October 31, 2020 • 43 mins
According to a 2009 poll, more Americans believe in ghosts than don't. But what are ghosts exactly? If they do exist, what are they made of and why are they hanging around? In this classic episode airing for Halloween, Josh and Chuck explore both sides of the divide between belief and skepticism on the topic of ghosts and look at some pretty cool explanations for hauntings.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, it's your old pal Josh Ghoulish Clark. And
for this week's special Halloween edition of s Y s
K Selects, I've chosen our classic episode How Ghosts Work,
which it turns out we recorded in July weirdly enough,
but it seems appropriate to release this Saturday. So I
(00:21):
hope you endured and boo. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know,
a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles
(00:42):
debe Chuck Bryant, and this is Stuff you should Know.
Jerry's over there twiddling and fuxing around Halloween and Julie right,
remember when we had the Horror fiction contest last year,
Actually this may be July. Um yeah, yeah, yeah, and
we I think that the deadline for submissions was in July.
Was weird to be in that kind of Halloween mindset
(01:02):
while it was hot out, but yeah, and I'm sure
it was weird to ask the authors, or not to ask,
but to have them get in that mindset to write
something creepy. We definitely didn't command. You talked me out
of that. Yeah, that was a good contest, also known
as the contest that shall never happen again. Well, we
also ended up with the one that we're going to
read this year, right, I think, yeah, yeah, it's a
(01:24):
good one. It is a good one. Uh, you guys
will have to see in a few months what we're
talking about is right, so chuck. Um, I myself have
never officially seen a ghost, but I understand you have
a ghost story. I do. I remarked about it and
I said, oh, I'm gonna wait till we do our
ghost podcast. Well here we are, pal is this it?
(01:44):
Should I go? Now? Yeah? Okay, I'm not saying this
was a ghost. What I'm saying is one night I
saw something very very very strange that I cannot explain. Okay, okay,
are you ready? Yeah? I feel like she could have
music or something. Year that could probably be done. Um
so Athens Georgia College, I would say, I don't remember
(02:06):
the exact year, but it was probably is. Um my
best friend and I, Brett, had had gone out and um,
we're going back home, uh and driving through five points
you know the area. So we're coming from like let's
say the direction of campus, and you know there's a
(02:26):
cut through if you take a certain road and five
points that cuts you over to Alps Road, and people
are gonna be like, what is he talking about? I know,
I just I'm talking to you here. Uh. And so
there's this one area where you go around a road
curves ninety degrees and then about i'd say two hundred
feet after that there's a four way stop sign. It's
very NEIGHBORHOODI area. I think that's like where Ray Golf
(02:49):
used to live. He Vince Duley lives over there. That
might be what you're thinking. So we go around this
ninety degree curve and I'm looking, you know, I'm filling
with the radio or something, and my buddy Brett starts,
uh like kind of joke, screaming like, oh what is that?
But getting around and I look up and in the
middle of the intersection and I swear, people, I'm not
(03:09):
making this up and I did not hallucinate it. This
is God's honest truth. There was a what looked like
a hundred year old woman wearing a black robe with
a purple sash dagonal across her chest, and she was
standing in the middle of the intersection holding a bible
(03:29):
like this kind of on her placed on her fingertips
as you would hold like like a waiter would hold
a platter about chess level, and she was sort of
looking in the other direction with kind of a vacant
look on her face like you have now or is
it just she was completely vacant, completely still didn't move
an inch and wasn't like an hazy apparition, I mean,
(03:51):
was solid and looked real, real, real, dude. It was
so freaky. We pull right up on her to you know,
take that left, and we're both kind of jokes screaming,
but then as we get closer, we're like, you know,
what's going on here? But it all happened in like, oh,
fifteen seconds, so it wasn't a lot of time to register,
(04:12):
you know what is this. We were just sort of
getting around and we pull right by her and take
a left, like you know, if this is her. We
pull within feet of her, and she's on my side
at this point because we're turning right by her. She
doesn't blink, doesn't move a muscle, and we were going
probably fifteen minur in this curve. He starts like he
(04:32):
can't drive his stick shift anymore because he's freaking out.
The cars like jerking and sputtering. He pulls over probably
fifty ft later. We both turned around out the back
window and there's nothing there. I'm getting looked chill bumps. Uh,
And to this day, I have no idea what the
heck it was. And it was either a crazy, crazy
(04:52):
old woman who is really fast, which is really creepy
and really fast, or the most believable Madam Tusso's wax
dummy I've ever seen. It was also really fast that
someone ran and set out there and we didn't see it,
and then ran and took it away. I'm not offering
any explanation, not saying it was a ghost, but I
have no recollect or explanation for what it could have been.
(05:14):
And it was the creepiest, weirdest thing I've ever seen.
And we both described it to each other immediately, like
what did you see? What did you see? Had gold leafing?
I mean, I can't say it was a Bible because
I didn't see the cover, but it, you know, had
that gold leafing around it looked like a bible. So
you both saw the same thing, exact same thing. Purple sash,
black robe, silver hair. That is one of the pernicious
(05:36):
qualities of a ghost sighting is that frequently people will
see the same thing. Two different people will see the
same thing, which lends a tremendous amount of credence to
something because if one person just sees it, well it's
a hallucination. Exactly. You were clearly on something, we were not.
But that's what somebody could say. Both of you saw it.
Even if you both were on something, right, that doesn't
(05:59):
mean you're gonna see the exact same thing. Yeah, and
I wasn't like some big ghost guy. I'd never have
had looked for them or say, oh I believe in ghosts.
It would just out of nowhere of boom, there it
happened right exactly. Um. You can also go a little
further if you're a skeptic and say, well, I mean
Chuck and Brett Brett just kind of we're playing off
one another description and they came to some unconsciously came
(06:23):
to an agreement of this. You guys compiled the story
and you saw the same thing that. However you approach
that probably depends on whether you're part of the or
the forty percent of Americans who don't believe in ghosts
or who do believe in ghosts. According to a two
thousand nine CBS News poll. I had never given it
much thought, but after that I was I was definitely like, well,
(06:46):
if that was a ghost and I just saw one, Yeah,
And I researched a little bit, but this was long
ago before the internets was born, and so I couldn't
find anything. And even looked yesterday just to see if
I could find out anything, if there was some sightings
or some old lady have been killed or anything, and nothing.
Now I couldn't find anything. So that was just your
own personal ghost. Maybe we're just some creepy old woman
(07:08):
who was still in not blinking as a car barrel
towards her. Either way, that is very unsettling either way. Um,
And that's a pretty good ghost story. It was a
good one. It was not a mask, you know, I
can say that for sure. Like we pulled up within
feet of her, Like I looked in her face and
she and she didn't move a mustle, didn't move a muscle. Man.
That's scary. It was the scariest thing that's ever happened
(07:29):
to me. And we told that story many many times
over the years, and everyone's always like, really, and I
always say, I swear, why would I make this up?
So that's my ghost story. That's a good ghost story.
You can reach us on Facebook, right, Yeah, it's time
for message break. All right. Wait, wait, Jerry, it's not
really time for message break. But she left pretty quick.
(07:51):
So we're talking ghosts. And like I said, forty percent
of Americans believe in ghosts, don't. Yeah, And I think
a lot of people, especially after reading this, there's the
whole you know, I really miss my deceased relative, and
I go to seances and I think those things the
(08:13):
mind can play tricks on you. But in my case,
it was just like those are the ones where I'm like,
what's going on here? You know, well, it's pretty much
impossible to disprove something or to prove something doesn't exist,
which is one reason why belief in ghosts continues on.
(08:33):
But there's also a lot of um. There's also a
lot of factors in ghosts that accumulated create this body
of you know, ghost belief. What our ghost ghostly sightings, hauntings, appversions,
all that stuff. Sure that um kind of over time
have taken on a life of their own, or I
should say, have been around for thousands and thousands of
(08:53):
years um, and have not been dispelled by science. Um.
So we're going to kind of approach this from like,
you know, here's what people believe ghosts are, and here's
some scientific explanations for it. But throughout this you'll notice
that at no point are we ever going to say
conclusively science has proven that ghost don't exist, because it
(09:17):
kind of can't. That's not to say that people aren't
using the scientific method to study ghosts, because some are,
and my hat is off to these people most of all. Yeah,
so let's hug cohosts man. All right, well I just
described my encounter, which, like I said, wasn't hazy or weird. Um, well,
it was weird. It wasn't like a hazy apparition. But
many times as an apparition, um, sometimes it's lights, it
(09:40):
seems to hit every sense. Sometimes it's a smell um,
like Tracy pointed out in this article, like the smell
of deceased relative's favorite meal being cooked in the other room,
stuff like that. Or the smell of the deceased relative
just smelled something like rotting. But it was just a
roll in the wall, right exactly. It can be a song,
(10:03):
can be flickering lights, can be uh, orbs in a picture.
