Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife (20 page)

Thinking that the discarnate Lady Prudentia was trying to communicate with him via his spell-checker,
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the caretaker called the Society for Psychical Research. The SPR took the claim seriously. This wasn’t, after all, the first purported instance of dead spirits using computers to communicate. Far from it. Spirits have also, if you buy into the literature on “instrumented transcommunication” (a close cousin of EVP), made use of TVs, VCRs, alarm clocks, and answering machines.

In 2001, the team of SPR researchers who were looking into the case hired software consultants Julie and David Rousseau to come take a look at the computer and the software to see if perhaps the caretaker’s system had been hacked into by capricious spirits still of the flesh. The Rousseaus confirmed that an experienced programmer could, without too much trouble, create the effects that the caretaker had seen. But a program like this would be simple to detect, and they quickly determined there’d been no foul play.

This left two possibilities: a bug in the software or a ghost in the machine. To test for the former, they attempted to recreate the phenomena on a document and computer of their
own, using all the same steps and software (Microsoft Word 6) that the caretaker had been using. They soon succeeded. (It is worth pointing out that Julie Rousseau is open to the possibility that paranormal forces can influence computers. She serves on the council of the SPR.)

The bug involved the custom dictionaries that the caretaker had set up and the unorthodox manner in which he had modified them. Our man had noticed that the peculiar spell-check offerings always seemed to involve words from one of his custom dictionaries. Because he believed the spell-check anomalies to be communications from Lady Prudentia, he had decided to expand her vocabulary by seeding his custom dictionary with dozens of ordinary words—rather than simply the proper nouns and place names related to the file.

Rousseau found that when she used Word 6 on her computer, the bug commenced on the twenty-first misspelling of custom dictionary words. The anomalous offering, she figured out, is simply the word that was last taken from the custom dictionary as an alternative suggestion for a misspelled word. Because the caretaker had four custom dictionaries operating, the bug kicked in much sooner than it would otherwise—which helped explain why the bug hadn’t been reported by other users.

You would think that the matter would have come to rest there, but it has not. The caretaker insists that some of the anomalous suggestions are
not
words he added to his custom dictionaries. Again, the Rousseaus offered a possible explanation. The man had a side business typing theses; presumably some of the odd alternates are custom dictionary entries related to these papers. Julie Rousseau gives the example of “Pennyhough,” which was offered as an alternative for a misspelling of “Trentham.” (Pennyhough happens to be the surname of a cleaning lady who reported having seen Lady Prudentia Trentham’s ghost.) A web search revealed several
authors of scholarly works who are named Pennyhough, so it isn’t hard to imagine that a student might have cited the name in a thesis and that it was added to the custom dictionary years back and since forgotten.

Julie Rousseau said that the researchers told her they find some of her explanations far-fetched and do not consider the case closed. It is interesting to come across people who feel that a ghost communicating via a spell-checker is less farfetched than a software glitch. Nonetheless, kudos to the pair for having IT professionals look into it.

There is a lesson here for both sides of the spirit divide, and that is that hasty assumptions serve no one. To make up one’s mind based on nothing beyond a simple summary of events—as believers and skeptics alike tend to do—does nothing to forward the pursuit of solid answers.

DAVE IS STILL talking. I’ve learned a lot of new things this morning, many of which make me want to raise my hand and go,
What???
just like that, with three question marks. I want to say,
Where’s
your proof, Dave? How do you know ghosts drain power
off your car batteries to manifest themselves? Where did you read that
cemetery planners chose their locations to be near “portal openings”?
Portal openings!? I’ll show you portal openings
… But I seem to be the only one having these thoughts, so I keep quiet.

The last topic of the morning is spirit photography. Dave is talking about “spirit orbs,” supposed blobs of energy that are very similar to what shows up on your prints if a dust speck or raindrop was right in front of the lens. People often e-mail Dave photos of “spirit orbs” that are obviously dust, and he then has the unpleasant task of telling them this.

“People used to say that when old buildings were renovated, the renovation disturbed ghosts, because they’d get a lot of orbs on their pictures.” Dave smiles. “Well, renovation also disturbs dust.”

