scientifically, to be haunted by spirits, but there are stories about these events everywhere we turn. These stories are told repeatedly, embellished, reported on by the media, and believed by many, but does that make hauntings real? According to a 1991 ruling by the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, the answer is, “Yes.”11 In the now-infamous Ghostbusters ruling, the justices decided that nationally published stories about a house being haunted were enough to affect its value and declared the house “haunted” under the law.
“Whether the source of the spectral apparitions seen by defendant seller is parapsychic or psychogenic, having reported their presence in both a national publication and the local press, defendant is estopped to deny their existence and, as a matter of law, the house is haunted,” Justice Israel Rubin wrote in the majority opinion. “It was defendant’s promotional efforts in publicizing her close encounters with the spirits which fostered the home’s reputation in the community, and the impact of that reputation goes to the very essence of the bargain between the parties, greatly impairing both the value of the property and its potential for resale.”
This was an interesting case and conclusion, but anyone who understands the judicial system or reads the court’s opinion can see that the judges didn’t establish that supernatural entities were real or present in the home. The case didn’t prove anything paranormal, but it does make one wonder what types of experiences the owner had in the home to warrant national attention. Did she make everything up? That’s possible, but there are people who do have genuine experiences that they believe are caused by ghosts. What’s really causing them?
Supposed hauntings could be the result of any number of things, including something as simple as a dirty house. Researchers at Clarkson University in New York found in 2015 that some reports of hauntings could potentially be linked to toxic molds, such as rye ergot fungus. Shane Rogers, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the school, said hauntings are “widely reported phenomena that are not well-researched.”
“They are often reported in older-built structures that may also suffer poor air quality,” Rogers said in a statement.12 “Similarly, some people have reported depression, anxiety and other effects from exposure to biological pollutants in indoor air. We are trying to determine whether some reported hauntings may be linked to specific pollutants found in indoor air.”
Another common and completely natural explanation for alleged ghost activity and feelings of being haunted is infrasound, also called low-frequency sound, which includes sounds lower in frequency than 20 Hz or cycles per second—the normal limit of human hearing. These extreme bass waves and vibrations can’t be heard by humans, but they can be felt and have been shown to produce anxiety, extreme sorrow, and chills in some people. In one study, scientists from the National Physical Laboratory in England combined forces with musicians to put on a concert featuring music laced with infrasound.13 The researchers found that 22 percent of the listeners, who were unaware of the details of the experiment, reported more unusual feelings and experiences during the pieces in which infrasound was present. Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire in Southern England, presented the results of the experiment to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He is one of the many experts who has argued that some of the odd sensations described during so-called ghost experiences could be explained by infrasonic vibrations.
“These results suggest that low frequency sound can cause people to have unusual experiences even though they cannot consciously detect infrasound,” Wiseman said in announcing the experiment’s conclusions.14 “Some scientists have suggested that this level of sound may be present at some allegedly haunted sites and so cause people to have odd sensations that they attribute to a ghost—our findings support these ideas.”
Numerous research projects have shown that sounds between 7 and 19 Hz can induce fear, dread, or panic in listeners,15 and in at least one study scientists were actually able to manufacture a ghostly “feeling of presence” in a laboratory setting.16 Some researchers, such as Vic Tandy of Coventry University in Warwickshire, took the hypothesis a step further. He reported that infrasound at around 18 Hz can resonate with the structure of the human eyeball and cause optical illusions of ghostly figures. Tandy claimed his study outlined an “as yet undocumented natural cause for some cases of ostensible haunting.”
“Using the first author’s own experience as an example, we show how a 19 Hz standing air wave may under certain conditions create sensory phenomena suggestive of a ghost,” he wrote in the abstract of a 1998 paper published in the Journal of the Society for Physical Research. 17 “Spontaneous case researchers are encouraged to rule out this potential natural explanation for paranormal experience in future cases of the haunting or poltergeistic type.”
Neil deGrasse Tyson has also looked into the 1998 study, saying Tandy was motivated by the fact that his lab was purported to be haunted. Tandy and his team ultimately discovered that the sound was coming from a newly installed fan, and when they turned the fan off, all paranormal phenomena stopped, according to Tyson.
“If you have a sound that resonates with something material, it’ll make the material vibrate at that frequency,” he said on his radio show StarTalk. “When that happens to you, your eye begins to see things that are in fact not there.”
