Paranormal Science – Ghosts & Related Phenomena [Part 2]

Continuing my journey into the paranormal phenomenon and links to scientific investigations.

Science of the Paranormal: Can You Trust Your Own Mind?

(Image credit: © Michal Bednarek | Dreamstime.com)

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

— Shirley Jackson, “The Haunting of Hill House,” 1959

Of all the paranormal phenomena that surround Halloween, the haunted house may be the last to inspire real fear. Witches? Haven’t been scary since the days of Salem. Zombies? Fun makeup, sure, but a bit campy. Vampires? Blame sparkly Robert Pattinson for taking the bite out of those bloodsuckers.

But the haunted house can send chills up the spine of the staunchest nonbeliever. Ghost stories tend to happen to the unsuspecting; who’s to say they might not happen to you? They’re also passed around by word of mouth, often by seemingly trustworthy sources. Nowadays, the Internet expands this oral tradition to almost anyone: Witness the website Jezebel’s annual spooky stories contest (and then try to sleep soundly tonight).

Science, of course, counsels skepticism toward the idea of spirits and spooks. So if real ghosts aren’t to blame for things that go bump, what might be? Though researchers have investigated culprits like electromagnetic fields and infrasound below the range of human hearing, the ultimate source of hauntings may just be that 3-lb. organ between the ears. [10 Ghost Stories That Will Haunt You for Life]

Seeking ghosts in sound

One plausible explanation for haunted houses is that people are responding to something in the environment — but that the “something” is far more mundane than restless spirits.

A possible culprit is infrasound, or sounds just below the typical human hearing threshold of 20 hertz. In 1998, Vic Tandy, a researcher at Coventry University in England, joined with fellow Coventry professor Tony Lawrence to write a paper based on Tandy’s own spooky experiences at a medical equipment manufacturing shop. On occasion, employees reported spooky sensations and the feeling of a presence in the room; Tandy dismissed all of this until one night when he began to feel cold and gloomy. After checking that none of the medical gas bottles were leaking, he sat back at his desk, only to see a gray figure emerge in the corner of his vision. When he summoned the courage to look at the apparition directly, it faded away. [Infographic: Belief in the Paranormal]

A subsequent experience while cutting metal led Tandy to wonder if sound energy was causing his and his colleagues’ inexplicable experiences. After a particular fan in the building was switched off, the “ghosts” disappeared, the researchers wrote in 1998 in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.

Proving this notion has been more difficult. Lots of things create infrasound, from the wind gusts of air conditioners to earthquakes. In one experiment, researchers used hidden infrasound generators during ghost tours given at Mary King’s Close in Edinburgh, United Kingdom. The close is now underground, but in the 1600s, it was a series of narrow alleyways and passages through tall buildings; local legend tells of plague victims bricked into the walls. During a city ghost festival in 2007, some unsuspecting tour groups were blasted with infrasound as they roamed these creepy passageways. [10 of the Spookiest Haunted Houses in America]

Read More – Science of the Paranormal: Can You Trust Your Own Mind?

Using science to investigate the paranormal

Science has long been used to investigate seemingly supernatural phenomena. Read about some of the most famous examples—and what they tell us about the historical relationship between science and the occult.

From Harry Price and his ‘National Laboratory of Psychical Research’ to the infamous case of the Cottingley Fairies, this story looks at the scientific instruments, methods and technologies used to test (or debunk) spiritualist mediums, fairy apparitions and ghostly visions.

Harry Price and the National Laboratory of Psychical Research 

In the years after 1900, several ‘psychical’ laboratories were purpose-built in Britain, Europe and the US by serious practitioners aiming to establish rigorous, controlled conditions for scientifically investigating the supernatural.

Photograph of Harry Price at the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, c. 1930, fixing machinery
Courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London © NLPR/Tourist Photo Library

Psychical investigator Harry Price established the London National Laboratory of Psychical Research (NLPR) in 1926. Price defined psychical research as the attempt to ‘ascertain, by exact experimental methods, how far the alleged phenomena of the séance room can be brought into line with normality’. Could science explain the strange phenomena spiritualists and occultists claimed were stemming from an unseen world?

NLPR images

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Ghost Busted: When Science Meets the Supernatural

How scientific are paranormal investigations, anyway?

(Credit: Marti Bug Catcher/Shutterstock)

It’s easy to have a laugh at the expense of all those ghost hunters you see on TV. With their flashy gadgets and dramatic reactions any time the night-vision camera captures a mote of dust in the air, it’s little wonder that the field of paranormal investigations has long been consigned to the garbage heap of pseudoscience.

And yet, over the decades, plenty of scientists and science-minded institutions have dipped their toes into the murky waters of the paranormal. Harvard’s own William James, who helped found the school’s psychology department, was obsessed with the supernatural throughout his career. Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle — a trained physician, don’t forget — spent the latter part of his life (and much of his credibility) as a defender of spiritualism. In the 1920s, the venerable Scientific American was open-minded enough to offer a long-standing reward, up to $15,000 at one point, to anyone who could provide conclusive evidence of ghosts. Even Einstein once attended a séance (although he did not report any spooky action).

Today, a surprising number of colleges and universities offer opportunities to study and even conduct research in parapsychology. And some scientists, although not many, have devoted their own time and resources to studying the paranormal — by becoming ghost hunters themselves. 

