Science Vs - Ghosts: The Science of Spooky Encounters

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

About 40 percent of Americans believe in ghosts, and one in five even say they've had an encounter with one! So could ghosts really exist?? Or does some other spooky phenomenon explain these strange and sometimes terrifying experiences? To find out, we visit a haunted house with paranormal investigators, explore one very creepy basement searching for ghostly mold, and try to move cutlery with the help of quantum physics. Join us on this Halloween adventure with astrophysicist Dr. Katie Mack, environmental engineer Dr. Shane Rogers as well as psychologists Dr Baland Jalal, and Prof. Chris French. Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsGhosts2024  This is an updated version of our ghosts episode from several years ago. In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Visiting a Haunted House  (06:09) Hunting for Ghosts in Theoretical Physics  (12:27) Eerie Electromagnetic Fields?  (16:49) Spooky Sleep Paralysis  (23:13) Spooky Spores (31:50) Spine Tingling Psychology This episode was produced by Ben Kuebrich, Kaitlyn Sawrey, Diane Wu, Heather Rogers, Shruti Ravindran and Wendy Zukerman. Editing by Annie-Rose Strasser and Blythe Terrell. Production assistance: Audrey Quinn. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Sound engineering, music production and original scoring by Bobby Lord. Thanks to Dr. Ciaran O’Keeffe, Dr. Neil Dagnall, Dr. Giulio Rognini, Raymond Swyers, Dr. Joseph Baker, Prof. Kwai Man Luk, Prof. Kin Seng Chiang, Prof. Tapan Sarkar, Prof. Maxim Gitlits, The Zukerman family, Joseph Lavelle Wilson as well as Jorge Just, Devon Taylor … and thanks to Haley Shaw for the spooooky violins in the Science Vs theme. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Oh, why am I getting this weird interference? Is it my phone? Could it be the occults? Is the interference gone now that you've moved your phone? Yeah, I've moved my phone. Okay, so not the occult this time. Not this time. Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus. Today on the show... Ghosts.

MUSIC PLAYS With the spooky season in full swing, we thought we'd revisit one of our favourite episodes. And you might be thinking, ghosts? What's Science Versus doing tackling ghosts? Well, you know what? Surveys find that a ton of people, roughly 40% of Americans, believe in ghosts. Around one in five even say that they have had an encounter with a ghost.

And that number has actually gone up since the 90s. On top of all that, many of us have had moments where things get a little spooky and we start to believe. To tell you the truth, I was like being sarcastic, but I was a little bit freaked out when you said you had interference on your microphone. Producer Caitlin Sorry and I are about to enter a haunted house. It's this totally unassuming two-story clapboard on a busy street in Queens, New York. Oh, here we go. This one's... There's a blue door. It's very beautiful.

It's pretty dark inside. Hello! Hello! Come in, girls. Thank you. This is Lynn. She's tall, has big glasses and a howling wolf shirt. And she mentioned that this house is surrounded by nine cemeteries. I always say, I always make the joke, if the zombie apocalypse happens, I'm at ground zero,

so I'm gone in the first wave. Lynn grew up in this house. She moved here with her parents when she was just five years old. And she told us that from the first moments that she walked in, she knew something wasn't right about this place. I don't remember it, but my grandmother always used to say,

you came in and the first thing you said to me was, Grandma, I don't want to move to the haunted house. Her parents didn't believe her. They bought the place anyway. But my grandmother knew right away that there was something in the house. And soon after the family moved in, Lynne had her first paranormal experience. She woke up to a scary presence in her bedroom. This used to be my bedroom.

She showed us where it happened. I would wake up in the middle of the night and there would be a black figure standing here. And I used to call him the priest when I was little. He had a long black gown. I always found him very unsettling. In fact, I used to go to sleep and I used to line up all my stuffed animals in between me and the corner. To protect you from the priest? My raccoon, my teddy bear, you know, all my little animals to protect me from him. But as I got older, he gradually, you know, all my little animals to protect me from him. But as I got older, he gradually, you know, went away. So that was the first thing. That was the first thing.

That was the first thing. But over the years, lots of other stuff has happened. Like, things seem to inexplicably move around her house. People who come over, they feel dizzy. Some have even fainted, she told us. Especially when they go down into her basement. Sometimes Lynn says that you can hear the calls of a man yelling, get out. Tonight she's invited friends over, her paranormal investigating friends.