One reason hauntings are reported so frequently could be that infrasound is just about everywhere. It can be caused by anything, including machines, air passing through a particular pipe or window, earthquakes, and other natural occurrences. In fact, even some animals, such as elephants and tigers, have been shown to emit infrasound—sometimes at levels that travel several kilometers.18
FEAR AND EXPECTATIONS
There are also evolutionary reasons that we might get the chills or feel spooked at seemingly random times—without any mental instability or infrasound. We may get goosebumps, or maybe our hair stands up on end, when we feel uneasy and scared regardless of whether or not the perceived danger is a legitimate threat. It turns out this is just a reflex and can be triggered by almost anything, including sharing scary stories or even the mere thought of a place being “haunted,” but where does this physical reaction come from? Scientists say it’s a leftover byproduct from our ancestors, who had more hair than us and would puff themselves up to look bigger like cats do when they feel threatened.
“The general principle is, if you are going to be attacked, try to look as big as you can,” David Huron, a musicologist at Ohio State University, told Popular Science.19
Huron says hair raising began as a response to cold, but can be linked to fear and surprise, as well as to other intense emotions and even music. This fear-based response explains why we still feel shivers during horror movies, even when we know there are no monsters under the bed, and why many people actua
lly enjoy the feeling of being frightened by them.
“One part of your brain is saying, ‘Oh my god, I’m gonna die! “ Huron said. “But the conscious part is saying that everything is OK. Which makes shivers feel good.”
In many ways, evolution has been good to us. Evolution is what has kept our species safe for hundreds of thousands of years. However, that safety doesn’t come without a cost, and unwarranted fear is often the price we must pay. We have developed a number of ways to keep ourselves aware of danger in our everyday lives, and they can all be tied back to fear in one way or another. Fear is a reaction to potential hardships, but it can also help shape many of our behaviors. Our bodies know that fear is a safe response, and they can (and often do) manufacture it at will.
While these fear-based reflexes likely kept our ancestors alive under the most dangerous circumstances, they can be confusing in a time period in which survival isn’t our top priority every day. For example, for our ancestors, being extra safe and aware of things approaching our territory would have been incredibly beneficial. Today, however, there are people who think that everything they see “out of the corner of their eye” is a ghost. They make this leap without realizing that our minds (and eyes) play tricks on us, and that this assumption of danger is actually related to our evolution and success as a species. That awkward tendency to register things out of the corner of our eyes as moving—and as threats—when they are not probably has saved more lives than you can imagine, but today some people stick with the “ghost” explanation. I constantly see strange coincidences, mysterious objects in my peripheral vision, and other things some people would consider proof of one supernatural force or another. I acknowledge these experiences for the glitches in my system that they are, but I often wonder how I’d interpret them as a believer.
GHOST-HUNTING TACTICS
Self-proclaimed paranormal investigators, including and especially those on television, often further the haunting myth by planting evidence, sensationalizing ideas, and using camera tricks and editing techniques to advocate for the existence of ghosts without providing any measurable or objective evidence for the rest of us to evaluate. That is why no findings from any ghost-hunting TV shows—or from any other person with a ghost-hunting hobby—have ever been submitted for peer review by any serious-minded person, and why their “evidence” isn’t really evidence at all. These so-called ghost hunters have, in many cases, dedicated their lives to proving the existence of ghosts, but every single one has—so far—been a failure. They are not ghost hunters; they are ghost pretenders.
The A&E series American Haunting provides a good example of manufactured drama and falsified evidence in ghost-hunting media. According to a man who owned a house that was the subject of one of the show’s episodes, the camera crew focused on “reenactments” of spooky events that were said to have happened. The developments that took place during the recording were reportedly edited around things that were actually said, but that were “cut to fit the needs of the editors.”
“So while I never lied about anything that happened, the world wouldn’t know the difference, because literally every moment was cut apart and pieced together in an order that resembled an old Lon Chaney movie,” the homeowner wrote anonymously. “The final product was a special effects extravaganza that made Sharknado 2 look like a subdued French film.”20
It should be common knowledge that the TV programs purporting to show ghost activity are for entertainment purposes only and, at best, they provide false “ghost” labels to events with perfectly natural explanations. At worst, however, they knowingly coerce the audience into believing baseless claims. Because of this manipulation, any skeptical person should be ready to ask some serious questions about any and all “investigators” of ghosts. For instance, why do the vast majority of spirit wranglers turn off the lights before filming? And why do people claiming to be ghost hunters commonly seem surprised when they say they hear noises in haunted buildings? Isn’t that what they were expecting? When ghost hunters do provide recordings as evidence for ghost communication, why is it always muffled and vague? Why is there never a clear and important message conveyed by the spirit about the afterlife? Why are there never any falsifiable predictions about this life?
