January 1, 2021 • 41 mins
Dr. Caroline Watt is one of the leading parapsychologists in the world. She is currently a Professor of Parapsychology at the University of Edinburgh. She says that half of all people in the world believe in some for of the paranormal and about 1 in 4 people have had a paranormal experience. She says her clinical research provides a lot of evidence that telepathy is possible.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Kesha and the Creepies is a production of I Heart Radio.
Hey Creepy is Today we are talking to Caroline Watt.
Dr Caroline Watt is one of the leading para psychologists
in the world. She's currently a professor of paras psychology
at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. So here's the
creepy backstory. In Andrew Colster and his wife Cynthia killed
(00:22):
themselves and in a suicide pact, they left their state
to support the study of the paranormal. This led to
the creation of the Parapsychology Unit at University of Edinburgh.
Dr Watt, who are speaking with today, wrote a letter
to the chair of the unit as she joined the
Parasychology department upon graduating from the university. Just so you
(00:43):
guys know, we are across oceans from each other and
my internet shitty, So there are moments that get a
little funky but also might just be a ghost. Because
we're talking about here we saw today here at Cash
(01:09):
in the Creepies, we have a very special guest. I
would like to welcome all the way from Edinburgh professor
and Dr Caroline. What you worked hard for those titles.
I'm gonna give you both. Oh just call me Caroline. Caroline. Well,
I'm so excited to have you here to talk to you.
(01:31):
I have like five billion questions and I think just
to start off with for our listeners, can you explain
what parapsychology is. So I'm a professor of parapsychology at
Edinburg University and parapsychology is a scientific study of paranormal experiences.
So it's quite unusual thing to find at university. But
(01:54):
Edinburgh is one of a few places in the world
where you can study para psychology. Why do you think
they're out of everywhere in the world. Well, we have
a bit of a track record. I mean, apart from
the fact that, of course Scotland has got lots of ghosts. Um.
We we have a chat record in our our department,
the psychology department of which is where I work. Um,
(02:14):
for many years we've had academics at that department who
have studied the paranormal. So, um, I think Edinburgh's kind
of got more of an open mind if you like
to do these ideas than many universities might have and
then you pivoted into para psychology. That's right. I mean,
I I got into parapsychology out of curiosity as a psychologist.
(02:38):
So I did my first degree in psychology, and I
wasn't taught anything about parapsychology in that degree, but um,
I knew as a psychologist that lots of people had
paranormal beliefs and experiences. So I was just really curious
as a psychologist about what lies behind these experiences, you know,
is there any truth to them as our the je
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in you and paranormal and psychic abilities. And I suspected
also that there would also be a lot of psychology
in these experiences. So it was really curiosity that brought
me into the field. Well, because I have had some
strange experiences myself, and sometimes I wonder because I definitely
have anxiety. So sometimes if something I'm very anxious about
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ends up happening, then am I psychic or am I
just super anxious and just very prepared for the worst? Yeah?
I mean that's a good example because for if you
have something that you're worried about, even subconsciously, it can
work its way into your mind and into your dreams.
For instance, So you might dream about something that you're
(03:41):
you're worried about and if that happens, if it comes
true the next day, you may feel that you know
the dream is predicting the future, but you One of
the things that we found in our research is that
people dream about all sorts of things, and they tend
to forget the dreams that don't come true. And so
most of our dreams don't come true, and we we
noticed the occasions when they do come true because it's
(04:03):
really striking and that makes us think, oh, maybe I
predicted that in my in my dreams. So there is
some evidence that we forget a lot of our dreams
and we're a bit selective about what we remember well,
especially if it does come true. Like you're saying, then
it feels almost like playing a machine at a casino
or something where you remember the time you want, but
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there's so many times you didn't exactly exactly. That's a
good analogy in your field of work, to people scoff
at you, or is it like how are you? How
is what you do received in like psychology world, In
the world where you're dealing with doctors and you're also
dealing with paranormal people, I'm sure always have a bunch
(04:47):
of questions as I do for you, but I also
just wonder if your peers, how did they treat you well.
It's funny, you know, if if I'm on an aeroplane,
UM I tend not to tell the person next to
me what I do, because yet all the stories of it,
like if you're a doctor, you know, a medical doctor,
and you say I'm a doctor and they say, oh,
I've got this sort of can you have a look
at it? So I turned, you know, if I want
(05:09):
peace and quiet, I tend to keep it to myself
what I do. But regarding my payers, my academic colleagues,
those that I work with, um no. And this is
why we have para psychology at Edinburgh. They know that
we're actually good scientists, so we're good researchers just like
they are. But you have to probably have personal contact
(05:30):
with the researcher to realize that. It's It's just like
any other prejudice or stereotype that if you don't get
to speak to the people that you have ideas about,
then the ideas can be quite mistaken. So I think
for parapsychology, for it to thrive in in this sort
of scientific world, psychologists like me have to be embedded
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within psychology departments in other university departments to break down prejudices,
because there definitely is a lot of negative baggage associated
with the P word. You know, some parapsychologists don't even
like using the word para psychology because you think it's
already got sort of toxic associations. Looking more into parapsychology
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and especially your background, it really interested me because from
what I've heard, maybe this has changed. You have not
had an experience with anything paranormal in your personal life,
not personally, No, it was it was just curiosity, sort
of intellectual curiosity, and it was a psychologist in me
that brought me into paras psychology. And the word paras
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psychology gives you a clue, you know that there is
a lot of psychology in there. So the two are
quite close, closely related in many ways. Um. I do know,
you know some parapsychologists who had an experience that kind
of made them curious and that that's what brought them
into the field. But a lot of them are kind
of maverick people. They are quite independent minded. They're just adventurous,
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curious people. They might not even have had a personal experience,
so they just know this is a kind of of
area where you can do exciting things and um, you know,
explores strange ideas and make an impact as well because
it's a relatively small field, so you can make an
impact because you're yourself. I'm you know, a big fish
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in a small bowl, if you like, yes to me,
that seems like that would have a huge impact on
people and our base fears of death and the unknown
of afterlife in religion, which is something that holds a
lot of communities and cultures and people together. And I
just think that if you could scientifically back that there
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was a paranormal experience that is truly unexplainable, there are
so many minds that could be changed. Because you see
the ghost hunting shows and they're very addictive and they're
really fun and all of that. But I think what
you're doing is looking at it all with this skeptical,
scientific but open mind. That's right, we're trying to I mean,
the problem is what we call them spontaneous experiences, that
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is real world world psychic or seemingly psychic experiences, and
you might include ghost experiences in that. These are actually
very difficult to study in any controlled way, because they're
happened unpredictably, and you know, you might take a TV
crew along, but you know you can't see everything that's
going on behind the camera. So to persuade the scientific community,
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we we think that you need to move into the
laboratory and do more controlled studies. And of course when
you do that, you're creating a much more artificial situation.
So there's a bit of a trade off because you
lose a lot of the drama, perhaps the emotional connection
that you might need in a real world psychic experience.
You get kind of watered down version. I think it's
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important that researchers study the paranormal in the laboratory situation
because it's much more controlled. You you're not losing, you
lose a lot in terms of the emotional impact of
the event. You're studying kind of watered down version of
a psychic experience in the lab. But I think you
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need that kind of control in order to persuade the
scientific community that there might be something to psychic abilities
in the real world. Spontaneous psychic experiences are more dramatic,
but they're also much harder to study in any controlled way.
They read a statistic and you would know better than I.
But about fifty of people believe in the paranormal or anghosts.
(09:30):
Is that about right? That's about right, yes, um, And
that that's taken very broadly, so that would include, for example,
traditional religious beliefs, so believing in a god, or believing
that you can pray and heal someone or have things
happen that you want because of prayer. These would also
be regarded as paranormal beliefs. So there's quite a wide
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definition of what what you know, psychologists would count as
as a paranormal belief And of about half of these
people believe they've had a paranormal experience. So that means
if you look, you know, you're walking along the street,
you're looking at the people around you, about one in
four will have had what they think is a paranormal experience.
