StarTalk Radio - Spooky Science

Episode Date: March 28, 2013

Our Halloween special investigates the science of ghosts and other haunting phenomena. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And this week we're doing a live show about dead people. It's Halloween time. And there's no other subject we could tackle for this week's episode than ghost hunting. I have with me Eugene Merman. Eugene.

Hello. Welcome back. Yes, it's good to be back. I love being here. Eugene tweets at Eugene Merman. It's true. That's what you do and that's where I find you and I don't otherwise see you. Yes.

So Eugene, are you a big ghost guy or what? Yeah, I'm a huge ghost guy. First of all, thanks for asking such an easily answered question. It's just a conversation starter. Don't overthink it. No, I don't. I'm not a, no. I guess the answer is, I don't know that I think there're ghosts, but I do think that there's lots of wizards.

So, you know, I'm not all bad. That makes up for it. So this, of course, has been around forever. People have, you know, it's a pre-scientific notion. Before science, there were ghost thoughts. The notion, yes, ghost thoughts. And it surely continues well into the era of science, scientific investigations, the methods and tools of science. But it was long suspected that dead people still hung around to haunt the living.

In particular, it was not just people who died ordinary deaths. That's not the typical ghost you'd find. It was people that might have died horrible deaths or died too early or died under extraordinary circumstances, almost as though their spirits were never at rest. Basically, little kids and then horse carriage mishap. I guess so. Right, because horses long outnumbered the years of utility that cars had done. Exactly. That's why I choose horses for my job.

Brilliantly done. Thank you. that cars exactly that's why i choose horses for my job brilliantly done thank you and so uh another interesting phenomenon was that in the late 1800s early 20th century there was a resurgence of people's efforts to communicate with the dead and seances were really big business and you'd go into would it be a well-lit room no no it would be a darkened room. A darkened room. Ghosts, everyone knows ghosts hate light bulbs. It was a darkened room and you'd pay someone, usually a woman,

who would communicate with the spirits who you lost. And so this whole show is about the analysis of what those folks did, what people are doing or say they're doing when they're trying to hunt down ghosts. And we have several guests we'll be bringing on for this.

One of them was a little while back. Former President Harry Truman. The spirit of. So one guest was Mary Roach. She's quite a prolific author on many subjects, but one of her books was called Spook, Science Tackles the Afterlife. And she was kind of agnostic on the issue. All she wanted to do was compile in her book a whole study of the stuff people did to investigate ghosts. Right.

So it's a compilation, really, but very well written. And let's see what she says about this. Mary Roach. You've got ghost hunting shows. You sure do. What are they about? Well, anytime there's a new technology, somebody gets the idea that this is what we need to communicate with the beyond. And frequently it's something like infrasound or

ultrasound or infrared. The only problem we've had in the past is just that we can't communicate with them, but now we're in a different range. New tool, new method. New tool, new method. This is the way to get through them. Even Edison, Thomas Edison, the time he died. Do you know any other Edison?

Kahn. Kahn Edison. The electric company of New York. So Thomas Edison, he was working on this machine that was, in essence, an amplifier. Because he believed that when you die, you turn into these little life units, these little bits. And he thought it was kind of like the Who's down in Whoville, Dr. Seuss. Their voices are very, very tiny, and if you could amplify them, you could hear them. So he was trying to create this sort of amplifying device for reaching the spirit world.

So modern-day Ghostbusters, they'll use infrared cameras or sonar detectors, bat detectors, thinking that maybe they communicate in a different wavelength than what we do. Now, the few ghost people I've spoken with, they're pretty convinced that they've got good enough data to say that ghosts are among us. But you've surveyed a century of this, centuries of this. Are they any more convincing to you than previous investigators? Well, I contacted one of the people who makes these electromagnetic, you know, EMF meters,

which is a common tool that the Ghostbusters use. What kind of meter again? EMF. Oh, EMF, electromagnetic fields. And I contacted one of these people, and I said, where along the line did you get the sense that what an EMF measures is spirit energy? Where did that come from? And he said, well, people seem to say that.

Good enough for me. And P.S., we're selling a heck of a lot of them. So now they started marketing, because it used to be something linemen would use. I mean, it's a tool. Linemen, you mean people for high tension lines. Sure, yeah. There's industrial applications for these things. Because if you're a football fan,

a lineman is someone else. That's true, and they don't use those meters. Well, they might. I don't know what they do with those meters. Anyway, these meters, EMF meters. And by the way, I let you know Maniac Field is all around us. There's radio waves, microwaves. Or like one time I was doing an article. I was on this supposedly haunted whaling ship at Mystic Seaport.

