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Restless Spirits


By Wil McCarthy

I n both Gaelic and Hebrew folklore, the seventh son of a family—and especially the seventh son of a seventh son—is believed to hold the favor of God and to possess unusual or even miraculous abilities. An old wives' tale, right? A ridiculous superstition? Well, maybe not. In 1995, MIT social scientist Frank Solloway made the startling discovery that first-born male children are about 50 percent less likely to be involved in scientific revolutions than their later-born peers. Indeed, birth order is the strongest single predictor of revolutionary thinking, and the later a child appears in the family, the less vested interest he has in the status quo, and so the more likely he is to resist it.

Boys with lots of older male siblings are also more likely to become homosexual adults, and in fact we can say with high confidence that seventh sons will tend to be unusual people who believe and accomplish many unusual things. Seventh-son "wizards" of history include rapper Tupac Shakur, physics and chemistry prodigy Robert Boyle, Japan's last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, and the Jewish King David. This is a nice lesson, I think, on the value of old wives' tales. I'm sure a lot of them are false, but the people who came up with them were no less intelligent than the people of today, and certainly no worse at observing the world around them. There's a lot of hard-earned wisdom locked up in these gems, and dismissing them out of hand is, well, silly.

It's also unscientific. As a discipline, science is extremely skeptical and holds all forms of evidence to a much higher standard than ordinary people do in their everyday lives. It's easy to interpret this show-me attitude as a kind of closed-mindedness, and in fact many scientists do dismiss folk wisdom without taking the time to examine it. In technical terms, this is known as "bad science." In good science, we examine the claims at face value, treat them as testable hypotheses and design experiments to disprove them. When a claim can't be disproven, we try another experiment, and another, until we run out of ideas. Any claims that withstand this multi-pronged assault are eventually accepted as true (or "probably true," since proving that something always works would take an infinite amount of time).

Anyway, everyone seems to be talking about SpaceShipOne and the X-Prize this month, and given my aerospace background, some of you might be expecting me to weigh in as well. But most of the important comments have already been made, and with All Hallows Eve coming on I feel it's a good time to take up my promise to examine the paranormal more often. We're going to talk about ghosts.

Fooled by machine ghosts

Are they real? Absolutely. Or rather, it depends on your definition of "ghost." In analog TV transmissions, a "ghost" is an echo of the original signal that has bounced off a mountain or building and arrives in your TV set a little bit later, a little bit weaker, a little bit out of phase with the actual picture. The result is a faint image slightly offset from the main image on your screen. In mountain valleys and city downtowns, you'll sometimes see two or even three ghost images trailing away across the front of your set. That's real.

Another type of ghost is the "electronic voice phenomenon," in which spoken words, phrases and occasionally whole sentences appear in the background of noisy audio recordings. These can be extremely creepy. While walking around my neighborhood I often dictate text into a palmtop computer and later play it back into voice recognition software. Occasionally, bits of text will appear that have nothing to do with what I actually said, and when I play the recording back I can distinctly hear strange words in the rustling of leaves or the chattering of a car engine. Stepping outside on this breezy October day, I've just uncovered the words "them do it all to them," "to the world a new work" and, most disturbingly, "before the fifth fifth stuffed in the fifth in the fifth fifth fifth fifth fifth." I'm not making this up. These are just patterns imposed on the noise by a pattern-seeking algorithm (my own brain, or a piece of software trained to respond like my brain), but even so, reading them gives me the shivers.

There are also ghost particles, ghost towns, ghost writers and hard-drive ghosts, all undeniably real. But none of these reflects the traditional definition of a ghost, which is the image or spirit of a deceased person that has, for some reason, lingered here on Earth rather than dissipating or moving on. It's interesting to note that ghosts are found in the folklore of literally every human culture, and while some of the details vary from place to place, others are surprisingly constant. A ghost is generally human in shape, but transparent, silvery, foggy or shadowed in appearance. It can speak, but its voice is faint or hard to make out. The air around it feels colder than normal, and sightings are usually accompanied by a sense of dread, even if the ghost appears otherwise harmless.

