The Science of the Supernatural
Mathematics prove that there are more than three dimensions in the world, but our brains aren’t sophisticated enough to perceive them. I, for one, can’t even conceive of how a fourth or fifth dimension is supposed to look. I’m not sure anyone can.
Okay. To be honest, I don’t know if all that stuff about mathematics proving the existence of extra dimensions is true. The scientist I heard that from isn’t a real scientist at all—he was just a character in an issue of The Amazing Spider-man. And he turned out to be a bad guy, so his word is probably even less reliable.
It sounds about right to me, but once math and science get into those theoretical realms of imaginary numbers, algorithms and stuff, I tend to get lost. My brain just can’t get wrapped around that sort of thing. If there’s a fourth dimension (and I know that most Twilight Zone episodes opened with Rod Serling saying, “There is a fifth dimension,” which I suppose implies there must be a fourth one out there), I’ll go ahead and assume that I can’t perceive it.
One thing I do know is that different brains work in different ways. Some people can look at a math problem and see something that makes sense. Others can look at a poem and understand it on levels that some of those mathematicians are never going to see. Others understand fashion, cars, or wine. Some people actually claim to understand what’s fun about hanging out in trendy nightclubs.
The fact that I’m not much of a scientist, though, doesn’t mean that I can’t understand the basics of the scientific method and approach ghosts critically. But the sheer fact that I hang out with a crowd of ghost hunters is going to make a lot of skeptics hesitant, at the very least, to count me among their number. Skeptics and people who believe in ghosts tend not to get along.
To many skeptics, people who believe in ghosts are gullible, superstitious flakes. Many ghost buffs, in turn, think that skeptics are a bunch of know-it-all jerks who are out to spoil their fun and just don’t understand that there’s anything in the world that hasn’t been explained already. I’ve had plenty of people step on the bus and say, “Boy, I hope there aren’t any skeptics on this tour.”
There’s a reason for this sentiment—some ghost fans are gullible, superstitious flakes who believe any stupid thing they see on the Internet. And a lot of skeptics are loud-mouthed jerks who try to win the argument against believers talk-radio style: by shouting louder than everyone else and insisting that anyone who doesn’t think science has already explained everything is a moron. Both sides can be equally dogmatic.
But while there are always debates between skeptics and believers, people who believe in ghosts (and other weird stuff ) spend most of their time arguing with each other.
There are a few basic things ghost hunters can agree on—for instance, places that are thought to be haunted tend to exhibit a lot of little environmental oddities, such as cold spots, weird electrical stuff, a tendency for batteries to drain very quickly, and so on. But the question becomes: are these environmental oddities there because the place is haunted, or are these environmental oddities just making us think the place is haunted? Some skeptics will immediately say it’s always, always just your mind playing tricks on you, nothing more. And some ghost fans are ready to punch anyone who suggests that the tapping noise they hear on the window might be a tree, not a dead person.
I usually side with the skeptics and scientists. But I also know that there’s plenty that we don’t know about the world yet. Skeptics will claim that ghosts, if they’re present, should have a measurable impact on the environment, but who’s to say if we’ve invented the right instruments to measure them yet? The scientific method holds that if something is real, it should be verifiable by scientific experiments that can be performed by anyone, even a child, and that will bring about the same results over and over. This is true, but it leaves out the fact that some of these experiments can only be performed by a child if that child happens to know how to operate a particle accelerator.
But the scientists are pretty much right—almost every ghost report can be explained away as something other than a dead guy. There are lots of normal things in the environment that can make you think there’s a ghost around.
For one thing, there’s infrasound—low-frequency noises caused by objects vibrating at a rate of about 18 hertz. That’s about the speed at which your eyeballs vibrate (which, as I understand it, they do all the time). Some scientific studies, particularly those by Vic Tandy, a lecturer at Coventry University in England, have indicated that the presence of these sounds—which can’t be heard by the human ear—in an environment can have a weird psychological effect on people. It can make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, and it can give you a distinct sensation that someone, or thing, is in the room with you. In fact, during hyperventilation, your vibrating eyeballs can not only make you think you’re seeing a vague gray form, but they can also produce the very infrasound that makes you think that the gray form is a ghost.
Infrasounds can even occasionally cause lightweight objects to move—they may be the culprit when the curtains flutter in a room. Since old pipe organ pipes are loaded (as I understand it) with infrasound, this may explain why so many old churches and theaters are said to be haunted (and practically all of them are).