And they're there with their EMF meters. And there's a giant. Mystic, Connecticut. Yes. Where's the big whaling village from the past? Exactly. There's a whaling ship. And they've got their equipment all set up and their EMF meters.

And they're getting like, you know, look at this. Well, there's a great big anchor. There's a greataling ship, and they've got their equipment all set up and their EMF meters, and they're getting like, you know, oh, look at this. Well, there's a great big anchor. There's a great big hunk of iron. Okay, that'll do it. That'll totally distort an electromagnetic field. Yeah, exactly. So I just wish if you're going to use a piece of equipment like that, you would actually know what an EMF is, how the meter works,

what other things might set it off. Thank you. So, Eugene, it's all about the tools. Yeah. You know, you go into the physics lab, pull out what you think will detect things you can't see, and why not invoke it? Well, you can get lots of boxes that you can put in places that'll make sounds based on random stuff that you don't understand.

Well, this is part of the problem, because if you haven't fully characterized your environment, you'll start detecting things that have been there all along, but you'll start thinking with your new apparatus that it's something spooky. That it's ghosts. That it's ghosts, yes. And not weird radio waves. Exactly. Or normal radio waves.

So the list is long. The list, there's something called an EVP detector, an electronic voice phenomenon detector, which detects sort of acoustic frequencies outside of what the human ear can detect. So typically dogs can hear outside of our frequencies, but this at its best would do much better than that. But what you don't know, what people don't often know, is that practically any transmitting device in a room has some kind of vibration that's got some kind of sound that you're not even paying attention to. You can't even hear.

It's going to start picking up. We live in a technological environment. And so what would be great if you had one of these detectors and you lived in a mud hut. And then you could see. And then you start to tell. Or if you had a dog that could detect ghosts. That would be even better. We have dogs that detect bed bugs.

You'd think you'd have one by now who could detect ghosts. There's an interesting study with regard to infrasound. This would be sound with frequencies lower than what is audible to the human eye. But I just want to say that just because I can't hear it doesn't mean it's a ghost. That's the

strangest assumption I've ever heard. Like, I can't hear it. It's probably a ghost. That's what it must be. What else could a person not hear? If your tools detect it and you don't, then you have an argument. So there was a fellow named Vic Tandy who was a lecturer at Coventry University. He was curious whether infrasound, again, this is sound at a lower frequency than you can hear, the human ear bottoms out at about 20 hertz, something like that.

So what he found is that at the frequency of 18 hertz, hertz is vibrations per second of a sound wave, that about that frequency, it resonates with the structure of the human eyeball. And if you have a sound that resonates with something material, it'll make the material vibrate at that frequency. And so that's what you mean by it resonates. And when that happens to you, your eye begins to see things that are, in fact, not there. And there was a room, there was a lab where he worked that was declared to be haunted by many people because you'd see things at the corner of your eye, a little fuzzy thing moving.

And he would see it himself. see things at the corner of your eye, a little fuzzy thing moving. And he would see it himself. And he finally actually did a research paper to show that there was a subsonic vibration in the room that triggered this reaction in the human eyeball upon walking in. And so it's interesting when you think something's supernatural, you just sort of think about it a little further. If I could emit an 18 hertz frequency, then would I freak people out everywhere I went? You would be a new kind of superhero, putting visions into people's eyeballs.

Yes. This is my plan now. Thank you, Neil. There are also things like ions in the air. Ions are charged atoms, charged particles, anything that's not a whole atom. If you say so. You can trust me on this one. I do.

Save your doubts for another time. Yeah, yeah. This one, I'm good for. I'm good for this one. So an ion, you take an atom, you strip off its electrons, or you add too many electrons, you make an ion. So an ion is a charged particle floating freely. Matter doesn't like staying charged.

It wants to sort of find its mate, close the loop, and you're done for it, rendering most matter in the universe neutral. So if you have ions, an ion field, it means something was going on there because the air does not want to stay ionized. And by the way, a lightning bolt is the atmosphere rendered visible because the lightning ionized the air on its way from the ground up to the cloud, which is the way lightning travels. Of course. Duh. Duh. Lightning. Yeah.

And also, there are things like we see what we call visible light. You know, Roy G. Biv? Can you recite Roy G. Biv for me? Like red, yellow. Orange. Orange know, Roy G. Biv. Can you recite Roy G. Biv for me? Like red, yellow, orange. Orange. Orange, yellow. Biv, blue, violet, DeVoe. I should have warned you.