And that that's to me why it's obviously of interest
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to psychologists to study. So even if you have a
spiritual experience or a very religious experience, or even participate
in praying, that you would be part of the fifty yes,
that would be counted as part of the because of
the aspect that, um, you know that the sense of
influence for one person, which is something and something happens,
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that would be a paranormal claim. So if you pray
for something to happen, like a person to be healed,
that have been studies, for example, looking at the power
of prayer, and they come under the category of para
psychology because there's no obvious normal mechanism to explain. You know,
if people get better through prayer, you know what else
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is going on if it's not power normal? So many questions. Um,
So I have a song called praying, which is just
ironic that we're talking about this, But I do find
myself either talking to my higher conscious just like the
best version of myself or whatever is out there or
the universe. I don't really like to put a label
on it because I don't know what it is. And
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it does bring me kind of back down to earth.
It makes me feel better. And like I was saying before,
humans have such a fear of death. I think it's
what drives most people in life, at least for me.
What I see, it's wanting to leave a legacy and
do something great while you're here, because we all know
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that we only have a finite amount of time, so
opening up the parapsychology of it's opening up religion. You're
opening up people's minds to the afterlife. And so in
your heart, are you trying to prove that it exists
or are you trying to prove that it doesn't? Or
do you not know? Are you open? Like? Are you atheist?
Are you ledges? Are you just well, you're you're being
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very broad there, Kesha. You're you're saying it's do you
believe in it? But it's you know, we're we're talking
about a whole lot of different things. So life after death,
for example, the possibility of surviving some some form of
our personality surviving after physical bodies has died. That's one
hypothesis we call that the survival hypothesis, and reincarnation would
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be part of that, the idea that you survive and
then you kind of come back. Um. But there's also
the sort of psychic abilities of the living, for example,
extrasensory perception, the claim that people can read one another's minds.
And then another thing that parapsychologists study is called psychokinesis
or p K. That's mind over matter, So it's the
claim that people can influence physical objects or heal other
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people by thought alone or by willpower alone. So when
you ask me, Kesha, what do I think? You know,
what am I trying to prove or it depends what
part we're looking at. So the survival question, for example,
I have not personally done any research into survival the
idea of life after death, but I having looked at
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the research that's been done, I found it's not to me,
it's not convincing that there's any scientific evidence. Sorry everybody,
but from what I've I've seen, the evidence is not
not there yet, and that might just be because it's
a very hard area to to look into. And of
course there's a question of faith, which is not a
scientific question and we we can't even you know, study that.
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But for the other area that you know, where I'm
actually doing my research extrasensory perception. So the idea of
telepathy or or people communicating, I'm my work is actually
testing that hypothesis, So I'm not setting out to prove
that it exists. So I've I've got a question in
mind when I do a study, which is, you know,
if we set up an experiment to see people can
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communicate with one another at a distance, you know, can
they do it if we set up in a careful way,
and so we test, we put we put them to
the test and see if they can actually m communicate
for example, the contents of a video clip or a
postcard that's been randomly chosen. So it's about testing the hypothesis.
And then if we get evidence, you know, we don't say, oh,
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that proves it. We just say this study proved provided
evidence in support of the hypothesis. So it's all very
kind of carefully worded because I think when you do signs,
you have to do you know, small steps, baby steps
all the time, and just try to be very careful
in what you're claiming. I was reading a book and
only a percentage of communication is actually verbal anyways. A
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lot of it can be visual, how you're holding your body,
if you're crossing your arms, If you say something, you
could say it twenty different ways, and your tone can
be saying something so different. So when you do those studies,
are people able to see each other they in separate places.
They have to be separated for exactly that reason that
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there's so much communication that's going on non verbally. UM,
So we do these experiments with two people, the sender
and a receiver, and they're in two separate rooms, and
the sender can hear the receiver about the receiver can't
hear the sender. So, um, we're trying to stop the
possibility that there's any normal communication available. So that includes
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all the senses that we know about. You have to
be really careful when you do these experiments that you're
not inadvertently allowing communication to happen. So yeah, we have
we have to be very cautious with the two people
know each other. The studies have tried it in different ways,
so there are better results when the sender and the
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receiver know each other. Because I'm thinking of if me
and my best friend, I know her so well. I've
known her since I was seven, So if you put
us in two separate rooms, you can put us across
the country from each other, and I bet one out
of ten times I could guess something that she was
thinking about because I know her so well. I feel
like the energy that she can put off, even in silences,
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there can be an energy put off from someone you
know really well. What you're saying is very important, which
is that people who know each other very well can
anticipate each other's thoughts, and that's different from psychic often, so,
for example, a married couple who have lived together for
years say that you know, they can finish each other's
sentences practically because they know each other's thoughts so well. Um.
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And And the way that we deal with that in
our experiments is that the thing that the sender is
sending has to be randomly chosen. So we don't allow
the sender. We don't say, go into this room and
think of a draw a picture, Draw any picture, because
there's a fairly good chance, if you know each other
very well, that you'll be able to guess what she's drawing,
like one out of ten, Yes, I totally know. Yeah, easy, easy. Um.
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So what we do is we have as a pool
of maybe a hundred pictures, and the sender is given
one randomly, so they don't they don't know what they're
going to and they don't get to choose it. They
don't get to choose it. But you're quite right if
they did get to choose it, then that would change
the chances of success in the experiment because their preferences
might match your preferences in the research that you've done.
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Has it changed your mind at all? Are you still neutral?
Are you trying to stay as neutral as you can,
or do you find yourself being swayed in one direction
or the other. I'll tell you what I've changed. I'm
not convinced yet that the I mean. I'm talking about
extrasensory perception studies. That's where I think the strongest evidences.
So there are studies that look at mind over matter
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using it sounds really boring, but using random number generators,
and they have very very weak effects in them, and
I've I don't find them very persuasive studies. But the
EESP studies using what's called the gangs field method are
quite interesting. And that that's the guns felt is a
kind of mild sensory isolation procedure. So you have red
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light shining on your face, you wear headphones, you've got
a mask over your eyes, and you essentially the receiver
in this experiment basically just relaxes and free associates. They
just describe what comes to their mind, so it's not
like try to guess what the sender is sending. It's
just describe what's in your head. And these experiments have
got quite a long track record and on on the whole.
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They've they've got fairly positive results. So I'm I'm following
up on that on that with my own work. So
my my view is that there's definitely something there in
these experiments, but we don't really have much clue as
to what's going on. We know we've seen some patterns.
So for example, studies with selected participants do better than
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studies with unselected participants. So what that means is that
people who are believe in the power normal, who have
had paranormal experiences, and who may have practiced some kind
of mental disciplines such as meditation, or who are interested
in their dreams and keep a dream diary, these participants
tend to do better in these experiments than just a
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random person pulled in off the street. So there are
some there's some patterns. I feel like that suggests there's
something going on, but we don't really understand what it means.
So it's almost like being open to it. It could be.
It could be that because it's a kind of a
weird experience doing that experiment, you know, sitting in a
comfy chair, you do a relaxation exercise, and you've got
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this red light on, you've got goggles on your eyes
and you're speaking out loud while someone else listens to you.
It's a bit like dreaming, but you know someone's in
the room taking notes at the same time, and it's
a weird experience. And maybe it's simply the case that
people who are creative are or who are good at meditating,
are more relaxed in that environment and are better able
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to notice what's going on inside their head and better
able to describe what's going on. So we're not quite
sure why these people do better. And that's you know,
that's one of the things that our work is trying
to look at when I think of psychic abilities, and
also is into me with telepathy, like being able to
communicate both ways and being cynical about it might actually
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keep you from being able to experience certain things from
what you're saying, that's what I'm gathering a little bit. Yeah, Yeah,
I think I think that's the case. Um, there's there's
research that suggests that people who we call it, we
have funny terms in parasocology, we call it sheep and goats.
The sheep are the believers, and the goats go to
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the disbelievers. And it's actually from it's a biblical metaphors.
It's from the from the day of judgment. I think.
So the sheep are the believers, the goats the disbelievers.
And there's some evidence that we actually call it the
sheep goat effect in our studies, that the sheep on
the whole tend to score more positively than the goats.
So the people who disbelieve tend not to do so well.
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And I do I do think in the real world
people who are sort of cynical and skeptical. I'm sure
they have weird experiences, as I'm sure they do, but
I think they probably find a way to explain them
away or to account for them. Um. So you know,
it's not only the believers of strange experiences of para
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normal experiences. I think everybody does. But we have different
ways of interpreting these experiences. In my personal life, usually
the women I'm around we like to talk about this
stuff more than men. Is that me just generalizing or
have you found that to be true? That is true,
It's not true that in the lab if you do
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a trled experience, women and men score at the same level.
