Ghosts ‘All in the Mind’ Ghosts are the mind’s...

Ghosts ‘All in the Mind’
Ghosts are the mind’s way of interpreting how the body reacts to certain surroundings, say UK psychologists.
A chill in the air, low-light conditions and even magnetic fields may trigger feelings that “a presence” is in a room - but that is all they are, feelings.
This explanation of ghosts is the result of a large study in which researchers led hundreds of volunteers around two of the UK’s supposedly most haunted locations - Hampton Court Palace, England, and the South Bridge Vaults in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Dr Richard Wiseman, of the University of Hertfordshire, and his colleagues say their work has thrown up some interesting data to suggest why so many people can be spooked in the same building but provides no evidence that ghosts are real.
Clustered experiences
In Hampton Court - alleged to contain the ghost of the executed Catherine Howard, 5th wife of Henry VIII - the volunteers were asked to face their fear. They had to record any unusual experiences, such as hearing footsteps, feeling cold or a presence in the room, as well as marking the location and intensity of the experience on a floor plan. Before this, candidates were also asked to reveal any prior knowledge of hauntings at the site. The researchers then examined the distribution of unusual experiences.
In a “normal” setting, you would expect the ghostly encounters to be evenly spaced, but in classic haunting, they would be clustered around certain places. The results were striking: participants did record a higher number of unusual experiences in the most classically haunted places of Hampton Court, areas such as the Georgian rooms and the Haunted Gallery.
Sensitive people
Making detailed measurements at each place, such as temperature, light intensity and room space, Dr Wiseman thinks that people are responding unconsciously to environmental cues and the general “spookiness” of their surroundings. He cites examples of mediums successfully indicating haunted areas of buildings with no prior knowledge of them.
Spiritualists interpret this as evidence that the ghosts are there, but another explanation is that the mediums are simply more sensitive to the environmental cues that result in haunted feelings - not sensitivity to the ghosts themselves.
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