In other words, consider all angles. Take the link between electromagnetic fields and spirits. I called the manufacturer of the TriField Natural EM Meter and asked what made the company believe they had grounds to market it as a Ghost Detector. No studies support this; as Dean Radin puts it, “there is no evidence that EMF meters detect anything other than EMF.” The man on the phone said he didn’t know for sure, but he assumed that someone, possibly more than one person, had noticed that an EMF meter registered a jump when he or she was standing in a spot that felt haunted.

But what if we take the ghost out of the equation? What if exposing someone’s brain to certain types of electromagnetic fields could create a feeling of an invisible presence? What if the energy
is
the ghost?

Aiming to find out, I took my brain to Canada.

*
The Donner Party spent the winter of 1846–47 stranded near Donner Lake, in the Sierras of California. When it became clear there wasn’t food to last the winter, seventeen of the strongest set out to get help. Another blizzard hit, stranding the rescue party at what came to be called the Camp of Death. The flesh and organs of four who died there—though not, I am relieved to report, the man named Mr. Burger—gave the others the strength to make it over the mountains. Lest you doubt the direness of the situation, a quote from
Unfortunate Emigrants:
“January 1, 1847. They made their New Year’s dinner of the strings of their snow-shoes. Mr. Eddy also ate an old pair of moccasins.” By the time help arrived, four months hence, most of those left alive had resorted to the food that knows no cookbook.

*
It’s possible that the history of creatively interpreted white noise dates as far back as the Oracle at Delphi, where the priestess sat above a crack in the temple floor, below which could be heard the roiling waters of a spring. Dean Radin, senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, has posited that the white-noise-like sounds of the water may have brought on auditory hallucinations. (The more common theory holds that ethylene fumes issuing from the spot were sponsoring the woman’s altered state of mind. Ethylene—better known for making bananas ripe than for making priestesses bananas—can cause hallucinations in concentrated amounts.)

*
Literally, upon occasion: EVP literature holds that Jürgenson has had cameos on the tape recordings of an Italian EVP enthusiast, while Konstantin Raudive has made repeated appearances in the static on the TV screen of a couple in Luxembourg.

*
A note about spirit guides. You will occasionally read piffle about differences between the EEG of a medium and that of her guide, or control, and how this proves the guide’s existence as a separate entity. In 1981, Gary Heseltine, now an epidemiologist with the Texas Department of Public Health, experimented with the EEGs of two unnamed mediums and their spirit guides Shaolin and Monsanto (the “Comanche chief,” not the fertilizer concern). Heseltine writes that since sensory and metabolic input affect EEGs, you would have to go to the extreme of “paralyzing and maintaining the medium on life support” to control these factors. Even then, he doubted you’d have proof. “Short of a high brain stem transection,” Heseltine concluded, “it is difficult to conclude that differences in the EEG cannot be a consequence of differing sensory inputs.”

*
Oh, for the days when a nation’s highest-paid recording star could be a beefy six-foot-two oysterman’s daughter named Clara Butt. So remarkable was her voice that Madame Butt, as she was known early on, was recruited at a tender age to sing private concerts for Queen Victoria. Her lauded career in opera paved the way for what must have been a much-welcomed shift in titularity to Dame Clara.

*
The Ometer decline has continued, largely at the hands of the textile industry, who have given us the FadeOmeter, the Crackometer, and the Launder-Ometer (not to mention the Atlas Perspiration Tester, the Shirley Stiffness Tester, and the Evenness Tester 3 With Hairiness Module). Further Ometer abuse comes from the Centers for Disease Control (the Flu-O-Meter), the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds—their Splatometer tracks the abundance of flying insects, whose decline spells trouble for birds—and Gary Ometer, former Director of Debt Management for the U.S. Department of the Treasury. I was hesitant to phone Gary, for his title led me to expect a man of, shall we say, high scores on the Shirley Stiffness Tester, but he was a good sport about it. Gary blames shabby Ellis Island bookkeeping for his family’s contribution to the Ometer situation.

