IT has always bothered me that I’ve never seen a ghost. As a sociologist who studies fear, I’m well acquainted with the statistics: Forty-two percent of American adults believe in ghosts.
Last year, in search of my own ghost story, I went to what is reputed to be one of the most haunted places in America: Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. Nearly 60 paranormal investigation teams explore the site each year, seeking evidence of ghosts within.
Even if the lore was stripped away, the former prison would still be terrifying. Its 30-foot Gothic castle walls separate Philadelphia from an institution with a long history of pain and abuse, the first prison to use solitary confinement.
Built in 1829, Eastern State was occupied until 1971, after which it was scavenged and plundered by trespassers and nature alike. When the site was turned over to a nonprofit in the mid ’90s it was in a state of ruin: crumbling walls, roofs collapsed into cellblocks, rusted pipes strewn across floors and chipped paint that gave every surface a look of decay. Much of it remains the same today, though it now operates as a museum, capitalizing on its reputation with features like a haunted house and a “ghost bus.”
I thought it was best to travel with professionals and joined a team complete with photographers, a psychic, lots of equipment and experienced ghost hunters. They unpacked their cameras, tripods, audio recorders, even an electromagnetic field detector. We walked stealthily through the dark cellblocks, and as I passed each cell and looked in, I imagined brutal killers locked behind layers of stone and wardens treating inmates like animals. My palms were sweating and my heart rate had ticked up a notch. I was starting to feel afraid.
Our minds are so powerful that we can “think” our bodies into having real physiological reactions. You want to believe a drug will work, so it does. You want to see a ghost, so you’ll see a ghost. These psychosomatic experiences are the standard scientific explanation for paranormal phenomena, but it’s not all in our minds.
While our senses are keen, there are things happening around us that we are not completely aware of. For example: infrasound, sound waves of 20 hertz or less, mostly inaudible to the human ear. Our bodies can pick up these tiny vibrations through our skin and even our eyes. They register that something is not quite right, and have been shown to produce feelings of uneasiness, revulsion, fear and chills. This is the same process that alerts animals of a coming natural disaster. A large, empty building with lots of structural deficits — like, say, an abandoned prison — is a prime spot for infrasound.
We carried out the hunt in silence. I would have loved to get everyone in an fMRI right then and look at their brains.
Over the past 20 years, fMRI and EEG studies of Tibetan monks, Carmelite nuns, psychics and the hyper-religious have revealed the neurological manifestations of mystical experiences. Researchers have found that stimulation of the brain’s left anterior insula is linked to the feeling of a “sensed presence.” The neuroscientist Shahar Arzy and his colleagues found that repeated electrical stimulation of an area of the left temporo-parietal junction resulted in the subject’s perceiving a shadowy figure. And those who suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy have reported experiences comparable to supernatural encounters, including feelings of heightened spirituality, a “sensed presence,” and euphoria collectively known as Gastaut-Geschwind syndrome.
This is not to say everyone who reports seeing a ghost is suffering from brain damage or a neurological condition, but it does suggest that changes in the way our brain is communicating can make us feel as if we’re engaging with the paranormal.
We stopped at a cell that the psychic reported to be especially active. The hunters set up a cassette tape recorder and microphone. We peered into the cell, dark except for a bright beam of moonlight coming in through the tiny window. I was staring harder than I ever had before.
The only sound came from the slow, hypnotic turning of the cassette tape. Time slowed to a crawl.
The passage of time is a subjective experience influenced by how important and how novel an experience is. New things, threatening things, arousing things all are going to feel as if they last longer. Our brains are working overtime to make sure we remember every little detail for future reference, gathering and processing all the signals and sensations in our bodies.
Standing in front of the prison cell I was overwhelmed by both the history of the prison and the anticipation of the hunt.
And that is when I felt it. A chill at the base of my neck quickly rippled throughout my body. My shoulders shuddered. I felt warm, relaxed and yet fully aware of everything around me. I was full of emotion and felt an incredible closeness to the four ghost hunters next to me, people I had met just hours before.
This was a sensation I had never experienced. For a few glorious moments I believed that a ghost, perhaps the long-ago occupant of this cell, was passing through me. I spent the rest of the evening in a trance, following the hunters through the cold, empty, eerie hallways.
I had my ghost story, finally.
Or did I? I knew that my powerful paranormal experience was most likely a result of my heightened, sensitized emotional state. The feelings I experienced are similar to what’s known as an “autonomous sensory meridian response.” It is not a clinical diagnosis, and there is skepticism over whether it is a physiologically distinct, measurable experience.
But whether it was the intense emotions induced by the building, the infrasound, a misfiring of key brain circuits, or my own desire to believe, I left that day with a far from normal experience.
Inside the old prison we were alive with energy, anticipation and excitement. I allowed myself to suspend my disbelief and indulge the instinct in every one of us to search and explore. I will never give up that adventure, and neither should you.
The New York Times
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