You'd be quizzed for this program. And so what you have is outside of that frequency of light, there's other bands of the spectrum, you know, infrared, ultraviolet. We can't see those. So you can imagine exploring the world. Chartreuse. I've never seen Chartreuse, ever. And so what we have is there's a colleague of mine, a good friend and colleague, Phil

Plate. His handle, his Twitter handle is Bad Astronomer. He had a blog called Bad Astronomy, where you'd write in and tell him things that you thought were true about the universe, and he would sort of give you the straight shot. And he's thought about ghosts as well. Let's find out what he tells us about this whole business. A lot of ghost hunters on TV and in life use a lot of equipment that they claim will detect a ghost.

They'll use thermal cameras, for example, cameras that can sense infrared light. And they walk around in places and they see all kinds of little hot spots and cold spots. But in fact, there's wiring behind the walls that can warm up a wall. There are places where air is trapped and it's warmer, where even if you lean against a wall and then walk away, you've warmed the wall up a little bit and you can see that. I have seen my own footprints on the floor glowing as I've walked past a thermal camera. They also use what they call EMFs or electromagnetic force detectors. And these basically are just testing for electricity. And so if there's electricity

flowing through a wall, they're going to see it. And if you walk past one of these things with metal in your pocket, that can be detected. So really, these things aren't really telling you what's there, except that there's just everything there. They're so sensitive that everything trips them. So every time you see these shows and they say, oh, it must be a ghost, it's like, no, it must be a million things. I think it would have ghosts on the end of that list. Carl Sagan would have said it would have been a billion things. I'm not quite sure. So we're coming up on our first break.

But after the break, we're going to bring in one of the foremost ghost investigators in the world. Oh, wow. His name is Joe Nickel. And he's going to tell us how he misuses science equipment to claim there are ghosts. I hope he can't hear me. He started life as a private investigator. So he thinks about data in a Sherlock Holmes sort of way. You say this, but I really see that.

And here's the evidence against what you're saying. And so that's how he started. And in that world, he then realized that there was a lot of work to be done in the sort of the skeptical world of exploring claims that people make. And people make honest, innocent statements about what's going on. Just seeing a frequency that makes their eyes think that there's a ghost. I get it. For example. It's not their fault that they're pretty sure they're talking to a dead friend.

For example. So we're going to talk to him about what tools he uses, what kinds of things he's investigated. He's actually in New Orleans right now and earlier today performed a seance in an attempt to reach the ghost of Houdini, which is an annual thing that gets done around Halloween time.

We've got to take a quick break, but more StarTalk when we return. You're listening to StarTalk Radio's Halloween show. I have with me Eugene Merman, and we're trying to summon the spirit of Joe Nickel. On our line. Is he here? No, it's the spirit in New Orleans. Joe Nickel, are you on the line?

Hi, Neil. Joe. Hey, man. How are you doing? We've had a poltergeist experience here. I'm glad we did not have to murder you. I feel myself being re-energized and coming back to the earth plane. Yeah. have to murder you. I feel myself being re-energized and coming back to the earth plane. So Eugene was glad

we didn't have to kill you because we weren't getting to your physical body, but we would surely get to your spiritual one. Thank you for that. You're welcome. So let me ask Joe, we're talking about searching for ghosts and we've got clips from an interview I conducted with Mary Roach.

We've got everybody's favorite bad astronomer, Phil Plait, coming in and out. But I've got you live on the line here. And I've already introduced you, so people already know who I'm talking to. You're a ghost hunter extraordinaire. No, you're a ghost investigator extraordinaire. Do you use technology to, when you walk into someone's home and they complain that their house is haunted, what do you do when you knock on the door? What I do is so different from what the ghost hunters do.

The ghost hunters say, sort of, move aside, ma'am. Just let us bring our high-tech equipment in here, and we'll see what we can find. And they bring in EVP meters, and they look for EVP. They bring in EMF meters. They bring in thermal imaging cameras. And on the silly notion that somehow there's a ghost energy, well, science hasn't found this. And, in fact, they're not detecting ghosts. They're detecting, you know, whatever. I mean, there might be a microwave broadcast tower causing the EMF meter to go off or faulty wiring.

So this is the pseudoscience approach. They're using scientific equipment, but they're fundamentally doing pseudoscience. What I do is to say, okay, ma'am, what exactly is happening in your home? And if she says, well, I woke up and I saw a ghost figure. I think it was my father. He was standing by my bedside. I would say, well, you know, you're probably having a waking dream. It exists in the twilight between being fully asleep and fully awake.

