Fringe-ology (19 page)

So what they did was, they reached out and held hands. In fact, when they shared this detail, they reached out and held hands again, all these years later, across the dining room table. “I was in the lead, a little in front of your mother,” my father said, “because I figured I had to protect everybody.”

From their position, my parents could see down the hallway to the front door. The stairway banister ran parallel to that same hallway. And from their vantage point, my parents could not see the stairs themselves—or what was on them. Booms sounded from the stairway as whatever it was came down, one step—
boom!
—at a time. To my father, the sound suggested a child throwing a tantrum. But this was one hulking child. Both my parents felt tremors in the floor every time another bang sounded. And when it reached the very bottom, there was a small change in the rhythm, an extension of the patterned silence between explosions, as if the Family Ghost, the water hammer(?), whatever it was, having reached the last step, was regathering itself to hit upon the landing—and my parents' hearts—with one last, ferocious, floor-shaking effort.

And then it did.

The last sound was the loudest—a big, two-footed dismount. The noise stopped then.

And it never happened again.

I
RECOGNIZE HOW TRULY
fantastic every word of the Family Ghost story is, and here I am, a reporter. I can hear the skeptics chortling, and I laugh right along with them. I realize that the ending of this story is particularly unbelievable. And I know for some people it will undermine my credibility. But what if I told you that I don't believe it myself? And what if I told you, further, that I don't
dis
believe it either?

The truth is, as a teenager and into my early twenties, I used to love telling this story. But over time, as the people I told it to were themselves older and more committed to a worldview, I pretty much stopped telling it altogether. Because believers left me utterly cold—through their unblinking acceptance of the story's every particular, and the way they prattled on, afterward, about the nature of poltergeists, negative spirits, and the afterlife. Here I was, thinking all this stuff was mysterious and unproven. And there they were, encyclopedias of the unknown.

Skeptics, on the other hand, greeted this story with scorn. And I was surprised to find that they delivered their prosaic explanations with greater emotion than any believers offered their more amorphous visions. The usual explanations have revolved around plumbing and the house settling. In response, I nod. Neither explanation strikes me as sufficient. Water hammers, expanding pipes, and settling floorboards don't strike repeatedly, incessantly, at that volume, over tens of minutes—or come down the stairs and then disappear forever. Further, my father says the water pipes extended only partly up into the walls of the second floor and could not account for a noise that seemed to originate higher than that, in the walls and ceiling.

One young skeptic once told me it
had
to be the plumbing. I explained why that particular prosaic explanation seemed unlikely, then said, in what I hoped was a conciliatory fashion, “But, hey, maybe it was.”

“Wh-wh-what do you mean?” he sputtered. “
May
be? It
has
to be.”

Taken aback by all this emotion, and from a rationalist, no less, I tried my best to ease the tension. But he seemed incredulous that I maintained the matter was simply . . .
unexplained
.

“I'm not saying it was a ghost or a spirit being,” I said. “I'm not saying it wasn't. I'm saying we don't know what it was.”

What I learned, over the years, was that for many skeptics, even an unlikely materialistic explanation that doesn't fit the stated facts is immensely, emotionally preferable to simply saying,
I don't know
. And so I have most enjoyed sharing the story with people who occupy a spot somewhere in the middle, who offered prosaic explanations and listened to my responses in a spirit of inquiry and conversation—in the playful spirit, in fact, that I have endeavored to write this book.

I've lived with this story for so long, in all its ambiguity, that the ongoing debate over the paranormal has seemingly always been one of my abiding interests. And yet, I also feel as if I had little choice in the matter. I was born into this, in other words—the Family Ghost is something I never, ever asked for. And so, for most of my years, I've watched all this from what might most accurately be termed the fringe of the fringe—not participating directly, but monitoring what skeptics and believers say about the possibilities. And I've looked for a prosaic explanation that does justice to my parents' version of events.

There are some intriguing ideas out there, like infrasound—sound waves too low to be audible to the human ear but powerful enough to influence our perception. Infrasound is produced by low- and high-pressure weather systems, storms, and human-made objects like large subwoofer speakers, diesel engines, and some wind turbines. The most well-known researcher in the area of infrasound and hauntings is engineer Vic Tandy, who saw a gray blob out of the corner of his eye one night and ultimately traced the experience to infrasound. He subsequently hit the road, looking for infrasound in reportedly haunted sites, with mixed success. And there are now others out there, pursuing his work and that of Dr. Michael Persinger, who believes electromagnetic waves can explain both religious experiences and ghosts.

In 2003 researchers in the United Kingdom reported an experiment in which low-frequency sound waves were played during a concert. Reports of unusual experiences increased by 22 percent during the periods in which the sound waves played, including anxiety, sorrow, chills, tingling in the spine, and pressure on the chest. But no one had visual or auditory hallucinations.

In another experiment, dubbed the “Haunt Project,” organizers locked seventy-nine people, individually, inside a specially constructed chamber for fifty minutes—bombarding them with infrasound and Persinger-styled EMF (electromagnetic field) waves. Such waves are found mostly near volcanoes and fault lines. But this study found no effect from the waves or the infrasound. In fact, people reported just as many odd experiences when the EMF waves and infrasound were turned off.

