THE SOUNDPROOF chamber where Persinger haunts his guests is about as big as a freight elevator. It appears to have been decorated circa 1970; the floor is covered with yellow and brown shag carpeting, and the subject chair is padded with a messy drape of cheap Mexican blankets. I half expect someone to pass me a bong.
Linda St-Pierre, the lab manager, is sticking EEG leads to my scalp. While she does this, I ask Persinger about a statement he made in one of his papers: “Although these results suggest that these apparitions are an artifact of an extreme state-dependence, the possibility that they are associated with transient, altered thresholds in the ability to detect normally indiscriminable stimuli cannot be excluded.” Could the “normally indiscriminable stimuli” he’s speaking of be generated by someone dead? In other words, is it possible that—rather than prompting hallucinations—certain electromagnetic field patterns enhance people’s ability to sense some sort of genuine paranormal impulse or entity?
Persinger acknowledges that both explanations are possible. It could be that people are being physically affected by the electromagnetic fields and then applying their own cultural overlay (“Ghost!”) to explain the experience, and it could also be that people—at least some of them—are suddenly, as a result of the field’s effect on their brain, able to pick up, as Persinger puts it, “actual information that’s in the environment.” Persinger thinks the latter is likely. “Particularly,” he says, “in places where people experience the same thing again and again.” Before I arrived, I had thought Persinger was a skeptic, a debunker, but clearly he’s not.
As he talks, Persinger ties a worn paisley scarf around my head to secure the EEG leads. He says he’s been using it for years. He pauses. “Wouldn’t it be funny if it turned out that all along, it was the scarf?” Persinger slides an orange Skidoo helmet down over the scarf. Glued to the outside of the helmet are eight small electromagnets, which will deliver the milliseconds-long pulses to my brain. Persinger assures me that the exposure level is no higher than that of a hair dryer. It’s the pattern of the signal—its complexity—that matters. Then he shuts off the lights and backs out the doorway.
“Ready?”
No. “Yes.”
The door shuts with a heavy, whispering clumpf, like a space-station air lock. Five minutes pass. I want to feel a presence, but mostly I just feel absence: of sound, of light, of the eerie effects I’d hoped for. If you’ve ever waited quietly in the dark before a surprise party begins, then you know what I’m experiencing right now. I worry that I’m going to disappoint Dr. Persinger, much as I’m disappointing myself. I certainly feel useless at times. There is something wrong with my mind.
Toward the end of the session, I begin to see and hear some things. Glimpses of faces, utterances that flash through my conscious mind so quickly I can’t remember them a second later. At one point, I hear a police car off in the distance—the repeated whoop-whoops that signal a driver to pull over.
After it’s over, Dr. Persinger comes into the chamber and sits down on an ottoman to interview me about my experiences. I interrupt him. “Did you hear the police siren?”
“No.”
“I did. From over in that direction.”
Persinger looks up from his notepad. “This is a soundproof room.”
Ah. Then I must have been drifting off to sleep.
“You’re labeling,” says Dr. Persinger. “Don’t label.” He gets up to retrieve my EEG printout. He flips through page after page of taut, insistent scratchings. “You weren’t drifting off to sleep. Not even close.”
Whatever it was and as real as it seemed, it wasn’t something I’d interpret as a paranormal phenomenon. About five years ago, for a period of several months, I would occasionally be awakened in the night by someone knocking loudly and insistently at either the front or the back door. So clear and so convincing were the knocks that the first time it happened I got out of bed, put on my bathrobe, and stumbled to the door, greatly amusing my husband, Ed, who was in the living room reading. No one was there. There had been no knocks. That had seemed spookier than this, but maybe it’s the context: sitting expectantly in a lab versus lying alone in bed late at night.
Persinger says that based on my answers to the questionnaires, I’m left-hemispherically dominant. I’m a “least responder.” For comparison, he hands me a sheet of paper with passages from transcripts of the sessions of highly responsive, right-hemispherically dominant types:
“I felt a presence behind me and then along my left side….”
“I began to feel the presence of people, but I could not see them; they were along my sides. They were colourless, grey-looking people. I know I was in the chamber but it was very real.”
Most impressive, to me at least, was the response of paranormal researcher-turned-skeptic Susan Blackmore, who visited Persinger well into her skeptical years, for a New Scientist article: “I felt something get hold of my leg and pull it, distort it, and drag it up the wall.”
It’s possible that the reason I’ve never experienced a ghostly presence is that my temporal lobes aren’t wired for it. It could well be that the main difference between skeptics (Susan Blackmore notwithstanding) and believers is the neural structure they were born with. But the question still remains: Are these people whose EMF-influenced brains alert them to “presences” picking up something real that the rest of us can’t pick up, or are they hallucinating? Here again, we must end with the Big Shrug, a statue of which is being erected on the lawn outside my office.
10. LISTENING TO CASPER
A Psychoacoustics Expert Sets Up Camp in England’s Haunted Spots
SIR FULKE GREVILLE lived in Warwick Castle from 1605 until 1628, the year he was stabbed by his disgruntled manservant Ralph.[38] The murder happened in London, but Sir Fulke’s ghost, in the manner of certain lost but persevering pets, found its way back to the castle. I’m guessing it got a lift from the Tussaud Group, the wax museum people, who bought the castle in 1978 and installed a Fulke-inspired production number called “Warwick Ghosts—Alive!” (“unsuitable for anyone of a nervous disposition”).
Sir Fulke is Coventry’s most famous ghost and certainly its highest-grossing, but not, to my mind, its most intriguing. For that you must visit the home of chartered engineer and psychoacoustics researcher Vic Tandy. Tandy, who teaches at Coventry University, is a big middle-aged guy with a goofball grin and glasses with heavy lenses that tend to pull the frames slightly off-kilter on one side or the other. He fits my stereotype of an engineer so well that when I hear him say things like “I have a second-level in aikido” and “I’m also a magician,” I have to stop myself from going, Really? We are sitting in Tandy’s living room with his wife Lynne and their son Paul, who has a stall at the local market selling rubber dog doo—and probably, knowing this family, a Ph.D. and a Heisman Trophy.
Tandy’s ghost story takes place twenty-some years ago, at a nearby factory that manufactured life-support systems. Tandy designed the company’s products and he put in a lot of overtime. One night as he returned to his lab from a coffee break, the cleaner barreled past him with a stricken look. “She told me there was a ghost in there. She said she’d been feeling uneasy, as though someone was in there with her, and then this gray thing appeared in the corner of her eye, and she took off running.”
38
A gripping moment that capped an otherwise drab existence. A proponent of what