It's very common. It's harmless, but it isn't a ghost. Or if someone reports a noise. My first haunted house was 1972, a McKenzie house in Toronto. So you've got a whole book of these things. Yeah. People were hearing footsteps on the stairs late at night when there was no one in the house and the house was locked. But as it turns out, next door was a footstep machine.

Yes. You got it. They're 40 inches away. It was a parallel iron staircase and a late-night cleanup crew. So, yes, a footstep machine. And so people were hearing footsteps, but they weren't hearing a ghost. So what I'm trying to do, just to sum up, I'm trying to explain what's happening not so so i'm i'm absolutely having to listen to the person who's telling me why they think they have a ghost and i'm trying to explain

that not anything else just that you don't use like magic ghost goggles or anything you're like oh there's a staircase or you how you dreamed when you were waking up that's right you are a morphine addict so everything is crazy. No magic ghost addict. No magic ghost goggles. Right, but you don't go in there presuming there's no ghost. No. What I'm trying to do is sort of what Coleridge called the willing suspension of disbelief.

I'm saying, look, when we cross the threshold into the haunted house, let us be careful to suspend belief and disbelief. Let's just free ourselves up rather like a crime scene technician who's trying to find out what's going on at this time in this place. Making no assumptions up front. You're like a non-menacing Batman. That's right. You see, it's just as bad to have, like the ghost hunters, to have an agenda. They start with a belief in ghosts, and then they're just using confirmation bias, just trying to confirm that so any anomaly is considered evidence for a ghost.

And the opposite of that, the dismissive debunking approach is equally bad because both of those are starting with the answer and working backwards to the evidence. And science doesn't do that. Joe, let's get back to that. I want to slip in another clip of my interview with Mary Roach. She wrote a book, Spook, that science tackles the afterlife. And let's see what she says about ghosts in the machines. Anytime a machine does something peculiar, there's a subset of the population that chooses to interpret it as a spirit.

For example, there are people who thought that when their VCR or their telephone, their voice recorder, their answering machine does something strange. There was a fairly well-known case in the sort of psychic community of a spell checker that was communicating supposedly by the suggestions because it would make strange suggestions did you mean penelope whoa that's

nothing like penelope but it turned out wait a minute i know a penelope oh my gosh yeah what it turned out is that the guy who owned the computer had added some things you know you can add things to your dictionary you can customize it so he had been customizing anyway, but it was an interesting case because they seemed out of the blue, like Seller, Penelope. There were all these things that added up to a famous murder in a castle somewhere. So he thought that this spirit

was communicating via a spell checker. Can you think of a more laborious and insane way to be communicating? Yeah, why not just whisper it in your ear? Say, yeah, thanks. Or write down a note. A chalkboard. I don't know.

A spell checker. So, yeah, this goes on and on, Joe. Now, Joe, you conducted a seance earlier today. Is that correct? We did. Did you conduct it or did you attend it? I conducted the seance. All right, Mr. Science.

You have the power and the knowledge. Well, look, people have been trying to contact the spirit of Houdini since he died in 1926 on Halloween. Houdini. Houdini. That's who we were looking for. And it turns out that no one has contacted Houdini's spirit. Has anyone tried texting? Well, they've tried having spirit mediums.

Has anyone tried texting? Well, they've tried having spirit mediums. So this time we're trying using skeptics who think like Houdini. You know, he spent the last years of his life exposing bogus spirit mediums who were pretending to contact the dead. They were doing no such thing. He would be furious to get contacted by a medium then. That is so cruel. So the mediums naturally fail. So we've suggested, hey, Harry, maybe we're your friends.

Come along. One of his own peeps. One of his own peeps. Yeah, yeah. Of course, he never shows up for us either, maybe proving the point that when your brain is dead, you're really actually, actually dead. Now, in mediums, yous, in the movie Ghost itself, it portrayed Whoopi Goldberg as one of the

spirit mediums, but modern day, not from a century ago. And do you have any comment about Ghost portrayed in film? Well, of course, when you have the visual medium, you can actually make the ghosts appear. How realistic do you think Star Wars is? They look rather like us, only a little transparent. Or they can be whatever you want.

It's cool that they're kind of semi-transparent. I've always liked that. Well, look, this is interesting because when photography was discovered, the original daguerreotypes, there were no ghosts. There were no ghosts in the next ambrotypes or tintypes. Only when glass plate negatives were invented, making double exposures possible, you started getting ghosts looking like transparent humans. Oh.