Then there’s carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide poisoning can cause dread, dementia, and hallucinations—extreme cases have people hearing the sound of bells or footsteps and even seeing apparitions up and walking around. This was first identified as the source of reports of a haunted house in the 1920s. However, it’s unlikely that this can be used to explain too many ghost reports, because when the poisoning gets bad enough to cause such hallucinations, the sufferer will probably be dead before he or she can report them to the local ghost hunters.
And these are just a couple of the more interesting ways we skeptics explain things away. There are also dozens upon dozens of regular scientific explanations—drug-fueled hallucinations, the wind blowing over pipes, seismic activity, and just plain tricks of the mind and imagination.
But these don’t explain everything away. They certainly didn’t explain all of the stories I heard from people on the bus, and they didn’t explain some of what I was seeing on my first investigations.
I kept an open mind during tours and investigations, of course, but I also had a little voice in the back of my head during every ghost hunt saying, “Hey, stupid! There’s no such thing as ghosts!” I would respond by saying, “Shut up, brain—this beats bagging groceries!”
Finally that voice in my head got more reasonable. “Fine,” it said. “Go looking for ghosts. But at least talk to all of your scientist buddies to see if there might, conceivably, be anything to all of this ghost business. Some scientific way that an apparition could haunt these old buildings and alleys.”
That was fair enough. After all, the idea that ghosts are a genuine scientific phenomenon, not a supernatural one, has been going around for a long time. Not everyone who believes in ghosts believes that these ghosts are transparent spirits that fly out of the body at the moment of death.
I began talking to every scientist I knew and every scientist I could track down in an attempt to see if there might be some way to use science to explain ghosts rather than just using it to brush them off, but with every physics discussion I got into, I realized I was in over my head. I felt like a four-year-old getting a lesson in algebra. Even back when I was in a high school classroom full of kids who believed that Adam and Eve had a pet dinosaur, I was a pretty average science student. I suppose I can claim to know the basics of science pretty well, but once people start trying to explain physics to me, I start to feel like a blubbering idiot. I tend, for better or worse, simply to take scientists at their word.
And when I started asking the scientists that I knew if ghosts exist, most simply said no outright. But this wasn’t very scientific of them at all. The term “ghost” has enough meanings that it can be considered a variable. Even I, a non-scientist who holds out hope of one day owning a real lightsaber and, if I can afford it, a space ship, knew that they shouldn’t be passing judgment on a variable before its parameters were defined.
It’s partly the fault of the flakier ghost fans that the scientists were jumping to conclusions so fast, but another part of the reason that so many say no right away is that scientists are just as cliquish as those of any other profession. If they said yes, or even maybe, they’d get picked on by some of their colleagues.
Finally, I found one scientist who was willing to talk about ghosts with me. Seth Kleinschrodt, my old partner in crime from Des Moines, had grown up to be an engineer. When I got ahold of him, he was teaching classes on science at the University of Iowa, and he had kept up his interest in ghosts. In particular, he was interested in how they could be explained scientifically. Just the sort of thing I wanted to talk about. And when I asked him to explain it to me the way he’d explain it to a four-year-old, he was able to do it.
“When a person dies traumatically,” he explained, “it’s very much an electrical process. A big jolt of energy. And when you get into upper-level physics, it’s all about how a jolt of energy will leave an impact on the environment basically forever.” He hoped one day to prove that a sudden, traumatic death could, in theory, create an “apparition.”
He theorized that one could actually re-create the effect and create an actual ghost, if one had a particle accelerator and someone willing to die traumatically in front of it or something like that. He did manage to go over my head eventually. But the general idea was actually one of the most common things you hear among people trying to reconcile a belief in ghosts with a belief in science: ghosts aren’t “souls,” they’re energy. One of the most basic scientific laws that we all remember from school is that matter and energy—including mental energy—can neither be created nor destroyed, only transferred and transformed.
To put it another way, most of the attempts to explain ghosts with science can be simplified by describing the concept of “bad vibes.” Everyone has had the experience of walking into a place and just getting a bad feeling about the joint. There’s just a chance that this bad feeling may have come from the residual energy left behind by people who saw or experienced something unpleasant in the place sometime before. Ghosts, in theory, are sort of a more extreme, concentrated version of these vibes.
