Do You Believe in Ghosts?
16 Gibson Street, Glasgow. Photo: Tanya Clarke 1995
The Uncanny
I love a good ghost story. Horror not so much. But ghosts, paranormal activity, even the odd UFO encounter here and there, I feel drawn to them.
I know. It all sounds so absurd, these things that go bump in the night.
And yet.
I've been listening to the Uncanny podcast written and presented by British journalist and writer Danny Robins. Robins leads each episode with enthusiastic energy and a journalistic spirit of investigation. Yet there is also care, attention and respect given to the individuals who tell him their stories, stories that are peculiar, frightening and even threatening at times.
In every episode, Robins is joined by a team of experts, including paranormal researchers Chris French who is a psychologist specialising in the psychology of paranormal beliefs and experiences, cognition and emotion, Ciarán O'Keeffe a psychologist specialising in parapsychology and forensic psychology and Evelyn Hollow, writer and paranormal psychologist.
With each episode, I learn something new about the world, the way our brains work, our senses, auditory/visual phenomena, sleep-related hallucinations and fear. Some stories are more compelling than others but each one takes us on an unsettling journey where attempts are then made to explain the unexplained.
Here's a list of some of the things I've learned about how we might experience the world.
Infrasound
You know how sometimes you walk into a room or an unfamiliar building and instantly feel uncomfortable? Fear and dread seem to seep into your very being. Science tells us that rather than feeling a ghostly presence what we're actually responding to is infrasound or low-frequency noise.
So what is infrasound?
The popular concept is that infrasound is a sound below 20Hz which is often believed to be inaudible to the human ear. I've done some further research and sciencedirect.com helpfully tells us that this is in fact incorrect. There has been some research done where the hearing threshold in individuals wearing earphones has been measured down as low as 1.5Hz.
But what does this even mean? How does a level of 20Hz sound?
Don't worry I've got you.
Surprisingly there is a YouTube channel called The Hertz complete with four videos where you can listen to an hour of sound at 60Hz, 50Hz, 40Hz and 20 Hz. Noise-cancelling head or earphones, if you have them, help. It's a little un-scientific. If you can't hear the sound you turn up the volume but it gives us an idea.
Start at 60 Hz and then see if you can hear at 50Hz, 40Hz or 20Hz at the same volume.
The sound is strange. I can almost feel it more than I can hear it if that makes sense. What about you?
I can only hear 20hz if I turn the volume up and then I hear what sounds like a flutter in my ears. It's a peculiar sensation. I'm not quite sure how to describe it. In the video comments, some people say they find it relaxing. I’m not so sure. I felt uncomfortable after just a few seconds.
A reminder. Do remember to turn the volume down when you've finished this experiment. Never mind ghosts. I got the fright of my life when an advert came on so loud I jumped which in turn made the dog jump until I tuned into the voice telling me loud and clear to Buy BC. Terrifying.
Anyway. I'm pretty sure all my years of clubbing and listening to music too loud on headphones have done a number on my hearing so 1.5 hz seems impossibly low. But who am I to argue with the folks at science direct?
What are the sources of infrasound?
"There are many natural sources of infrasound, including meteors, volcanic eruptions, ocean waves, wind and any effect which leads to slow oscillations of the air. Man-made sources include explosions, large combustion processes, slow-speed fans and machinery."
From What is infrasound?
In 1980 an engineer called Vic Tandy published a paper called Ghost in the Machine.
"Tandy describes working in a laboratory that had a reputation for being eerie. People complained of feeling anxious and uncomfortable there. Tandy himself thought he saw an apparition. One day, a fencing foil clamped in a vice started vibrating for no reason. He found a fan emitting noise at a frequency of 19 Hz, and when it was turned off, the noise — and the feelings of discomfort — disappeared. Tandy found that these low-frequency vibrations caused blurred vision, dizziness and feelings of fear in humans. He repeated his experiment at several locations reputed to be haunted."