Method vs. Myth

Noah Leigh is one such researcher. With an undergraduate degree in biology and a master’s in epidemiology and cell biology, Leigh is a career scientist who applies his scientific training to investigating the paranormal. In 2007, he founded his own team, Paranormal Investigators of Milwaukee (PIM). Their work is nothing you’d see on TV, but if it was it would be more like MythBusters than Ghost Hunters.

“We have a ‘debunk-first’ mentality, and that’s reflected in our cases,” he says. “There are a handful of teams out there who use methods similar to ours, but they’re few and far between.” PIM operates as a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit, which means the group doesn’t charge for its work or make money off of the outreach programs they conduct at libraries and other venues. They don’t use mediums or psychics, and while they do use cameras, digital audio recorders and other technical instruments to support their investigations, their most important tool is one you don’t see often in the field: the scientific method.

“We do bring more scientific rigor to the process. We make actual reports — a lot of investigators don’t — and we document as much as we can,” Leigh says. “We use equipment, but not the stuff you see on TV. So much of that is ridiculously expensive and useless most of the time. Low-quality equipment is subject to interference and gives you lots of false positives. Plenty of investigators are fine with that, it makes for more drama, but that’s not how we operate.” 

Pseudo vs. Science

Leigh knows the pitfalls of attempting legitimate scientific inquiry into the supernatural; he’s well aware that most of the scientific community dismisses paranormal research as pseudoscience. “If you do it right, the investigations themselves aren’t pseudoscientific,” he counters. “It’s the method behind the investigation and the people conducting it. A lot of teams are biased — they already believe in the paranormal so they will be looking at whatever evidence they gather to support that belief. That’s not how we work. We always have a questioning mindset.”

That mindset is evident in the “Paranormal 101” section of PIM’s website, which offers unbiased insight into all the tropes of paranormal reality television, from mysterious orbs captured on camera to electronic voice phenomenon. The site is also packed with case files of PIM investigations across the country. Many of these cases, Leigh notes, are exercises in disproving the paranormal.

Read More – Ghost Busted: When Science Meets the Supernatural

The Science (and Non-Science) of Ghosts

Ghosts are everywhere—yet nowhere. Cultures all around the world believe in spirits that survive death to dwell in another realm. In fact, ghosts are among the most widely believed of paranormal phenomena: Millions of people are interested in ghosts, and a 2019 Ipsos/YouGov poll found that 45% of Americans say that ghosts “definitely or probably exist.”

The idea that the dead remain with us in spirit is ancient, and appears in countless stories from the Bible to Macbeth. It even spawned a folklore genre: ghost stories. Belief in ghosts is part of a larger web of related paranormal beliefs, including near-death experience, life after death, and spirit communication. Such beliefs offer many people comfort — who doesn’t want to believe that our departed loved ones are looking out for us, or with us in times of need?

Many people have tried to—or claimed to—communicate with spirits over the centuries; in Victorian England, for example, it was fashionable for upper-crust ladies to hold séances in their parlors after tea with friends. So-called “Ghost Clubs” dedicated to searching for ghostly evidence formed at prestigious universities including Cambridge and Oxford, and in 1882 the most prominent such organization, the Society for Psychical Research, was established. Eleanor Sidgwick was an investigator (and later president) of that group, and could be considered the world’s first female ghostbuster. Meanwhile across the pond during the late 1800s, many American psychics claimed to speak to the dead — and were exposed as frauds by skeptical investigators such as Harry Price and Harry Houdini.

Despite these early, sporadic spirit investigation attempts, it wasn’t until recently that ghost hunting became a widespread interest around the world. Much of this is due to the popular TV series Ghost Hunters, which ended thirteen seasons without finding good evidence for ghosts. The show spawned dozens of spinoffs and imitators, and it’s not hard to see why the show was so popular: the premise is that anyone can look for ghosts. The two original stars were ordinary guys (plumbers, in fact) who decided to look for evidence of spirits. Their message: You don’t need to be an egghead scientist—or even have any training in science or investigation—to look for ghosts: All you need is some free time, a dark place, and a few cameras and gadgets. If you look long enough (and your threshold of evidence is low enough) any “unexplained” light or noise could be evidence of ghosts.

Scientifically evaluating ghosts is problematic for several reasons, including that surprisingly diverse phenomena are attributed to ghosts. To one person a door closing on its own is a sign of a ghost, while for others it may be missing keys, a faint scent, a cold area in a home, or even a dream about a dead friend. When sociologists Dennis and Michele Waskul interviewed ghost experiencers for their 2016 book Ghostly Encounters: The Hauntings of Everyday Life (Temple University Press) they found that “many participants were not sure that they had encountered a ghost and remained uncertain that such phenomena were even possible, simply because they did not see something that approximated the conventional image of a ‘ghost.’ Instead, many of our respondents were simply convinced that they had experienced something uncanny — something inexplicable, extraordinary, mysterious, or eerie.” Because of this, many people claiming to have had a ghostly experience didn’t necessarily see anything that most people would recognize as a classic “ghost.” In fact they may have had totally different experiences whose only common factor is that it was not easily explained.

Read More – The Science (and Non-Science) of Ghosts

In Paranormal Science 3 – I will continue my Investigations!