Yeah. And then that went okay through the 19th century. Occasionally, you get some other kind of glitch. But really, until fairly recently, ghosts sort of looked like, well, us, only transparent. And now, the ghost hunters are finding ghost orbs, balls of energy. And all those are are particles of dust in the air right in front of the lens bouncing the flash back. Off the flash, exactly. bouncing the flash off the flash exactly so but it's interesting because we've had this whole iconographic sort of shift from ghosts that look like us to ghosts that may look like

it's a lot of energy it's a lot easier to find a ball of energy than obi-wan kenobi that's right and and sometimes you'll see a strand in a photograph that is supposed to be a strand of ectoplasmic energy and that's justlasmic energy. And that's the camera strap. The camera strap. Okay. Ectoplasmic camera strap. You know, I've got a clip from Phil Plank talking about movies. He's a big movie buff. And a good friend of mine. He's a good friend of yours. Let's see what he has to say about ghosts in movies. In a lot of movies, you get kind of three types of ghosts. You get the ghosts who are loved ones, like in the movie Ghost.

You get the mischievous ones who are trying to cause some trouble, like in Ghostbusters. And then some that just kind of hang around and don't do anything. And there have been a couple of movies like that as well. I think in real life, what most gets reported as a ghostly phenomenon are simply pictures or movies that people see or things that happen in their house. Now, you can imagine you're in an old house at night. You're hearing noises. Things are moving. That is when you're vulnerable to being frightened.

And so I think that when you get reports like that, they're more likely to be from people who are scared. I remember in my old house, we had a fan that was way up on the ceiling. We had to turn it on using a remote control. And the frequency would drift a little bit. And so sometimes that thing would just turn on by itself when the neighbors turned on their TV or something. And our TV used to turn off and on by itself, too, because of that remote control problem. And if you're alone in some house at night and that happens, that's freaky.

And so I think in general, those are the kind of ghosts that you hear the reports about. And those are the kind of movies, I think, that do really well. So, Joe, when you – this is Joe Nickel on the line. Joe, when you greet up with people who ask you to investigate their homes, are they afraid or are they curious? Well, they're often both. Often both. If they go so far as to ask me to come, they're probably not looking to have it. On mushrooms?

They're probably prepared to have me try to explain it rather than just agree with them. Otherwise, if they go to ghost hunters, of course, the ghost hunters are going to pretty much find that, yes, we have some anomalies here. And look, the ghost hunters are using what's called an argument from ignorance. Most of the paranormal works this way. We'll get back to the argument from ignorance, but only after we take a quick break. We'll see you in a few. Welcome back to our Halloween edition of StarTalk Radio. So I've got on the line Joe Nickel, who's a professional ghost-sighting investigator. And we have him live from New Orleans, where he's attending a skeptics conference. And, Joe, let me ask you something.

And if I may say, risking my life here, buddy. I mean, the vampires, the voodoo goblins. They all come out in New Orleans. I believe you mean goths. I think you're mistaking your fans. Oh, maybe these are just people dressed up. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

But it is New Orleans. You know, it is. I don't know if many people know that the cemetery in the ghoul scene of Michael Jackson's thriller video is a cemetery on the outskirts of New Orleans. No. That's correct. A small cemetery there. I drove by it at night. Scared the hell out of me.

That's correct. The small cemetery there. I drove by it at night. Scared the hell out of me. So, Joe, when people tell you they've seen ghosts, what kind of evidence do they offer you to get your interest? By and large, they're using an argument from ignorance. What they're doing is they're saying, gee, you know, this happened. We had some electronic glitch or I heard a noise or something happened. My keys were mislaid.

I mean, not mislaid they i mean i'm not misled that my keys were moved and so what they do is is it's an argument from ignorance they're saying we don't know what caused this therefore it's a ghost there's no way i put my keys in this weird place probably a ghost that's right that's an art it's called an argument from ignorance meaning meaning not that the person is is ignoramus, but what it means is that you're saying, I don't know. They're like low-level conspiracy theorists. Yeah, you're trying to draw a conclusion from I don't know.

So it's a logical fallacy. I don't know. Therefore, I do know. And so what we're trying to do is explain things, saying, well, maybe it could be this. Maybe you mislaid your keys. Maybe that went on, as Phil Plait was saying, there could be an electronic glitch causing something to come on. Yeah, or a ghost in a remote control. Right.

Turning on your TV at random. Exactly. But look, we have to prioritize the possibilities. We have to say, look, we know this happens sometimes, so that's a pretty good hypothesis. And we've never, ever found, science has never found one, not one ghost. Well, wait, Joe, that's because you haven't found the ectoplasm. And in fact, I spoke with Mary Rocha about ectoplasm. Apparently, it's a real concept in the ghost hunting community.

