Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there

by Richard Wiseman

  When you stared at the solid black image a few moments ago you unwittingly forced the 'black-white' neurons to quieten down for a very long period of time. Then, when you shifted your attention to the empty box, the neurons became activated. However, because they were already in a quiet state, the activation made them become over-excited, creating a rebound effect that resulted in a white afterimage.

  The Rose Without a Thorn

  Hampton Court Palace has a long and controversial history. In the early 1500s the Archbishop of York, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, invested seven years of his life and over 200,000 gold crowns building a palace fit for a king. A few years after completing the project Wolsey fell out of favour with the reigning monarch, Henry VIII, and felt it would be politically expedient to gift his beloved palace to the Royal family. Henry graciously accepted Wolsey’s kind offer, expanded the estate to ensure that it could hold his thousand-strong court, and promptly moved in. The palace went on to become home to some of Britain’s most famous kings and queens before being opened to the public in the mid-nineteenth century. Nowadays Hampton Court Palace is one of Britain’s most popular historical attractions, playing host to more than half a million visitors each year.

  The palace is famous for many things. It houses invaluable works of art from the Royal Collection, contains the best preserved medieval hall in Britain, and boasts giant Tudor kitchens designed to feed 600 twice a day. Oh, and one other thing. It is also one of the most haunted buildings in Britain. Various spirits allegedly haunt the palace. There is, for example, a ‘lady in grey’ who walks through the cobbled courtyards regular as clockwork, a ‘woman in blue’ who continuously searches for her lost child, and a phantom dog that lives in Wolsey’s closet. However, despite stiff competition, Hampton Court’s most famous spirit is that of Catherine Howard.

  Henry VIII did not have a great track record when it came to relationships, of course. He cheated on his first wife, beheaded his second, lost his third while she was giving birth to his only son, and divorced his fourth. In a move that would make even the most experienced marriage counsellor raise an eyebrow, the 49-year-old Henry then became infatuated with a 19-year-old courtier named Catherine Howard. After a brief period of wooing Henry married Howard, publicly declaring that she was his ‘rose without a thorn’.

  A few months after getting married, Howard found herself very much in love. Unfortunately, the apple of her eye was not her husband Henry, but rather a young courtier named Thomas Culpepper (who, according to several accounts more than lived up to his reputation as a ‘gentleman of the bedchamber’). News of their affair eventually reached Henry, who promptly decided to fetch the garden shears and remove the head of his beloved rose. Upon hearing the bad news, Catherine was understandably upset, and ran to Henry to plead for her life, but was stopped by Royal guards and dragged back through the corridors of the palace to her apartments. A few months later both Thomas Culpepper and Catherine Howard were beheaded at the Tower of London.

  The ghost of Catherine Howard is said to haunt the corridor that she was dragged down against her will. By the turn of the last century this area of the palace had become associated with a whole host of ghostly experiences, including sightings of a ‘woman in white’ and reports of inexplicable screams.

  In January 2001 a palace official telephoned me, explained that there had been a recent surge in Howard-related phenomena, and wondered whether I might be interested in investigating.6 Eager to use the opportunity to discover more about hauntings I quickly put together an experiment, assembled a research team, photocopied hundreds of blank questionnaires, loaded up my car and headed off to the palace for a five-day investigation.

  The palace had called a press conference to announce the start of my study, and had attracted the attention of journalists from all around the world. We decided to make the press conference a two-part affair, with a palace official talking about the history of the haunting in the first half, a brief break, and then my good self describing the forthcoming investigation. A palace historian kicked off the proceedings by telling a packed room of reporters what happened when Henry met Cathy. During the brief break I stepped outside to get some fresh air and the strangest thing happened. A car containing two tipsy teenagers drove slowly past me. One of the teenagers wound down the window and threw an egg at me. The egg smashed on my shirt. Unable to change, I tried to remove the worst of the stains and then returned to the press conference. A few minutes into my talk one of the journalists noticed the marks on my shirt and, assuming that it was ectoplasm, asked whether Catherine Howard had already slimed me. I replied ‘Yes. This is going to be a tougher investigation than I first thought.’ Although said in jest, my comment was to prove prophetic.

  Prior to the experiment, I had asked the palace to supply me with a floor plan of the corridor that would have held such unpleasant memories for Catherine Howard. I then met with Ian Franklin, a palace warder who had carefully catalogued a century of reports of unusual phenomena experienced by staff and visitors, and asked him to secretly place crosses on the floor plan to indicate where people had consistently reported their experiences. To avoid any possible bias during the investigation, neither I, nor any other member of the research team knew which areas had been marked by Ian.

  During the day groups of visitors were transformed into ghost hunters. After hearing a brief talk about the project, each participant was handed a blank floor plan, asked to wander along the corridor and place an ‘X’ on the floor plan to indicate the location of any unusual experiences that they might have (essentially playing a game of ‘spot the ghoul’). Each night we would place a variety of sensors and a £60,000 heat imager in the corridor in the hope of catching Catherine mid-‘boo’.

