A psychoacoustics expert sets up camp in England’s haunted spots
SIR FULKE GREVILLE lived in Warwick Castle from 1605 until 1628, the year he was stabbed by his disgruntled manservant Ralph.* The murder happened in London, but Sir Fulke’s ghost, in the manner of certain lost but persevering pets, found its way back to the castle. I’m guessing it got a lift from the Tussaud Group, the wax museum people, who bought the castle in 1978 and installed a Fulke-inspired production number called “Warwick Ghosts—Alive!” (“unsuitable for anyone of a nervous disposition”).
Sir Fulke is Coventry’s most famous ghost and certainly its highest-grossing, but not, to my mind, its most intriguing. For that you must visit the home of chartered engineer and psychoacoustics researcher Vic Tandy. Tandy, who teaches at Coventry University, is a big middle-aged guy with a goofball grin and glasses with heavy lenses that tend to pull the frames slightly off-kilter on one side or the other. He fits my stereotype of an engineer so well that when I hear him say things like “I have a second-level in aikido” and “I’m also a magician,” I have to stop myself from going, Really? We are sitting in Tandy’s living room with his wife Lynne and their son Paul, who has a stall at the local market selling rubber dog doo—and probably, knowing this family, a Ph.D. and a Heisman Trophy.
Tandy’s ghost story takes place twenty-some years ago, at a nearby factory that manufactured life-support systems. Tandy designed the company’s products and he put in a lot of overtime. One night as he returned to his lab from a coffee break, the cleaner barreled past him with a stricken look. “She told me there was a ghost in there. She said she’d been feeling uneasy, as though someone was in there with her, and then this gray thing appeared in the corner of her eye, and she took off running.”
Tandy’s first guess was that an anesthetic bottle was leaking, and the fumes were causing the cleaner to hallucinate. Everything checked out fine, so he put it down to, as they say at Warwick Castle, a nervous disposition. The next night, though, working late again, Tandy began to feel strange himself. “I felt my hackles go up.”* Again, Tandy suspected fumes. He wondered whether someone had left the stopper off the tricoethylene, which his lab mates used for degreasing machine parts. “That wasn’t it, so I thought, Right. I’ll go have a coffee. I came back in. Same thing.” Again with the hackles. “Then I see this gray object around to the side of me. I would say I was projecting a form onto it, trying to make sense of it, but…it had arms and legs at one point. I turned to look at it and it disappeared. The following day I was going in for a fencing competition—”
“Really?”
“Yeah. So anyway, I’d brought my foil in to fix it. I’d put it in the vise and gone over to my desk, and when I turned back, it was moving on its own. Aaaaaa!” I don’t know how to spell the sound Tandy just made. Imagine an opera singer being garroted at the crescendo of an aria. What he means is, it scared the bejeebers out of him. But only for a moment. “I thought, No, no, come on, there has to be a reason for this.”
Ever the engineer, Tandy set out to find the answer. Had the cleaner come in at this juncture, she would not have been reassured about the safety and normalcy of her place of employment. She would have found Vic Tandy on his hands and knees, sliding a fencing weapon slowly across the linoleum. Every few seconds, he’d stop to jot notes on a pad. By watching for where the blade started to vibrate, he could measure the peaks and troughs of the sound wave he suspected might be his ghost and pinpoint the frequency. (When sound pressure waves hit an object, they cause it to vibrate; if the object is an eardrum, the brain reads these vibrations—a certain range of them, anyway—as sound.)
Tandy’s suspicion was that his ghost was the product of inaudible, low-frequency sound waves—infrasound. Indeed, when he set up his measuring equipment in the lab, he found a sharp peak at nineteen hertz. (Infrasound runs from zero to twenty hertz.) If the source is powerful enough, infrasound can, in addition to setting fencing foils aquiver, engender all manner of mysterious-seeming phenomena. Unbeknownst to audience members, infrasound pulses were sent out at certain points during a piano concert at Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral in September 2002. It was at these points that concertgoers reported—via a questionnaire distributed before the concert began—a variety of physical effects, such as tingling on the back of the neck and “strange feelings in the stomach,” as well as an intensification of their emotions.
Infrasound has also been reported to cause vision irregularities: sometimes blurring, sometimes a vibrating visual field. The eyeball, Tandy explains to me, has a resonant frequency of nineteen hertz. Meaning that in the presence of a standing nineteen-hertz infrasound wave, your eye would start to vibrate along with the waves. This is similar to the effect of a powerful operatic voice on a wineglass: When the voice—created by pressure waves from vibrating vocal cords—hits on the resonant frequency of glass, the glass in turn begins to vibrate and may, if the note is held, even shatter.
Tandy explains that peripheral vision is extremely sensitive to movement, a helpful adaptation for dealing with predators that sneak up on you from the side. “If your eyeball is dithering, the sides—the peripheral vision—are where it’s going to register.” The blurry gray ghost in the edge of the cleaner’s vision could have resulted from just such a dither.