We could call them Ghostbusters. There's Anthony Simonelli and Trey Haywood. Anthony! Man, I see all your posts. I'd be wondering you gonna hit New York anytime soon or what? Anthony is a committed investigator. The first time he saw a ghost was when he was a kid. He and his friends were taking a shortcut through a cemetery on the way home. I'm standing in my friend's in front of me and I see over his shoulders a woman over a grave praying with her hair blowing, she had this long red hair, a white gown and she's praying like you know with her hands crossed with her head down. So you know, 13 years

old, I said hey guys check this out and she was gone. And Anthony has made it his life's work to try to find out what he saw. But I want to prove it, because everybody tries to make you look silly doing this, and like you're crazy. And everybody that's into the paranormal now had experiences when they were kids or something,

and they're trying to find an answer for themselves. Lynn was nodding along. People have made her feel silly too. My mother had spent her whole life telling me, and my grandmother, she was crazy, and telling me that, stop imagining things. But what if Lynn and Anthony aren't imagining things? I mean, for centuries, people have sworn that they've seen ghosts, those who have crossed over, crossing back.

And so today on the show, we want to know what is going on here. We first looked into the science of ghosts several years ago, but today we're picking up our ecto goggles and slime blower once more. We've updated the science and we are back hunting for ghosts. We're gonna look for them in black holes, in the multiverse. We're even building a scientifically approved haunted room to find out once and for all, is it possible? Could ghosts exist?

And if not, what else could be going on here? Science vs. Ghosts is coming up just after the break. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Managing a business is no small feat, but there are things you can use to help make it easier. Like Shopify. They're a commerce platform focused on one thing and one thing only. Commerce. They challenge the status quo so that your business can do bigger and better, and you

can focus on building what's next. For enterprise brands that believe there's a better way, there's Shopify. Learn more at Shopify.com slash enterprise, all lowercase. TING! Y'all afraid of ghosts? How about ghost peppers? It's the moment you've been waiting for.

The ghost pepper sandwich is back at Popeyes, a buttermilk-battered chicken breast served on a brioche bun with barrel-cured pickles, and here's the best part. It's topped with a sauce made from ghost peppers and ancho chilies. If that doesn't send a chill of anticipation down your spine, nothing will.

Get your Ghost Pepper Sandwich today at Popeyes before it ghosts you for another year. -♪ Chicken from Popeyes. before it ghosts you for another year. ["Take it from Popeyes." ["Science Versus." Welcome back to Science Versus, the show that's pitting facts against phantoms. After meeting Lynne and seeing her haunted house, we at Science Versus went searching high and low for what could explain Lin's experiences.

Now, ghost believers sometimes love to lean on theoretical physics to explain how ghosts might exist. Some paranormal groups, for example, argue that ghosts may exist in another dimension that closely parallels ours. So we spoke to a theoretical physicist to find out if that was possible. Dr. Katie Mack is at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, Canada. I'm a theoretical astrophysicist. I do cosmology, which is the study of the whole universe from beginning to end, all

that kind of stuff. So everything in the universe, that would include ghosts, right? So, we wanted to know if there was any room for ghosts in theoretical physics. If you really wanted ghosts to exist, what would you pick as your, like where's your best bet? Right. So, yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, let's say that you want to believe in ghosts and you just really, really want to show that it's possible.

Like you can go to the edges of what we understand and what we have really solid theory about. You can posit another universe, composite a parallel universe, you composite like a parallel reality that's disconnected from our own. Yes, a parallel universe. You can put anything you want there, like absolutely anything. All the fairies live in the multiverse, fine. And the reason Katie is fine putting ghosts in another universe is because, you know, scientists have never reliably measured ghosts with all their fancy sciencey devices.