Let's find out what she has to say about it. In your book, you actually have the word ectoplasm. That's Ghostbusters all the way. I don't even know what ectoplasm is. I'm using the word in the sentence. I don't even know what it is. It's fun to say, though. Yeah, the Ghostbusters ectoplasm is just sort of slime.

It's green goo. It's that green goo. They're kind of sticky and probably tough to get out of your clothes. But ectoplasm, back in the, spiritualism, you're familiar with spiritualism,

this was a belief, it was a religious movement. That you communicate with the dead. Yes, but not only that, this ectoplasm was tangible representation of spirit energy. So the medium would produce

this stuff and say, here, look, it's tangible proof, you can hold it in your hand, you can see it. So ectoplasm had a real meaning and definition. Yes, yeah, yeah, it's tangible proof. You can hold it in your hand. You can see it. So ectoplasm had a real meaning and definition. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Whether or not it itself was real.

Exactly. Wow. Exactly. So this period would have been late 1800s, I guess, right? Yeah, through the early 1800s. Early 1900s, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure.

And that's when you had seances. Seances were big. Yeah, it's kind of the hottest ticket in town, some of those. It was very entertaining. You'd have this woman, you know, who would do it. Was there never a guy? Why can't a guy be in touch with the dead? Yes, there was a guy, Rudy Schneider, is that his last name?

Anyway, very, very, very charismatic and colorful. I won't go into the details because they're a little gross. You'll have to read the book to get into the details. Spook by Mary Roach, okay. So anyway, this ectoplasm, they'd go into a medium cabinet, they'd pull the curtain, and it's dark in there, and the curtain would open, and there'd be this stuff that had come out of this medium's mouth. And people were like, oh, wow, look at that. It turned out it took magicians to debunk this, because they had, you know, PhDs. Houdini among them.

Houdini and Harry Price, because their point of view was, no, you don't need a PhD. What you need is a background in magic, and I can tell you what they're doing. A background in how to fool somebody. A background in how to fool somebody. Yes, in how to fool somebody. And, in fact, a scientist has no experience purposefully trying to fool somebody. Right, right. So they got, you know, Charles Brachet, Nobel Laureate. They got Arthur Conan Doyle, who fell for everything, apparently.

But people really bought into this. The Scientific American did articles on ectoplasm. The Sorbonne, there were studies done there on ectoplasm. So the urge to believe was so strong. the skepticism, the cheesecloth. It was cheesecloth wound up very, very tight that the person would swallow and regurgitate. They were regurgitators. It's a sideshow. So the slime was their saliva all over it.

Yeah, their stomach juices, yeah. Nasty. Sometimes they would use sheep, oh, guts. Sheep guts. So the urge to believe overcame any urge to be skeptical, except among magicians who saw this as quite an act. Yes. And what was interesting about both Houdini and Harry Price is that they had lost a parent or a loved one, and they were looking for the real deal. But along the way, they were like, you're not it, you're not it, you're not it.

And in the end, didn't find anybody who passed their criteria. So they maintained their skepticism all the way? Yeah, but they had this hope that they'd find the real deal. Okay, so that makes it that much stronger a result if you're looking for it and you want it to be true, but none of it convinces you. Well, that was Mary Roach reflecting on some elements of her book, Spook. I've got on the line Joe Nickel. Joe, has anyone offered you ectoplasm as evidence for ghosts? Well, as I mentioned earlier, some of these photographs

that you get have what looks like a spiraling vortex or sometimes a strand-like effect, and people often say that's ectoplasm, but what it invariably tends to be is the camera strap is bouncing the flashback. You can get almost anything in front of the camera lens when the flash is on, a wandering fingertip, strand of hair, a passing insect, particles of dust, almost anything. And you could create really, really spooky effects. It could be a ghost insect. It could be a ghost insect. Right, right. A dead fly ghost insect.

No, I think it's a ghost camera strap yes and i'll give those hypotheses all the all the attention they they deserve that is i will promptly ignore them and and move right on so so anything anything that that can intrude even uh if you're in a cold place and your breath goes out and creates a kind of fog it can create a really misty looking ghost effect. All these things, some of these are called ectoplasm and they're all supposed to be some form

of ghost energy. None of them actually of course are. So now that everyone has access to a digital camera with immediate results of what they photographed, you probably have more of these incidences, especially when people don't fully understand the photographic photography as a medium. Right, because what they're doing is particularly, see, if this happened in a suburban home, maybe they wouldn't think, they'd just think it's a photo glitch.