We'll talk about that, or a ghost in a picture.
Like there's plenty of those. Hey, I got you got
a Google. It's pretty fun to look at those. Yeah,
and there's some that are like this one's not quite
explained to my full satisfaction. Yeah, some of the If
you look up famous ghost pictures, there's a handful that
(10:23):
have made the rounds over the years that are pretty good.
Like the Lady of Brown Hall, I believe is that
the girl with a fire? No, that's a good one.
That's a real good one. Um, there's a woman descending
a staircase like a ghostly woman. Um. Freddie Jackson the
World War two, World War One pilot killed or mechanic.
(10:45):
I'm sorry he was killed, and then he showed up
in a group photo two days later. Um. That one
was explained as a double exposure, which I mean, just
the coincidence behind it is in and of itself staggering
if that is the explanation, and for of course it
also could be a hoax. But it's a pretty good on.
Freddy Jackson is my favorite one. I think my favorite
(11:06):
is the Old West. Did you see that one? It's
like boothill or something it was in I think, and
this guy dressed up like a cowboy and you know,
had his picture made but with his friend. And then
in the back ground you see this guy. Yeah I
did like kind of peeking up maybe behind a tombstone. Um,
just in the brush. Yeah, And supposedly these things were
(11:28):
verified by photo experts and stuff is having been untouched.
So yeah, because photoshop is making it way easier to
screw with photography, but it's also fairly easy to detect too.
If you really dig into the individual pixels, you can say, well,
this is obviously, and especially these old photos when they're
(11:50):
examining negatives, it's not that those weren't photoshops, right, I mean,
it could be light playing tricks. But when you see
a girl standing by the rail of you know, with
a fire behind her, that one is explained as the
girl in the fire. Yeah, that was explained as a
just a sheer chance mixture of smoke and light. And
(12:11):
then our um programming, like us being hardwired to pick
faces out of anything. I don't know, man, that looked
pretty much like a girl to me. It definitely doesn't it. Yeah. Um,
And then of course there's the funny things like the
three minute a Baby Ghost, which was a cut out
of Dead Dancing, or The Wizard of Oz, like Hanging Munchkin,
which was although I have to say, since you bring
(12:33):
it up, one of the greatest short you know, I
love short horror fiction. Of course they're one of the
greatest um ones I've ever read. Was called The Hanging
Man of Oz. It's like, um it was. It's only
just a few years old, but it's a good little
short story. Yeah. Yeah, this guy who like gets kind
of caught up in like looking for it. It's good,
(12:56):
good horror fiction. Um. This doesn't have to do with
go But supposedly there's a murder captured on Google Earth.
Have you seen that making the rounds? No, it's an
aerial shot obviously of a dock somewhere in Europe, I think,
by the water, and it looks like a guy's like
dragging a dead body in a big pool of blood
toward the water. But they I think they've debunked that
(13:19):
it was a dog who had shaken off and gotten
the ground wet, and people verified later like, yeah, that
was me and my dog, and yeah, I stop asking
questions because my dog soone posted in on our Facebook wall.
But I mean you bring up a that's that's a
really good like you see what you want exactly. Um.
But again we say, you can't really prove that ghost
(13:40):
stone exists. So people are like, prove it doesn't prove anything,
you know. Um, if you can prove that a photograph
has been faked, then you've proven it's been faked. But
you can't just look in and be like, oh, I'm
sure it's a fake that doesn't muster. Yeah, so they
(14:24):
we we've covered photos. They show up in photos. Well
why are they here? I mean there's a lot of explanations,
like they're delivering bad news or good news, right. Yeah.
There's a lot of ghost stories where, um, the dead
have suddenly appeared to a relative on the other side
of the planet at the moment they died. Like the
relative wakes up the next day to find out that
(14:45):
the person died at nine a m. When they just
saw them sitting in their room at that same time.
So sometimes they're they're coming to say, hey, I love you,
see you in fifteen years, um, or they're coming to
say you're about to die. That's another that's the worst
long standing legend. Yeah, or they're about to say like, um,
(15:08):
it's it's a should sell your Yahoo stock now, that'd
be a good ghost, right. Um. You know, there's a
lot of stuff you can you can say that people
have attributed to ghosts and why they're here. Um, there's
also that horrible um experience as their last moments. Yeah,
(15:29):
they they are at the point where they died too
young or uh, maybe have just gone back to their
favorite place in life. Um, earthbound spirits, I think is
what paranormal investigators call those situations, like they're stuck here
or it's like, you know, get off my train type
of situation. They're guarding a place. Maybe there's not one,
(15:53):
but two um ghost women at the Hotel del del
Coronado in San Diego, very famous late night eighteenth century
built hotel resort um and both of them took their
own lives at the hotel when they found out they
were pregnant at a wedlock or one was married but
her husband and left her and so they're in two
(16:13):
different rooms still. But that's an example of a ghost
being tied to a place. Yeah. And um, we have
an article on the site about haunted hotels that a
lot of hotels and all around the world, but especially
in places like New Orleans and um like old spooky Spanish.
I guess the Cornetto is probably one of those. There's one,
and I believe Colorado or the one they used for
(16:37):
the Overlooking No. Um, it's it's just like a plain
o like regular cool hotel, but it has like a
stream running through the lobby. Yeah, which is cool in
and of itself. And I don't remember where I saw this,
but um, it was like on some TV show or
this it's like a super haunted hotel supposedly, see like
the ghost Waiter, is it? I don't I don't remember.
(16:59):
I don't wait through the the river, Yeah, he had
his pants rolled up and yeah, flipp the caviary pop
is awesome. Uh that is the best of must right then,
I'm sorry. Um. And you know there are mediums out
there who uh you know, if you saw the movie
Ghost Whoopy Goldberg. Obviously there's many times hucksters trying to
(17:19):
take advantage of people, saying they can contact people, put
you in touch with your relatives that have passed. Um,
but I'm sure they're very There are a lot of
mediums who really believe what they're doing is for real,
you know. Yeah. And what's what's kind of ironic is um.
There's this really great article, it's just a little quick
editorial actually from Los Angeles Times in two thousand and six,
(17:41):
is called The Science Afraid of Ghosts is written by
Deborah bloom Right, and she basically points out that like
we we used to have psychical research societies, like William James,
effectively the founder of psychology, like investigated the paranormal as
well and conducted like extensive real scientific experiments and along
(18:05):
the way debunked a lot of mediums, like the nineteenth century,
the Victorian era, um. And so part of this investigation
into the paranormal um was not just it wasn't just
to prove that ghosts existed. It was just to understand
the paranormal on its own terms. And along the way, say,
(18:26):
this person is a fraud, this person is a huckster.
This ectoplasm is cheesecloth that they had like stuffed in
their cheek, you know. Um, And and that was part
of it. And over time I think science has just
kind of thrown out the whole thing, the baby with
the bath water, and now it's just up to uh
kind of the more mean spirited section of the skeptical
(18:51):
world to just go after and debunk. There's nobody looking
for There are very few people looking to prove or
disprove the existence of ghosts. It's more just like this
photograph was faked, right, you know what I mean? Yeah? Um,
And on photographs, I guess we should talk about orbs
um very famously. Orbs show up in pictures, and uh,
(19:14):
some people, you know, say that that is a very
um specific part of the journey of the ghost is
when they are an ORB. I have an ORB picture
which I'll post on Facebook. Emily believes it is our grandfather.
We he had just passed away, and the photograph he
was the biggest dog lover I've ever known. And Uh,
(19:36):
we had just finished our fencing in our backyard and
our house that we bought. So it had been like
six or eight months that our dogs couldn't go back there.
So we finally let them back there, and I had
a camera. It was like, I gotta take pictures to this,
and they start playing around like crazy, and in one
of the pictures there's an ORB boom right there above
the dogs playing, and Emily was like, that's Charlie, that's
(19:57):
my grandfather. He's coming to visit. So I didn't debunk that.
But supposedly skeptics will say that could be a camera
flash reflecting off with thus particles I use, no flash,
water spots on the camera lens, bone dry uh defects,
and digital camera sensors. I guess it could be that
(20:19):
although it was a new camera and it's never done
that sense or printing errors. It was not printed or developed,
so who knows. I'm just saying I've got a great
ORB photo that I'll post my dog's playing. You raise
a really good question then, like, I mean, what's the
what's the value of debunking that I don't know photo?
It made him only feel nice? It still does, so
(20:40):
why I mean, what is the value? I mean, I
guess we'll cover it later. Yeah, but there's this, uh
that that question keeps coming up to me throughout the
researching this. It's like it's not hurting anybody, right, Um,
so chuck uh. I guess a really good question. If
we're gonna talk about how ghost work is, what would
ghosts be made of? Like we said, the Victorians believe
(21:01):
that they were made of ectoplasm. Today, if you talk
to a someone who believes in ghosts and like researchers
ghosts and like that's part of their world. They prevailing
idea is that they're made of energy of somehow okay
I can't remember which, a lot of thermodynamic state. That
energy cannot be created or destroyed, just transferred states. That
(21:25):
would be a pretty good understanding of what ghosts are
if they are real. So a life force that had
passed from a live person is now a different kind
of energy exactly, Um, medic Chlorians, what is that? This
is the Star Wars? Okay, is how they explained the force?