  Day one of the investigation went badly, with several participants wandering into the wrong corridor and then wondering why the floor plan was so wildly inaccurate. On day two we were joined by a woman who claimed to be the reincarnation of Catherine Howard, and said that she could provide a unique first person perspective on the proceedings (‘Actually, I was dragged up the corridor, not down it’, ‘Not sure that the new paint job in the kitchens works for me’, etc). On day three a Brazilian film crew attempted to film in the haunted corridor but the presenter suddenly had an anxiety attack and left the palace without completing the piece. Day four turned out to be especially interesting. The team (which now included the reincarnated Catherine Howard) assembled in the morning as usual and reviewed the heat sensor data from the previous night. It was immediately obvious that something very strange had taken place, with the graphs showing a massive spike in temperature around 6 a.m. We eagerly rewound the recording from the thermal imager to discover if we had caught Catherine on tape. Dead on 6 a.m. the doors at one end of the corridor burst open and in walked a figure. The reincarnated Catherine Howard instantly recognized the figure as a member of Henry VIII’s court. However, a few seconds later the proceedings took a decidedly more sceptical turn when we saw the figure walk over to a cupboard, remove a vacuum cleaner and start to clean the carpets. Thankfully, the data from the rest of the investigation proved more revealing.

  Field footage of thermal ‘ghost’

  www.richardwiseman.com/paranormality/ThermalGhost.html

  First of all, people who believed in ghosts experienced significantly more strange sensations than the sceptics. Interestingly, these odd experiences were not randomly spread throughout the corridor but rather stacked up in certain areas. Even more interestingly, these areas corresponded to the ones that Ian Franklin had identified from analysis of previous reports. Given that neither the team nor volunteers knew the location of these areas during the study, it was strong evidence that something strange was happening.

  We have obtained the same pattern of findings in several investigations at other haunted locations. Time and again those who believe in the paranormal experience more ghosts than those who don’t, and these sensations frequently occur in places that have a reputation for b
eing haunted. As I loaded my equipment back into my car and said goodbye to our well-meaning but intensely annoying Catherine Howard wannabe, one question nagged away in my mind. Why?

  The Machine in the Ghost

  Spend any time looking at websites about ghost-hunting or reading books about hauntings and you will soon come across the ‘Stone Tape Theory’. According to its proponents, ghosts are the result of buildings recording and then replaying past events. To put it another way, ghosts don’t just walk through walls but are actually part of them. The idea has emotional appeal but, from a scientific perspective, suffers from three significant problems. First, the idea is quite literally a work of fiction. In December 1972 the BBC broadcast a Christmas ghost story entitled The Stone Tape. Written by Nigel Kneale (who also penned the fabulous Quatermass), the play centres on a group of scientists investigating an old haunted house. The researchers discover that the stone in one of the rooms is capable of recording past events, and that the alleged ghosts are actually these recordings being replayed. Curious to discover more, the team carry out various experiments and (as is often the way when fictional scientists meddle with the unknown) unwittingly release a malevolent force into the world. The second problem with the theory is that it is completely implausible – as far as we know, there is no way that information about events can be stored in the fabric of a building. And the third and final problem – and from a scientific perspective this is perhaps the biggest stumbling block – is that there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that it is true.

  Thankfully, other scientists have come up with more plausible ways of explaining things that go bump in the night. In the 1950s Mr G. W. Lambert, the president of the Society for Psychical Research, suggested that the answer lay not in the walls of haunted buildings but rather in the natural movement of earth and water deep beneath their foundations.8

  BOO!

  Psychical researcher Tony Cornell carried out a great deal of fascinating work into the unknown, but perhaps his strangest series of studies aimed to assess the reliability of eyewitness testimony for ghosts.9 The idea was simple. First, Cornell and his colleagues would dress up as apparitions, stand in various public spaces at night, and attract the attention of passers-by. Next, other members of the research team would interview these eyewitnesses and assess the accuracy of their testimony. However, as is often the case with supernatural science, the studies proved surprisingly difficult to conduct.

  In their initial experiment Cornell wrapped himself up in a white sheet and spent several nights walking around a dark park in the centre of Cambridge. Although 80 people were in a position to see the fake spirit, none of them appeared to notice the strange goings-on. Wondering if the disappointing results were due to poor illumination Cornell put the sheet on again and spent several nights walking around a well-lit Cambridge graveyard. A total of 90 cars, 40 cyclists and 12 pedestrians passed by, but only four people appeared to notice the apparition. Of these, two were interviewed, with one saying that he had assumed that the 'ghost' was part of an art project and the other remarking that the person under the sheet 'surely must be mad'. In a final attempt to be spotted, Cornell contacted a local cinema and arranged to re-stage his ghost walk in front of the screen just prior to the showing of an X-rated film (chosen 'to safeguard against children being present'). The audience were then asked to raise their hands if they had seen something unusual, revealing that a third of the audience had failed to notice the fake spirit. The testimony from those who did spot the figure was often far from accurate, and included a description of a young girl dressed in a summer frock, a woman dressed in a heavy coat, and a polar bear ambling across the screen.

  Cornell's findings suggest that if the dead do indeed walk among us they might benefit from wearing a high-visibility vest.