But if now they're in a haunted house looking for a ghost, and anything happens, I mean, literally anything, they call it an anomaly and that's supposed to infer that it's a ghost but again it's just an argument from ignorance it's not evidence of anything must be a ghost that's right especially if the thing you're in is called a haunted house right i'm going to say that's that's going to predispose people to some false information that absolutely absolutely joe i want to put you on the spot. What would you count as really good evidence for a ghost? Just so I can do that and get you to certify.

Well, you know, it's hard to say what some non-existent thing might be like. I mean, we just, I think we would. Well, do you think it would be handsome? I think by now, if ghosts i think we would well do you think it would be handsome i think by now if ghosts existed we would know it i i think one would have come up to to a group of skeptics and and convince them in no uncertain terms and and this would have happened you don't get how those think that's right ghosts avoid skeptics at all costs what if they're simply socially anxious you never thought that when people die maybe they just don't like groups.

Yeah, or as Maury Povich said to me once, Maury's nothing if not a smart aleck. I was on your show and I said, well, whenever I go into a haunted house, ghosts appear to go out the back door. And he said, well, Joe, maybe they just don't like you. That's exactly right.

And, you know, I have to consider that that's possible. You know, continuing in my conversation with Phil Plait, the bad astronomer, we talked about how skepticism actually has revealed itself in the two famous ghost movies, Ghostbusters and Ghosts from decades past. Let's check it out. I love some of the stuff in Ghostbusters where they turn skepticism on its head. And in the beginning of the movie, when they're walking around through the library,

and there's a bunch of books piled up. And I think it was Egon who goes a little crazy about it and says, that's amazing. And then Bill Murray says, yes, no human would stack books this way, which is such a great skeptic line because, of course, you have to look for the mundane explanation. But the beauty of that is in the movie, it was the ghosts that did that. So it's all messed up. And in the movie Ghost, there is a skeptical series of steps that goes on. And I like the way they did it.

Whoopi Goldberg's character is, in fact, a fraud. She cannot speak to the dead. But then Sam shows up, Patrick Swayze's character shows up, and she can hear him. She can't see him, but she can hear him. And then she has to go and prove that she can do this. And, of course, Demi Moore's character doesn't believe her. And there has to be a series of pieces of evidence. And, in fact, when Demi Moore goes to the cops and says,

listen, this psychic told me things that she couldn't possibly have known, the cops say, look, she could have figured this out this way and this way and this way. All of which was basically correct. They did that pretty well. But then they show, of course, that it is, in fact, Patrick Swayze's ghost who's talking to Whoopi Goldberg. And so it turns skepticism on its head. I actually felt that that was pretty good, the way they set that all up. And they kind of poke fun at the skeptics. But of course, the only way they can do that is because it is a fictional movie. In the end, course, the only way they can do that is because it is a fictional movie. In the end, sadly to say,

skeptics typically are correct. So I think that most, in fact, the vast majority of cases of ghosts are clearly misidentification. And the ones that are unsolved, if there are any, are probably solvable. If we just had a little bit more evidence, it would show that they're not ghosts. That was the bad astronomer, Phil Plait. Joe, you have a book coming out now? It's out or is it coming out soon? It'll be out early next year I hope. You hope? Yes, I hope. Is it called It's Probably Not a Ghost but Maybe? The Science

of Ghosts. But look, I've actually caught some ghosts. We're going to have to go to break in like a few seconds, but hold that thought. Alright, we've got to take a break, but more StarTalk Radio. Welcome back. Before the break, Joe Nickel, who we have on the line, a ghost investigator extraordinaire. You left us hanging, Joe.

You said you found evidence for ghosts. Investigator extraordinaire. You left us hanging, Joe. You said you found evidence for ghosts. Well, as I've published in our magazine, Skeptical Inquirer, I've caught a few ghosts. One of them was at a haunted inn in Ohio, and people couldn't explain how they would go to this particular room, and paintings and pictures on the walls would be turned askew. And the cleaning crew would straighten things back up.

And sure enough, the next time they were askew again. And this was very puzzling. And I thought, well, maybe trucks going by rumbling could shake the walls enough. Not a great hypothesis. Turned out when I checked into the hotel late one night and just chatted up the desk clerk, she said, you know, that room upstairs, she said, well, the cleaning crew is just so superstitious, I just can't help but mess with their minds. And so I use my passkey and I go up at night and I turn things away.

And they just, they get so excited. And of course, right then and there, I had caught another ghost. There it is. Doesn't get more real than that, Neil. Caught a real ghost. So most ghosts are mischievous clerks. That's as real as it gets for me. Mischievous clerks. Let me get to my last clip with Phil Plait, the bad astronomer,

who reflects, interestingly, on the movie Ghost, which I think is everyone's favorite ghost movie. Well, it was mine, actually. Yeah, don't give me ghosts. Don't make me like ghosts. I'm sorry. I think it's fine. Sorry, it's my favorite ghost movie, if I had to pick one.