Next Tandy went off in pursuit of the source. He found it in the basement. “The maintenance people had replaced an exhaust fan,” he says. “I think they made it themselves. Huge, huge amount of unneeded energy. I mean, it was quite surprising the fan wasn’t standing still and the building going ’round it.”
All of this got Vic Tandy thinking. What if he were to visit some of England’s purportedly haunted spots and take some sound readings? What if the feelings people report when they think they’ve been in the presence of spirits are in fact the effects of infrasound? The more he thought about it, the more sense it made. Old buildings have thicker, more solid walls, which resonate better. And old abandoned castles and cellars often have no furniture or curtains to absorb sound waves. Infrasound would also help explain why reports of ghosts are often localized—why people sense a presence in just one part of a room. Infrasound tends to “pool”—it registers strongly in the spots where the peaks and troughs of sound waves overlap, and disappears where peak and trough cancel each other out. Tandy even has an infrasound-based explanation for why people sometimes feel cold in the presence of what they take to be a ghost. Infrasound can activate the fight-or-flight response, and part of that response is a curtailing of blood to the extremities. Hence the chills (and the racing heart and thus, it stands to reason, the unease).
Tandy knew from local hearsay that the Coventry Tourist Information Centre was a promising place to start. Though they spent their days pushing “Warwick Ghosts—Alive!” the staff was convinced that something ghostly was going on directly below them. Excavations for the foundation of the tourism office had uncovered a fourteenth-century cellar that the tourism staff now uses for storage. In a Journal of the Society for Psychical Research article on the project, Tandy quotes a Coventry tour guide who had accompanied a Canadian journalist to the cellar: “The gentleman was frozen to the spot and the colour drained from his face.”
Tandy went in to take some measurements. I asked him if he felt anything. He said only once—a brief, sudden sense of something “washing over him.” His wife Lynne, who has accompanied him on several visits, volunteers that she felt nothing. “Though I do sometimes feel a strange oppressiveness in the Sainsbury’s dairy area.” I volunteer that, owing to her accent or my fourth-grade maturity level, this came through as: “the Sainsbury’s derriere.” Lynne’s look suggests that the humor isn’t registering. It suggests she might think I’m something of a dairy area myself.
Tandy did not find infrasonic frequencies in the cellar, but he did find them just outside it. The eighteen-hertz entity lives in the hallway that opens into the cellar (though its source remains unknown). Tandy figures people were blaming the cellar because of how it looked. As he puts it, “You don’t get ghosts in well-lit white-walled concrete corridors. You get ghosts in vaulted fourteenth-century cellars.”
According to a Dortmund University nonlethal weapons expert named Jürgen Altmann, infrasound can, in a small percentage of the population, set off vibrations in the liquid inside the cochlea. These vibrations—which happen because of an uncommon anatomical weakness in the bone structure of the ear—could create a sudden, inexplicable feeling of motion, which could lead to the unease that some of the cellar visitors reported.
The majority of visitors, however, feel nothing. Tandy gave a talk earlier in the week and took the entire crowd over to the cellar afterward. Despite their having been primed to feel something, only one out of the group of fifty did. The same meager odds appear to apply for industrial infrasound. NASA astronauts on liftoffs are exposed to massive infrasound vibrations, to no apparent deleterious effect. (It was, in fact, in a NASA contractor’s report that Tandy read about the vibrating eyeball effect. NASA had experimentally exposed volunteers to infrasound back in the sixties, to be sure, as Tandy puts it, “that they didn’t deliver jam to the moon.”) It is thought that only a small portion of the population is sensitive to infrasound. Tandy believes that when the odd office worker starts talking about Sick Building Syndrome, infrasound may in fact be the culprit. There are said to be people so debilitatingly sensitive to infrasound that even the very low levels of it that come off the ocean can make them nauseous. At any rate, it’s not the sort of situation where you can set up a speaker and inflict mental and physical discomfort on demand.
This particular fact came as a great disappointment to the military-industrial complex. For years, infrasound was served up as the next big thing in nonlethal weapons. Obviously, powerful amplifiers would be needed to boost the decibel level—unless your intent was simply to make your enemy feel peculiar. In strong doses, infrasound has been alleged to cause all manner of bodily unpleasantness: nausea, salivation, “extreme annoyance,” rapid pulse, vibrating visual field, “intolerable sensations in the chest,” gagging, vomiting, bowel spasms, and “uncontrollable defecation.” Jürgen Altmann, the best authority on the subject that I could find, says that the more dire second half of the list is hearsay. In the vast stack of literature that Altmann reviewed, he found only one allegation of vomiting and none for bowel spasms and their pal uncontrollable D.
Contrary to persistent Internet rumors, actual infrasound weapons are rare. Altmann found one Russian institution—the very specifically named Center for the Testing of Devices with Non-Lethal Effects on Humans—that was said to have developed a device propelling a baseball-sized pulse of about ten hertz over hundreds of meters. He could find no information on the efficacy of the device, but his tone suggests you’d be better off propelling real baseballs.