But when it comes to who is willing to send
in reports of experiences or who writes to the parapsychology labs.
It's more women than men who report experiences. And I
think that maybe not because women are more psychic than men,
but because culturally it's more acceptable for a women. You know,
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the stereotype is that we're more kind of in tune
with our emotions and are more intuitive, We're more willing
to talk about at these things. So I think that
makes women more likely to report paranormal experiences than men.
So it's it's not that they have more experiences, but
they're more willing to talk to other people about them, right,
just because of the stereotype of being emotional being very
open about it. It's quite hard to know where the
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psychic comes in there, because it's very hard to separate
what's normal and knowing each other's habits and sharing personalities
and sharing genetics, and then what's the paranormal. So it's
really really difficult to to separate these two out well. Also,
I would think especially genetics, like my brother, we do
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share the same mother, so we were raised in the
same household. And the nature versus nurture of human beings
and the psychology behind that is our mothers are very
open about all of these kinds of topics and nothing
was off the table versus I know some people that
grew up in a home opposite of that, where it
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was just very pragmatic, are less inclined to just talk
about this kind of stuff all day. Yeah. I mean,
I think when when you're trying to judge if it
is this a paranormal or psychic communication or not, it's
easier if the event is unexpected. So it's a bit
like I was saying, when we do our experiments, we
have a sender and a receiver, and the center has
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a randomly selected target, so the receiver can't guess what
what they're they're going to be thinking about. And I
think it's the same in life. It's something really unexpected happens,
like I don't know, you you've you know, you break
your ankle walking off the cab, or you know your
bitten your hand gets bitten by a dog or something unexpected,
and your brother or your mother or your family member
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gets that feeling, then that's that's more likely to be
psychic for me because it's unexpected. It was coming out
of the blue, so it seems more like a kind
of dramatic communication at that point, out of the ordinary exactly,
not something we would talk about all the time, not
saying it happens all the time. I has there been
anything you've seen that has just completely blown your mind. Well,
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I've I've taken part in experiments where, um, you know,
I was the sender and it was scance felt experiments actually,
and um, my friend was the receiver and there was
one In fact, it was the other way around. I
was a receiver, so I was a person relaxing with
the red lights and everything. And you know, I'm not
someone who thinks that they're psychic, but I and I
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normally don't get very vivid mental image ry at all.
So I closed my eyes, I don't really see anything.
But this one time I closed my eyes and I
kind of got this very clear image of a peacock
feather and I thought it was so clear and unusual
for me. And I just said, it's a peacock feather
and she said, yes, you know, this ender, that's what
the sender was looking at. So you know, I've had
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I've had a striking experience which was quite unusual because
it was nothing like you know, normally it's not as
clear as that in the lab. So I've had that
kind of experience, but it's been in a in a
controlled environ and so I can't you know, I don't
believe it was just a coincidence. Um. You know, I've
taken part in experience, and I've also run experiments where
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overall I've done um, you know, have a precognition study
with the gun spell, which is about getting impressions about
a future target that you will see at the end
of the session. So you lie back, you relax, you
describe what's going on inside your head, and at the
end of the session, we randomly select a film clip
and show it to you, and then we judge the
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similarity between your impressions and the film clip. And I've
done that and got with sixty people what we say
statistically significant results, meaning that we've got more successful um
identifications of the picture that you would get by just
a chance. So you know, I've seen I've seen that,
and that makes me think that that it's worth pursuing
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this line of research, because you know, I think something
is going on. I am really fascinated with the psychology
of people, why people are the way they are, why
they are who they are, because if there was ever
proof of a paranormal like a spirit hunting be opening
the door to something so huge for humanity. I mean,
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there's a lot of ideas if you do see a ghost.
I mean, I'm actually reading a book at the moment,
which is it's about um. It's called The Haunting of
Alma Fielding, and it's a story. It's a true story
about para psychologist who investigated a woman called Alma Fielding
who had a lot of poltergeist experiences around her. Um. So,
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you know, objects would fly off the shelfs and so on,
and he he was a psychologist, but he he tended
to think of it as not a spirit, but as
a sort of psychological projection from Alma of her desires
and traumas, if you like. So there are some you know,
if you see a ghost or a polter geist, that
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doesn't mean this proof of the afterlife, to mean some
that's creating the effects around you. So there's different theories
basically to to explain ghosts, Like one's energy could become
so powerful that you are sending or receiving an image,
but that's not actually approve of afterlife. It could just
be you're wanting to it could be the living. I
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mean if you think, um, you know, there's a theory
about poltergeist, which is this idea of objects moving around.
You know. For many years, par psychologists thought that maybe
the focused person that that it seemed to center on.
The phenomena centered on they they thought was that like
an adolescent person. And the theory was that, well, this
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adolescence have kind of a lot of turmoil going on,
a lot of repressed energies and feelings, and um, that
that might be expressed through um, you know, instead of
them actually physically acting out, they psychically act out around them.
So that's one theory, you know, behind the polter Geist.
What is the definition of a polter guyst because when
(28:03):
you say poulter guys, I get so many different images
in my head from different movies and books. Well, it's
a German word. Pulter means noisy and guys means ghosts,
so it's a noisy ghost. So it's basically a rowdy
ghost that sort of throws things around, you know. It
affects physical objects with furniture around, throws plates across the room,
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It seems to center usually on a person. You know,
it's it doesn't sort of occur randomly. It seems to
there's like an outbreak in a household, and then it
goes on for a few weeks and then it kind
of usually peters out. Um, So the thought was that
it might focus on articular person. That's what parasitologists have
thought might be going on. But the problem with these
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events is that they you know, they start off they're
quite dramatic, but over time they gradually wane, and so
they're actually quite hard to study because again they're unpredictable.
And then typically the parasitologists might come along with a
camera and then nothing happens that they leave the room
and they played lip taps right, or as you're saying before,
it could be that you're so full of some sort
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of emotion that your energy is literally making things fly
off the walls, and then maybe after you do that
for a couple of weeks, then you've calmed down, like
a good therapy session. Yes, exactly, there was a place
near Edinburgh, oh, Hampton Court. Yes, I have heard that
some places do seem to have one specific kind of
(29:31):
haunting and something that people see over and over. It's
a reoccurring thing, and it's generally everyone sees a woman
in the corner, or everyone here's footsteps in this one room.
I don't actually know that much about Hampton Court and
the underground vaults, so I was wondering if you could
just talk about that. Yeah, well, I mean there's a
(29:51):
little bit of a difference with a ghost and haunting,
So let's let's sort of do with that first of all.
So ghosts might just be a kind of experience that
might happen just once in one particular location, where you
see a figure, for example, or you hear something and
you think there's nobody actually there. But haunting is where
there's a repeated event in a particular location. And so
(30:12):
there's certain locations, typically of course, historical locations where they
develop a reputation for being haunted because lots of people
have seen the same thing there or have had lots
of unusual experiences in Hampton Court Palace Um in Surrey
Um has quite you know, it's got five hundred years
(30:32):
of history, so there's been plenty of Henry King. Henry's
wives have been beheaded there, and that's not very nice. No, no,
he was he was harsh. She was harsh anyway. So
it hit the Haunted Gallery in Hampton Courts, so called
because Catherine Howard, one of Henry the Eight's wives. Um,
she sort of was found committing adultery and then was
(30:55):
sentenced to death and she ran to the king to
plea for her life and was ragged screaming along this
this gallery and then and later of course she was beheaded.
And then in later years people would see this figure
and walking in the gallery. So we did an experiment there.
This is work that I did was Professor Richard Wiseman,
who I've collaborated with quite a lot, and we asked
(31:18):
it was really about the psychology of ghostly experiences, so
it was not a vigil. So it's not the sort
of thing you usually see on Telly where a bunch
of people sit in the haunted location with a camera
and wait for things to happen. What we did was
we um we got the warder of the palace, so
this is the people who kind of know they take
(31:38):
two guides around the tours round and they know where
people report the experiences. We gave them a floor plan
of two areas, the Haunted Gallery in the Georgian rooms,
and we got them to mark on the floor plan
where it is that people report strange experiences, and there
were clusters, you know, where people were reporting these experiences.