Who are the medic Chlorians? I don't remember. It was
very disappointing, though it sounds really familiar. Was it from
(21:46):
the newer three? Yeah? Yeah, it was how they explained. Basically,
they explained what the force was, and everyone was like,
why don't you go and do that? I got you.
I remember that now. Um. Other theories are that um,
if they are some sort of energy, they could also
be some form of matter, right, so maybe they're made
(22:07):
of some sort of quantum particles or an arrangement of
quantum particles, which I find kind of an interesting explanation
because think about it, ghosts can are They're frequently said
to be able to travel through solid matter. Right. Well,
if you go down to the quantum level and you
start looking at transistors, there's a big problem in early
transistor um development and that individual electrons can pass right
(22:31):
through the wall of a transistor. It's called quantum tunneling,
and um they had to figure out how to use
crystals to kind of block trans electrons in to make
them flow the way you wanted rather than just be like, oh,
I'm over here now. So some people say, well, maybe
these are some sort of quantum particles or an arrangement
of quantum particles that were able to perceive somehow, right,
(22:54):
And then the question I would have is is there
a consistent uh explanation on why some people might become
a ghost and some others not? And the answer is no,
Or are they everywhere and some you just have a
stronger energy force or something? Who knows? Yeah? Because I
mean if if people tend to perceive ghosts more than others,
(23:18):
and that typically from studies has been shown to be
people who believe in ghosts tend to see them more often,
report hauntings. Um, why wouldn't they see them all the time? Yeah,
Like why wouldn't so? Yeah, that would indicate that there
is something about an individual person that would make them
become a ghost. So many questions. Well, the whole unfinished business,
(23:39):
like it died too young. Things I can wrap my
head around that, Like an energy force that was so
strong that has now gone still could be around. Um,
I'm trying to decide what part I'd lie in. Do
I believe in ghosts? I think so? Okay. So there's
a dude named Richard Wiseman of a University of Hertfordshire,
(24:02):
and he's done a lot of research in gb Great Britain,
and he has found some pretty consistent results that people
have generally reported the same things in the same places,
even if they didn't know there was any ghost activity there,
even if they did or didn't believe. Actually, if they
did believe, they were more, like you said, more apt
(24:25):
to see a ghost. But he had consistent results of
specific places. Yeah, I mean like he applied the scientific
method to researching ghosts, and he he documented what what parts,
what areas in a reportedly haunted place. Sightings were most
frequently reported basically found that, like you could, you could
(24:47):
map out areas where sightings were. Okay, so that's step one,
and then step two. We had people who who encountered
ghosts described their experiences, and he kind of compiled the data.
Then he went back to see what other commonalities there
were for an area. Yeah, like physical conditions there, Yes,
like how cold is it? Is it humid? Um? Let
(25:09):
me measure the light, let me measure the magnetic field? Right.
What he found, though, interestingly, was that um, there were
specific areas where people who had no understanding of the
history of the place they were seeing where it heard
that the area was haunted, had reported seeing something. So
there was something to a specific area being quote haunted,
(25:33):
And people who didn't necessarily believe in ghosts or didn't
know that the place was supposed to be haunted had
reported not only that they'd seen a sighting or something
in this building, but in the specific area of this building. Yeah,
what does that mean? It's a consistent study, right, So,
and Wiseman is a part of this kind of long
but very um small, smally sparsely populated um tradition of
(26:00):
like paranormal researchers, like legitimate ones I could get into that. Man.
When I was a kid, I used to want to
go to Duke and study paranormal or para psychology there. Yeah,
they had a para of psychology department. It was led
by a guy named Joseph Ryan, who was another like
legitimate para psychological researcher. Um, you could have gotten a
(26:21):
TV show on Science Chip, Yeah, totally. U c l
A used to have one from I think now they
shut it down and I think the mid eighties, but
it was around from like the fifties or sixties up
to the eighties and it was well respected. Um. William
James was another researcher. Uh. As of the nineties, James,
(26:43):
Huron and Renny Lange are still doing research and writing books. Um.
Harry Price was a very famous one. Yeah. He was
famous for investigating Borderley Rectory, which was supposed to be
like the most haunted place in England. And then now,
if you want to get a degree in paras psychology,
(27:04):
you can go to the American University or you can
go to University of Edinburgh. Those are the two places
as far as I know, in the Western world where
you can get a paras psychology degree. I could see
that the Great Britain's has a lot of um ghostly
activity and paranormal investigators, and they're into it over there,
and Edinburgh is supposed to be the most haunted city
in all of Europe. Really a bunch of dissatisfied scotsman
(27:27):
roaming the bog. Right. Um, so we've kind of laid
it out right, Yeah, I feel like we've laid it out,
like we've got them. We all understand what ghosts. I
don't think we really said anything that people are like,
oh yeah, sure, I didn't realize that's what a ghost is. Um.
What I found interesting is that there's some really good
(27:49):
explanations for ghostly activity. Yeah. Sometimes Tracy points out, I
mean there's so many explanations. There's such a wide range
from this person just hallucinated something, right, And I want
to say with that, specifically, we're starting to understand that
hallucinations are way more common than anybody has admitted for
(28:11):
a very long time because we are afraid of being
put away or label is crazy. But people hallucinate more
than we generally understand they do. And specifically, grief is
supposed to be able to trigger hallucinations. Pretty really which
would explain visitation and dead relatives shortly after they die. Yeah. Um,
(28:33):
we've talked about sleep paralysis before. That's an explanation that
you hear a lot about someone laying in bed. They
can't move and they are hallucinating, um, spirits and things. Right,
they think they're awake, but they're not. Yeah, and you're
incapable of moving. There's also the hypnogogic trance, which comes
at the onset of sleep and is a sort of
(28:53):
trance that supposedly you can hallucinate in. Yeah, I've had
that happen before, Like in my wake am I sleep
that I just hear something? Oh yeah, yeah, sure, you know. Um.
And then sometimes it's just you know, the window shut
itself because it was loose and the wind blew it,
or the door shut because there was a draft, or
(29:13):
it's cold in here because you know there's a draft.
You know, a lot of times there's just literally an explanation,
a physical explanation for what happened. So, um, you you
hit upon. One of the hallmarks of haunting activity is
a change in temperature and unexplained change in temperature in
a haunted room when a ghost is present and like
(29:34):
you said, it's often like a chimney or a drafty
window or something like that. But people who investigate this
kind of thing also often explain that phenomenon by um,
a lack of humidity. Right, Lower humidity can make a
room feel colder. Right? And what about an area of
a room? Though I don't know, I mean, I don't
(29:56):
like that's that's a really good question, dude. How can
an area of a room be number one colder if
if there isn't a draft, If it's not a draft,
it's just like a static area in a room that's cold. Um,
if there's just a decrease in humidity, what causes the
decrease in humidity that makes it feel colder? And they
(30:17):
have found that um areas that are supposedly haunted, well,
I should say, Richard Wiseman found in one place that
was supposedly haunted, UM, it tended to be less humid
than other areas, So that would explain the cold chill.
But how is one area just a part of a
room less humid than another. Yeah, and I'm curious about
(30:38):
what kind of temperature drop people have seen, um, Like
how drastic it's been. I couldn't find any like reputable
information on that. Like in the movies, you walk into
the corner and you can see your breath all of
a sudden and you're freezing. Yeah, like the sixth sense, right, yeah, yeah,
that poor kid. Um. But also I wonder then if
it's not even necessarily a real change in temperature. Supposedly
(31:01):
ghost hunters can measure changes in temperature in a room
and that means the ghost is present. Or if it's
just the sensation of a chill running through your body
and it's not actually thermal, it's psychological. Yeah, your your
central nervous system. Yeah, I just got chill bumps earlier.
You know, you did. What about the electrical fields? That's um,
A very common thing is for a parent noormal investigator
(31:23):
to measure magnetic field and electrical fields in an area. Um,
they will say that this is kind of proof that
there's some sort of presence there because the you know,
the Ghostbusters E meter is going crazy? Right, exactly what
do they call that? I can't believe. We can't remember that.
I can't remember it either, the one that that Egan
(31:45):
held up to Uh yeah, yeah, I don't remember what
it's called. We're going to get in trouble for that. Yeah, sorry, guys. UM,
But sometimes, UM, these fields can cause wacky things happening
with the brain, can cause hallucinations, can cause dazziness or
or other neurological symptoms. And they're saying that might play
into it, the fact that you think you have seen
(32:06):
a ghost right there, they're saying. Investigators are saying, yeah,
there actually is something different here with the UM. The
area's electrical field, electro magnetic field. There's something going on here.