Nonetheless, people worry. “I still get people ringing me up, thinking their neighbor is trying to get them out of the house by shooting infrasound at them,” says Tandy. I used to have a neighbor who shoots high-decibel Eagles songs out his windows, causing nausea and extreme annoyance at a fraction of the cost. I’d have loved to get my hands on a retaliatory infrasound blaster.
“Try a church organ,” suggests Tandy. “The big ones put out a lot of infrasound. Or you could rent an elephant.”
Elephants, as well as whales and rhinos, have recently been found to communicate by infrasound; they can both produce it and hear it. In the wake of recent research at the Fauna Communications Research Institute in North Carolina, tigers were added to the list. Tigers have large territories to defend, and it’s thought they use infrasound—which has the advantage of carrying over long distances and penetrating dense foliage—to warn trespassers.
The tiger finding spoke to Tandy. The fact that humans—albeit a minority of them—are able to sense infrasound had puzzled him. Why would the ability have evolved if we don’t communicate in infrasound? Perhaps to sense predators. Being able to detect a tiger in the vicinity was—for primitive man, anyway—a valuable knack. “So maybe there are people in the cellar whose tiger detector, as it were, is going off.”
The research is a nice fit with Tandy’s work. Though tigers’ vocalizations were found to span a range of audible and inaudible (to us) sound, their roars were measured at and below eighteen hertz—very close to the infrasound frequency that set Vic Tandy’s saber rattling. To test the notion that tigers use infrasound to ward off potential rivals, Elizabeth von Muggenthaler, the researcher who had recorded vocalizing tigers, set up powerful speakers to play the big cats’ roars and growls back to them. If ever there were a moment when acoustical science broke through the drear confines of audiograms and spectral analyses, this was it. Von Muggenthaler reports that the recordings caused several of the tigers to “roar and leap towards the speakers.”
You can try this experiment on yourself by turning your computer speaker to top volume, going to www.acoustics.org/press/145th/Walsh2.htm, scrolling down to the paragraph about roars, and clicking on the speaker icon. Even though I know what’s coming, it scares the rubber dog doo out of me every time I play it. I recall once going to the big cat house of our local zoo at feeding time. For a solid minute, the tigers and lions stood in their cages and roared. I started to cry, though I wasn’t upset. I had the same embarrassing response to what I’m guessing were the effects of infrasound twice before: once while standing on a rooftop that was buzzed by a Blue Angels fighter plane, and another time standing two streets away from an imploded building as it collapsed. Also, I used to feel an ineffable queerness in my chest during Sunday mass, which I put down to God looking inside me and knowing I wasn’t listening. Now I’m thinking it was the organ music. I’m thinking I must be an infrasound sensitive.
I’ll soon know, because Tandy has promised to expose me to some nineteen-hertz waves. In fact, that’s where we’re heading now. Tandy gets up from the couch. It’s 6:30 p.m., and the Coventry tourism office has closed. Perhaps we’re going to the haunted tower at Warwick Castle? Tandy stops halfway down the first-floor hallway and makes a left. We are not going to Warwick Castle. We’re going to Vic and Lynne Tandy’s dining room. “You can really get a nice standing nineteen-hertz wave going in here. I’ve got my kit all set up for you.”
Tandy’s laptop is set up to channel computer-generated infrasound through the subwoofers of a car stereo amplifier and into a speaker. He pulls out a dining room chair for me. The speaker is seated at the head of the table. “Ready?” says Tandy.
He hits a series of keys on the laptop. We sit in the quiet, heads bowed, as if waiting for the speaker to say grace.
I think I feel something, but then again, I’m looking for it. Tandy says he can’t usually feel it while it’s on, but that he notices the room feels different when he shuts it off. So we turn the infrasound off, then back on, and then off again. It’s hard to say. It’s certainly subtle.
Lynne comes in to set the table for dinner. After she leaves, I ask Tandy to put the infrasound on one last time. He leans over, presses some keys. Is there a mild buzziness in my brain? A faint, indescribable weirdness? It’s there, I think it’s there. “I can feel something already,” I whisper.
Tandy looks up from his keyboard. “I haven’t got anything on yet.”
IF YOU ASK me which is the more likely explanation—infrasonics or spirits—I will tell you to apply the wisdom of Occam’s razor,* a principle which holds that the simplest, the least far-fetched, of two competing theories is the place to put your money. But depending on who’s shaving, Occam’s razor yields manifestly different views. To those who believe in an afterlife, the most straightforward explanation for hearing your dead dad is that you’re hearing your dead dad’s spirit. Infrasonics and vibrating eyeballs and fight-or-flight responses would, given this particular worldview, seem to be needless and unlikely complexities. But to those of a less spiritual bent, the concept of a consciousness leaving a body and persisting in some ordered form that is able to interact with living beings is a notion that demands an even more elaborate and unnecessarily complex explanation.
Perhaps it’s time for a break from the tail-chasing complexities of scientific method. Perhaps some other learned pursuit has something to offer us. Has anyone, for instance, tried to prove the existence of ghosts in a court of law? In fact they have. In the farm belt of central North Carolina, some eighty years ago.