  Gauld and Cornell found a house that was scheduled for demolition and persuaded the local council to give it to them for the purpose of serious scientific research. The duo started off by cementing a powerful vibrating machine to the wall of the house. Next they slung a long rope around the chimney and attached a heavy weight to the end of the rope. They then ventured inside the house and carefully positioned 13 ‘test’ objects in different rooms, for example, placing a marble on the floor in one room and a teacup and saucer on a shelf in another. Preparations complete, they moved onto the second stage of the experiment.

  Gauld positioned himself inside the house and Cornell switched on the giant vibrator. The entire house shook but none of the test objects moved an inch. Cornell then arranged for the heavy weight on the end of the rope to be lifted and slammed into the side of the building. All the test objects remained unmoved by the experience. The following day Gauld and Cornell returned to the house, turned the vibrator up to 11, and finally managed to get the teacup to rotate in the saucer. The dynamic duo then repositioned the vibrator for even greater effect and took up positions in the house for one final test. As a colleague turned the vibrator’s dial to maximum Gauld and Cornell felt the entire house shake. Dirt came crashing down the chimney, slabs of plaster fell from the ceiling, and a large crack emerged in one of the bedroom walls. Subsequently describing their time there as ‘quite our most terrifying experience in pursuit of a poltergeist’, they stood their ground and observed that even under these extreme conditions only a few of the test objects moved (a plastic beaker fell over, the cup and saucer fell off the shelf and a plaster of Paris donkey moved a fraction of an inch away from the wall). After putting their lives on the line in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, Gauld and Cornell concluded that Lambert’s theory simply didn’t hold water.

  Lambert is not the only one to suggest that hauntings might be the result of bad vibrations. In my previous book, Quirkology, I described another idea put forward by electrical engineer Vic Tandy.10 In 1998, Tandy was working in a laboratory that had a reputation for being haunted. Working alone in the lab late one August night, he started to feel increasingly uncomfortable and had the distinct impression of being watched. As he slowly turned around he saw an indistinct grey figure slowly emerge from the left side of his peripheral vision. With the hair on the back of his neck standing to attention, Tandy eventually built up the courage to look directly at the figure. As he did, it faded away and disappeared.

  Tandy was a keen fencer and the following day brought his foil into the laboratory for repairs. As he clamped the foil into a vice, it started to vibrate frantically. Although initially baffled, he eventually figured out that the air conditioning unit in the room was producing a low frequency sound wave that fell well below the human hearing threshold. These waves, referred to as ‘infrasound’, vibrate at a frequency of around 17Hz, and are capable of producing weird effects. Tandy speculated that in some allegedly haunted buildings certain naturally occurring phenomena, such as strong winds blowing across an open window or the rumble of nearby traffic, could be creating infrasound and giving people strange experiences that they incorrectly attribute to the presence of spirits.

  There is some evidence to support Tandy’s idea. For example, in 2000 he reported investigating a fourteenth-century cellar in Coventry that had a reputation for being haunted, and found infrasound in the part of the cellar where many people had reported seeing apparitions.11 As I also noted in Quirkology, some additional research has suggested that people do have strange experiences when exposed to low frequency sounds. However, although the theory might explain some alleged ghostly activity, the required combination of strong winds, specifically shaped windows and nearby traffic mean that it is unlikely to account for a large number of hauntings.

  Of course, as a scientific explanations for spirits, infra-sound is not the only show in town. . . .

  Waiting for God

  Neuropsychologist Michael Persinger, from Laurentian University in Canada, believes that ghostly experiences are caused by the brain malfunctioning and, more controversially, that these sensations can be easily elicited by applying very weak magnetic fields to the outside of
the skull.12

  In a typical Persinger study participants are led into a laboratory and asked to sit in a comfortable chair. They then have a helmet placed on their heads, are blindfolded, and are asked to relax for about 40 minutes. During this time several solenoids hidden in the helmet generate extremely weak magnetic fields around the participant. Sometimes these fields are focused over the right side of the head, at other times they switch to the left and once in a while they circle around the skull. Finally the helmet and blindfold are removed and the participant is asked to complete a questionnaire indicating if they experienced any strange sensations, such as the sense of a presence, vivid images, odd smells, being sexually aroused or coming face to face with God.

  After years of experimentation, Persinger claims that around 80 per cent of participants tick the ‘yes’ box to at least one of these experiences, with some even going for the ‘all of the above’ option. The study has featured in lots of science documentaries, resulting in several presenters and journalists putting Persinger’s magic helmet on their heads in the hope of meeting their maker. For the most part, they have not been disappointed. Parapsychologist Sue Blackmore felt as if something had got hold of her leg and dragged it up the wall, followed by a sudden sense of intense anger (which is exactly how I would feel if someone took my leg and dragged it up a wall). Scientific American columnist and sceptic of the paranormal Michael Shermer had an equally strange time under the influence of the helmet, feeling a strange presence rush past him, followed by a sense that he was drifting out of his body. Persinger does not, however, have a 100 per cent track record, with evolutionary biologist and well-known atheist Richard Dawkins feeling very little, followed by a strong sense of disappointment.