I’M WANDERING the corridors of a derelict hospital. The place was abandoned following the mysterious disappearances of a woman in a coma, then several other patients. Strange noises have been reported coming from inside. Nobody knows what’s going on. It’s pretty spooky in here – dimly lit, with peeling paint and rusty doors. I screw up the courage to open one of them and – BAM! – a bloodied zombie girl leaps out at me. My heart starts racing.
That zombie gets everyone, says Connor Lloyd at Buckinghamshire New University, UK. He should know. He designed the game and has all his players wired up so he can monitor their heart rate, breathing and sweating to find out what scares players. “I’m interested in how games affect people’s minds,” he says. But when , head of psychology at the university, came across the game, he realised it could do much more. O’Keeffe is now adapting it to study ghosts.
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Rationalists may scoff, but it’s only human to feel haunted. Many more people believe in ghosts and claim to have encountered one than you might suppose (see “Anyone for ghosts?”). “I think it’s quite arrogant of us to ignore these experiences and to say they’re all deluded,” says O’Keeffe, who is one of only a handful of researchers studying ghost sightings and supposedly haunted locations. Of course, he doesn’t believe ghosts are real. What he wants to know is why we get spooked. Over the years, researchers have singled out various physical, psychological and environmental factors. But debate continues about which ones are actually involved, how they create ghostly experiences and why some of us are more affected than others. An immersive game could be the best way to find answers.
Ghost in the machine
For a start, it could help assess one of the oldest ideas about what causes paranormal experiences. In the early 1900s, British radio pioneer Oliver Lodge linked physical vibrations to reports of psychic phenomena. Others have since pointed the finger specifically at infrasound – sounds below the normal limit of human hearing – and electromagnetic fields. In 1998, Vic Tandy at Coventry University, UK, found evidence of a link between infrasound at around 19 hertz and specific physiological sensations, such as shivering, and . But other studies have been inconclusive.
was carried out in 2009 by a team at Goldsmiths, University of London, who built a room to investigate environmental factors linked to ghostly encounters. Participants in the Haunt project reported plenty of “anomalous” sensations, ranging from tingling and sadness to sensing a presence, terror and even sexual arousal. However, there were no peaks in these effects close to planted sources of infrasound, and they were just as common when the infrasound was off as when it was on. The project also investigated the idea that ghost sightings might be connected with certain electromagnetic fields known to influence brain activity in a way similar to transcranial magnetic stimulation, and that are thought to induce hallucinations. Again, there was no association between reports of odd sensations and the fields being on or off.
Chill factors
The case for electromagnetic fields is less compelling, but O’Keeffe suspects infrasound does have a role in experiences of haunting. He and others have questioned the Goldsmiths team’s findings, pointing out that the researchers didn’t measure background vibrations. Infrasound at around 19 hertz can come from a range of sources, he says, such as air-conditioning ducts, heavy traffic, planes and thunder, and it can travel long distances.
Context is crucial, though. For hundreds of years, church organs were built with infrasonic pipes, O’Keeffe notes, and among believers infrasound might heighten feelings of awe and being in the presence of God. In a building reputed to be haunted, for those who believe in ghosts, infrasound might boost the sensation of being in the presence of a spirit. O’Keeffe’s fieldwork supports this idea. “What we’ve found over the course of the last decade, looking at infrasound levels in haunted locations, is that it acts as an exacerbator of already existing experiences.”
O’Keeffe has had an unrivalled opportunity to do this research. As a result of appearances on TV ghost-hunting programmes – including serving as resident parapsychologist on Most Haunted between 2004 and 2010 – he has had access to locations normally closed to academic scrutiny. That has helped him build a picture of the factors that come together to make a place feel haunted. “I did quite a bit of survey work then, to look for commonalities in environmental variables,” he says. He found, for example, that dim lighting and being underground will almost guarantee that at least one person will feel a place is haunted. Other factors associated with spookiness include large spaces and a high contrast between exterior and interior light levels.
A drop in temperature also often crops up in reports of ghostly encounters. That may come from something as prosaic as a breeze, but there’s another simple explanation, says O’Keeffe. When the brain’s amygdala detects a threat, adrenaline is released. This hormone directs blood flow away from the skin towards the muscles, to assist with the fight-or-flight response, and the switch can make an individual feel cold. Someone who believes in ghosts and is convinced they are in a haunted location is more likely to have this response. And because a temperature drop is now so ingrained in stories about ghost encounters, people are primed to interpret coldness as a sign of being in the presence of something supernatural, O’Keeffe says.
A virtual reality game linked to physiological sensors could provide a systematic way to assess how environmental factors such as vibrations, physical settings and chills interact to generate ghostly feelings. It could also be used to test the power of suggestion. As the temperature effect indicates, you are more likely to be spooked if you believe in the paranormal. And , who led the Haunt project, has . He and his colleague Krissy Wilson found that believers would often disregard the evidence of their own eyes if another person claimed to have witnessed a paranormal event.
“The misinterpretation of sensory information can have strange effects”
But even a non-believer can have a supernatural experience if the circumstances are right. O’Keeffe notes that many ghostly encounters happen at night, when people are tired and wired from being in a supposedly haunted place. He suspects that , by affecting our judgement and decision-making. A mix of stress and exhaustion can certainly induce hallucinations, including sensing a presence. Mountaineer Reinhold Messner, for example, was sure that a third man, who he couldn’t quite see, accompanied him and his brother on their descent from Nanga Parbat in Pakistan. What’s going on here?