HEARING VOICES
In addition to personal testimonies and intentionally misleading filming practices, some of the most common forms of so-called evidence put forth by ghost hunters and hailed by believers are electronic voice phenomena (EVP). EVP is a vague term, as it generally refers to any recording that seems to inexplicably resemble human speech, but it is much like other pieces of purported evidence for ghosts in that it is completely unverifiable, subjective, and based entirely on assumptions. Many people claim to hear ghost voices (whatever that means) on recordings of supposedly empty space, but these sounds can almost always be explained by stray radio signals, static, and other background noises. As is the case with many “proofs” of the supernatural, EVP can perhaps be best addressed via questions that might spur additional thought on the part of the believer. In the instance of EVP, I like to ask, “Do you believe our larynx, or voice box, transcends into the afterlife, too? How exactly do you think the process works?”
Contrary to what some ghost hunters would have you believe, if you place an audio recorder overnight in any location, you are likely to come across strange and unfamiliar sounds. It’s usually the listener’s imagination, however, that allows them to take the form of recognized speech and become “EVP.” More often than not, unless you’ve somehow picked up a stray radio conversation, what you are actually hearing is static that you are interpreting as a voice because of our tendency to find patterns (even when they are absent). This is yet another example of apophenia (see chapter 9), which is the subject of research by auditory hallucination expert Diana Deutsch, a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego. In one study, Deutsch recorded a large number of nonsense phrases and “phantom words” that were played for students. She says the students interpreted the meaningless sounds in a variety of different ways, 21 and this process could be the root cause of EVP.
“Often people initially hear a jumble of meaningless sounds, but after a while distinct words and phrases suddenly emerge,” Deutsch wrote, adding that dieting students were more likely to hear “I’m hungry” or “Diet Coke,” while stressed students more often reported hearing “I’m tired” or “no time.” “People appear to hear words and phrases that reflect what is on their minds—rather as in a Rorschach test, though it’s my impression that the present effect is stronger.”
If you think you’ve experienced an EVP and you’re with someone else who claims to have heard the the same thing, it’s also possible that you were made to expect a specific word or phrase, which in turn caused you to perceive it. In psychology, this is called priming, and it is why people who are instructed to say “silk” repeatedly and then asked what cows drink will often respond with “milk” instead of water. It’s also why even self-proclaimed skeptics are more likely to report supernatural occurrences if they are told to expect them,22 and why you probably didn’t notice the extra “the” in the first sentence of this paragraph. With EVP, priming works like this: one person hears a noise and interprets it as a voice saying something like, “Hello, Tom.” That person then tells other observers what they heard, and their minds prepare to recognize it. Once the recording is played back to the others, or they’ve had time to reflect on the sound with that suggestion in mind, it becomes an audible pattern to them and everyone thinks they hear the same words. In a study involving paranormal groups and EVP, researchers found that the teams readily identified the phenomenon in recordings from a variety of locations, but were inconsistent in their “interpretation of the alleged communication.”23
“Still, it is possible that the one matched EVP is a result of communication with the deceased,” the authors wrote. “Another possibility is that noise was generated from some other source and follows a
particular pattern, which caused the teams to interpret the noise in a similar fashion. We feel the latter explanation is more likely the case, given the physical explanations for EVP, such as human error.”
In the end, EVP will never prove the existence of anything supernatural, simply because it doesn’t give us any real data. All you can do is prove something made a sound that someone interpreted as a voice, but not where it came from or anything else about it. It could be anything from trickery and manipulation to static, so jumping to the conclusion of a deceased human’s spirit seems premature.
EMF READINGS AND OTHER “UNBELIEVABLE” PIECES OF EVIDENCE
Many ghost hunters also use electromagnetic field (EMF) detectors to create the false perception that ghost activity exists. They often cast these EMF readings as evidence, but neglect to mention that electromagnetic fields, which are common and can emanate from nearby microwaves and other industrial electronic appliances, among other things, have never been shown to have any connection to so-called spiritual phenomena. No matter how much a ghost hunter shouts, “My EMF meter was off the charts!” it will never prove that those electromagnetic fields are linked to spirits. For that, we’d need real scientific evidence. Benjamin Radford explains that ghost hunters use “a variety of creative—and dubious—methods to detect their quarry’s presence.”
“Virtually all ghost hunter groups claim to be scientific, and most give that appearance because they use high-tech scientific equipment such as Geiger counters, Electromagnetic Field (EMF) detectors, ion detectors, and infrared cameras,” Radford wrote for Live Science. “Yet the equipment is only as scientific as the person using it; you may own the world’s most sophisticated thermometer, but if you are using it as a barometer, your measurements are worthless.”
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