But that would be okay, because lots of theories about parallel universes say that whatever is in that other universe, it can't interact with ours. So ghosts in another universe can't mess with our atoms, our electricity, or anything that we can measure in labs around the world. And if they're not messing with this stuff, then they're not messing with our fundamental understanding of the world. But... That also means they can't talk to you, and they can't move stuff around in your house,

and, you know, you'll never know if they're real or not. So that doesn't really help us because Lin's ghosts, and the ghosts that many other people have encountered, do interact with our world. They're moving stuff around and scaring us. So can we squeeze ghosts into theoretical physics? Somehow? Can we squeeze ghosts into theoretical physics somehow? Katie thought for a bit, and she was like, you know, there is one theory

about parallel universes that could mean that ghosts living in that parallel universe might just be able to interact with ours. Okay, but here's what you need to know. be able to interact with ours. Okay, but here's what you need to know. Katie's idea of a ghost is very different to Lynn's and probably yours. Katie is, after all, a theoretical physicist. If you had a ghost that was pure mass,

like a black hole, if your ghost is a black hole. Yes. Let's say the ghost itself is a black hole? If your ghost is a black hole. Yes. Let's say the ghost itself is a black hole, which by the way is a place in space where gravity is incredibly strong. And your ghost is living on this other plane. And so a ghost is a black hole in another universe. And let's say that black hole in the other universe bumped right up against our universe.

Then in principle, your ghosts could have, could create some gravitational pull in our universe. So if, if your ghost, if your ghost was a black hole, it could not, it could not scare you? Yeah. I mean, like, I don't know. I guess, I guess like it would, it could create a little bit of gravity here. Somewhere in the universe.

Could it knock over glasses or move things around by changing the gravity? Sure. Yeah. If that happens, if you- Really? Really, Katie? But if you, like, yeah, I mean, if you have a black hole, stationary black hole that you put on this other dimension and you got it to stand still and it happened to be nearby to one of your glasses. However, it would also be pulling on your table and you probably would notice

other effects from the gravity. And if you do, you should definitely make some measurements and write a paper and send it to the Astrophysical Journal because that would be very interesting. Do not send it to me. That's an important caveat. Please do not send it to me. Absolutely do not send it to me or any other physicists. However, if somebody can make a measurement of the gravity of a black hole from another dimension affecting their self-aware, that would be a very interesting experiment. It would be very weird if it were just, you know, your own kitchen where this was happening. But I mean, yeah, I can't rule that out. Can't rule it out.

But even if there is something to this ghost black hole theory, it could only explain why some things are moving around Lin's house, right? But what about the Phantom Priest or Anthony seeing that ghost in a cemetery? We're going back to Lin's haunted house to try to get more answers. We all head down to Lin's creepy basement. It's hot, musty, and dark. And every now and then the heater turns on

with this big, creepy clank. Anthony has brought a whole bunch of equipment with him. It's all sorts of gadgets to capture and communicate with ghosts. He's got a digital audio recorder, cameras, and a meter that measures the activity of electromagnetic fields, which are huge in the ghost hunting community. So electromagnetic fields are these invisible energy fields that happen when there's an electric charge.

It's what makes your hair stand up when you get static electricity. And you can feel the electromagnetic field when you move metal around near a magnet. But most of the time, there are electromagnetic fields all around you and you just don't notice, like radio signals and the magnetic field of Earth.

Lots of stuff can affect these fields, like electrical power lines, transmitting TV antennas, and cell phones, as well as thunderstorms. But according to Anthony, ghosts can also interfere with these electromagnetic fields. Which takes us back to this device that he has to detect changes in these fields.

His device looks a bit like a handheld transistor radio with a very long antenna. What is that? What is that noise? That's just the noise it goes. It's a detector, it's an alarm that if something comes close to it, like a spirit... Or a hand. You're doing it with a hand.

Yes. You know, you have electrical charges that pump your heart and everything. So when a spirit manifests, it has electrical charge. So that's what causes this to go on, because electrical charge is part of the spirit that's manifesting. Anthony kept the magnetic field detector out the whole time that we were there, but it didn't pick up much. But our next question is,

could ghosts be interfering with electromagnetic fields? That's what we asked our theoretical physicist, Dr. Katie Mack. No, I mean, the thing is that if ghosts created magnetic fields, then you would measure that in laboratories. We have very high precision measurements of things like electric and magnetic fields. So Katie's like, if ghosts were messing with electromagnetic fields, then what happens to all those precise measurements that scientists have

recorded? Then all of our measurements would be off everywhere. So I guess the other big pool of evidence that ghost hunters have are images. Perhaps you've seen these photographs with flashes of light that look like orbs or maybe there's something blurry, a little spooky in the background. We scrolled through a bunch of these and I don't know, a lot of the time they just look like tiny bits of dust that might have drifted close to a camera's lens. And academics have pointed out that, you know, they can look kind of creepy, particularly

if a camera has infrared light. But you're not necessarily looking at a ghost. As we finished up our conversation with Katie, all we had was a theory about black holes in another universe. And then as we were saying goodbye, she said... So the bit about the black hole in another universe knocking the glass off the table, I feel like I need to check my numbers on that. Hmm.