But it's possible that that's what's making you think there's
a ghost here, rather than there's a ghost here and
it's affecting the field. It's hitting your angular gyrus right,
(32:28):
that's a part of the brain that UM. Evidently, if
it's stimulated, you can get the sense that someone's behind
you mimicking your movements. Yeah, which is pretty creepy. I mean,
we're we're all familiar with the transcranial magnetic stimulation the
thinking cap. That's a cool episode. UM. And when you
apply a magnetic pulse to different parts of the brain,
(32:49):
different things happen, and one of them is definitely hallucinations.
And then another example of UM, the magnetic field messing
with us. I guess is that a lot of haunting
activity is reported at night, supposedly UM. And that's right exactly,
that's that's number one. But number two the magnetosphere, you know,
(33:10):
the the the part of the Earth's atmosphere that protects
us from the charged ions of solar wind, the way
that the Earth is arranged to the Sun, the part
that's in darkness. UM has a larger part of the
magnetosphere surrounding it, more warped toward that. So that might
explain it then, right, so it looks like a spider.
(33:30):
It does, but there's a lot more UM magnetic field
activity going on in the darker side of Earth, so
at night that one could be a stretch. Yeah. I
think my favorite UM explanation that I had not heard
about is infrasound. I think that's pretty cool. This to
me is that, Yeah, it's UM low frequency sound waves
(33:51):
that you cannot hear. You know, with your naked ear,
you won't notice it, but it can cause your eyes
to vibrate, it can cause you to see things, you
can cause a sense of dread. UM and cracked. Actually,
one of our favorite websites did a test at a concert,
didn't they Well, they reported on it. There was a
(34:12):
they don't do test, that's right, they report on test.
But yeah, there's a great correct article on it. UM.
And they're talking about In the fifties, a guy named
Vladismir Vladimir Gavreaux, robotics engineer, noticed that like one of
his lab assistants was bleeding from an ear. It's not good,
and traced it to UM to this infrasound. I think
(34:33):
it's like seven and nineteen hurts and UM. You can't
hear it, like you don't realize you're hearing sound, but
you're reacting to it. And like you said, it causes
all sorts of like weird psychological effects, like a sense
of dread, a sense that there's somebody else near you. Um,
all the classic telltale signs of hauntings, so much so
(34:54):
that they've traced literal like hauntings back to infrasound. Yeah,
the Ghost in the Machine is an article UM by
Victandy and Tony Lawrence that the same thing was going
on there and they traced it back to a fan
and then they modified the fans housing the sound went
away and the supposed haunting went away, right exactly. I mean,
(35:16):
isn't that weird? Though? Like, surely you've been in a
room before that you just had to turn around and
run out of because you just knew that there's somebody
else in there with you. You have, I have plenty
of times sort of. But I think it's like I've
been in like Savannah near you know, on the ghost tour.
Like I'm highly suggestible what I'm saying. But isn't it
strange to think that a sound that you can't hear
(35:38):
it was responsible for producing that that? Like we're our
brains are that malleable that like just a sound we
can't even hear, but the vibrations we can still sense
somehow are having an effect on our brain and scaring
us and making us turn around and run out of yeah,
and potentially twitching your eye and causing hallucinations. Right, So
this sound has been shown. NASA showed that um that
(36:01):
an infrasound at that frequency can make your eye vibrate imperceptibly.
But then something close to your vision, like say the
rim of your glasses or something appear, Your brain confuses
and things that that's moving, So it looks like there's
a little dark figure moving out of the corner of
your eye. Infrasound can actually cause visual and audit well
(36:23):
not auditory hallucination, psychological yeah, psychological effects and visual hallucinations.
So and the creation of a sense of dread. Yeah,
that's yeah. I want to get an infrasound machine. It's
just like played around the office. You know, there may
already be one here. Well. I don't even think we
said what the guy did though at the concert? Did
we know he played? Did he play it? Under the
(36:45):
concert and people were freaking out? Yeah? I think like
a quarter of the people at the concert reported feeling
like horrible dread and like some nausea. Um. Maybe because
it was a Doctor John show. That's the first awful
thing I could think of. Dr John's correct. I know,
I knew you were gonna say that. It really is.
(37:07):
I mean, like you shoul see that guy played two
pianos at once. Yeah, he's he's he's a legend. What
am I talking about? You're thinking of? Um? Maybe Dr
Hook and the Medicine Show. No Dr Demento. I was
trying to think of the worst band I can think of,
and that's the first thing that came to my mind,
that's who you thought of. Nickelback is out there. Yeah,
(37:29):
it was a Nickelback show. There. We can fix this
in editing, Okay, Um, so what else? I think The
last thing Tracy has here is that, um, the National
Science Board is actually come out and said that if
you believe in paranormal it can be dangerous because that
means you have reduced critical thinking skills and you can't
(37:50):
make great day to day decisions. It's kind of mean.
That irked me because on the other end of the spectrum,
you can definitely make the case that just pooh pooing
out of hand as non existent anything that science can explain.
It shows a distinct lack of critical thinking and even
more dangerously, a lack of imagination, and that irks me
(38:12):
to no end. Yeah, I enjoyed that you sent me
the skepdoid. Brian Dunning is that the same his article,
and I kind of appreciated his approach with this was
you know, uh, maybe that means there's other cool ways
to explain these things, right, like don't poopo it. Maybe
open your mind to other interesting phenomena that can be explained. Well,
(38:34):
he was saying, don't just assume that if you just
stop at it was a ghost, then there wasn't. Right,
then you're you're pursuing. You're just you're not pursuing any longer,
one way or another. Yea. And yeah, you're you're kind
of shutting down these avenues that could be really interesting
and eye opening. I appreciated that. I appreciated his approach
to because he's a huge skeptic, but he's not. He
(38:56):
didn't take like a James Randy esque glee or delight
in destroying the illusions of idiots, you know. Yeah, And
I think that's his deal period as people. Uh, I
think he gets accused of that oftentimes, is you know,
a fun killer and he's like, that's not what I'm
trying to do here. I'm trying to apply research and
real science, two things. I think he likes killing fun
(39:16):
a little bit. Maybe a little bit. So that's ghosts. Yeah, done,
Yeah for now. If you if you want to learn
more about ghosts and read a ghost story first firsthand
account of a ghost story from Tracy Wilson, you can
type ghosts in the search bar at how stuff works
(39:36):
dot com. It will bring up this article. And I said,
how stuff works so it's time for a message break.
I'll bet now. Listener mail now, listener mail. All right, yeah,
(40:07):
this is from a teacher. We always like reading these,
Um Chuck, Josh and Jerry have been listening for over
a year now, and was never more grateful than about
a month ago. I wound up driving three preteen boys
to Space Academy in Huntsville, Alabama. Remember Space Camp? Great movie?
Uh not really, I never saw the movie. I just
(40:27):
remember if you didn't see Space Camp. Oh man, that
was right in the wheelhouse. No, all right, you see.
I'm a middle school teacher in Morgantown, North Carolina, recently
relocated from Decatur, Georgia, where I worked at the brick
Store and squash Blossom Jerry's old hunts Okay Um. Every
(40:49):
two years, our six and seventh grade students go on
a trip to the Science Academy. And we're a tiny school,
just twenty four kids in the entire middle school. Teachers
frequently end up driving on field trips themselves, about a
seven hour drive, and on the journey we were plagued
with traffic, rain, and car sickness. At about hour four,
when tensions were high, was white and knuckled and began
(41:09):
questioning my career choice, and I said, screw it, I'm
gonna put on your podcast about ninjas. They were mesmerized.
During the rest of our trip, we learned about sword swallowing, bigfoot,
and surfing, just to name a few. So thank you
for saving us in our time of need, more pointingly,
creating a podcast that appeals to all ages. There's a
show with my thanks, I'd like to teach you a
tried and true car game, like your podcast, only requires
(41:31):
uh that a person be young at heart. It's called
passed around the ether rag as you drive down the road.
As you drive down the road, take note of all
the car models you pass in front of the model name.
Insert any potty word of your choice with middle school
boys and most likely you two as well. Toilet, puke
(41:53):
and poop work marvelously. Uh So we ended up with
a few gyms like the toilet Avalanche, the puke Avenge,
and the poop Fusion. So many thanks and congratulations on
all your success. That's Sierra Benton. Thanks a lot, Sierra Benton.
That's a great email. I'm glad we could help you out.
Keep your saying the poop fusion. That's pretty solid band name.
(42:14):
Yeah yeah yeah, um yeah. We get a lot of
email about how like we keep people saying during their
everyday lives. Yeah, I'm glad, I'm but we're helping. Uh.
