WAS Ebenezer Scrooge a closet scientist? Charles Dickens’s celebrated
skinflint certainly showed commendable scepticism when first confronted by the
ghost of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley, famously dismissing him as
mere humbug. “You don’t believe in me,” observed the ghost. “I don’t,” said
Scrooge. “What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your
senses?” asked Marley, invitingly. Here, however, Scrooge runs out of steam with
a feeble, “I don’t know.”
If only today’s scientists had been on hand to help the old man out. They
might, for instance, have demanded photographs and videos of Marley taken
simultaneously from several angles, plus recordings of his voice. More
importantly, they’d want to know what Marley was made of. Was he a fog of ions?
If so, what were their chemical identities? Was he emitting radiation and, if
so, at what energies? And what were the temperatures and pressures in his body?
Did his presence generate electromagnetic fields? Above all, was he a real,
physical entity, or simply a hallucinatory product of Scrooge’s guilty
conscience?
We know, of course, that Marley and the other spirits in A Christmas
Carol were the products of Dickens’s imagination. But today’s ghost hunters
are after more than mere fantasy. For the first time, they are armed with
affordable yet sophisticated sensors and recording equipment. And they are
beginning to turn up unusual physical measurements from “hauntings”, as well as
intriguing if not entirely convincing photographic evidence. “There’s been more
progress in the past two decades than in the past 200 years,” says Randy
Liebeck, a ghost investigator in Totowa, New Jersey. “The technology is now
becoming available to the layman.” And, he predicts, it’s only a matter of time
before ghosts are captured on video.
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Even allowing for attention-seekers, pranksters and fraudsters, common
threads are emerging from the more reliable data collected by today’s spirit
sleuths. Paradoxically, some data are proving to be of equal value to both
sceptics and believers. Unusual magnetic field data, for example, are seen by
believers as the telltale signatures of ghosts, but by sceptics as freakish
natural phenomena that induce hallucinations.
Whatever their interpretation, the findings have a degree of credibility
because many seasoned investigators are themselves seeking rational
explanations. Most confess to never having seen or experienced the very
phenomena that they investigate, relying instead on the flickering needles of
their instruments to sample these invisible entities. To find their quarry, most
visit haunted sites alongside professional psychics who claim to see and
experience the spirits. These sensitive accomplices point to where the ghosts
are and the investigators wade straight in with their equipment humming,
whirring and clicking.
Of the emerging evidence, the most convincing is of sharply fluctuating
magnetic fields at spots where ghosts appear. “In areas where people see things
you get much higher readings,” says Loyd Auerbach, a California-based trustee of
the American Society for Psychical Research. Background levels are about 1 or 2
milligauss, but at hauntings, wildly fluctuating readings peak at as much as 100
milligauss.
Liebeck, meanwhile, says that the electrical component of these strange
fields is usually a static DC field like those emitted by biological systems
such as mammals, not an AC field typical of electrical circuits. And these
ghostly electromagnetic fields don’t stay in one place. “They float from one
room to another, and vary from the size of a baseball to a basketball,” says
Liebeck.
Several instruments are available which measure electromagnetic fields. They
are portable and can be calibrated to cancel out background fields, only
springing into life when they pick up abnormal fluctuations.
Getting the shivers
Portable infrared thermometers which register temperature remotely are de
rigueur, as they reveal intense cold spots wherever the ghostly magnetic
fields occur. “The ambient temperature typically drops by between 20 and 35
degrees centigrade where these phenomena occur,” says Dave Oester, cofounder of
the International Ghost Hunters Society in Crooked River, Oregon. “The tips of
your fingers turn white with cold at these spots, even in ambient temperatures
of 40 degrees centigrade,” confirms Liebeck.
Some ghosts even turn out to be radioactive, if readings from Geiger counters
are anything to go by. Liebeck has recorded gamma rays from ghosts on several
occasions. Signs of radioactivity are also being found by other researchers such
as William Roll, a psychologist at the State University of West Georgia in
Carrollton.