Of course, there can be no one-size-fits-all explanation for an experience that has occurred in humankind for millennia, long before subwoofer speakers and the diesel engine made the scene. And so one other possibility to toss on the pile is that of a psychological explanation, beginning with “the fantasy-prone personality” or FPP, for short. Proposed in 1981 by the psychologists Sheryl Wilson and Theodore Barber, the FPP is a kind of debunker's dream. In this formulation, the fantasy prone are people who not only lead rich fantasy lives—they can actually blur the lines between fantasy and reality. Wilson and Barber identify fourteen characteristics of fantasy proneness:

1. Being an excellent hypnotic subject

2. Having imaginary playmates as a child

3. Fantasizing frequently as a child

4. Adopting a fantasy identity

5. Experiencing imagined sensations as real

6. Having vivid sensory perceptions

7. Reliving past experiences

8. Claiming psychic powers

9. Having out-of-body or floating experiences

10. Receiving poems, messages, and such, from spirits, higher intelligences, and the like

11. Being involved in “healing”

12. Encountering apparitions

13. Experiencing hypnagogic hallucinations (waking dreams)

14. Seeing classical hypnagogic imagery (such as spirits or monsters from outer space)

In other words, the fantasy prone are more likely to believe, among other things, that they experienced something that mainstream science rejects. And yes, the reasoning sounds a bit circular. Like any diagnosis in psychology, fantasy proneness lies, to some extent, in the eye of the beholder. Most people probably have some of these traits. But answering yes to any six of the fourteen questions is believed to mark one as fantasy prone. (For the record, my tally is four; I answered yes to 1, 2, 3, and 6.) But I also wonder, Could having a single strange, unexplained experience
make
someone fantasy prone?

We do reevaluate our life experiences as we go along. Some events are forgotten entirely. Others seem to grow more vivid, depending on what's happening in our lives right now. Could Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the psychologist with whom our tale first started, have been
made
fantasy prone by hearing the incredible tales told to her by her patients?

Those who knew Kübler-Ross claim they initially took her to be like most scientists—the kind of woman who considered death to be the end. It was only years after she started encountering
other information
, in the near-death experiences and deathbed encounters of her patients, that she started visiting psychics and the like. Based on what we know of her biography, if Kübler-Ross took the FPP test before her conversion, she might have scored under six. But if she took the test after, say, 1975, she would have answered yes to about nine of the FPP traits—at the least.

The FPP is perhaps not so terrifically awesome as the skeptical mind might have us believe. Skeptics love to put reports of alien abduction down to fantasy proneness. And I don't particularly blame them. I didn't cover alien abductions in this book because I thought it would be too difficult for me to overcome my own bias that abductees are fantasizing. But psychological assessments of abductees are mixed—with numerous studies finding them no more likely to engage in fantasy than anyone else.

There are other psych-based tests for irrational thinking. The Magical Ideation Scale seems particularly popular—and indeed, predictive, if also a bit extreme. The form is comprised of thirty true/false statements:

10.
The government refuses to tell the truth about flying saucers.

13.
Numbers like 13 and 7 have no special powers.

14.
I have noticed sounds on my records that are not there at other times.

15.
The hand motions that strangers make seem to influence me at times.

And, my favorite:

21.
I have sometimes had the passing thought that strangers are in love with me.

People who choose the fantastic answer to a multitude of these questions or who report particularly detailed and dramatic personal experiences related to a subset of these questions are, statistically, more likely to develop some sort of schizophrenia-spectrum disorder. And for that matter, people who qualify as fantasy prone are more likely to have experienced some kind of trauma as a child, encouraging them to develop a rich fantasy life. And so the skeptical community has used magical thinking and the FPP as whipping sticks to suggest there is something very different and at times quite literally
wrong
with the people who disagree with them. But to me, while this whole area of research is surely fruitful, it also seems underdeveloped. In each case, both the fantasy prone and the magical thinkers often sail through life with no mental problems and exercise an increased faculty for creativity. So, I'd love to see some studies on what might be called
sane
belief. I also find it curious that, while there is a body of research on the paranormally inclined, there is comparatively no research at all on why unbelievers hold the opinions
they
do. Is there a particular personality type associated with
rejecting
all paranormal phenomena?

Our pal skeptic, Chris French, admits the lack of research on skeptical psychology reflects simple bias. “When you look at the people who are doing this kind of research,” he says, “we wouldn't think we
need
to be studied. But I think it's an important topic, and I intend to carry out some research of my own.”

French cautions that the theories he holds are pure speculation at the moment. But he thinks there is probably a scale for unbelievers. “Someone like James Randi or Richard Dawkins, both of whom I hold in great respect, were probably
born
not believing,” he says. “And they would represent one end of the spectrum.”

As we come back down the scale, he says, we might find people like himself. But even he was once “out there” (my words) with Randi and Dawkins.

After converting to skepticism, French, by his own account, wrapped himself in dogma. He was a hardline skeptic. And in his mind, practicing psychics were frauds. Believers were idiots. “I didn't have any tolerance for ambiguity,” he says. “I felt that acknowledging areas that might require more research just sort of muddied the waters.”

He mellowed as the years and experience
re
opened his mind. He remains a committed skeptic. But “I do question how much we
know
in the empirical sense you're talking about. I think the best tack to take is one that's nondogmatic, in which we go on learning and remain willing to revise our beliefs.”

So where does all this leave me and the Family Ghost?

Well, more than thirty years have passed, and I don't know for sure what caused my family's experiences. Yet here's the kicker: neither do you. The experience happened too long ago, and the events described don't comport with any of the prosaic explanations thus far offered. This means it's nothing for a believer to build his life or worldview around. But I also don't see it as a viable exhibit in a treatise on why ghosts don't exist.

I'd be remiss, in fact, if I didn't note that not
all
the research goes against ghosts. In 2010, Dr. Barrie Colvin, a skeptical psychologist, conducted an analysis of recorded poltergeist sounds and claimed they had a radically different acoustic signature than normal rapping or knocking. He studied ten poltergeist cases and found the same odd sound waves every time. “In each of the recordings, when subjected to acoustic analysis, a particular sound pattern is detected which so far remains unexplained,” reads a Society for Psychical Research announcement of Colvin's findings. “Attempts to replicate this pattern in ordinary ways have so far been unsuccessful.”