If you have a story about how we kept you saying,
we'd like to hear those obviously. Um, we want you
to tweet to us seriously. S y s K podcast.
(42:35):
We want you to hang out with us on Facebook
because it's fun over there. That's Facebook dot com slash
Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email
to stuff podcast. How Stuff Works dot com. Stuff you
Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts for my Heart Radios, at the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or where ever you listen to
(42:56):
your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody, it's your old pal Josh Ghoulish Clark. And
for this week's special Halloween edition of s Y s
K Selects, I've chosen our classic episode How Ghosts Work,
which it turns out we recorded in July weirdly enough,
but it seems appropriate to release this Saturday. So I
(00:21):
hope you endured and boo. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know,
a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles
(00:42):
debe Chuck Bryant, and this is Stuff you should Know.
Jerry's over there twiddling and fuxing around Halloween and Julie right,
remember when we had the Horror fiction contest last year,
Actually this may be July. Um yeah, yeah, yeah, and
we I think that the deadline for submissions was in July.
Was weird to be in that kind of Halloween mindset
(01:02):
while it was hot out, but yeah, and I'm sure
it was weird to ask the authors, or not to ask,
but to have them get in that mindset to write
something creepy. We definitely didn't command. You talked me out
of that. Yeah, that was a good contest, also known
as the contest that shall never happen again. Well, we
also ended up with the one that we're going to
read this year, right, I think, yeah, yeah, it's a
(01:24):
good one. It is a good one. Uh, you guys
will have to see in a few months what we're
talking about is right, so chuck. Um, I myself have
never officially seen a ghost, but I understand you have
a ghost story. I do. I remarked about it and
I said, oh, I'm gonna wait till we do our
ghost podcast. Well here we are, pal is this it?
(01:44):
Should I go? Now? Yeah? Okay, I'm not saying this
was a ghost. What I'm saying is one night I
saw something very very very strange that I cannot explain. Okay, okay,
are you ready? Yeah? I feel like she could have
music or something. Year that could probably be done. Um
so Athens Georgia College, I would say, I don't remember
(02:06):
the exact year, but it was probably is. Um my
best friend and I, Brett, had had gone out and um,
we're going back home, uh and driving through five points
you know the area. So we're coming from like let's
say the direction of campus, and you know there's a
(02:26):
cut through if you take a certain road and five
points that cuts you over to Alps Road, and people
are gonna be like, what is he talking about? I know,
I just I'm talking to you here. Uh. And so
there's this one area where you go around a road
curves ninety degrees and then about i'd say two hundred
feet after that there's a four way stop sign. It's
very NEIGHBORHOODI area. I think that's like where Ray Golf
(02:49):
used to live. He Vince Duley lives over there. That
might be what you're thinking. So we go around this
ninety degree curve and I'm looking, you know, I'm filling
with the radio or something, and my buddy Brett starts,
uh like kind of joke, screaming like, oh what is that?
But getting around and I look up and in the
middle of the intersection and I swear, people, I'm not
(03:09):
making this up and I did not hallucinate it. This
is God's honest truth. There was a what looked like
a hundred year old woman wearing a black robe with
a purple sash dagonal across her chest, and she was
standing in the middle of the intersection holding a bible
(03:29):
like this kind of on her placed on her fingertips
as you would hold like like a waiter would hold
a platter about chess level, and she was sort of
looking in the other direction with kind of a vacant
look on her face like you have now or is
it just she was completely vacant, completely still didn't move
an inch and wasn't like an hazy apparition, I mean,
(03:51):
was solid and looked real, real, real, dude. It was
so freaky. We pull right up on her to you know,
take that left, and we're both kind of jokes screaming,
but then as we get closer, we're like, you know,
what's going on here? But it all happened in like, oh,
fifteen seconds, so it wasn't a lot of time to register,
(04:12):
you know what is this. We were just sort of
getting around and we pull right by her and take
a left, like you know, if this is her. We
pull within feet of her, and she's on my side
at this point because we're turning right by her. She
doesn't blink, doesn't move a muscle, and we were going
probably fifteen minur in this curve. He starts like he
(04:32):
can't drive his stick shift anymore because he's freaking out.
The cars like jerking and sputtering. He pulls over probably
fifty ft later. We both turned around out the back
window and there's nothing there. I'm getting looked chill bumps. Uh,
And to this day, I have no idea what the
heck it was. And it was either a crazy, crazy
(04:52):
old woman who is really fast, which is really creepy
and really fast, or the most believable Madam Tusso's wax
dummy I've ever seen. It was also really fast that
someone ran and set out there and we didn't see it,
and then ran and took it away. I'm not offering
any explanation, not saying it was a ghost, but I
have no recollect or explanation for what it could have been.
(05:14):
And it was the creepiest, weirdest thing I've ever seen.
And we both described it to each other immediately, like
what did you see? What did you see? Had gold leafing?
I mean, I can't say it was a Bible because
I didn't see the cover, but it, you know, had
that gold leafing around it looked like a bible. So
you both saw the same thing, exact same thing. Purple sash,
black robe, silver hair. That is one of the pernicious
(05:36):
qualities of a ghost sighting is that frequently people will
see the same thing. Two different people will see the
same thing, which lends a tremendous amount of credence to
something because if one person just sees it, well it's
a hallucination. Exactly. You were clearly on something, we were not.
But that's what somebody could say. Both of you saw it.
Even if you both were on something, right, that doesn't
(05:59):
mean you're gonna see the exact same thing. Yeah, and
I wasn't like some big ghost guy. I'd never have
had looked for them or say, oh I believe in ghosts.
It would just out of nowhere of boom, there it
happened right exactly. Um. You can also go a little
further if you're a skeptic and say, well, I mean
Chuck and Brett Brett just kind of we're playing off
one another description and they came to some unconsciously came
(06:23):
to an agreement of this. You guys compiled the story
and you saw the same thing that. However you approach
that probably depends on whether you're part of the or
the forty percent of Americans who don't believe in ghosts
or who do believe in ghosts. According to a two
thousand nine CBS News poll. I had never given it
much thought, but after that I was I was definitely like, well,
(06:46):
if that was a ghost and I just saw one, Yeah,
And I researched a little bit, but this was long
ago before the internets was born, and so I couldn't
find anything. And even looked yesterday just to see if
I could find out anything, if there was some sightings
or some old lady have been killed or anything, and nothing.
Now I couldn't find anything. So that was just your
own personal ghost. Maybe we're just some creepy old woman
(07:08):
who was still in not blinking as a car barrel
towards her. Either way, that is very unsettling either way. Um,
And that's a pretty good ghost story. It was a
good one. It was not a mask, you know, I
can say that for sure. Like we pulled up within
feet of her, Like I looked in her face and
she and she didn't move a mustle, didn't move a muscle. Man.
That's scary. It was the scariest thing that's ever happened
(07:29):
to me. And we told that story many many times
over the years, and everyone's always like, really, and I
always say, I swear, why would I make this up?
So that's my ghost story. That's a good ghost story.
You can reach us on Facebook, right, Yeah, it's time
for message break. All right. Wait, wait, Jerry, it's not
really time for message break. But she left pretty quick.
(07:51):
So we're talking ghosts. And like I said, forty percent
of Americans believe in ghosts, don't. Yeah, And I think
a lot of people, especially after reading this, there's the
whole you know, I really miss my deceased relative, and
I go to seances and I think those things the
(08:13):
mind can play tricks on you. But in my case,
it was just like those are the ones where I'm like,
what's going on here? You know, well, it's pretty much
impossible to disprove something or to prove something doesn't exist,
which is one reason why belief in ghosts continues on.
(08:33):
But there's also a lot of um. There's also a
lot of factors in ghosts that accumulated create this body
of you know, ghost belief. What our ghost ghostly sightings, hauntings, appversions,
all that stuff. Sure that um kind of over time
have taken on a life of their own, or I
should say, have been around for thousands and thousands of
(08:53):
years um, and have not been dispelled by science. Um.
So we're going to kind of approach this from like,
you know, here's what people believe ghosts are, and here's
some scientific explanations for it. But throughout this you'll notice
that at no point are we ever going to say
conclusively science has proven that ghost don't exist, because it
(09:17):
kind of can't. That's not to say that people aren't
using the scientific method to study ghosts, because some are,
and my hat is off to these people most of all. Yeah,
so let's hug cohosts man. All right, well I just
described my encounter, which, like I said, wasn't hazy or weird. Um, well,
it was weird. It wasn't like a hazy apparition. But
many times as an apparition, um, sometimes it's lights, it
(09:40):
seems to hit every sense. Sometimes it's a smell um,
like Tracy pointed out in this article, like the smell
of deceased relative's favorite meal being cooked in the other room,
stuff like that. Or the smell of the deceased relative
just smelled something like rotting. But it was just a
roll in the wall, right exactly. It can be a song,
(10:03):
can be flickering lights, can be uh, orbs in a picture.