From science.howstuffworks.com
So if you felt some discomfort listening to that YouTube sound at 20Hz, you're not unusual. If these low-frequency sounds can cause such distress and fear all logical explanations will go out the window. I find that there is also something called The Hum where people are continually distracted by a low-frequency sound that not everyone can hear but is distressing in its persistence for other individuals.
Sometimes the source is never found.
Electronic Voice Phenomena - EVP
The phenomena of voices being recorded on electronic or digital devices have been long used as 'evidence' for the existence of the supernatural. I don't know about you but I am doubtful that spirits are communicating through an iPhone. There are so many ways that sound can be either recorded unintentionally and then misinterpreted.
Radio interference is often cited as a cause for EVP. In electronic devices, particularly older ones, the device's internal wiring can act as an antenna picking up signals from a nearby radio station, or from other electronic devices or electromagnetic equipment. Add in something called pareidolia, where the human brain in its search for familiar patterns interprets indistinct sounds as an other-worldly voice speaking, and you have a ghost talking to you.
Older equipment is a particular problem as a source for recording any paranormal evidence.
Think of a record player.
Before your favourite track plays you hear all those blips and pips and knocks as the needle bumps over various bits of dust on the vinyl. (If you're too young to know what a record player is, here's a video for you.) Your brain knows what that is and makes sense of it. But then imagine you're in a building, perhaps an old psychiatric hospital or an ancient prison. There you are all your senses on high alert, already creeped out by your surroundings and you start to record the room with the tape recorder and microphone your grandma gave you.
You play it back and hear those blips and pips and other background oscillations and you try to hear a voice. I would. For sure. A highly sensitive microphone might pick up sounds that the human ear can't and you in your creepy building hear a voice. And this is where things get tricky. If the microphone picks up a sound you can't hear, who's to say that that sound is not the voice of a lost soul?
Apophenia
Apophenia is a psychological term very much related to pareidolia. Whereas pareidolia is the tendency of humans to find faces or voices in vague or disconnected stimuli, apophenia is a result of the brain trying to make sense of a disordered world through any form of sensory input.
For example, in visual apophenia, you might try to find a face in a cloud or a familiar shape in spilt paint on the ground. In my home on the floor in the downstairs loo, there's a shape where the knots of wood form a face with long hair. The face isn't actually there, it's a pattern from the wooden floor. But I always see a face. Every time.
There's numerical apophenia where a series of numbers or a date appear to have particular significance even when they are simply random. And then there is conceptual apophenia where connections are found between unrelated ideas, events and concepts. Enter in conspiracy theories.
While it is important for humans to be able to make patterns and connections from various stimuli in order to help us navigate our environment and understand the world, this natural cognitive default can have us misinterpreting random information in our efforts to make sense of the unfamiliar.
Stone Tape Theory
This theory, for me, is a difficult one for me to get behind. The idea is that rock, preferably quartz or sometimes limestone absorbs and stores the emotional energy of a traumatic event. It's not a 'theory' as such, more like speculative thought. A theory suggests something that is supported by scientific research. As far as I can tell, there is no scientific evidence to back up this theory.
So what happens when the rock stores this traumatic energy?
A sensitive person picks up on this energy which will then manifest itself to this individual as a sound or apparition or an image of someone or something, replaying a scene over and over again. It's certainly a creepy notion that a building can absorb terrible events. Maybe we want to believe that when something dreadful happens that it is never forgotten.
There's a good article here: The Stone Tape Theory, Residual Hauntings and the Deep Influence of Memory and Emotion. It makes for a great read.
I'm not convinced though. How about you?
Sleep-related Hallucinations
Have you ever woken in the night, convinced you are awake and experienced a peculiar event?
I have. Just recently I woke up, at least that's what I thought, and was certain that the windows and doors were rattling as if an earthquake was happening. There are earthquakes here, albeit not often, so it didn't seem an unusual thing to imagine. In the morning I canvassed my family. Did anyone hear the windows shaking in the night?
Nothing.
Just a dream.
I even googled whether there had been an earthquake that night. Nope. Not a rumble. But I was convinced I was awake.