While Katie's checking her numbers, this still all leaves us with a very, very big question. How could it be that one in five Americans reckon they've encountered a ghost? That's so many people and so many ghosts. So many people and so many ghosts. After the break, scientists start meeting these ghosts too. This was very real. I had a very real supernatural experience. And using their own Scooby Gang devices, we'll find out what's going on.

This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Managing a business is no small feat, but there are things you can use to help make it easier. Like Shopify. They're a commerce platform focused on one thing and one thing only. Commerce. They challenge the status quo so that your business can do bigger and better, and you can focus on building what's next. For enterprise brands that believe there's a better way, there's Shopify.

Learn more at Shopify.com slash enterprise, all lowercase. I am so dreading groceries this week. Why? You can skip it. Oh, what? Just like that? Just like that. How about dinner with my third cousin? Skip it Fluffy's favorite treats skippable midnight snacks skip

My neighbor's nightly saxophone practices Nope, you're on your own there Could have skipped it should have skipped it skip to the good part and get groceries meals and more delivered right to your door on skip. Welcome back. Today on the show, ghosts. Why do so many people have strange experiences with them? Scientists have gone searching for explanations, which takes us back to Lynn's first run in with a ghost. She was sleeping when she saw a figure.

A lot of times I would wake up in the middle of the night and there would be a black figure standing here. Dr. Belen Jalal is a neuroscientist at Harvard University, and he has been researching this very type of encounter. And he got started about a decade ago because it happened to him too. So basically I slightly woke up and I realized, okay, I'm paralyzed here. I can't move, I can't speak. And I had this feeling of some evil presence.

It was a ghost or some entity. And then I felt like suddenly this creature was pulling my legs and it was pulling my legs up and down and up and down and I knew I wasn't dreaming. And then it started to choke me and it started to press on my chest so I couldn't breathe. This was very real. I had a very real supernatural experience. Baland was totally confused. It was just one of those things, right?

You know you're not crazy because you're not crazy in all other respects. It's only in this particular thing. And so he's devoted a large chunk of his career to researching what on earth happened to him. Because he tells us that similar experiences have been documented for thousands of years in cultures all around the world. In ancient Rome, this apparition was called incubus or succubus. In Japan, it's known as kanashibari, which literally translates to bound in metal.

But Beland and other researchers now think that these ghostly encounters aren't quite ghosts, but actually something called sleep paralysis. This is where you wake up and you can't move your limbs. I've had it and it's actually really scary, even though I knew there was this thing called sleep paralysis when I woke up. I thought, oh my God, I'm paralyzed. But I wasn't, because it was just sleep paralysis. And we've actually talked about this on the show before.

It's pretty common. One review of 35 studies found that around 8% of the population might have had it. But people can experience it in very different ways. For me, I just couldn't move. But sometimes people have difficulty breathing, or like Beland, they feel this pressure on their chest, or even a full blown hallucination. Now, we think this happens because when you're in REM sleep,

which is a stage of sleep where you can dream vividly, your brain stem actually sends messages to your spinal cord to basically paralyze you. And this stops you from acting out your dreams at night. But during sleep paralysis, you wake up, but your brainstem is still sending those messages, so you can't move your body. Or as Balan puts it, you're awake, but you're still under the spell of REM paralysis.

So it's simply a glitch in the machine, right? A little technical glitch, and we are mentally awake, even though our bodies are physically paralyzed. In fact, one study actually analyzed brain waves of a 59-year-old man while he was experiencing sleep paralysis. And they found that it really did look like this intermediate state of mind between being awake and being in REM sleep. But just because you're paralyzed, why would you start seeing ghosts or like Beland thinking that your legs are moving up and down?

Well, Beland has this idea that he hasn't fully tested yet, but it has to do with our perception of our body. So I occupy this body, you occupy your body, okay? I don't occupy Brad Pitt's body, unfortunately, alright? So we all have a sense of a body image, right? Okay, this is created in the brain. But during sleep paralysis, when the brain tells the body to move, it doesn't. Your brain's like, move, okay, move, but there's no feedbacks from your body. And so your brain is pretty confused at this point. And so it tries to clear up this confusion by constructing a body image for you.