We'll talk about that, or a ghost in a picture.
Like there's plenty of those. Hey, I got you got
a Google. It's pretty fun to look at those. Yeah,
and there's some that are like this one's not quite
explained to my full satisfaction. Yeah, some of the If
you look up famous ghost pictures, there's a handful that
(10:23):
have made the rounds over the years that are pretty good.
Like the Lady of Brown Hall, I believe is that
the girl with a fire? No, that's a good one.
That's a real good one. Um, there's a woman descending
a staircase like a ghostly woman. Um. Freddie Jackson the
World War two, World War One pilot killed or mechanic.
(10:45):
I'm sorry he was killed, and then he showed up
in a group photo two days later. Um. That one
was explained as a double exposure, which I mean, just
the coincidence behind it is in and of itself staggering
if that is the explanation, and for of course it
also could be a hoax. But it's a pretty good on.
Freddy Jackson is my favorite one. I think my favorite
(11:06):
is the Old West. Did you see that one? It's
like boothill or something it was in I think, and
this guy dressed up like a cowboy and you know,
had his picture made but with his friend. And then
in the back ground you see this guy. Yeah I
did like kind of peeking up maybe behind a tombstone. Um,
just in the brush. Yeah, And supposedly these things were
(11:28):
verified by photo experts and stuff is having been untouched.
So yeah, because photoshop is making it way easier to
screw with photography, but it's also fairly easy to detect too.
If you really dig into the individual pixels, you can say, well,
this is obviously, and especially these old photos when they're
(11:50):
examining negatives, it's not that those weren't photoshops, right, I mean,
it could be light playing tricks. But when you see
a girl standing by the rail of you know, with
a fire behind her, that one is explained as the
girl in the fire. Yeah, that was explained as a
just a sheer chance mixture of smoke and light. And
(12:11):
then our um programming, like us being hardwired to pick
faces out of anything. I don't know, man, that looked
pretty much like a girl to me. It definitely doesn't it. Yeah. Um,
And then of course there's the funny things like the
three minute a Baby Ghost, which was a cut out
of Dead Dancing, or The Wizard of Oz, like Hanging Munchkin,
which was although I have to say, since you bring
(12:33):
it up, one of the greatest short you know, I
love short horror fiction. Of course they're one of the
greatest um ones I've ever read. Was called The Hanging
Man of Oz. It's like, um it was. It's only
just a few years old, but it's a good little
short story. Yeah. Yeah, this guy who like gets kind
of caught up in like looking for it. It's good,
(12:56):
good horror fiction. Um. This doesn't have to do with
go But supposedly there's a murder captured on Google Earth.
Have you seen that making the rounds? No, it's an
aerial shot obviously of a dock somewhere in Europe, I think,
by the water, and it looks like a guy's like
dragging a dead body in a big pool of blood
toward the water. But they I think they've debunked that
(13:19):
it was a dog who had shaken off and gotten
the ground wet, and people verified later like, yeah, that
was me and my dog, and yeah, I stop asking
questions because my dog soone posted in on our Facebook wall.
But I mean you bring up a that's that's a
really good like you see what you want exactly. Um.
But again we say, you can't really prove that ghost
(13:40):
stone exists. So people are like, prove it doesn't prove anything,
you know. Um, if you can prove that a photograph
has been faked, then you've proven it's been faked. But
you can't just look in and be like, oh, I'm
sure it's a fake that doesn't muster. Yeah, so they
(14:24):
we we've covered photos. They show up in photos. Well
why are they here? I mean there's a lot of explanations,
like they're delivering bad news or good news, right. Yeah.
There's a lot of ghost stories where, um, the dead
have suddenly appeared to a relative on the other side
of the planet at the moment they died. Like the
relative wakes up the next day to find out that
(14:45):
the person died at nine a m. When they just
saw them sitting in their room at that same time.
So sometimes they're they're coming to say, hey, I love you,
see you in fifteen years, um, or they're coming to
say you're about to die. That's another that's the worst
long standing legend. Yeah, or they're about to say like, um,
(15:08):
it's it's a should sell your Yahoo stock now, that'd
be a good ghost, right. Um. You know, there's a
lot of stuff you can you can say that people
have attributed to ghosts and why they're here. Um, there's
also that horrible um experience as their last moments. Yeah,
(15:29):
they they are at the point where they died too
young or uh, maybe have just gone back to their
favorite place in life. Um, earthbound spirits, I think is
what paranormal investigators call those situations, like they're stuck here
or it's like, you know, get off my train type
of situation. They're guarding a place. Maybe there's not one,
(15:53):
but two um ghost women at the Hotel del del
Coronado in San Diego, very famous late night eighteenth century
built hotel resort um and both of them took their
own lives at the hotel when they found out they
were pregnant at a wedlock or one was married but
her husband and left her and so they're in two
(16:13):
different rooms still. But that's an example of a ghost
being tied to a place. Yeah. And um, we have
an article on the site about haunted hotels that a
lot of hotels and all around the world, but especially
in places like New Orleans and um like old spooky Spanish.
I guess the Cornetto is probably one of those. There's one,
and I believe Colorado or the one they used for
(16:37):
the Overlooking No. Um, it's it's just like a plain
o like regular cool hotel, but it has like a
stream running through the lobby. Yeah, which is cool in
and of itself. And I don't remember where I saw this,
but um, it was like on some TV show or
this it's like a super haunted hotel supposedly, see like
the ghost Waiter, is it? I don't I don't remember.
(16:59):
I don't wait through the the river, Yeah, he had
his pants rolled up and yeah, flipp the caviary pop
is awesome. Uh that is the best of must right then,
I'm sorry. Um. And you know there are mediums out
there who uh you know, if you saw the movie
Ghost Whoopy Goldberg. Obviously there's many times hucksters trying to
(17:19):
take advantage of people, saying they can contact people, put
you in touch with your relatives that have passed. Um,
but I'm sure they're very There are a lot of
mediums who really believe what they're doing is for real,
you know. Yeah. And what's what's kind of ironic is um.
There's this really great article, it's just a little quick
editorial actually from Los Angeles Times in two thousand and six,
(17:41):
is called The Science Afraid of Ghosts is written by
Deborah bloom Right, and she basically points out that like
we we used to have psychical research societies, like William James,
effectively the founder of psychology, like investigated the paranormal as
well and conducted like extensive real scientific experiments and along
(18:05):
the way debunked a lot of mediums, like the nineteenth century,
the Victorian era, um. And so part of this investigation
into the paranormal um was not just it wasn't just
to prove that ghosts existed. It was just to understand
the paranormal on its own terms. And along the way, say,
(18:26):
this person is a fraud, this person is a huckster.
This ectoplasm is cheesecloth that they had like stuffed in
their cheek, you know. Um, And and that was part
of it. And over time I think science has just
kind of thrown out the whole thing, the baby with
the bath water, and now it's just up to uh
kind of the more mean spirited section of the skeptical
(18:51):
world to just go after and debunk. There's nobody looking
for There are very few people looking to prove or
disprove the existence of ghosts. It's more just like this
photograph was faked, right, you know what I mean? Yeah? Um,
And on photographs, I guess we should talk about orbs
um very famously. Orbs show up in pictures, and uh,
(19:14):
some people, you know, say that that is a very
um specific part of the journey of the ghost is
when they are an ORB. I have an ORB picture
which I'll post on Facebook. Emily believes it is our grandfather.
We he had just passed away, and the photograph he
was the biggest dog lover I've ever known. And Uh,
(19:36):
we had just finished our fencing in our backyard and
our house that we bought. So it had been like
six or eight months that our dogs couldn't go back there.
So we finally let them back there, and I had
a camera. It was like, I gotta take pictures to this,
and they start playing around like crazy, and in one
of the pictures there's an ORB boom right there above
the dogs playing, and Emily was like, that's Charlie, that's
(19:57):
my grandfather. He's coming to visit. So I didn't debunk that.
But supposedly skeptics will say that could be a camera
flash reflecting off with thus particles I use, no flash,
water spots on the camera lens, bone dry uh defects,
and digital camera sensors. I guess it could be that
(20:19):
although it was a new camera and it's never done
that sense or printing errors. It was not printed or developed,
so who knows. I'm just saying I've got a great
ORB photo that I'll post my dog's playing. You raise
a really good question then, like, I mean, what's the
what's the value of debunking that I don't know photo?
It made him only feel nice? It still does, so
(20:40):
why I mean, what is the value? I mean, I
guess we'll cover it later. Yeah, but there's this, uh
that that question keeps coming up to me throughout the
researching this. It's like it's not hurting anybody, right, Um,
so chuck uh. I guess a really good question. If
we're gonna talk about how ghost work is, what would
ghosts be made of? Like we said, the Victorians believe
(21:01):
that they were made of ectoplasm. Today, if you talk
to a someone who believes in ghosts and like researchers
ghosts and like that's part of their world. They prevailing
idea is that they're made of energy of somehow okay
I can't remember which, a lot of thermodynamic state. That
energy cannot be created or destroyed, just transferred states. That
(21:25):
would be a pretty good understanding of what ghosts are
if they are real. So a life force that had
passed from a live person is now a different kind
of energy exactly, Um, medic Chlorians, what is that? This
is the Star Wars? Okay, is how they explained the force?