*
The publicity stunt is one of the lesser-known Edison inventions. In 1903, as part of a scheme to discredit the alternating current system (Edison was a DC man), he got involved in the Topsy-the-elephant situation. The Coney Island pachyderm had been sentenced to die for having killed three of her handlers. (One fed her a lit cigarette, so in my mind the jury’s still out.) The swift and humane execution of an elephant was proving troublesome. Cyanide had failed, and hanging promised all manner of logistical turmoil. Edison called the ASPCA and suggested electrocution. He filmed the highly effective dispatch, and used it as proof of the dangers of AC.

*
Until he figured out that his “halo” was a reflection of sunlight at a certain angle, Watson believed himself to have been singled out for some great purpose. “I told my mother about my halo,” he writes. While Mrs. Watson did not come right out and say she could see it, she did the motherly thing and said it “didn’t seem at all strange to her that her son was thus distinguished.” Emboldened, Watson confided in Alexander Graham Bell. Bell told him to get his eyes examined.

*
I can easily relate to the feeling that one’s spell-checker is possessed. Mine recently informed me that “fucking” is not a word, but that “cucking,” “rucking,” and “funking” were all good words that I might like to substitute.

I
T IS HARD to imagine being terrified in Sudbury, Ontario. A bland, friendly mining city 150 miles north of Toronto, Sudbury is best known for the Big Nickel, a thirteen-ton statue of Canadian pocket change. Curling is popular here. Under the category “Other Fun Stuff ” on the Sudbury website, the tourism people have listed a vegetable store.

Nevertheless, fear is on the agenda tonight. I’m heading to the Consciousness Research Lab at Laurentian University to be electromagnetically “haunted.” Michael Persinger, the neuroscience professor who runs the lab, has a theory about ghosts. The theory holds that certain patterns of electromagnetic field activity—both the earth’s own natural kind and the man-made kind created by wiring and appliances and power
lines—can render the brain more prone to hallucinations. In particular, the sort that involve an invisible, sensed presence.

In a study published in 1988, Persinger compared thirty-seven years of dated
Fate
magazine haunting reports with geomagnetic activity for those dates. He found a nice correlation, and he wrote up his findings in
Neuroscience Letters
. In a similar study three years later, University of Iowa psychologists Walter and Steffani Randall examined monthly fluctuations in solar winds (which influence the earth’s geomagnetics) to see if they mirrored monthly ups and downs in “humanoid hallucinations” culled from old Society for Psychical Research records. Indeed, both showed peaks in April and September, with a trough in between.

Persinger then turned his attention to man-made electromagnetic fields (EMFs). In 1996, a Sudbury couple had contacted him about strange goings-on in their house. They heard breathing and whispering sounds and at one point felt someone touching their feet as they lay in bed. The husband saw an apparition of a woman who appeared to move through the couple’s bed. Persinger and two colleagues drove out to the house and set up equipment to monitor EMFs in the various rooms. True to his theory, the house was an electromagnetic free-for-all. Wires were poorly grounded and circuits overloaded with electronic equipment. Not only were the EMFs most intense in the places where the couple had experienced their “ghosts,” but they showed the telltale irregularities that Persinger has come to see as the hallmarks of haunt-prompting fields.

If electromagnetic fields like these could be generating “hauntings,” then it’s reasonable to assume you could create what Persinger calls a synthetic ghost by exposing people to similar, laboratory-generated EMFs. This is what Dr. Persinger will, at my request, be doing to me tonight. In the
back of his lab is a soundproof chamber—a haunt box—outfitted with a comfy chair, in which subjects sit while Persinger directs complex patterns of EMFs into their brains via an electromagnet-bedecked, wire-sprouting helmet.

Normally I object to strangers beaming force fields into my brain. But Michael Persinger has a university post and his papers are published in mainstream medical journals. How dangerous could it be? I’ve been pondering this in the back of the cab on my way to the university. The driver, a graduate of Laurentian, asks what sort of work I’m doing there. I tell him I’m visiting Michael Persinger. He swivels to look at me. “Strange guy. I heard he’s totally nocturnal, eh? And he keeps rats.”

It would seem that in Sudbury, Ontario, Michael Persinger is more famous than the Big Nickel. He is assuredly more interesting. “They say he mows his lawn in a three-piece suit.”