The Beland reckons ends up getting kind of projected out in front of you. So you wake up and you see something strange and it don't look good. Other researchers have suggested that the intense fear that can come when people get sleep paralysis is also playing a role here. We know that fear on its own can make it hard to breathe and can give you this tightness and pressure in your chest. We also know that during REM, parts of the brain linked to strong emotions are really activated.

And so it just means that your brain is going through a lot at this time and it's just desperately trying to make sense of it all. And in the end, it just goes, ah! And you create a very vivid, very real hallucination of creatures in your bedroom that can have all kinds of shapes. So it's like a little bit like when you misspell something in Google and it just says, I think this is what you meant. Exactly.

Well, that's a very good way to put it. But in this case, of course, your mind's autocorrect has gotten it totally wrong. You might see a shadowy figure that perhaps looks like a scary priest or something else. So while we're still working out the details of why people see these visions when they have sleep paralysis. Many academics in this space think that this is one reason why a lot of people encounter ghosts. But of course, while it's a very ghoul idea, it would only explain the ghosts that people encounter when they're just waking up.

What about when we see spooky stuff when we're wide awake? And maybe even hanging out in Lynn's basement? Well, to answer that, we need a new Ghostbuster. So meet Shane Rogers. He's a professor of environmental engineering from Clarkson University in upstate New York. And Shane has been interested in paranormal activities since he was a boy.

When Shane was 11 years old, he also lived in a creepy house like Lynn's, close to a cemetery. And he had this really spooky experience one night. I came downstairs to get a glass of water and it was dark in the living room and I saw a light kind of shining around the living room. And then the light itself, I realized, wasn't on the wall. And it was in the room. And so, of course, I ran back upstairs into my room and had to process that information. And so, by you had to go upstairs and process that information,

does that mean you were like scared out of your mind? I spent some time under my blanket there. LAUGHS like scared out of your mind. I spent some time under my blanket there. More than a decade ago, Shane got to thinking back to that experience. But he was thinking about it from a new perspective. He was a scientist now, and he was seeing things a little differently. And he thought about that house.

It was old and musty, and it made him think that maybe mold was growing there. And he thought about that house. It was old and musty. And it made him think that maybe mold was growing there. Yeah, mold. And maybe that's what made him see that paranormal light. So why would mold cause something strange in the neighbourhood? Well, when moulds reproduce, they can release spores in the air that you then breathe in.

And sometimes, if you're sensitive, these spores can make you cough or wheeze and potentially trigger an inflammatory reaction. And Shane suspected that maybe this inflammatory reaction just maybe might affect your brain as well, potentially making you more anxious and more likely to think that you see ghosts. And he thinks maybe this is more likely to happen if you're already in a creepy place. Perhaps as you process information in those types of places and you're having unease, anxiety, and those sorts of things, you process it in a different way. Oh, so you're already primed to be thinking,

this is gonna be a haunted house, and then the mold tips you over the edge. Yes, yes. The experiences that you have because of your exposure to the mould tips you over that edge, yeah. To make his case, Shane leans on studies that have found neurological symptoms like fatigue or difficulty concentrating in people living or working in damp and mouldy places. And studies in mice have found that when they're exposed to certain mould spores, you can actually see inflammation in their brain.

But this idea that mould in buildings can cause neurological problems is actually pretty controversial and there's no conclusive evidence that living in a mold-infested place can mess with your brain, let alone make you see a ghost. Which is why Shane started this study. There's no official name for it. Students like to call it moldbusters. The moldbusters head to haunted places, houses, museums, restaurants, abandoned buildings. And then they test for mold.

At each site, they'll take air samples. OK, so basically what you're hearing is just a vacuum pump. So we'll put on kind of just a filter. So we're trapping whatever might be in the air. And this mold busting gadget, his vacuum pump, it really does look like it's straight out of Ghostbusters. If I could strap it on my back, I would. By now, him and his team have headed to almost 30 places, half of them

haunted, half of them not. Have you had any spooky experiences personally while visiting these places? Oh my gosh. Some of the places that we went are definitely very spooky. In what way? I mean, you know, dark places, just that creepy vibe, you know. Some of the places, it's, holy smokes, like who...