In fact, I talked about this concept of ghosts all the time on the tours—the term people like to use for this is “psychic imprint.” Or, if that’s too New Agey for you, “residual haunting.” One example we often gave was a psychic imprint supposedly left behind by Highball, a dog who was present at the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
Though he wasn’t shot at, Highball was apparently so freaked out that he left behind an “imprint,” or some sort of freaked-out vibe. Dogs tended to go nuts when they walked by the site of the massacre up until about the 1990s, when the imprint apparently dissipated into the environment. The ghosts-as-science theorists pretty generally agree that these energies, whatever they are, don’t last forever. You almost never hear about ghosts of people who died more than about three hundred years before; there are ghosts reported on the sites of plenty of Civil War battlefields, but you seldom hear about ghosts on the sites of battles from, say, the Hundred Years’ War.
The idea that ghosts are “caused” by a sudden jolt of some form of mental energy or another isn’t a new one, either. Variations on the idea have been going around for well over a century.
In 1907, Dr. Bernard Hollander addressed a group of scientists at the Lyceum Club in London and reported that ghosts were no longer the stuff of superstition—they were scientific fact. The speech was reported in great detail in the Chicago Tribune.
Ghosts were the result, he said, of “the wireless telegraph of the mind.” They were not souls, but “living thoughts projected into space by the personality at the death moment.”8
The human brain, he explained, was a storehouse of energy. He believed that the energy was electrical in nature, but admitted that this was sort of an open question. The bottom line, though, was that a thought in the brain was a physical thing. A “mental picture” was a construction of images and energies within the brain. Some people, such as great leaders, were apt to send out these mental images into the ether. These images produced in the brain may be sent out to sensitive people who may, in fact, receive the images in the form of a vague presentiment if they happen to be in the right state of mind. This explanation, he claimed, was “the simplest explanation of telepathy, and removes it at once from the realm of the supernatural.”
Hollander explained that ghosts were a form of this sort of telepathy, and he cited the “familiar example” of a murdered man being seen in ghostly form at the scene of the crime. At the moment of murder, the mysterious energies of his mind would be wrought to such a fever pitch that they would become reality, forming a sort of picture of the man’s image or personality that may attach itself to the area. Certain people might pick it up visually under certain circumstances. Others never will, even though it’s always there, waiting to be seen, because their brains just aren’t set up for it.
The specter, Hollander went on, may be a perfect image or one that is vague and undefined, depending on the exact nature of the mental energies exerted. It may stay in one place or rove around. It may stay only a short time before fading away, or it may linger for generations. It may not be seen often, but certain people with their brains wired in a certain way may notice it when they’re in exactly the right frame of mind. This, he explained, was why ghosts may be seen only infrequently. “This will explain,” he said, “why daring men who come [to haunted houses] with pistols and swords9 will not see a ghost at first. So long as they are wide awake and belligerent, their brain is too active to receive the image. It is only when they get tired that the impression is made upon their brains.”10
Dr. Hollander was a fairly well-regarded scientist in his day, and many who attended his lecture seem to have received this information as cold, solid fact. How much of it stands up today is another matter—Dr. Hollander is best known today for his interest in phrenology, the practice of figuring out people’s mental capacity and character by measuring their skulls. No less an authority than Mr. Smithers on The Simpsons said that phrenology “was dismissed as quackery 160 years ago.” After all, if we can send out thoughts over a sort of wireless telegraph of the mind, why can’t we get it to work under laboratory conditions? Why hasn’t the military found a way to transmit data via brain waves? In short, why haven’t we made any real progress in learning to control or understand this stuff?
Still, his theory is as close as anyone has come to summing up how ghosts come to exist if they’re not souls floating out of the body at death. Many of the scientists I discussed this with admitted that, while Dr. Hollander was probably incorrect about the precise mechanics of the process, he may have been on to something.
I wouldn’t say I believe that some form of concentrated mental energy can create a “living thought” that can be seen as a ghost, but I suspect that something like that might happen under certain circumstances. If there’s one thing I learned from my investigations into ghosts as science, it’s that there’s a difference between believing and suspecting.
Of course, what, exactly, this “concentrated mental energy” is, how it is generated, how it impacts the environment, and whether it even exists in the first place are still lingering questions. They may never be answered—though plenty of people have tried.
In the 1970s, when there was a lot of scientific research into psychic phenomena going on, a researcher in Toronto headed up what became known as the Philip Experiment.
