Have you ever felt the urge to visit a haunted house or a horror film just for the joy of it? Or do you think about wearing a spooky costume to scare the living daylights out of your friends? Maybe on Halloween, you can, but what about the not-so-spooky days?
Most Americans believe that ghosts are for real. The belief in ghosts can be traced back to the Mesopotamia days when the fear of ghosts was a rampant thing. It also went on to affect people’s collective psyche. But dig deep, and you may find a perfectly logical and science-based reason behind paranormal activities. Here are a few explanations about why Science asks you not to get spooked out.
Fear or Sound Waves
Right below the range of human hearing, infrasound can make you feel some strange sensations. People cannot hear imperceptible sounds that are below 20 hertz. Even if you cannot hear the sounds in the real sense of the word, you may respond to the noises with a feeling of foreboding or dread.
In 1988, an engineer Vic Tandy of Coventry University decided to spend a night at a haunted lab. The night turned out to be a spooky one as colleagues went to experience an overwhelming sense of anxiety and distress. They went on to feel shivers down their spines. Tandy had the eerie feeling of noticing a dark blob at the corner of his eye. Later it was found that there was a silent fan creating sound waves at around 19 hertz. This is the frequency that causes vibration in people’s eyes and may make people experience optical illusions. However, as soon as you switch off the fan, they immediately started feeling better, read less spooked out.
Variations in Electromagnetic Fields
EMF or Electromagnetic field meters help detect electrical problems. You will invariably find them in the ghost-hunters toolbox. Neuroscientist Michael Persinger asserts that normal variation in electromagnetic fields can be a reason behind supposed hauntings.
He didn’t just say it randomly but tested it in the 1980s when he made people wear helmets, delivering a less than strong magnetic stimulation. Most of these subjects undergoing this test felt the eerie presence of something in the room. There have been instances at the Hampton Court Palace that had strong electromagnetic fields and paranormal activities.
Carbon Monoxide Behind Hauntings
An episode of This American Life covering Halloween had host Ira Glass and toxicologist Albert Donnay delt on this topic. They were dabbling with an old ghost, the details published in 1921 in the American Journal of Ophthalmology. Mrs. H and her family moved into an old house and were suddenly full of paranormal activities. There were the usual spooky trappings such as suspicious voices, scary footsteps sounds, and had the feeling of people pushing them down on the bed.
There were other ominous signs such as dying houseplants, and Mrs. H’s children were not feeling their usual selves with complaints of weakness and headaches. An investigation revealed that there had been a faulty furnace that filled the house with carbon monoxide fumes. Carbon monoxide poisoning causes strange and inexplicable feelings, including hallucinations and sickness. Miraculously the strange happenings stopped as soon as they repaired the furnace.
Waking Paralysis and Hallucinations
Have you ever heard about sleep paralysis? Well, it’s a common explanation for a ghost sighting when the body is naturally paralyzed when the body is in REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep.
A person experiencing this feeling of paralysis can make you feel terrorized while awake. This happens when the body-brain wires cross, and a person suddenly feels a few seconds to a few minutes of waking paralysis, which leads to hallucinations. Different people have different hallucinations that can make you feel right, from spiders to ghosts, and fill you up with a feeling of dread. When somebody has a feeling of terror around bedtime or experience wakeful time right in the middle of the night, they have a paralytic feeling of terror, so much so that they cannot move an inch. This condition is diagnosed as sleep paralysis.
In Conclusion
There are other reasons influenced by social influences, such as when people see something, others will follow suit and say that they see the same thing. Just one person’s saying something confidently may make others believe the same. So, there may be a perfectly plausible explanation why you may see something and believe that it is a ghost sighting. Science says it isn’t a ghost or a paranormal activity. What about you?