I don't want to be down here. Right, right. It looks like something out of a horror film. Oh God, is anything, anything like, just a vibe? Is that any very specific, like a hand on your shoulder or a get out from deep within the basement? Yeah, do you know, we didn't get, yeah, we didn't get any, you know, yelling at us,

but strange sounds that you can't define, and where did that come from? I'm not really sure. Playing around, because you see on the Ghost Hunter shows people doing the knocking, and then, hey, knock back. You knock, and then something knocks back. You're like, wait a minute.

Oh, that did happen to you? Which is, oh yeah, just playing around. And it was like, okay, but obviously, you know. But obviously what, Shane? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. We're just there to test for mold, Wendy.

So that was one of the so-called haunted places that he's visited. But I know what you're thinking. Well you're probably thinking a lot of things right now. But one question might be, well what's he using for a control? Well he's chosen comparable creepy places, but ones where no one has seen a ghost. So for example, he told me about this basement at his university that he tested. Picture this.

He and his students go into this pitch black basement. There's this concrete hallway, almost like a bunker, which leads to this large room. I'm like, I don't even really know what this room is for. Oh gosh. And halfway down this room, to the right was a door. And as you like the only door in the room. Oh, God.

Like what? You know, it is dark, pitch dark, you know, we have flashlights. And we go down there, we open the door a little bit and go to walk in. And in the middle of the room is just a chair. Just like an old wooden chair just sitting there. Facing the door. As if like someone were just sitting in this room staring at the door. You know? Water on the floor.

And the students that were working with me were like, I don't want to go in there. You know? It just raised your hackles. You're just like, what in the world? This was a non-haunted place. Yeah. It was a good control. It was probably the scariest one.

So, after all of these spooky adventures, what has he found? Well, Shane's work is unpublished and preliminary, but his early analysis suggests that this mold theory might have something to it. We can see that locations that are haunted have higher concentrations of mold spores in the air, significantly higher concentrations of mold spores in the air than places that are not. Places where people have had haunting experiences tend to have worse infestations of mould. Yes, yes.

You're far more likely to find mould in a place that's haunted than you are in a place that's not. Which is all very curious. But there is still this very big question around whether these molds really are affecting people's brains and then increasing the chance that they see a ghostly hallucination. And I gotta say that some other academics that I reached out to about this thought, you know, maybe there's something here, but it's a little bit spurious. You know, like spurious, but spurious.

I mean, bottom line, we all just want to see the data published in a peer reviewed journal. Okay. So while things in our environment like mold might increase the chance that you'll encounter a ghost, for now, the evidence is about as weak as the electromagnetic fields around you right now. So until we get more data, we have to move to a science that's a little more concrete.

Psychology! So, who are we gonna call? Chris French, an emeritus professor at Goldsmiths University of London. And Chris studies, among other things, why people believe in ghosts. Well, ghosts are a tricky one because typically with ghosts... Sorry, we've got a dog in the room with us, he just flapped her ears. Let's listen again. Definite dog flap.

Stop it, Chacey. Right. So for a long time, Chris was a real believer. When I was a kid, I was terrified of ghosts. I had to sleep with a nightlight for many, many years. Did you see a ghost? No, I don't think I ever actually saw one, but I'd always lived in fear that I might.

All through university and even as he started his PhD, Chris thought that ghosts might exist. But now, as a professor, he thinks something else might be going on here, which is why he did this very cute and very creepy study. So we thought, wouldn't it be fun to create an artificial haunted room? Can we actually induce these kinds of experiences in people? So he builds this room. If you went inside, it was just white, it was circular, and there was nothing in it. He got about 80 people to wander around alone in the room.

And he told them that they might experience mildly unusual sensations. Go in there, stay in there for 50 minutes, you can wander around and tell us whether you have any strange experiences. Were you tempted to go on the speakers? Ooh. Ha ha ha. That would be totally unethical and we wouldn't dream of it. Yeah, it would have been funny, but no, we didn't do it. Ha ha ha.