But the most common item in a ghost hunter’s utility belt is a camera. These
are cheap, simple and quick to use—vital for catching that elusive spirit
before it disappears through a wall. Often, the cameras are set up so that they
can be activated automatically, taking multiple pictures from different angles
to corroborate the event. A variety of film types are available which capture
different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, including the ultraviolet and
far-infrared regions outside the range of the human eye. Since these films can
pick up what the eye misses, the investigators have to wait until the photos are
developed before they can “see” the ghost. But many of the best images have been
captured with standard films loaded in ordinary cameras.
Some photographs of spooky images conform to the archetypal ghost stereotype,
but many resemble white smudges that could be blamed on errors in the
photographic development process. Investigators accept that photographs are
probably the most impressive, but least trusted evidence. “There’s always the
caveat that it could be an artefact of the developing process,” says Liebeck.
“These [ghostly images] don’t usually crop up, however, except in photos of
places with reputations or reports of hauntings,” he says. Liebeck even sent 10
images to Polaroid’s research headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for
evaluation. “They said the observed images are caused by electromagnetic fields
or ionisation fogging effects,” says Liebeck. He says this fits in with some
theories of ghosts.
Video cameras and tape recorders are regularly employed during stakeouts
simply to observe the site. “They are often used to eliminate things in the
environment we can explain, such as people or pets walking into the room,” says
Howard Wilkinson, a veteran British investigator now retired from the department
of psychology at the University of Nottingham.
Caught in a web
In the 1980s, Wilkinson invented a television-sized box of tricks called
SPIDER (Spontaneous Psychophysical Incident Data Electronic Recorder), so named
because the wires trailing from it to sensors and monitors resembled a spider’s
legs. Wilkinson, who performs investigations with Tony Cornell and Alan Gauld of
Britain’s Society for Psychical Research, says that SPIDER is capable of working
on its own, activating cameras as soon as it receives an unusual signal from one
of its sensors. “It’s like a glorified burglar alarm,” says Wilkinson. But
SPIDER has now been replaced by time-lapse video recordings, with video cameras
set to film at about one frame a second unless sensors pick up bizarre events,
when the video reverts to normal recording speed.
Most ghost hunters would dearly love the ability to see in the dark. Many of
the most dedicated sleuths already have “night-vision” binoculars which amplify
light levels in the gloom of night by a factor of 30 000 or more. Some even
bathe the environment in infrared light, which shows up objects even more
clearly. “We’ve observed full-body apparitions using infrared night-vision
binoculars,” says Oester. “The infrared illuminates objects, making the
phenomena glow.”
But what ghost hunters really need is a sensitive thermal-imaging video
camera. This would allow even the smallest temperature changes linked to these
events to be captured on film. The obstacle is price, with units costing
$50 000 or more. But cheaper, less sensitive equivalents are finally
coming onto the market. “Sony has launched a digital camcorder that operates in
complete blackness,” says Oester.
No ghost has ever been caught on video. And exciting as all these technical
developments are, they leave many questions unanswered and others open to wide
interpretation. The magnetic readings, for example, might be ghosts. Equally,
however, they may be natural electromagnetic fields which are themselves
responsible for inducing hallucinations. Many investigators point to work by
Michael Persinger of the Laurentian University of Sudbury in Ontario, Canada,
showing that hallucinations, alien abductions, hauntings and out-of-body
experiences can all be induced in experimental volunteers by subjecting their
brains to electromagnetic fields (“Alien abduction: the inside story”,
New Scientist, 19 November 1994, p 29).
Wilkinson and Gauld have published data supporting the hallucination
explanation in Proceedings of the Journal of Psychical Research (vol
57, p 275). By examining records of hauntings since the mid-1800s and comparing
the dates with records of fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field, they
demonstrated a link between ghostly sightings and sunspot cycles that can
trigger magnetic storms on Earth.
Last year, William Roll of the State University of West Georgia investigated
two hauntings that he attributes to abnormally strong magnetic fields. In one
case, he found high levels of magnetic disturbance in a haunted hunting lodge in
Texas, but attributed this to piezoelectric currents released by rocks rubbing
together in a geological fault zone directly below the lodge. In another case,
he found that “hauntings” were due to a metal mesh on which wall plaster had
been mounted, that focused fields that already existed inside the house.
