Richard Wiseman. Skeptic. Volume 13, Issue 4, Winter 2008.
The Savoy Hotel in London is famous for fine dining, attentive service, grandiose interiors, and, of course, a three-foot high wooden black cat called Kaspar. In 1898, a South African businessman named Woolf Joel booked a table for fourteen at the hotel. Unfortunately, one of his guests cancelled at the last moment, leaving him with just thirteen diners. Woolf decided to ignore the old wives tale that it is unlucky to have thirteen people around a table, and pressed ahead with the meal. Three weeks later, Woolf returned to South Africa, and was shot dead in a highly publicized murder. For decades after the incident, the Savoy didn’t allow parties of thirteen to dine at the hotel, and went so far as to have a member of staff join any such group, rather than run the risk of having another murder on their hands. In the 1920s, the hotel asked designer Basil Lonides to produce a sculpture to replace their human good luck charm, and he created Kaspar. Since then, this beautiful Art Deco cat has been joining wealthy parties of thirteen for dinner. Each time, he is fitted with a napkin, given a full place setting, and served the same food as his fellow tablemates.
Superstitious and magical thinking pervade our entire lives. Dr. Samuel Johnson always tried to court good fortune by leaving his house right foot first, and avoided treading on cracks in the pavement. Adolf Hitler believed in the magical powers of the number seven. President Woodrow Wilson believed the number thirteen had consistently brought luck into his life, noting that there were thirteen letters in his name, and during his thirteenth year at Princeton University he became their thirteenth President. His Royal Highness, Prince Philip apparently taps on his polo helmet seven times before a game. Swiss tennis ace Martina Hingis allegedly avoids stepping on the court “tramlines” between points. American basketball star Chuck Persons admitted to feeling nervous before a game unless he had eaten two KitKats, or two Snickers bars, or one KitKat and one Snicker bar. Even Nobel Prize winning physicist Niels Bohr is rumored to have placed a horseshoe over his door (although here the evidence is debatable—when asked whether he thought it really brought him good luck, Bohr replied “No, but I am told it works whether you believe in it or not”).
Irrationality is not restricted to princes, politicians, and physicists. One recent Gallup poll revealed that 53% of Americans said that they were at least a little superstitious, and an additional 25% admitted to being somewhat or very superstitious. Another survey revealed that 72% of the public said that they possessed at least one good luck charm. The results of my own 2003 superstition survey, conducted in collaboration with the British Association for the Advancement of Science, revealed the same high levels of belief in modern-day Britain, with approximately 80% of people routinely touching wood, 64% crossing their fingers and 49% avoiding walking under ladders.
Superstition Kills
Although the consequences of many traditional beliefs, such as touching wood or carrying a lucky charm, are relatively harmless, the effects of other superstitious ideas have far more serious implications. The sociologist David Phillips was fascinated with investigating whether people’s date of birth influenced their moment of death. In an article published in the British Medical Journal, Phillips reported a link between superstition and the precise moment of passing away. In Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese, the word for “death” and “four” are pronounced in almost exactly the same way. Because of this, the number four is seen as unlucky in Chinese and Japanese cultures. Many Chinese hospitals do not have a fourth floor, and some Japanese people are nervous about travelling on the fourth day of the month. The link also stretches to California, where new businesses are offered a choice of the last four digits in their telephone numbers. Phillips noticed that Chinese and Japanese restaurants contain about a third fewer 4’s than expected, a pattern absent in restaurants describing themselves as American. All of this led Phillips to wonder whether the superstitious stress induced on the fourth of each month might play an important role in health. Could it be linked, for example, to the onset of a heart attack?
To assess the possible effects of these beliefs on health, Phillips and his team analyzed the records of over forty-seven million people who had died in America between 1973 and 1998. They compared the day of death of Chinese and Japanese Americans with white Americans, discovering that in the Chinese and Japanese populations, cardiac deaths were 7% higher on the fourth of each month than any other day. This figure jumped to 13% when the investigators focused on chronic heart deaths. The mortality data from white Americans contained no peaks. The work is controversial, and has been questioned by other researchers. Nevertheless, Phillips and his team are confident that something strange is happening, and named the alleged effect after Charles Baskerville, a character in the Arthur Conan Doyle story The Hound of the Baskervilles, who suffers a fatal heart attack from extreme psychological stress.