So we had this kind of map and then we
(31:59):
get off people, members of the public, a blank map
and we asked them to walk around the space and
to mark on their map where they were having experience.
It's like feeling chills or sensing a presence or hearing
feeling at touched, you know. So we were interested to
see whether people agreed, you know, with the warders what
(32:20):
the history was, you know, where the haunted experiences were happening.
And we found that yes, they did agree, even though
and we one of the things we wondered was what
is it Because they've read the tour book and asked
people that question before they did the experiment. Some people
had no idea of the history and some people did,
(32:40):
so we only looked at the data for those who
had no idea, and they showed the exactly the same pattern.
So that was that was very interesting. That suggests that
there's something about these locations that are causing people to
have an unusual experience because they agree it's not random.
It's in certain parts of the room where they're saying, oh,
I feel cold here. So that was one of the
(33:02):
things that we did, and then we we did a
follow up experiment with a similar kind of idea in
the underground vaults in Edinburgh and the Hampton Court study
was like in broad daylight, it was kind of busy, um,
lots of tourists mulling around. It was quite surprising that
lots of the people in our experiment had strange experiences
given it was actually quite a kind of bustling. It
(33:25):
was that spooky, yeah, it was. It wasn't spooky, It
wasn't spooky. But the Emperor Vaults are are spooky. You know,
they're kind of dark, they're damp, and they're kind of underground.
There are the kind of underground caverns underneath the bridge.
There's another one that's called Mary King's Close, which is
quite a good tourist attraction. It's kind of an underground
street and it also was reputedly haunted. But that that
(33:48):
one is not a kind of ghost tour, it's quite
a historical tour. I'd recommend that I'm not I have
no personal investment in this. By the way, folks, but
the underground vaults. What we did was we got again,
we got the tour guides, because there are people were
taking tours around the vaults and they had kind of
built up a dossier, if you like, a where in
(34:08):
the vaults, which one there were ten vaults, ten rooms,
which was the most spooky and where most people were
getting experiences. And we ranked ordered the ten vaults from
the most to the least haunted. So we had what
we called our Haunted Order. And then we got individuals
of the public individually went to one of the ten
(34:29):
vaults and then they would spend about ten minutes in
there and with a questionnaire, you know, right down what
they were experiencing, and we were we found that their
reports matched the Haunted Order, So the same thing essentially,
it was slightly different design, same thing as a Hampton
Court Palace um study that people were agreeing which was
(34:51):
this haunted vault, which was the scariest vault to be in,
and which was the least haunted? So was that when
you say scary as vault to at least aunted. So
is that according to historical like the most messed up
things happened per room. It's it's it's not it's not
that there were historical events happening there. It's not like,
(35:12):
you know, there was a slaughter in the in one
room and you know the other room as a bakery.
Not that. So it was more that when people visited
these rooms before our experiment, there were more strange experiences
happening in one vault compared to another one. So it
was it was the track record, I feel like the
ghost track record of the vaults, and we were basically
(35:34):
finding um Even when we had people who had no
knowledge beforehand of what was in the vaults, they still
agreed where the strange experiences were happening. So to us,
that suggested, actually, there's something about the environment, not necessarily
anything ghosts, something about shape and the lighting and the
temperature and the humidity of the vaults that may contribute
(35:57):
towards people having um sing weird experiences. And we did
find both studies found that the majority of the experiences
that what we're reporting what to do with changes in temperature,
usually feeling chilled, but you know, sometimes it would be
the other way around, feeling unusually hot. So that might
be something to do with the environment that they're in. Well,
(36:17):
I assume like the ventilations, lighting, or if a room
is just colder because it's in a different floor or whatever,
those kind of things. I'm sure you've thought of all
those things. Well, we have, but I mean, I think
these are quite subtle things you're not For example, if
you're in a room, you you maybe not consciously thinking about,
you know, how light or how dark the room is
(36:40):
relative to light in the corridor outside. And when we
we found that that was one of the factors that
seemed to influence I think what might be happening at
least you know, this doesn't explain August at all, but
you know what, what we observed was that people may
be unconsciously responding to subtle things in their environment without
being aware of it. It's not that there was like
a blowing through, but you know, there could be quite
(37:02):
subtle even things like geomagnetic activity. So you know, um,
you know, very very subtle kind of environmental things that
we don't normally pay any attention to maybe having some
influence on us. Another another study, if I've got time
to mention, it's not study that that I did, but
it was about infrasound. Um, so this is someone called
(37:22):
Vic Tandy, who found that he was working in a
workshop and and he noticed he kept getting this kind
of blurring in his vision and kept seeing a figure
off to his to his right, and um, he felt
it was haunted. He felt it was quite a booky experience.
And then one day he had one of these big
fencing swords, you know, a file that's thank you. He
(37:44):
had it clamped in this workshop and he noticed that
it started to vibrate. And he was an engineer, so
he was kind of curious, why is it kind of vibrating?
And he moved it up and down the workshop and
he discovered that there was a kind of a standing wave.
So there was a very low energy sound wave in
the workshop that you couldn't hear. It was too low
for our auditory system, but it was the foil was
(38:06):
picking it up. And he discovered that there was a
new air conditioning system had been put in. This big
kind of fan was creating a kind of vibration, or
a low energy vibration in the room. And that he believed,
and there's evidence from elsewhere as well, that that can
cause kind of strange visual effects because it can affect
you that your eyeballs. So he thought it started off
(38:29):
as a kind of haunting experience. But he believed that
he found a kind of physical explanation for it. But
it took a little bit of detective work. You know,
it wasn't at all obvious what what the cause was, right,
It's just so interesting as you're talking and thinking of
crystals and how certain kinds of stones could be have
different pulls depending on what your body has made out of.
(38:51):
So you have to take all of this into consideration,
which I'm sure you do. It's just such a fascinating
line of work. I mean, it seems like you would
never be boring. It never does get boring. No, no,
except if I've got a hundred and fifty essays to mark.
Oh jeez, Okay, well I will let you go. But
I just wanted to Are you a spiritual person a
religious person? No? I I like mother Nature. You know,
(39:14):
I loved the environment and you know the planet. But
you know I'm not I'm not a spiritual person. I
don't think even in like these psychic moments, does it
make you feel more connected to anything inside yourself or
anything else or to the other person. Well, I suppose
I'm normally the person who's running the experiment rather than
having the experience myself. Have you ever had an experience
(39:37):
where it just like sent chills up your spine and
it just made you feel like maybe there is something? Yeah, yeah,
I had to. I mean actually, um so one of
the things I did was Richard Wiseman again, was that
we were doing a kind of theatrical event which was
a recreation of a Victorian seance. Okay, so see, never
(39:57):
a dull moment in my in my job, right, And
what we were doing was it was kind of an
experiment because you know, we weren't trying to raise any spirits, okay,
without giving any secrets away, I was kind of helping
out behind the scenes, shall always say. And I had
to hide, so I was like a kind of secret
accomplice I had to hide in. It was down down
(40:18):
in Mary King's Close actually, and I was down there
on my own waiting for the group to arrive, and
I could hear footsteps around me, and um, I thought,
that's really strange because I know there's nobody else here,
and yeah, I could hear the footsteps. So that was
definitely a you know, a hair standing off at the
back of my neck experience. Oh my gosh. Well, I
definitely would love to check in in like five years
(40:40):
and see what other creepy things you experience, because I
bet if you're opening yourself up to it, as you said,
you might be receiving more creepy things in your life.
I hope so, I hope so well. I just want
to say thank you very much. If you would like
to tell our listeners where to find you or more
information about you, now would be the dame. Just you
(41:01):
can tell about a girl like a website or Cussler
Parapsychology Unit. That's our website, and on that you can
find a little bit more about what we do and
hopefully you might be able to get involved. Great. Well,
if you ever need somebody to study, I'm your girl, right.
Thank you so much. Thanks for infoting me. It's been fun.
Kesha and the Creepies is a production of I Heart Radio.
Hey Creepy is Today we are talking to Caroline Watt.