Spooked by spectral recordings

Is that possible? Again, yes, depending on the exact meanings you ascribe to these terms. Certainly, when reputable people worldwide claim to have seen the same unusual things, we should believe they're seeing something. Leaving aside the issue of fraud, I believe these sightings fall, more or less, into three broad categories:

(1) Mistaken identity. I once saw a ghost myself, in the presence of reliable witnesses, on a cold December midnight while looking up into a tower window of the 150-year-old Miramont Castle near Colorado Springs. The apparition was proportioned like a human being, and took the form of a translucent, billowing figure in what appeared to be a monk's cowl. Parts of it seemed luminous, while other parts were deeply shadowed, and the "head" swiveled back and forth as though looking out the window. When it finally seemed to latch its gaze directly on us, we steeled ourselves to hold our ground and study the scene more carefully. The "ghost" turned out to be a dry-cleaning bag draped over a coat rack, illuminated by a nearby desk lamp, inflated in the updraft of a heating vent and rendered humanoid by the same part of our brains that identifies a smiley face in three squiggles on a yellow circle.

The ghost retained some of its scare power, though, even when its true nature was revealed. This is not surprising, since even horror movies and haunted-house rides give us a thrill of terror. There is surely something in the wiring of human brains, urging us to retreat from strange figures in the darkness. And this thing really did look scary! I suspect a lot of "ghost" sightings occur under circumstances like these. One persistent specter in a Denver parking lot turned out to be a spill of luminescent radium from a World War I-era watch factory.

(2) Subliminal senses. "Infrasound" is any tone or vibration too low in pitch to register in the human ear, and there are many sources of it in both the human and natural worlds. Vibration is measured in "Hertz" (Hz) or cycles per second, and the human audible range is from around 20 to 20,000 Hz. Below this we can sometimes feel the vibration in our bones and organs, though we aren't consciously aware of it unless the intensity is fairly high. In particular, vibrations around 18 Hz are known to trigger flashes of light in the peripheral vision—kind of like rubbing our eyes—and also to initiate the mammalian "raise the hackles" response, which tightens our skin and causes hair follicles to stand out straight, probably in a vestigial effort to make our once-furry bodies look bigger. People often interpret this as a feeling of physical cold or psychic dread, or both. Vibrations around 12 Hz are believed to induce muscle weakness and even fainting.

Combined with other sensations, such as the tickling of drafts, the groan of settling foundations, the glow of phosphorescent molds or the scritching of rodents, it isn't hard to see how these subliminal impressions could "haunt" a particular location for years or decades at a time. Especially if someone died there, or something else frightening happened.

(3) Recorded information. Remember the old phonographs? Sound is captured as the vibration of a moving needle, and recorded in the grooves of a rotating vinyl disc. These recordings can later be played back simply by pressing another needle against the disc while it spins. You don't even need an amplifier to hear it, although it certainly helps. And when you listen to an old vinyl record, you really are hearing the voice of a dead person that has somehow pressed a durable trace of itself into the world. Some kinds of wheel-thrown pottery are also believed to record ancient sounds, dating back to the middle ages and beyond, although no one has ever succeeded in extracting an intelligible voice from one. Photographs are another sort of durable trace, and so are the "flash people" whose shadows were burned into the sidewalks and foundations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, during the nuclear explosions that ended World War II.

Most modern ghost hunters seem to believe that similar impressions can be left in the electromagnetic fields of a building or outdoor location, and somehow picked up by human senses. Scientifically speaking, this is a valid hypothesis. Unfortunately, decades of persistent investigation have failed to reveal any conclusive evidence. If effects like these exist, they must be very subtle indeed. But electromagnetism is not the only way to leave a trace. Today's technology allows us to find information in the spin of an electron, the entangled states of paired photons, the kinked strands of an errant protein molecule or the exact arrangement of a shattered glass. We can read DNA from a 40,000-year-old crime scene, and now the physicists are telling us that even a black hole—the ultimate destroyer of evidence—cannot actually remove information from the universe.

Everything that happens, everything that has ever happened, is stored in the patterns of the world around us. And with the powerful pattern-matching software we carry around in our heads, is it so far-fetched to suppose that the site of a gruesome murder might leave behind traces that our eyes and ears and nerves can reconstruct? Putting such hypotheses to the test may or may not reveal anything new about the world, but I do know one thing: We can scare ourselves silly just thinking about it.


Sources used for writing this column can be found here.

Wil McCarthy is a rocket guidance engineer, robot designer, nanotechnologist, science-fiction author and occasional aquanaut. He has contributed to three interplanetary spacecraft, five communication and weather satellites, a line of landmine-clearing robots and some other "really cool stuff" he can't tell us about. His short writings have graced the pages of Analog, Asimov's, Wired, Nature and other major publications, and his book-length works include the New York Times notable Bloom, Amazon "Best of Y2K" The Collapsium and most recently Lost in Transmission. His acclaimed nonfiction book, Hacking Matter, is now available in paperback.




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