Dr. Persinger is not at the lab to greet me. I’m told he’ll be arriving later, after I’ve filled out some personality inventories, part of the protocol for whichever experiment my data will become part of. A research assistant seats me at a table just inside the door, and there I remain, for the next half hour, checking True and False boxes.
I have been taken aboard a space
ship. I sometimes tease animals. I certainly feel useless at times. There
is something wrong with my mind
.

I can’t imagine the sort of personality that would check True for some of these statements. Or maybe I can.
I mow the
lawn in a suit. I like rats.

The lab assistant gets up to run an errand. For some reason, she locks the door as she leaves. I sit awhile. I get up and pace. A table against one wall is stacked with plastic storage containers, each holding two large chunks of brain preserved in a clear liquid.
Fascinating
, I think, and then I notice the labels on the lids: “Sean and Kristy.” “Michelle and Holly.” “Brent
and Derek.” On any other evening, I’d have assumed that these were the students who dissected the brains. On any other evening, it would not cross my mind that Sean and Kristy might
BE THE BRAINS IN THE CONTAINER
.

The door opens behind me. It’s a man in a three-piece suit. The suit is black, with pinstripes and a watch fob. Dr. Persinger, trim and white-haired and seemingly sane, introduces himself. Before he even sits down, he begins to scan my answer sheets. He seems in a hurry to get me into the chamber. I tell him I’d like to ask some questions first. He says that’s fine and that we’ll walk over to the Colony Room and talk there. I picture dark wood paneling, trustees conversing in hushed tones.

Dr. Persinger unlocks an ordinary-looking door on the other end of the building. Inside are two long walls of cages and a corresponding wall of smell: Colony, as in rats. But the rodents aren’t a hobby, as the cabdriver had made it sound; they’re subjects in various experiments on the beneficial effects of EMFs. (Persinger believes certain kinds of EMFs can be helpful in treating conditions as widely varying as depression and multiple sclerosis.) He tells me he returns several times during the night to make adjustments and gather data, often going to bed around four. Hence the reputation as a nocturnal being.

While he attends to his rats, Persinger gives me the lowdown on the haunt theory. Why would a certain type of electromagnetic field make one hear things or sense a presence? What’s the mechanism? The answer hinges on the fact that exposure to electromagnetic fields lowers melatonin levels. Melatonin, he explains, is an anti-convulsive; if you have less of it in your system, your brain—in particular, your right temporal lobe—will be more prone to tiny epileptic-esque microseizures and the subtle hallucinations these seizures can cause. Persinger
adds that the emotions of bereavement produce stress hormones that may serve to raise the likelihood of these microseizures even further.

Persinger isn’t the only researcher to have examined the link between spirituality and tiny seizures in the temporal lobe. In a 2002
Psychological Reports
study of 242 undergraduate volunteers, scores on a ninety-eight-item spirituality assessment were significantly predictive of scores on a questionnaire that assessed a cluster of symptoms of complex partial epilepsy, including hallucinations, fear, and a sense of detachment from one’s body. Also known as temporal lobe epilepsy, this condition often goes undiagnosed. Without a medical explanation for these mystifying experiences, patients may interpret them as spiritual events and adjust their belief systems accordingly.

It would seem that Persinger has the whole ghost business neatly sewn up. It’s true that people with naturally occurring microseizures—e.g., sufferers of complex partial epilepsy—often have hallucinations. It’s also true that EMF exposure dampens the body’s natural production of melatonin. This has been shown in rats and in dairy cows housed inside a “bovine exposure chamber” at the McGill University Dairy Cattle Complex
*
in Quebec.

The results of Persinger’s lab work suggest that you can indeed evoke that haunted feeling in a lab using EMFs. Of the approximately one thousand people who have had Persinger’s
signature electromagnetic bursts applied to their right temporal lobes, eighty percent, he says, have felt a presence. In 2002, he published a paper on lab-generated hauntings in the
Journal of
Nervous and Mental Disease
. Forty-eight university students were exposed to complex one microTesla electromagnetic fields either over the left temporal lobe or the right, or both. A fourth group received sham pulsations. Those whose right brains were exposed were more likely to report feeling fear and sensing a presence than were left hemisphere or sham exposures. Disappointingly, no other researchers have replicated Persinger’s work.

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.