Dr Caroline Watt is one of the leading para psychologists
in the world. She's currently a professor of paras psychology
at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. So here's the
creepy backstory. In Andrew Colster and his wife Cynthia killed
(00:22):
themselves and in a suicide pact, they left their state
to support the study of the paranormal. This led to
the creation of the Parapsychology Unit at University of Edinburgh.
Dr Watt, who are speaking with today, wrote a letter
to the chair of the unit as she joined the
Parasychology department upon graduating from the university. Just so you
(00:43):
guys know, we are across oceans from each other and
my internet shitty, So there are moments that get a
little funky but also might just be a ghost. Because
we're talking about here we saw today here at Cash
(01:09):
in the Creepies, we have a very special guest. I
would like to welcome all the way from Edinburgh professor
and Dr Caroline. What you worked hard for those titles.
I'm gonna give you both. Oh just call me Caroline. Caroline. Well,
I'm so excited to have you here to talk to you.
(01:31):
I have like five billion questions and I think just
to start off with for our listeners, can you explain
what parapsychology is. So I'm a professor of parapsychology at
Edinburg University and parapsychology is a scientific study of paranormal experiences.
So it's quite unusual thing to find at university. But
(01:54):
Edinburgh is one of a few places in the world
where you can study para psychology. Why do you think
they're out of everywhere in the world. Well, we have
a bit of a track record. I mean, apart from
the fact that, of course Scotland has got lots of ghosts. Um.
We we have a chat record in our our department,
the psychology department of which is where I work. Um,
(02:14):
for many years we've had academics at that department who
have studied the paranormal. So, um, I think Edinburgh's kind
of got more of an open mind if you like
to do these ideas than many universities might have and
then you pivoted into para psychology. That's right. I mean,
I I got into parapsychology out of curiosity as a psychologist.
(02:38):
So I did my first degree in psychology, and I
wasn't taught anything about parapsychology in that degree, but um,
I knew as a psychologist that lots of people had
paranormal beliefs and experiences. So I was just really curious
as a psychologist about what lies behind these experiences, you know,
is there any truth to them as our the je
(03:00):
in you and paranormal and psychic abilities. And I suspected
also that there would also be a lot of psychology
in these experiences. So it was really curiosity that brought
me into the field. Well, because I have had some
strange experiences myself, and sometimes I wonder because I definitely
have anxiety. So sometimes if something I'm very anxious about
(03:20):
ends up happening, then am I psychic or am I
just super anxious and just very prepared for the worst? Yeah?
I mean that's a good example because for if you
have something that you're worried about, even subconsciously, it can
work its way into your mind and into your dreams.
For instance, So you might dream about something that you're
(03:41):
you're worried about and if that happens, if it comes
true the next day, you may feel that you know
the dream is predicting the future, but you One of
the things that we found in our research is that
people dream about all sorts of things, and they tend
to forget the dreams that don't come true. And so
most of our dreams don't come true, and we we
noticed the occasions when they do come true because it's
(04:03):
really striking and that makes us think, oh, maybe I
predicted that in my in my dreams. So there is
some evidence that we forget a lot of our dreams
and we're a bit selective about what we remember well,
especially if it does come true. Like you're saying, then
it feels almost like playing a machine at a casino
or something where you remember the time you want, but
(04:24):
there's so many times you didn't exactly exactly. That's a
good analogy in your field of work, to people scoff
at you, or is it like how are you? How
is what you do received in like psychology world, In
the world where you're dealing with doctors and you're also
dealing with paranormal people, I'm sure always have a bunch
(04:47):
of questions as I do for you, but I also
just wonder if your peers, how did they treat you well.
It's funny, you know, if if I'm on an aeroplane,
UM I tend not to tell the person next to
me what I do, because yet all the stories of it,
like if you're a doctor, you know, a medical doctor,
and you say I'm a doctor and they say, oh,
I've got this sort of can you have a look
at it? So I turned, you know, if I want
(05:09):
peace and quiet, I tend to keep it to myself
what I do. But regarding my payers, my academic colleagues,
those that I work with, um no. And this is
why we have para psychology at Edinburgh. They know that
we're actually good scientists, so we're good researchers just like
they are. But you have to probably have personal contact
(05:30):
with the researcher to realize that. It's It's just like
any other prejudice or stereotype that if you don't get
to speak to the people that you have ideas about,
then the ideas can be quite mistaken. So I think
for parapsychology, for it to thrive in in this sort
of scientific world, psychologists like me have to be embedded
(05:51):
within psychology departments in other university departments to break down prejudices,
because there definitely is a lot of negative baggage associated
with the P word. You know, some parapsychologists don't even
like using the word para psychology because you think it's
already got sort of toxic associations. Looking more into parapsychology
(06:11):
and especially your background, it really interested me because from
what I've heard, maybe this has changed. You have not
had an experience with anything paranormal in your personal life,
not personally, No, it was it was just curiosity, sort
of intellectual curiosity, and it was a psychologist in me
that brought me into paras psychology. And the word paras
(06:32):
psychology gives you a clue, you know that there is
a lot of psychology in there. So the two are
quite close, closely related in many ways. Um. I do know,
you know some parapsychologists who had an experience that kind
of made them curious and that that's what brought them
into the field. But a lot of them are kind
of maverick people. They are quite independent minded. They're just adventurous,
(06:54):
curious people. They might not even have had a personal experience,
so they just know this is a kind of of
area where you can do exciting things and um, you know,
explores strange ideas and make an impact as well because
it's a relatively small field, so you can make an
impact because you're yourself. I'm you know, a big fish
(07:15):
in a small bowl, if you like, yes to me,
that seems like that would have a huge impact on
people and our base fears of death and the unknown
of afterlife in religion, which is something that holds a
lot of communities and cultures and people together. And I
just think that if you could scientifically back that there
(07:36):
was a paranormal experience that is truly unexplainable, there are
so many minds that could be changed. Because you see
the ghost hunting shows and they're very addictive and they're
really fun and all of that. But I think what
you're doing is looking at it all with this skeptical,
scientific but open mind. That's right, we're trying to I mean,
the problem is what we call them spontaneous experiences, that
(07:59):
is real world world psychic or seemingly psychic experiences, and
you might include ghost experiences in that. These are actually
very difficult to study in any controlled way, because they're
happened unpredictably, and you know, you might take a TV
crew along, but you know you can't see everything that's
going on behind the camera. So to persuade the scientific community,
(08:23):
we we think that you need to move into the
laboratory and do more controlled studies. And of course when
you do that, you're creating a much more artificial situation.
So there's a bit of a trade off because you
lose a lot of the drama, perhaps the emotional connection
that you might need in a real world psychic experience.
You get kind of watered down version. I think it's
(08:44):
important that researchers study the paranormal in the laboratory situation
because it's much more controlled. You you're not losing, you
lose a lot in terms of the emotional impact of
the event. You're studying kind of watered down version of
a psychic experience in the lab. But I think you
(09:05):
need that kind of control in order to persuade the
scientific community that there might be something to psychic abilities
in the real world. Spontaneous psychic experiences are more dramatic,
but they're also much harder to study in any controlled way.
They read a statistic and you would know better than I.
But about fifty of people believe in the paranormal or anghosts.
(09:30):
Is that about right? That's about right, yes, um, And
that that's taken very broadly, so that would include, for example,
traditional religious beliefs, so believing in a god, or believing
that you can pray and heal someone or have things
happen that you want because of prayer. These would also
be regarded as paranormal beliefs. So there's quite a wide
(09:54):
definition of what what you know, psychologists would count as
as a paranormal belief And of about half of these
people believe they've had a paranormal experience. So that means
if you look, you know, you're walking along the street,
you're looking at the people around you, about one in
four will have had what they think is a paranormal experience.
And that that's to me why it's obviously of interest
(10:16):
to psychologists to study. So even if you have a
spiritual experience or a very religious experience, or even participate
in praying, that you would be part of the fifty yes,
that would be counted as part of the because of
the aspect that, um, you know that the sense of
influence for one person, which is something and something happens,
(10:38):
that would be a paranormal claim. So if you pray
for something to happen, like a person to be healed,
that have been studies, for example, looking at the power
of prayer, and they come under the category of para
psychology because there's no obvious normal mechanism to explain. You know,
if people get better through prayer, you know what else
(10:58):
is going on if it's not power normal? So many questions. Um,
So I have a song called praying, which is just
ironic that we're talking about this, But I do find
myself either talking to my higher conscious just like the
best version of myself or whatever is out there or
the universe. I don't really like to put a label
on it because I don't know what it is. And
(11:19):
it does bring me kind of back down to earth.