Let's check out, see what he has to say. Look, it's a beautiful story. It was funny. It was warm. It was a beautiful romance story. I got choked up at the end of it. Of course, you can't help it. It's just being human.

But it does buy into this idea that people tend to believe in things like that, and it reinforces this idea as well. If you're deeply in love, if you're married or you have a lifetime partner, and that person dies, who would not want to spend another hour with that person or even just a moment like they do at the end of that movie? And besides that sort of immediate emotional comfort, there's also sort of a long-term idea that, look, there is an afterlife. When you die, there are some of you that sticks around,

or maybe doesn't literally stick around on Earth, but still exists and has your memories, is you. And I can't think of anything more appealing than that. So in a movie like that, it does sort of play into those emotions. Every skeptic I know who does it all the time says, the things I have to be most skeptical about are the things I most want to believe are true. Because that's how easy it is to get fooled, to fool yourself. And that's when you have to be

most on guard what he's saying is the reason that i i don't totally believe in valhalla but really want to want to yes joe the urge to want to believe that's pretty strong isn't it it's absolutely powerful carl sagan used to say that he wished he could talk even if just once a year to his dead parents these are these are powerful emotions. I remember when my grandmother died as a boy and how much I didn't want that to be the case. So if we were voting, who among us wouldn't vote for ghosts? We'd all raise our hands. Yes, we want that.

But we don't vote in science. We have to look at the evidence. And no matter how powerful that urge is, even in me, I mean, even when I'm not that personally involved and I'm in a haunted castle in Austria or someplace. You get around. I do. I do. I've been in more haunted places than Casper. But I can feel the ambiance sometimes of places, and I say to myself, if this place isn't haunted, it ought to be.

So you feel in the haunted vibe. Is there one country that's more haunted than others in terms of their claims and assertions? Oh, we probably outdo about everybody else. I mean, we've got ghost hunting stuff on every channel, and it's just huge. It's just absolutely huge. on every channel, and it's just huge. It's just absolutely huge. And now today, almost every city, town, and hamlet in the country has a ghost hunting club.

Really? And bless them, they don't know what they're doing. They're not detecting ghosts. They're not on the cutting edge of finding something that science can't find. But their heart's in the right place. Their heart's in the right place. Their heart's in the right place. And you're going to rip out their heart. That's what you do.

Their hearts are in the right place and their gadgets are in the right place, but nothing they're doing vaguely resembles science. You know, when I was a kid, I was angry that the only thing haunted out there were haunted houses, and I grew up in an apartment. And I said, can't we have a haunted apartment? And then came Ghostbusters, the movie. It was a haunted apartment.. And I said, can we have a haunted apartment? And then came Ghostbusters, the movie. It was a haunted apartment. Yeah. I said, yes.

Or Dr. Robert Baker, the late Dr. Robert Baker, the psychologist with whom I investigated so many haunted houses. And he had a saying, there are no haunted places, only haunted people. And then paranormal activity came out to prove it. Yes. We've got to wind down here. i'm going out looking for ghosts right you're in new orleans i can get out of here you're in the best place to do it yeah and i want to uh leave with a clip from our favorite uh phone-in comedian brian mallow he's the science comedian you can catch him in his twitter stream he has some reflections on what ghosts might be, what might look like if you found one. Let's check them out.

This weekend, while everyone is dressing up for Halloween, I'm reminded of why I don't believe in ghosts. I know it's a controversial stand, but hear me out. If ghosts were real, they would be naked. And I'm completely serious. At the point that you die, you give up your physical body, transcend the material realm. Why on earth would you need clothes? Are you cold? Is it a little bit drafty in between dimensions? Or maybe you're shy, still a little self-conscious about the size of your ghost hood.

Are they the clothes you wore in real life? Bermuda shorts, knee-high socks? Whoa, scary. Or just a plain white gown that's issued when you check in upstairs? You know, the non-gender specific eternal white gown for all your haunting needs. No, ghosts would be naked, and that's even scarier than the shining. For StarTalk Radio, I'm Brian Mallow, reminding you that astronomy can save your life, if you're undead. That was Brian Mallow, who's a science, professional science comedian. Did you know they were out there, Eugene? They or him?

Okay. But now I do. Both. Yes. It is both. We've got to wind down on StarTalk Radio on this Halloween edition. I want to thank my guests. And as always, I bid you to keep looking up.