Additional evidence pointing to hallucinations has come from observations in
Britain suggesting that sound waves trapped in confined spaces might affect
perception. This year, Vic Tandy, a lecturer in information technology at
Coventry University in Warwickshire, reported a case where ghosts in a
laboratory turned out to be illusions triggered by a freak standing wave.
Vibrations from a new extractor fan created a 19-hertz standing wave within the
room. Intense ultrasound and infrasound are known to cause symptoms such as
hyperventilation, breathlessness and a feeling of oppression. The fan was
removed and the hauntings ceased (Journal of the Society for Psychical
Research,vol 62, p 360). Tandy is now investigating whether standing waves
can be created by other phenomena, such as wind passing across windows or
chimneys.
Ectoplasmic vapour
Believers in a more ghostly explanation, however, are convinced that these
electromagnetic phenomena are entities in their own right. “It’s ectoplasmic
vapour, like a fog or mist that suddenly appears,” says Oester. “We know from
photographs that ghosts cast shadows, so they have density and mass.” And the
high levels of electromagnetic activity during sunspot cycles or the extra
gravitational pull on the Earth when the Moon and Sun are aligned simply provide
the fuel for dormant spectres to manifest themselves. “That’s when geomagnetic
fields are strongest,” says Oester. “The spirits are electromagnetic in nature,
and they use the extra energy available to manifest themselves.” This need for
energy might account for the sudden drops in temperature when ghosts appear.
A favourite theory is that ghosts are some kind of electromagnetic entity
etched into the environment. “There are two basic types of ghost,” says Liebeck.
“Hauntings” are those phenomena that appear without interacting with people or
the environment —”like the playback of a video recording”, he says. The
other, far more intriguing type of ghost is the “apparition”, where the ghost
seems to have “intelligence” and can interact with humans. “A haunting is like a
prerecorded videotape, whereas an apparition is more like a videoconference,”
says Auerbach. “The apparitions react to what people are saying or doing. It’s
as if the ghosts are trying to play with people.
“Apparitions tend to behave like they did when they were alive, and do things
to people and for people,” he adds. But he offers no explanation for how this
could be. “It’s an energy form of consciousness, and the psychological
conditions of the person who died and something in the environment allow someone
to stick around,” he says. “I’ve talked to physicists about it, but at this
point in time, there isn’t an explanation.”
Oester says that most of the cases he is called to are not in traditional
“spooky” places, but in new homes. “The most common are hauntings in which a
spirit has adopted a family,” he says. “They almost have a guardian-spirit
arrangement, especially around children, and the ghost is often a helpful,
motherly type. We’ve never encountered demonic or evil-type hauntings,” he
says.
Even among open-minded sceptics who hanker for rational, verifiable
explanations, some experiences have left them puzzled. Wilkinson, for example,
is still mystified by video footage from a case when an infant in Leicestershire
had supposedly been talking to a female spectre. The parents claimed that a
wind-up mobile which played a Brahms lullaby could sometimes be heard in the
dead of night, even though the child was unable to operate it. Sure enough, the
video caught the mobile spontaneously playing. “It went off fully, the child
stirred slightly and the siamese cat wandered in and out again,” says Wilkinson.
“We have absolutely no explanation for that.”
Sceptical or not, the ghost investigators expect more exciting results to
follow as their arsenal of detector paraphernalia grows. “We can’t say [a ghost
is] a spirit of a dead person, but I’m convinced there’s an underlying reality
and it is recordable with current technology,” says Liebeck.
The ever-present danger of fraud means that to earn scientific credibility,
it is vital that results be authenticated. If more scientist can be persuaded to
lend their time, enthusiasm and maybe the odd thermal imaging camera to the
hunt, who knows what else might emerge. Astral planes and parallel dimensions
will probably remain the stuff of pure fancy, however, and maybe scientists are
right to remain sceptical. Scrooge, of course, takes the words right out of
their mouths. “It’s humbug still,” he said. “I won’t believe it.”
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Further information:
Bags of spooky images can be found at: http://www.ghostweb.com/ghost.html - Advice for budding ghost hunters is provided at: http://www.ghosthunter.org/