At the time, a lot of research was going into poltergeists—ghosts that aren’t really seen, but will manifest by throwing things around, tugging at your clothes, etc.—and the research suggested that the phenomena might not be of ghostly origin at all. A large number of poltergeists seemed to be reported in houses in which there was a young teenage girl. The idea that many scientists came up with during the late 1960s was that these disturbances that were blamed on ghosts were actually the result of telekinetic energy. In other words, it wasn’t a dead person, it was the pent-up mental energy of the living girl that was causing all of the dishes to fly around the room.11
Intrigued by the notion that a ghost could be “created” by living people, a fellow named Dr. A. R. G. Owen gathered a group of people to see if the effect could be recreated. To begin with, they constructed an elaborate biography of a fictional man named Philip Aylseford. According to the story, Philip was born in 1624, was knighted at age sixteen, got married, worked as a secret agent, and fell in love with a gypsy girl. When his wife learned of the affair, she had the gypsy burned at the stake as a witch, and Philip, distraught, committed suicide in 1654. With a story like that, it would be a shame if there wasn’t a ghost.
In 1972 (this certainly sounds like something that would have happened in the 1970s, doesn’t it?), the group began to meditate, visualize, and talk about the details of Philip’s life, trying to teach themselves to “believe” in him. They conducted nineteenth-century-style séances, sitting around a table and attempting to get Philip to communicate with them by banging on the table or making it levitate.
Early results, as you can probably imagine, were pretty much inconclusive. Some members of the group began to report that they felt as though there was a presence in the room, but that was about it. Then, amazingly, “Philip” began to communicate, answering yes-or-no questions by tapping on the table.
The group engaged “Philip” in several long question-and-answer sessions, some of which were held in front of observers. He didn’t seem to know anything about himself that the group hadn’t already made up, but he did provide some accurate information about real seventeenth-century people and events.
Now, it’s worth noting that none of the group really believed that Philip was an actual entity—it was assumed that he was a result of their own invention. And, though other groups tried similar experiments with similar results throughout the 1970s, the results can hardly be called conclusive, and it’s always possible that there was a hoaxer present. Still, the results do serve to suggest, if not prove, that there’s something to the notion that concentrated mental energy can create some sort of physical impact. It also sort of suggests that these impacts can manifest in a way that makes them seem to have a sort of intelligence about them.
So there you have it: ghosts are impressions made on your brain by “living thoughts projected into space.” Some of those imprints may be “stronger” and easier to notice than others, and sometimes you simply may not be in the right frame of mind for your brain to pick up on it at all, but the energy is always there, waiting to be reacted to. We can even apply this idea to hauntings that we think we’ve debunked—the rattling sound may just be the tree brushing against the window, but it was that residual energy that made you think that sound was a ghost, rather than just going straight for thinking of the tree. When, in A Christmas Carol, Scrooge tells the ghost of Marley that he’s not real, just the result of an undigested bit of beef, perhaps Marley could have said, “Well, you’re on the right track, there—it was that bit of beef that put you in the right sort of state of mind to see me!”
That’s one theory anyway. And while it’s pretty sensible compared to some of the stranger theories that go around, it won’t explain away every ghost. For instance, if ghosts are all in our heads, why can audio recorders and cameras sometimes seem to pick them up, seeing as how the equipment doesn’t have a mind of its own (as much as it sometimes seems to)?
And, anyway, it’s sort of a cop-out explanation to say that it really is ghosts making you think the tree brushing against the window is the sound of a gallows being erected. It’s like looking at a ghostly figure in a picture, determining that the figure is just an optical illusion created by dust and shadows, but deciding that ghosts use dust and shadows to manifest. Then again, is that so unreasonable? Maybe that is how it works.
Once again, no theory can explain all ghosts away. And just because mental energy might be able to create a “ghost,” it doesn’t necessarily mean that some sort of spirit doesn’t fly out of a person’s nose at the moment of death and embark upon an eternity of rattling chains.
After refreshing myself on the theories that appealed to skeptical minds, I decided it was only fair to find out some of the more paranormal theories.
Luckily, I had a friend who was a psychic detective.
8. “How to See Ghosts,” Chicago Tribune, June 2, 1907.
9 . Judging from newspaper reports of the day, swords and pistols were actually much more common ghost-hunting tools than you’d think. One Chicago Tribune article from the late nineteenth century (“The Ghost of Lincoln Street,” February 17, 1888) even spoke of a ghost that was appearing nightly, drawing large crowds to come and shoot at it.
10. “How to See Ghosts,” Chicago Tribune, June 2, 1907.
11. It seems a bit odd that this would be taken seriously as a scientific explanation, but it often has been. Others have, of course, been skeptical about this. The classic catch phrase for skeptics here is “If there’s anyone here who can move objects with their mind, will you please raise my hand?” I’ve asked it on the tour myself; the first time some kid manages to raise my hand, I’m taking that kid straight to Vegas.