It makes me feel better. And like I was saying before,
humans have such a fear of death. I think it's
what drives most people in life, at least for me.
What I see, it's wanting to leave a legacy and
do something great while you're here, because we all know
(11:40):
that we only have a finite amount of time, so
opening up the parapsychology of it's opening up religion. You're
opening up people's minds to the afterlife. And so in
your heart, are you trying to prove that it exists
or are you trying to prove that it doesn't? Or
do you not know? Are you open? Like? Are you atheist?
Are you ledges? Are you just well, you're you're being
(12:01):
very broad there, Kesha. You're you're saying it's do you
believe in it? But it's you know, we're we're talking
about a whole lot of different things. So life after death,
for example, the possibility of surviving some some form of
our personality surviving after physical bodies has died. That's one
hypothesis we call that the survival hypothesis, and reincarnation would
(12:23):
be part of that, the idea that you survive and
then you kind of come back. Um. But there's also
the sort of psychic abilities of the living, for example,
extrasensory perception, the claim that people can read one another's minds.
And then another thing that parapsychologists study is called psychokinesis
or p K. That's mind over matter, So it's the
claim that people can influence physical objects or heal other
(12:46):
people by thought alone or by willpower alone. So when
you ask me, Kesha, what do I think? You know,
what am I trying to prove or it depends what
part we're looking at. So the survival question, for example,
I have not personally done any research into survival the
idea of life after death, but I having looked at
(13:08):
the research that's been done, I found it's not to me,
it's not convincing that there's any scientific evidence. Sorry everybody,
but from what I've I've seen, the evidence is not
not there yet, and that might just be because it's
a very hard area to to look into. And of
course there's a question of faith, which is not a
scientific question and we we can't even you know, study that.
(13:31):
But for the other area that you know, where I'm
actually doing my research extrasensory perception. So the idea of
telepathy or or people communicating, I'm my work is actually
testing that hypothesis, So I'm not setting out to prove
that it exists. So I've I've got a question in
mind when I do a study, which is, you know,
if we set up an experiment to see people can
(13:52):
communicate with one another at a distance, you know, can
they do it if we set up in a careful way,
and so we test, we put we put them to
the test and see if they can actually m communicate
for example, the contents of a video clip or a
postcard that's been randomly chosen. So it's about testing the hypothesis.
And then if we get evidence, you know, we don't say, oh,
(14:14):
that proves it. We just say this study proved provided
evidence in support of the hypothesis. So it's all very
kind of carefully worded because I think when you do signs,
you have to do you know, small steps, baby steps
all the time, and just try to be very careful
in what you're claiming. I was reading a book and
only a percentage of communication is actually verbal anyways. A
(14:38):
lot of it can be visual, how you're holding your body,
if you're crossing your arms, If you say something, you
could say it twenty different ways, and your tone can
be saying something so different. So when you do those studies,
are people able to see each other they in separate places.
They have to be separated for exactly that reason that
(14:59):
there's so much communication that's going on non verbally. UM,
So we do these experiments with two people, the sender
and a receiver, and they're in two separate rooms, and
the sender can hear the receiver about the receiver can't
hear the sender. So, um, we're trying to stop the
possibility that there's any normal communication available. So that includes
(15:22):
all the senses that we know about. You have to
be really careful when you do these experiments that you're
not inadvertently allowing communication to happen. So yeah, we have
we have to be very cautious with the two people
know each other. The studies have tried it in different ways,
so there are better results when the sender and the
(15:42):
receiver know each other. Because I'm thinking of if me
and my best friend, I know her so well. I've
known her since I was seven, So if you put
us in two separate rooms, you can put us across
the country from each other, and I bet one out
of ten times I could guess something that she was
thinking about because I know her so well. I feel
like the energy that she can put off, even in silences,
(16:04):
there can be an energy put off from someone you
know really well. What you're saying is very important, which
is that people who know each other very well can
anticipate each other's thoughts, and that's different from psychic often, so,
for example, a married couple who have lived together for
years say that you know, they can finish each other's
sentences practically because they know each other's thoughts so well. Um.
(16:26):
And And the way that we deal with that in
our experiments is that the thing that the sender is
sending has to be randomly chosen. So we don't allow
the sender. We don't say, go into this room and
think of a draw a picture, Draw any picture, because
there's a fairly good chance, if you know each other
very well, that you'll be able to guess what she's drawing,
like one out of ten, Yes, I totally know. Yeah, easy, easy. Um.
(16:51):
So what we do is we have as a pool
of maybe a hundred pictures, and the sender is given
one randomly, so they don't they don't know what they're
going to and they don't get to choose it. They
don't get to choose it. But you're quite right if
they did get to choose it, then that would change
the chances of success in the experiment because their preferences
might match your preferences in the research that you've done.
(17:14):
Has it changed your mind at all? Are you still neutral?
Are you trying to stay as neutral as you can,
or do you find yourself being swayed in one direction
or the other. I'll tell you what I've changed. I'm
not convinced yet that the I mean. I'm talking about
extrasensory perception studies. That's where I think the strongest evidences.
So there are studies that look at mind over matter
(17:36):
using it sounds really boring, but using random number generators,
and they have very very weak effects in them, and
I've I don't find them very persuasive studies. But the
EESP studies using what's called the gangs field method are
quite interesting. And that that's the guns felt is a
kind of mild sensory isolation procedure. So you have red
(17:56):
light shining on your face, you wear headphones, you've got
a mask over your eyes, and you essentially the receiver
in this experiment basically just relaxes and free associates. They
just describe what comes to their mind, so it's not
like try to guess what the sender is sending. It's
just describe what's in your head. And these experiments have
got quite a long track record and on on the whole.
(18:18):
They've they've got fairly positive results. So I'm I'm following
up on that on that with my own work. So
my my view is that there's definitely something there in
these experiments, but we don't really have much clue as
to what's going on. We know we've seen some patterns.
So for example, studies with selected participants do better than
(18:39):
studies with unselected participants. So what that means is that
people who are believe in the power normal, who have
had paranormal experiences, and who may have practiced some kind
of mental disciplines such as meditation, or who are interested
in their dreams and keep a dream diary, these participants
tend to do better in these experiments than just a
(19:03):
random person pulled in off the street. So there are
some there's some patterns. I feel like that suggests there's
something going on, but we don't really understand what it means.
So it's almost like being open to it. It could be.
It could be that because it's a kind of a
weird experience doing that experiment, you know, sitting in a
comfy chair, you do a relaxation exercise, and you've got
(19:24):
this red light on, you've got goggles on your eyes
and you're speaking out loud while someone else listens to you.
It's a bit like dreaming, but you know someone's in
the room taking notes at the same time, and it's
a weird experience. And maybe it's simply the case that
people who are creative are or who are good at meditating,
are more relaxed in that environment and are better able
(19:44):
to notice what's going on inside their head and better
able to describe what's going on. So we're not quite
sure why these people do better. And that's you know,
that's one of the things that our work is trying
to look at when I think of psychic abilities, and
also is into me with telepathy, like being able to
communicate both ways and being cynical about it might actually
(20:07):
keep you from being able to experience certain things from
what you're saying, that's what I'm gathering a little bit. Yeah, Yeah,
I think I think that's the case. Um, there's there's
research that suggests that people who we call it, we
have funny terms in parasocology, we call it sheep and goats.
The sheep are the believers, and the goats go to
(20:28):
the disbelievers. And it's actually from it's a biblical metaphors.
It's from the from the day of judgment. I think.
So the sheep are the believers, the goats the disbelievers.
And there's some evidence that we actually call it the
sheep goat effect in our studies, that the sheep on
the whole tend to score more positively than the goats.
So the people who disbelieve tend not to do so well.
(20:51):
And I do I do think in the real world
people who are sort of cynical and skeptical. I'm sure
they have weird experiences, as I'm sure they do, but
I think they probably find a way to explain them
away or to account for them. Um. So you know,
it's not only the believers of strange experiences of para
(21:11):
normal experiences. I think everybody does. But we have different
ways of interpreting these experiences. In my personal life, usually
the women I'm around we like to talk about this
stuff more than men. Is that me just generalizing or
have you found that to be true? That is true,
It's not true that in the lab if you do
(21:31):
a trled experience, women and men score at the same level.