And people did have experiences in the room. No full blown ghosts, but... Some people came out saying, whoa, that was really weird. Ha ha ha. Some people felt dizzy or odd. A few even experienced terror. And those are the kinds of experiences that people typically report when they go

to reputedly haunted locations. I mean, it's actually, although typically when you talk about ghosts, it summons up an image of some kind of full blown apparition. That is actually kind of remarkably rare. It's much more common for people to just report these kinds of milder anomalous experiences that I'm talking about. So the most parsimonious explanation is basically that if you say to some

suggestible people, go in here and you might have some weird experiences, some of them do, it's just the power of suggestion. And there's a bunch of other really fun studies that have found that the power of suggestion plays a really important role in all of this paranormal stuff. Like in one study, researchers created fake seances with an actor and brought in over a hundred people to these events. The actor suggested that a table had moved during the seance, when it hadn't. And after the fact, almost a third of the participants thought that the table had moved. A third. They did the trick again with a handbell, and that

time one in ten were like, oh yeah, that handbell moved. So the power of suggestion, it is huge here. And Chris says, you know, people don't like being told that this is what might have made them think that they saw an apparition. Typically, if you say to someone who reports that they've seen a ghost or well, maybe you were just seeing things, in other words, you were hallucinating, they'll get very defensive because they interpret that to mean you're saying I'm crazy. But it doesn't mean that at all. We can all, under the kind of appropriate circumstances, hallucinate.

I'm sure you've had this experience yourself, if you go into an old building and somebody says, oh, it's supposed to be haunted, it suddenly feels very different. You start noticing every little anomaly, every little creak, every little noise that you might otherwise have not paid much attention to. Could it be vehicles? No, no idea what he's talking about. And the people around you can also make a big difference here.

So for example, studies have found that when someone knew, says that they're seeing paranormal things, like literally there's been research where someone will say that they see that a key is bending when it's not. And then others around them were more likely to agree, yeah, the key is bending. On top of all of this, once you believe that something is true, you can start seeing signs of it all around you. This is sometimes called confirmation bias, and we can all fall prey to it.

So, bottom line, when you've got a group of people who believe in ghosts and go on hunts together expecting to find these ghosts, psychological forces can kick in, which ultimately means that the friends create a world where ghosts do exist. And that's really the science of ghosts. I walked Lynne and her friends through all of these theories. They weren't really buying it. For them, the ghosts exist.

So we haven't convinced you, or these scientific theories don't help you out? No. I'm not saying these aren't theories that might actually explain other situations and other things, but it's not my reality. We're not here to convert anybody. We believe what we believe. We have our reality to convert anybody. We believe what we believe. We have our reality

and our experiences, you know? I mean, for people who believe no proof is necessary, for people who don't believe no proof is ever enough. That's just the way I look at it. And while a lot of these ghost stories really can be explained by sleep paralysis or our own psychology. Shane, our mold buster. Well, he's had so many ghost stories by now, that he still sees a little mystery in all this. Science can tell us a lot of things, but to rule out something like this with science,

it's gonna be really hard to do now, isn't it? To rule out something like ghosts, you mean? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, you can't science these experiences away so easily. And I think that, you know, this is part of the human experience and it's interesting and I think that it enriches our lives. I think it would be a boring place if we were to not have cool, interesting things like this happen and to have a mystery that we just maybe can't solve yet.

Mysteries are what drives us. So it drives science. We don't know all the answers and so we do it. That's science versus ghosts. Oh wait, Katie Mack. Oh my gosh, she's still checking the numbers on that black hole ghost theory. Katie? Could the black hole ghost theory. Katie?

Could the black hole ghost knock over your glasses? No. No. No. So if, no. I'm just going to say no. That's science versus ghosts. Professor Chris Fredge has a new book out now called The Science of Weird Sh**,

Why Our Minds Conjure the Paranormal, and it's a really fun read. My TikTok is at Wendy Zuckerman. Come say hello. Our Instagram is at Science versus. That's science vs. This episode has 54 citations in it. If you want to read more about ghosts, just check out the show notes and click on the link-Keys. Edited

by Annie Rose Strasser with help from Blythe Sorrell. Production assistance, Audrey Quinn. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Sound engineering and spooky mix by Bobby Lord. Original scoring by Bobby Lord and Emma Munger. Thanks to all of the researchers that we reached out to for this episode, including Professor Barry Markovsky, Dr. Kieran O'Keefe, Dr. Neil Dagnell, Dr. Giulio Rugnini, Raymond Swires, Dr. Joseph Baker, Professor Kwai Man Luk, Professor King Seng Chinag, Professor Tappan Sarkar, Professor Maxim Gitliks, and also a big thanks to Jorge Juss, Devin Taylor, the Zuckerman family, and Joseph LaVelle Wilson.

And finally, thank you to Hayley Shaw for the spooky violins during the Science Versus theme. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.