Some who report feeling someone is there when no one is actually present. at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and colleagues examined some of them, and traced their experiences to lesions in parts of the brain involved in sensorimotor control: the processing of signals from touch, body movement and proprioception, or how we sense the location of our body parts in space. In particular, damage in any one of three brain areas resulted in the misperception of “self” as “other”.
The team then used these insights to generate a feeling of a presence in people without neurological damage, using a “master-slave” robotic system. Blindfolded participants were connected to a master robot by their right fingertip, so the device matched their arm movements. These movements were relayed to a slave robot, which touched their backs while the master simultaneously simulated the sensation of touch in the fingertip. Despite the impossibility, it felt like they were touching themselves. When the researchers introduced a time lag, the volunteers reported feeling there was someone else behind them, and even being touched by “ghostly fingers”. The experience was so intense that some had to stop.
“Our study shows that the brain has multiple representations of our own body,” says Blanke. “Normally, these are successfully integrated, giving us a unitary experience of our body and self. However, when the brain network is damaged, a second representation of our body – different from our physical body – may arise, which is not experienced as ‘me’ or ‘I’, but rather as the presence of another human being.” He notes that at high altitudes, a lack of oxygen could affect the temporoparietal junction, one brain region his team identified as playing a role in sensing a presence. Physical exhaustion could do so too. “Due to its direct link with sensorimotor processing, it could impact the brain regions we described,” says Blanke.
Seeing in the dark
His team isn’t alone in finding that the misinterpretation of sensory information can have strange effects. Researchers at the University of Rochester in New York fitted people with helmets containing an eye-tracking camera. They then told them to wave a hand in front of their face – like an upside-down pendulum – and follow the motion with their eyes. Of course, the volunteers could do this easily in a well-lit room. But in total darkness, about – albeit dim and blurry. The camera indicated that they were tracking its motion pretty well.
“Seeing in total darkness? According to the current understanding of vision, that just doesn’t happen,” says , one of the researchers. “What we reported in our study was really a blending of the senses.” People were using information from feeling the movement of their arm to create this illusion. Some volunteers had synaesthesia – a classic blending of the senses – and they were particularly good at “seeing” in the dark. But they weren’t the only ones who could do it, and other studies indicate that many of us can combine information from different senses in the way people with synaesthesia do.
Could this kind of effect help explain ghost sightings, which often occur at night? “I’d say yes,” says Tadin. The experiment has certainly piqued O’Keeffe’s curiosity. He is especially interested in the finding that when people claimed to see their hand in the dark, their eyes smoothly tracked its movements, just as they did in the light. However, the eyes of people who said they couldn’t see their hand in darkness made tiny jerks as they moved. “I see the application of this as a kind of lie detector for mediums”, says O’Keeffe, who often claim to see spirits moving around in the dark. It could be a way of distinguishing those who may be seeing something – even if it’s just a hallucination – from fraudsters.
In February, O’Keeffe started taking a smaller, lighter version of the eye-tracker used by the Rochester team to “haunted” locations including Gloucester prison and Field Place, an 18th-century house in Worthing. “I’ve done three locations in the field with about 20 people, including a couple of mediums,” he says. The unpublished pilot study at Field Place found jerky eye movements in two people who reported seeing a spirit moving, suggesting that they weren’t genuinely tracking something.
O’Keeffe is also exploring ways to adapt Lloyd’s game to his own ends. It is played on a monitor, but O’Keeffe wants to create a fully immersive 3D experiment. In his lab, he has a VR setup that includes a headset as well as two controllers to generate virtual hands. Once these are linked up to a version of Lloyd’s haunted hospital, the next challenge will be to find ways to test how different factors combine to generate spooky sensations. “The idea is we’ll hook people up to the physiological sensors and we’ll explore how varied the experiences are if you add infrasound, or a small amount of caffeine – or do people get fearful because there’s an open door?” With a little ingenuity, he may even find ways to trick people’s sensory perception. And with VR, he will be able to do all these tests in a controlled environment on many more people than he can study in the field.
It’s a way off yet. But if O’Keeffe succeeds, he will have created the world’s first haunting machine. I suspect I won’t be the only one keen to try it out.
Anyone for Ghosts?
Between 30 and 40 per cent of . In the US, 18 per cent . Unsurprisingly perhaps, people who score higher on the Fantasy Prone Personality scale are more likely to believe in ghosts. The trait of neuroticism has also been linked to belief. So has extroversion, although extroverts may simply be happier to express their beliefs.
The number of people who admit to believing in ghosts has certainly risen in recent decades. A Gallup poll in the 1950s found that just 10 per cent of people in the UK were believers, and 2 per cent reported having seen an apparition. at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, and author of The Haunted: A social history of ghosts, says that an interest in alternative ideas in the 1970s and then the rash of ghost-hunting TV shows have both helped make belief in ghosts more acceptable.
There has also been a change in people’s conception of what a ghost is. “If I’d been able to do a vox pop 100 years ago, they’d have said the souls of the dead,” Davies says. “Now, most have a vague notion of it being some sort of visual expression of the dead person – perhaps electrical impulses left behind in the atmosphere.”
This article appeared in print under the headline “Game of ghosts”