Who are the medic Chlorians? I don't remember. It was
very disappointing, though it sounds really familiar. Was it from
(21:46):
the newer three? Yeah? Yeah, it was how they explained. Basically,
they explained what the force was, and everyone was like,
why don't you go and do that? I got you.
I remember that now. Um. Other theories are that um,
if they are some sort of energy, they could also
be some form of matter, right, so maybe they're made
(22:07):
of some sort of quantum particles or an arrangement of
quantum particles, which I find kind of an interesting explanation
because think about it, ghosts can are They're frequently said
to be able to travel through solid matter. Right. Well,
if you go down to the quantum level and you
start looking at transistors, there's a big problem in early
transistor um development and that individual electrons can pass right
(22:31):
through the wall of a transistor. It's called quantum tunneling,
and um they had to figure out how to use
crystals to kind of block trans electrons in to make
them flow the way you wanted rather than just be like, oh,
I'm over here now. So some people say, well, maybe
these are some sort of quantum particles or an arrangement
of quantum particles that were able to perceive somehow, right,
(22:54):
And then the question I would have is is there
a consistent uh explanation on why some people might become
a ghost and some others not? And the answer is no,
Or are they everywhere and some you just have a
stronger energy force or something? Who knows? Yeah? Because I
mean if if people tend to perceive ghosts more than others,
(23:18):
and that typically from studies has been shown to be
people who believe in ghosts tend to see them more often,
report hauntings. Um, why wouldn't they see them all the time? Yeah,
Like why wouldn't so? Yeah, that would indicate that there
is something about an individual person that would make them
become a ghost. So many questions. Well, the whole unfinished business,
(23:39):
like it died too young. Things I can wrap my
head around that, Like an energy force that was so
strong that has now gone still could be around. Um,
I'm trying to decide what part I'd lie in. Do
I believe in ghosts? I think so? Okay. So there's
a dude named Richard Wiseman of a University of Hertfordshire,
(24:02):
and he's done a lot of research in gb Great Britain,
and he has found some pretty consistent results that people
have generally reported the same things in the same places,
even if they didn't know there was any ghost activity there,
even if they did or didn't believe. Actually, if they
did believe, they were more, like you said, more apt
(24:25):
to see a ghost. But he had consistent results of
specific places. Yeah, I mean like he applied the scientific
method to researching ghosts, and he he documented what what parts,
what areas in a reportedly haunted place. Sightings were most
frequently reported basically found that, like you could, you could
(24:47):
map out areas where sightings were. Okay, so that's step one,
and then step two. We had people who who encountered
ghosts described their experiences, and he kind of compiled the data.
Then he went back to see what other commonalities there
were for an area. Yeah, like physical conditions there, Yes,
like how cold is it? Is it humid? Um? Let
(25:09):
me measure the light, let me measure the magnetic field? Right.
What he found, though, interestingly, was that um, there were
specific areas where people who had no understanding of the
history of the place they were seeing where it heard
that the area was haunted, had reported seeing something. So
there was something to a specific area being quote haunted,
(25:33):
And people who didn't necessarily believe in ghosts or didn't
know that the place was supposed to be haunted had
reported not only that they'd seen a sighting or something
in this building, but in the specific area of this building. Yeah,
what does that mean? It's a consistent study, right, So,
and Wiseman is a part of this kind of long
but very um small, smally sparsely populated um tradition of
(26:00):
like paranormal researchers, like legitimate ones I could get into that. Man.
When I was a kid, I used to want to
go to Duke and study paranormal or para psychology there. Yeah,
they had a para of psychology department. It was led
by a guy named Joseph Ryan, who was another like
legitimate para psychological researcher. Um, you could have gotten a
(26:21):
TV show on Science Chip, Yeah, totally. U c l
A used to have one from I think now they
shut it down and I think the mid eighties, but
it was around from like the fifties or sixties up
to the eighties and it was well respected. Um. William
James was another researcher. Uh. As of the nineties, James,
(26:43):
Huron and Renny Lange are still doing research and writing books. Um.
Harry Price was a very famous one. Yeah. He was
famous for investigating Borderley Rectory, which was supposed to be
like the most haunted place in England. And then now,
if you want to get a degree in paras psychology,
(27:04):
you can go to the American University or you can
go to University of Edinburgh. Those are the two places
as far as I know, in the Western world where
you can get a paras psychology degree. I could see
that the Great Britain's has a lot of um ghostly
activity and paranormal investigators, and they're into it over there,
and Edinburgh is supposed to be the most haunted city
in all of Europe. Really a bunch of dissatisfied scotsman
(27:27):
roaming the bog. Right. Um, so we've kind of laid
it out right, Yeah, I feel like we've laid it out,
like we've got them. We all understand what ghosts. I
don't think we really said anything that people are like,
oh yeah, sure, I didn't realize that's what a ghost is. Um.
What I found interesting is that there's some really good
(27:49):
explanations for ghostly activity. Yeah. Sometimes Tracy points out, I
mean there's so many explanations. There's such a wide range
from this person just hallucinated something, right, And I want
to say with that, specifically, we're starting to understand that
hallucinations are way more common than anybody has admitted for
(28:11):
a very long time because we are afraid of being
put away or label is crazy. But people hallucinate more
than we generally understand they do. And specifically, grief is
supposed to be able to trigger hallucinations. Pretty really which
would explain visitation and dead relatives shortly after they die. Yeah. Um,
(28:33):
we've talked about sleep paralysis before. That's an explanation that
you hear a lot about someone laying in bed. They
can't move and they are hallucinating, um, spirits and things. Right,
they think they're awake, but they're not. Yeah, and you're
incapable of moving. There's also the hypnogogic trance, which comes
at the onset of sleep and is a sort of
(28:53):
trance that supposedly you can hallucinate in. Yeah, I've had
that happen before, Like in my wake am I sleep
that I just hear something? Oh yeah, yeah, sure, you know. Um.
And then sometimes it's just you know, the window shut
itself because it was loose and the wind blew it,
or the door shut because there was a draft, or
(29:13):
it's cold in here because you know there's a draft.
You know, a lot of times there's just literally an explanation,
a physical explanation for what happened. So, um, you you
hit upon. One of the hallmarks of haunting activity is
a change in temperature and unexplained change in temperature in
a haunted room when a ghost is present and like
(29:34):
you said, it's often like a chimney or a drafty
window or something like that. But people who investigate this
kind of thing also often explain that phenomenon by um,
a lack of humidity. Right, Lower humidity can make a
room feel colder. Right? And what about an area of
a room? Though I don't know, I mean, I don't
(29:56):
like that's that's a really good question, dude. How can
an area of a room be number one colder if
if there isn't a draft, If it's not a draft,
it's just like a static area in a room that's cold. Um,
if there's just a decrease in humidity, what causes the
decrease in humidity that makes it feel colder? And they
(30:17):
have found that um areas that are supposedly haunted, well,
I should say, Richard Wiseman found in one place that
was supposedly haunted, UM, it tended to be less humid
than other areas, So that would explain the cold chill.
But how is one area just a part of a
room less humid than another. Yeah, and I'm curious about
(30:38):
what kind of temperature drop people have seen, um, Like
how drastic it's been. I couldn't find any like reputable
information on that. Like in the movies, you walk into
the corner and you can see your breath all of
a sudden and you're freezing. Yeah, like the sixth sense, right, yeah, yeah,
that poor kid. Um. But also I wonder then if
it's not even necessarily a real change in temperature. Supposedly
(31:01):
ghost hunters can measure changes in temperature in a room
and that means the ghost is present. Or if it's
just the sensation of a chill running through your body
and it's not actually thermal, it's psychological. Yeah, your your
central nervous system. Yeah, I just got chill bumps earlier.
You know, you did. What about the electrical fields? That's um,
A very common thing is for a parent noormal investigator
(31:23):
to measure magnetic field and electrical fields in an area. Um,
they will say that this is kind of proof that
there's some sort of presence there because the you know,
the Ghostbusters E meter is going crazy? Right, exactly what
do they call that? I can't believe. We can't remember that.
I can't remember it either, the one that that Egan
(31:45):
held up to Uh yeah, yeah, I don't remember what
it's called. We're going to get in trouble for that. Yeah, sorry, guys. UM,
But sometimes, UM, these fields can cause wacky things happening
with the brain, can cause hallucinations, can cause dazziness or
or other neurological symptoms. And they're saying that might play
into it, the fact that you think you have seen
(32:06):
a ghost right there, they're saying. Investigators are saying, yeah,
there actually is something different here with the UM. The
area's electrical field, electro magnetic field. There's something going on here.