But when it comes to who is willing to send
in reports of experiences or who writes to the parapsychology labs.
It's more women than men who report experiences. And I
think that maybe not because women are more psychic than men,
but because culturally it's more acceptable for a women. You know,
(21:54):
the stereotype is that we're more kind of in tune
with our emotions and are more intuitive, We're more willing
to talk about at these things. So I think that
makes women more likely to report paranormal experiences than men.
So it's it's not that they have more experiences, but
they're more willing to talk to other people about them, right,
just because of the stereotype of being emotional being very
open about it. It's quite hard to know where the
(22:17):
psychic comes in there, because it's very hard to separate
what's normal and knowing each other's habits and sharing personalities
and sharing genetics, and then what's the paranormal. So it's
really really difficult to to separate these two out well. Also,
I would think especially genetics, like my brother, we do
(22:37):
share the same mother, so we were raised in the
same household. And the nature versus nurture of human beings
and the psychology behind that is our mothers are very
open about all of these kinds of topics and nothing
was off the table versus I know some people that
grew up in a home opposite of that, where it
(22:58):
was just very pragmatic, are less inclined to just talk
about this kind of stuff all day. Yeah. I mean,
I think when when you're trying to judge if it
is this a paranormal or psychic communication or not, it's
easier if the event is unexpected. So it's a bit
like I was saying, when we do our experiments, we
have a sender and a receiver, and the center has
(23:20):
a randomly selected target, so the receiver can't guess what
what they're they're going to be thinking about. And I
think it's the same in life. It's something really unexpected happens,
like I don't know, you you've you know, you break
your ankle walking off the cab, or you know your
bitten your hand gets bitten by a dog or something unexpected,
and your brother or your mother or your family member
(23:41):
gets that feeling, then that's that's more likely to be
psychic for me because it's unexpected. It was coming out
of the blue, so it seems more like a kind
of dramatic communication at that point, out of the ordinary exactly,
not something we would talk about all the time, not
saying it happens all the time. I has there been
anything you've seen that has just completely blown your mind. Well,
(24:04):
I've I've taken part in experiments where, um, you know,
I was the sender and it was scance felt experiments actually,
and um, my friend was the receiver and there was
one In fact, it was the other way around. I
was a receiver, so I was a person relaxing with
the red lights and everything. And you know, I'm not
someone who thinks that they're psychic, but I and I
(24:25):
normally don't get very vivid mental image ry at all.
So I closed my eyes, I don't really see anything.
But this one time I closed my eyes and I
kind of got this very clear image of a peacock
feather and I thought it was so clear and unusual
for me. And I just said, it's a peacock feather
and she said, yes, you know, this ender, that's what
the sender was looking at. So you know, I've had
(24:47):
I've had a striking experience which was quite unusual because
it was nothing like you know, normally it's not as
clear as that in the lab. So I've had that
kind of experience, but it's been in a in a
controlled environ and so I can't you know, I don't
believe it was just a coincidence. Um. You know, I've
taken part in experience, and I've also run experiments where
(25:07):
overall I've done um, you know, have a precognition study
with the gun spell, which is about getting impressions about
a future target that you will see at the end
of the session. So you lie back, you relax, you
describe what's going on inside your head, and at the
end of the session, we randomly select a film clip
and show it to you, and then we judge the
(25:29):
similarity between your impressions and the film clip. And I've
done that and got with sixty people what we say
statistically significant results, meaning that we've got more successful um
identifications of the picture that you would get by just
a chance. So you know, I've seen I've seen that,
and that makes me think that that it's worth pursuing
(25:51):
this line of research, because you know, I think something
is going on. I am really fascinated with the psychology
of people, why people are the way they are, why
they are who they are, because if there was ever
proof of a paranormal like a spirit hunting be opening
the door to something so huge for humanity. I mean,
(26:15):
there's a lot of ideas if you do see a ghost.
I mean, I'm actually reading a book at the moment,
which is it's about um. It's called The Haunting of
Alma Fielding, and it's a story. It's a true story
about para psychologist who investigated a woman called Alma Fielding
who had a lot of poltergeist experiences around her. Um. So,
(26:37):
you know, objects would fly off the shelfs and so on,
and he he was a psychologist, but he he tended
to think of it as not a spirit, but as
a sort of psychological projection from Alma of her desires
and traumas, if you like. So there are some you know,
if you see a ghost or a polter geist, that
(26:57):
doesn't mean this proof of the afterlife, to mean some
that's creating the effects around you. So there's different theories
basically to to explain ghosts, Like one's energy could become
so powerful that you are sending or receiving an image,
but that's not actually approve of afterlife. It could just
be you're wanting to it could be the living. I
(27:20):
mean if you think, um, you know, there's a theory
about poltergeist, which is this idea of objects moving around.
You know. For many years, par psychologists thought that maybe
the focused person that that it seemed to center on.
The phenomena centered on they they thought was that like
an adolescent person. And the theory was that, well, this
(27:41):
adolescence have kind of a lot of turmoil going on,
a lot of repressed energies and feelings, and um, that
that might be expressed through um, you know, instead of
them actually physically acting out, they psychically act out around them.
So that's one theory, you know, behind the polter Geist.
What is the definition of a polter guyst because when
(28:03):
you say poulter guys, I get so many different images
in my head from different movies and books. Well, it's
a German word. Pulter means noisy and guys means ghosts,
so it's a noisy ghost. So it's basically a rowdy
ghost that sort of throws things around, you know. It
affects physical objects with furniture around, throws plates across the room,
(28:24):
It seems to center usually on a person. You know,
it's it doesn't sort of occur randomly. It seems to
there's like an outbreak in a household, and then it
goes on for a few weeks and then it kind
of usually peters out. Um, So the thought was that
it might focus on articular person. That's what parasitologists have
thought might be going on. But the problem with these
(28:46):
events is that they you know, they start off they're
quite dramatic, but over time they gradually wane, and so
they're actually quite hard to study because again they're unpredictable.
And then typically the parasitologists might come along with a
camera and then nothing happens that they leave the room
and they played lip taps right, or as you're saying before,
it could be that you're so full of some sort
(29:08):
of emotion that your energy is literally making things fly
off the walls, and then maybe after you do that
for a couple of weeks, then you've calmed down, like
a good therapy session. Yes, exactly, there was a place
near Edinburgh, oh, Hampton Court. Yes, I have heard that
some places do seem to have one specific kind of
(29:31):
haunting and something that people see over and over. It's
a reoccurring thing, and it's generally everyone sees a woman
in the corner, or everyone here's footsteps in this one room.
I don't actually know that much about Hampton Court and
the underground vaults, so I was wondering if you could
just talk about that. Yeah, well, I mean there's a
(29:51):
little bit of a difference with a ghost and haunting,
So let's let's sort of do with that first of all.
So ghosts might just be a kind of experience that
might happen just once in one particular location, where you
see a figure, for example, or you hear something and
you think there's nobody actually there. But haunting is where
there's a repeated event in a particular location. And so
(30:12):
there's certain locations, typically of course, historical locations where they
develop a reputation for being haunted because lots of people
have seen the same thing there or have had lots
of unusual experiences in Hampton Court Palace Um in Surrey
Um has quite you know, it's got five hundred years
(30:32):
of history, so there's been plenty of Henry King. Henry's
wives have been beheaded there, and that's not very nice. No, no,
he was he was harsh. She was harsh anyway. So
it hit the Haunted Gallery in Hampton Courts, so called
because Catherine Howard, one of Henry the Eight's wives. Um,
she sort of was found committing adultery and then was
(30:55):
sentenced to death and she ran to the king to
plea for her life and was ragged screaming along this
this gallery and then and later of course she was beheaded.
And then in later years people would see this figure
and walking in the gallery. So we did an experiment there.