There are two main categories of sleep-related hallucinations; hypnagogic hallucinations which can occur when you're falling asleep and hypnopompic hallucinations which can happen when you are waking up. Both types produce similar auditory, visual or other sensory experiences in that transition zone between sleep and wakefulness. The body is still experiencing a sleep state and unable to move yet those hallucinations are incredibly vivid and feel very real.
Ideomotor Effect
We're nearly at the end of my romp through all things paranormal and there's one last thing I want to examine. Ouija boards. I've written about this before in my post, Tiny Paper Rectangles and the Ouija boards we made at boarding school out of torn-up bits of paper and a pen. Nothing happened of course, much to our disappointment, but I still remember the thrill of anticipation.
The ideomotor effect is the phenomenon of making particular movements unconsciously. So in the case of an Ouija board, if the pointer is moving, there is a strong chance that someone is pushing the pointer even though they swear on their mother's life they are not.
Here's the BBC to explain:
"Hold the end of the string with your arm out in front of you, so the weight hangs down freely. Try to hold your arm completely still. The weight will start to swing clockwise or anticlockwise in small circles. Do not start this motion yourself. Instead, just ask yourself a question – any question – and say that the weight will swing clockwise to answer "Yes" and anticlockwise for "No". Hold this thought in mind, and soon, even though you are trying not to make any motion, the weight will start to swing in answer to your question.
Magic? Only the ordinary everyday magic of consciousness. There's no supernatural force at work, just tiny movements you are making without realising. The string allows these movements to be exaggerated, the inertia of the weight allows them to be conserved and built on until they form a regular swinging motion. The effect is known as Chevreul's Pendulum, after the 19th Century French scientist who investigated it."
From How the ouija board really moves
Do You Still Believe in Ghosts?
There is an episode of Uncanny called The Curse of Luibeilt. This is the story of two climbers Phil Macneill and Jimmy Dunn who in 1973 decided to head out into the Scottish Highlands for a weekend of climbing. They boarded the train to Balloch from Glasgow, then hitched a lift to Kinlochleven and then hiked further north to a place called Luibielt. Here they came across an old bothy. They peered through the windows and the place appeared to be lived in. As bothies are old tenant farmers cottages that now provide free shelter for hikers and climbers this is a bit unusual.
The table was laid for Christmas dinner and there were other signs of habitation. Phil and Jimmy left their bags in an outbuilding and went climbing for the day. They returned in the evening, about 9pm and still the interior looked much the same as when they’d looked through the windows some hours earlier. They decided to head inside as the outisde temperature had dropped significantly and they needed to get somewhere warm Except the inside of the bothy wasn’t warm. It was even colder than outside. And then the story really begins. They decided to sleep downstairs and after getting into their sleeping bags they blow out the candles.
"the first noises which we hear are footsteps upstairs in that room above. The second noise we hear is the dismantled metal-framed bed being pulled away from the wall and it sounds as though it was being put together, and then a little while later, the third noise we hear is the boulder being rolled around the floor.”
Read the rest of Phil’s story Don’t Sleep in This House.
There are various other troublesome noises as if things are being thrown around a room and then more footsteps. The footsteps began to come down the spiral staircase that finished outside the door to the living room where they’d been sleeping. Armed with an ice axe, Phil decided to open the door. But there is nothing there.
Phil and Jimmy leave Luibielt that night but the experience had a lasting effect on Phil. He believed that whatever had spooked them in Luibielt had followed him home to his flat in Glasgow at 39 Gibson Street.
Here’s a coincidence. In 1995/96 I used to live on Gibson Street. I think the flat I lived in was at number 16. I had no idea at the time that Gibson Street was a place with a reputation for ghosts.
I won’t continue on with this. I have a feeling I could go on forever. I do, however, dig out a series of photographs I took of the flat at 16 Gibson Street and publish them for you here.
Photographs always have a sense of other about them. But that’s for another time.
Gibson Street, Glasgow. All photos by Tanya Clarke 1995
