Who doesn't like a good ghost story? Apparently 2 in 5 Americans believe in hauntings, with eerie abandoned houses, woods, asylums and hotels frequently serving as the stages - but are there other explanations for the creep factor of these spooky locations? Let's take a look at...
- The Power of Context - how humans can misattribute sensations
- The Fungus Among Us - the effect mold can have on humans and animals
- Bad Vibrations - how infrasound can scramble your perception
- The Case of the Haunted Lab - how a haunting was explained and resolved
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| Ruined buildings are staples of ghost stories...(Tama66) |
The Power of Context
Isn't it funny how supposedly haunted areas tend to have common themes? Feelings of dread, unexplained sounds or chills and a history hinting of disappearances and deaths are all part of the package.
People tend to discount these sinister sensations in more mundane circumstances - for example, writing off a chill in a supermarket. The reason we pay attention to them in certain contexts may be due to a quirk of the mind called misattribution. The human brain is constantly bombarded with information - sights, sounds, scents, memories, feelings, emotions and so on. Our brains combine this mélange of information, stitching together a coherent picture of our current situation... but they don't always get things right.
One study looking into this effect targeted male participants crossing a stable or shaky suspension bridge. Participants were approached by a female researcher, who asked them to fill out a questionnaire and offered them her number - in case they wanted to talk further. Males in the shaky bridge condition (who were probably much more anxious) were significantly more likely to contact the researcher - and used more romantic (or even sexual) content in their survey responses. It seems that they may have been misattributing their anxiousness from crossing the bridge as attraction to the female researcher!
A similar kind of thing could be happening in the case of hauntings. For example, a feeling of unease might be written off as food not agreeing with you in a well-lit suburban house. Alone in a ruined castle at midnight, you might think that same gut-feeling was the result of something watching you from the shadows...
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| Mold can have strange effects on the brain as well as the body... (ClickerHappy) |
The Fungus Among Us
Many supposedly haunted areas are inundated with mold and other fungi - but the presence of these organisms might actually be the cause of any spooky sensations!
Many people report health problems when exposed to moldy buildings - pain, fatigue, anxiety and even "brain fog." A study of mice exposed to toxic and non-toxic mold spores found that both types increased anxiety in the animals. The spores seemed to interfere with the memory of young mice, while lowering the pain threshold and enhancing the auditory-cued memory of older mice. The researchers suggest that this is due to the spores activating the immune system of the mice.
Vulnerable people run additional risks in moldy locations. Aspergillosis can occur when breathing in small bits of Aspergillus mold - such as might be found in compost, leaf piles, old bedding, dust and damp buildings. Coughing blood and mucous, fatigue, wheezing and weight loss can all occur thanks to this fungal infection of the lungs. If unexplainably spitting up blood while wasting away doesn't sound like a ghost story, I don't know what does.
Bad Vibrations
One other explanation of "hauntings" is infrasound - sound at low frequencies just on (or below) the edge of human hearing. Infrasound can come from a number of sources, including malfunctioning machinery or even poorly designed architecture that catches the wind. Though we can't really detect it, some researchers suggest that infrasound could affect our perception.
You can observe resonance quite easily in every day life (a lowered car window that seems to "throb" while driving down a motorway is resonating) and the human body can resonate as well. Research suggests that a frequency around 18 hertz will cause the human eye to resonate, for example. This internal shaking can have a whole slew of effects - feelings of unease, chills, auditory or visual hallucinations - even brain damage or death.
As a side note, tigers and lions are capable of mixing frequencies of around 18 hertz into their roars - Bioacoustician Elizabeth von Muggenthaler theorized that this is behind the rattling effect a big cat roar can have on a human.
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| Certain low frequencies can cause the human body to resonate! (garten-gg) |
The Case of the Haunted Lab
One real life "haunting" was experienced and ultimately resolved by Vic Tandy. Tandy was a design engineer working on prototype medical equipment in a building in Warwick. This building had built up a bit of a reputation as being "haunted" which Tandy dismissed as people misinterpreting the noises of the machines.
Though skeptical of the paranormal, Tandy quickly began having encounters of his own. One day he noticed a floating grey blob in his vision, accompanied by a feeling of dread. In another incident, a fencing foil he had brought into the building for a competition began to vibrate without explanation. This vibrating sword ultimately clued Tandy in to the presence of a low frequency soundwave. Examination of the lab found a faulty air-conditioning fan resonating at 18.9 hertz - a frequency that we can't hear, but can cause the human eye to vibrate (alongside causing the other undesirable sensations mentioned above.) Following the repair of the faulty fan, no further ghostly incidents were reported!
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