But it's possible that that's what's making you think there's
a ghost here, rather than there's a ghost here and
it's affecting the field. It's hitting your angular gyrus right,
(32:28):
that's a part of the brain that UM. Evidently, if
it's stimulated, you can get the sense that someone's behind
you mimicking your movements. Yeah, which is pretty creepy. I mean,
we're we're all familiar with the transcranial magnetic stimulation the
thinking cap. That's a cool episode. UM. And when you
apply a magnetic pulse to different parts of the brain,
(32:49):
different things happen, and one of them is definitely hallucinations.
And then another example of UM, the magnetic field messing
with us. I guess is that a lot of haunting
activity is reported at night, supposedly UM. And that's right exactly,
that's that's number one. But number two the magnetosphere, you know,
(33:10):
the the the part of the Earth's atmosphere that protects
us from the charged ions of solar wind, the way
that the Earth is arranged to the Sun, the part
that's in darkness. UM has a larger part of the
magnetosphere surrounding it, more warped toward that. So that might
explain it then, right, so it looks like a spider.
(33:30):
It does, but there's a lot more UM magnetic field
activity going on in the darker side of Earth, so
at night that one could be a stretch. Yeah. I
think my favorite UM explanation that I had not heard
about is infrasound. I think that's pretty cool. This to
me is that, Yeah, it's UM low frequency sound waves
(33:51):
that you cannot hear. You know, with your naked ear,
you won't notice it, but it can cause your eyes
to vibrate, it can cause you to see things, you
can cause a sense of dread. UM and cracked. Actually,
one of our favorite websites did a test at a concert,
didn't they Well, they reported on it. There was a
(34:12):
they don't do test, that's right, they report on test.
But yeah, there's a great correct article on it. UM.
And they're talking about In the fifties, a guy named
Vladismir Vladimir Gavreaux, robotics engineer, noticed that like one of
his lab assistants was bleeding from an ear. It's not good,
and traced it to UM to this infrasound. I think
(34:33):
it's like seven and nineteen hurts and UM. You can't
hear it, like you don't realize you're hearing sound, but
you're reacting to it. And like you said, it causes
all sorts of like weird psychological effects, like a sense
of dread, a sense that there's somebody else near you. Um,
all the classic telltale signs of hauntings, so much so
(34:54):
that they've traced literal like hauntings back to infrasound. Yeah,
the Ghost in the Machine is an article UM by
Victandy and Tony Lawrence that the same thing was going
on there and they traced it back to a fan
and then they modified the fans housing the sound went
away and the supposed haunting went away, right exactly. I mean,
(35:16):
isn't that weird? Though? Like, surely you've been in a
room before that you just had to turn around and
run out of because you just knew that there's somebody
else in there with you. You have, I have plenty
of times sort of. But I think it's like I've
been in like Savannah near you know, on the ghost tour.
Like I'm highly suggestible what I'm saying. But isn't it
strange to think that a sound that you can't hear
(35:38):
it was responsible for producing that that? Like we're our
brains are that malleable that like just a sound we
can't even hear, but the vibrations we can still sense
somehow are having an effect on our brain and scaring
us and making us turn around and run out of yeah,
and potentially twitching your eye and causing hallucinations. Right, So
this sound has been shown. NASA showed that um that
(36:01):
an infrasound at that frequency can make your eye vibrate imperceptibly.
But then something close to your vision, like say the
rim of your glasses or something appear, Your brain confuses
and things that that's moving, So it looks like there's
a little dark figure moving out of the corner of
your eye. Infrasound can actually cause visual and audit well
(36:23):
not auditory hallucination, psychological yeah, psychological effects and visual hallucinations.
So and the creation of a sense of dread. Yeah,
that's yeah. I want to get an infrasound machine. It's
just like played around the office. You know, there may
already be one here. Well. I don't even think we
said what the guy did though at the concert? Did
we know he played? Did he play it? Under the
(36:45):
concert and people were freaking out? Yeah? I think like
a quarter of the people at the concert reported feeling
like horrible dread and like some nausea. Um. Maybe because
it was a Doctor John show. That's the first awful
thing I could think of. Dr John's correct. I know,
I knew you were gonna say that. It really is.
(37:07):
I mean, like you shoul see that guy played two
pianos at once. Yeah, he's he's he's a legend. What
am I talking about? You're thinking of? Um? Maybe Dr
Hook and the Medicine Show. No Dr Demento. I was
trying to think of the worst band I can think of,
and that's the first thing that came to my mind,
that's who you thought of. Nickelback is out there. Yeah,
(37:29):
it was a Nickelback show. There. We can fix this
in editing, Okay, Um, so what else? I think The
last thing Tracy has here is that, um, the National
Science Board is actually come out and said that if
you believe in paranormal it can be dangerous because that
means you have reduced critical thinking skills and you can't
(37:50):
make great day to day decisions. It's kind of mean.
That irked me because on the other end of the spectrum,
you can definitely make the case that just pooh pooing
out of hand as non existent anything that science can explain.
It shows a distinct lack of critical thinking and even
more dangerously, a lack of imagination, and that irks me
(38:12):
to no end. Yeah, I enjoyed that you sent me
the skepdoid. Brian Dunning is that the same his article,
and I kind of appreciated his approach with this was
you know, uh, maybe that means there's other cool ways
to explain these things, right, like don't poopo it. Maybe
open your mind to other interesting phenomena that can be explained. Well,
(38:34):
he was saying, don't just assume that if you just
stop at it was a ghost, then there wasn't. Right,
then you're you're pursuing. You're just you're not pursuing any longer,
one way or another. Yea. And yeah, you're you're kind
of shutting down these avenues that could be really interesting
and eye opening. I appreciated that. I appreciated his approach
to because he's a huge skeptic, but he's not. He
(38:56):
didn't take like a James Randy esque glee or delight
in destroying the illusions of idiots, you know. Yeah, And
I think that's his deal period as people. Uh, I
think he gets accused of that oftentimes, is you know,
a fun killer and he's like, that's not what I'm
trying to do here. I'm trying to apply research and
real science, two things. I think he likes killing fun
(39:16):
a little bit. Maybe a little bit. So that's ghosts. Yeah, done,
Yeah for now. If you if you want to learn
more about ghosts and read a ghost story first firsthand
account of a ghost story from Tracy Wilson, you can
type ghosts in the search bar at how stuff works
(39:36):
dot com. It will bring up this article. And I said,
how stuff works so it's time for a message break.
I'll bet now. Listener mail now, listener mail. All right, yeah,
(40:07):
this is from a teacher. We always like reading these,
Um Chuck, Josh and Jerry have been listening for over
a year now, and was never more grateful than about
a month ago. I wound up driving three preteen boys
to Space Academy in Huntsville, Alabama. Remember Space Camp? Great movie?
Uh not really, I never saw the movie. I just
(40:27):
remember if you didn't see Space Camp. Oh man, that
was right in the wheelhouse. No, all right, you see.
I'm a middle school teacher in Morgantown, North Carolina, recently
relocated from Decatur, Georgia, where I worked at the brick
Store and squash Blossom Jerry's old hunts Okay Um. Every
(40:49):
two years, our six and seventh grade students go on
a trip to the Science Academy. And we're a tiny school,
just twenty four kids in the entire middle school. Teachers
frequently end up driving on field trips themselves, about a
seven hour drive, and on the journey we were plagued
with traffic, rain, and car sickness. At about hour four,
when tensions were high, was white and knuckled and began
(41:09):
questioning my career choice, and I said, screw it, I'm
gonna put on your podcast about ninjas. They were mesmerized.
During the rest of our trip, we learned about sword swallowing, bigfoot,
and surfing, just to name a few. So thank you
for saving us in our time of need, more pointingly,
creating a podcast that appeals to all ages. There's a
show with my thanks, I'd like to teach you a
tried and true car game, like your podcast, only requires
(41:31):
uh that a person be young at heart. It's called
passed around the ether rag as you drive down the road.
As you drive down the road, take note of all
the car models you pass in front of the model name.
Insert any potty word of your choice with middle school
boys and most likely you two as well. Toilet, puke
(41:53):
and poop work marvelously. Uh So we ended up with
a few gyms like the toilet Avalanche, the puke Avenge,
and the poop Fusion. So many thanks and congratulations on
all your success. That's Sierra Benton. Thanks a lot, Sierra Benton.
That's a great email. I'm glad we could help you out.
Keep your saying the poop fusion. That's pretty solid band name.
(42:14):
Yeah yeah yeah, um yeah. We get a lot of
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everyday lives. Yeah, I'm glad, I'm but we're helping. Uh.
If you have a story about how we kept you saying,
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(42:35):
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