This is work that I did was Professor Richard Wiseman,
who I've collaborated with quite a lot, and we asked
(31:18):
it was really about the psychology of ghostly experiences, so
it was not a vigil. So it's not the sort
of thing you usually see on Telly where a bunch
of people sit in the haunted location with a camera
and wait for things to happen. What we did was
we um we got the warder of the palace, so
this is the people who kind of know they take
(31:38):
two guides around the tours round and they know where
people report the experiences. We gave them a floor plan
of two areas, the Haunted Gallery in the Georgian rooms,
and we got them to mark on the floor plan
where it is that people report strange experiences, and there
were clusters, you know, where people were reporting these experiences.
So we had this kind of map and then we
(31:59):
get off people, members of the public, a blank map
and we asked them to walk around the space and
to mark on their map where they were having experience.
It's like feeling chills or sensing a presence or hearing
feeling at touched, you know. So we were interested to
see whether people agreed, you know, with the warders what
(32:20):
the history was, you know, where the haunted experiences were happening.
And we found that yes, they did agree, even though
and we one of the things we wondered was what
is it Because they've read the tour book and asked
people that question before they did the experiment. Some people
had no idea of the history and some people did,
(32:40):
so we only looked at the data for those who
had no idea, and they showed the exactly the same pattern.
So that was that was very interesting. That suggests that
there's something about these locations that are causing people to
have an unusual experience because they agree it's not random.
It's in certain parts of the room where they're saying, oh,
I feel cold here. So that was one of the
(33:02):
things that we did, and then we we did a
follow up experiment with a similar kind of idea in
the underground vaults in Edinburgh and the Hampton Court study
was like in broad daylight, it was kind of busy, um,
lots of tourists mulling around. It was quite surprising that
lots of the people in our experiment had strange experiences
given it was actually quite a kind of bustling. It
(33:25):
was that spooky, yeah, it was. It wasn't spooky, It
wasn't spooky. But the Emperor Vaults are are spooky. You know,
they're kind of dark, they're damp, and they're kind of underground.
There are the kind of underground caverns underneath the bridge.
There's another one that's called Mary King's Close, which is
quite a good tourist attraction. It's kind of an underground
street and it also was reputedly haunted. But that that
(33:48):
one is not a kind of ghost tour, it's quite
a historical tour. I'd recommend that I'm not I have
no personal investment in this. By the way, folks, but
the underground vaults. What we did was we got again,
we got the tour guides, because there are people were
taking tours around the vaults and they had kind of
built up a dossier, if you like, a where in
(34:08):
the vaults, which one there were ten vaults, ten rooms,
which was the most spooky and where most people were
getting experiences. And we ranked ordered the ten vaults from
the most to the least haunted. So we had what
we called our Haunted Order. And then we got individuals
of the public individually went to one of the ten
(34:29):
vaults and then they would spend about ten minutes in
there and with a questionnaire, you know, right down what
they were experiencing, and we were we found that their
reports matched the Haunted Order, So the same thing essentially,
it was slightly different design, same thing as a Hampton
Court Palace um study that people were agreeing which was
(34:51):
this haunted vault, which was the scariest vault to be in,
and which was the least haunted? So was that when
you say scary as vault to at least aunted. So
is that according to historical like the most messed up
things happened per room. It's it's it's not it's not
that there were historical events happening there. It's not like,
(35:12):
you know, there was a slaughter in the in one
room and you know the other room as a bakery.
Not that. So it was more that when people visited
these rooms before our experiment, there were more strange experiences
happening in one vault compared to another one. So it
was it was the track record, I feel like the
ghost track record of the vaults, and we were basically
(35:34):
finding um Even when we had people who had no
knowledge beforehand of what was in the vaults, they still
agreed where the strange experiences were happening. So to us,
that suggested, actually, there's something about the environment, not necessarily
anything ghosts, something about shape and the lighting and the
temperature and the humidity of the vaults that may contribute
(35:57):
towards people having um sing weird experiences. And we did
find both studies found that the majority of the experiences
that what we're reporting what to do with changes in temperature,
usually feeling chilled, but you know, sometimes it would be
the other way around, feeling unusually hot. So that might
be something to do with the environment that they're in. Well,
(36:17):
I assume like the ventilations, lighting, or if a room
is just colder because it's in a different floor or whatever,
those kind of things. I'm sure you've thought of all
those things. Well, we have, but I mean, I think
these are quite subtle things you're not For example, if
you're in a room, you you maybe not consciously thinking about,
you know, how light or how dark the room is
(36:40):
relative to light in the corridor outside. And when we
we found that that was one of the factors that
seemed to influence I think what might be happening at
least you know, this doesn't explain August at all, but
you know what, what we observed was that people may
be unconsciously responding to subtle things in their environment without
being aware of it. It's not that there was like
a blowing through, but you know, there could be quite
(37:02):
subtle even things like geomagnetic activity. So you know, um,
you know, very very subtle kind of environmental things that
we don't normally pay any attention to maybe having some
influence on us. Another another study, if I've got time
to mention, it's not study that that I did, but
it was about infrasound. Um, so this is someone called
(37:22):
Vic Tandy, who found that he was working in a
workshop and and he noticed he kept getting this kind
of blurring in his vision and kept seeing a figure
off to his to his right, and um, he felt
it was haunted. He felt it was quite a booky experience.
And then one day he had one of these big
fencing swords, you know, a file that's thank you. He
(37:44):
had it clamped in this workshop and he noticed that
it started to vibrate. And he was an engineer, so
he was kind of curious, why is it kind of vibrating?
And he moved it up and down the workshop and
he discovered that there was a kind of a standing wave.
So there was a very low energy sound wave in
the workshop that you couldn't hear. It was too low
for our auditory system, but it was the foil was
(38:06):
picking it up. And he discovered that there was a
new air conditioning system had been put in. This big
kind of fan was creating a kind of vibration, or
a low energy vibration in the room. And that he believed,
and there's evidence from elsewhere as well, that that can
cause kind of strange visual effects because it can affect
you that your eyeballs. So he thought it started off
(38:29):
as a kind of haunting experience. But he believed that
he found a kind of physical explanation for it. But
it took a little bit of detective work. You know,
it wasn't at all obvious what what the cause was, right,
It's just so interesting as you're talking and thinking of
crystals and how certain kinds of stones could be have
different pulls depending on what your body has made out of.
(38:51):
So you have to take all of this into consideration,
which I'm sure you do. It's just such a fascinating
line of work. I mean, it seems like you would
never be boring. It never does get boring. No, no,
except if I've got a hundred and fifty essays to mark.
Oh jeez, Okay, well I will let you go. But
I just wanted to Are you a spiritual person a
religious person? No? I I like mother Nature. You know,
(39:14):
I loved the environment and you know the planet. But
you know I'm not I'm not a spiritual person. I
don't think even in like these psychic moments, does it
make you feel more connected to anything inside yourself or
anything else or to the other person. Well, I suppose
I'm normally the person who's running the experiment rather than
having the experience myself. Have you ever had an experience
(39:37):
where it just like sent chills up your spine and
it just made you feel like maybe there is something? Yeah, yeah,
I had to. I mean actually, um so one of
the things I did was Richard Wiseman again, was that
we were doing a kind of theatrical event which was
a recreation of a Victorian seance. Okay, so see, never
(39:57):
a dull moment in my in my job, right, And
what we were doing was it was kind of an
experiment because you know, we weren't trying to raise any spirits, okay,
without giving any secrets away, I was kind of helping
out behind the scenes, shall always say. And I had
to hide, so I was like a kind of secret
accomplice I had to hide in. It was down down
(40:18):
in Mary King's Close actually, and I was down there
on my own waiting for the group to arrive, and
I could hear footsteps around me, and um, I thought,
that's really strange because I know there's nobody else here,
and yeah, I could hear the footsteps. So that was
definitely a you know, a hair standing off at the
back of my neck experience. Oh my gosh. Well, I
definitely would love to check in in like five years
(40:40):
and see what other creepy things you experience, because I
bet if you're opening yourself up to it, as you said,
you might be receiving more creepy things in your life.
I hope so, I hope so well. I just want
to say thank you very much. If you would like
to tell our listeners where to find you or more
information about you, now would be the dame. Just you
(41:01):
can tell about a girl like a website or Cussler
Parapsychology Unit. That's our website, and on that you can
find a little bit more about what we do and
hopefully you might be able to get involved. Great. Well,
if you ever need somebody to study, I'm your girl, right.
Thank you so much. Thanks for infoting me. It's been fun.
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