It is one thing for superstitious people to inadvertently kill themselves, but quite another when their beliefs directly affect other people’s lives. Thomas Scanlon and colleagues looked at traffic flow, shopping centers, and emergency hospital admissions on Friday the 13ths. Over a two year period, they discovered significantly less traffic flow on sections of London orbital M25 motorway on Friday the 13th compared to Friday the 6th, suggesting that nervous drivers might be staying indoors. They then examined various types of hospital admission on the two dates, including poisoning, injuries caused by venomous animals, self-harm, and transport-related accidents. Of these, only the traffic accident grouping showed a significant effect, with more accidents on Friday the 13th than Friday the 6th. The effect is far from trivial, with an increase of 52% on the fateful day. However, Scanlon and his colleagues only had access to admissions from one hospital, so the numbers were relatively small, and thus it was possible that their findings were simply due to chance. In a significantly larger but equally controversial study, Finnish research Simo Nayha examined similar records between 1971 and 1997 for the whole of Finland. During this time there were 324 Friday the 13ths and 1339 “control” Fridays. The results supported the previous research, especially for women. Of the deaths for men, only 5% could be attributed to the unlucky day, while for women the figure was a staggering 38%. Both sets of researchers attribute the rise in accident rates to drivers feeling especially nervous on that most inauspicious of unlucky days. The message is clear; superstition kills.
Lotteries, Lunacy, and the Thirteen Club
Proponents of superstition argue that there must be something to these beliefs because they have survived the test of time. They have a point. Lucky charms, amulets and talismans have been found in virtually all civilizations throughout recorded history. Touching wood dates back to Pagan rituals that were designed to elicit the help of benign and powerful tree gods. When a ladder is propped up against a wall it forms a natural triangle that was seen as symbolic of the Holy Trinity, and to walk under the ladder was seen as breaking the Trinity. The number thirteen is seen as unlucky because there were thirteen people at Christ’s last supper.
Skeptics view this type of historical data, not as evidence of the validity of superstition, but rather of a depressingly deep-seated irrationality, noting that scientific tests of superstition have consistently obtained negative findings. They too, have a point. The alleged relationship between superstitious behavior and national lotteries is a good example. Each week, millions of people across the world buy lottery tickets in the hope of changing their lives for the better by getting lucky and winning a large sum of money. The winning numbers are drawn at random, and so there should be no way of predicting the outcome of the lottery. That however, doesn’t stop people trying all sorts of magical rituals to increase their chances of being successful.
When the National Lottery was first launched in Britain, I worked with fellow psychologists Peter Harris and Matthew Smith to put these various rituals to the test. In a large-scale experiment conducted with a BBC television program entitled Out Of This World, we asked 1000 lottery players to send us their numbers prior to a draw, to indicate whether they thought themselves lucky or unlucky, and describe the method they had used to make their selection. The lottery forms were returned remarkably quickly. In all, we received replies from 700 people who, between them, intended to buy just over 2,000 lottery tickets. Matthew and I entered everyone’s choice of numbers into a giant spreadsheet one day before the draw. Having done so, we suddenly realized that we had collected some extraordinary information. If lucky people really do pick more winning lottery numbers than unlucky people, then the numbers that were being chosen by the lucky people, but not by the unlucky ones, would be more likely to be winning numbers. It hadn’t occurred to us before, but if the theory was right, some of the data we had collected for our experiment could make us millionaires.
Matthew and I debated the ethics of the situation for at least a few seconds, and then started to analyze the information. We noticed that some numbers were being chosen by lucky people and avoided by unlucky people. We slowly identified the “most likely” winning numbers—1, 7, 17, 29, 37, and 44. For the first and only time in my life, I bought a lottery ticket. The UK National Lottery draw takes place every Saturday night and is broadcast live on primetime television. As usual, the 49 balls were placed in a rotating dram and six balls, plus a special “bonus” ball, were randomly selected. The winning numbers were: 2, 13, 19, 21, 45, 32. We hadn’t managed to match a single number. But had the lucky and unlucky people in our experiment fared any better? Actually, there was no difference. Lucky people did no better than unlucky people, and those using any kind of superstitious ritual were just as unsuccessful as those choosing their numbers randomly. There were also no differences between people basing their decisions on their date of birth, the ages of their children, or behavior of their pets. In short: Rationality 1—Superstition 0.
Perhaps the most systematic and thorough test of superstition dates back to the turn of the last century. In the 1880s, American Civil War veteran Captain William Fowler decided to tempt fate by creating a Thirteen Club in New York. The idea was simple. He would invite twelve guests to join him for dinner on the thirteenth day of each month, and break various widely held superstitions such as spilling salt on the table, crossing forks, and opening umbrellas indoors. The scheme was an instant success and quickly became one of New York’s most popular social clubs, forcing Fowler to hire ever-larger rooms capable of holding several tables each containing thirteen guests. Over the next forty years or so, the Club’s membership ran into the thousands, and its list of honorary members included no less than five successive American Presidents. The members’ strength of feeling against the superstitious mindset should not be underestimated. In a speech to the Club on December the 13th in 1886, politician, agnostic, and orator Robert Green Ingersoll noted:
The most important thing in this world is the destruction of superstition. Superstition interferes with the happiness of mankind. Superstition is a terrible serpent, reaching in frightful coils from heaven to earth and thrusting its poisoned fangs into the hearts of men. While I live, I am going to do what little I can for the destruction of this monster.
Ingersoll went on to explain that if he died, and discovered that there was an afterlife, he would spend his time there continuing to argue with those that believed in the supernatural. Despite consistently engaging in behaviors that allegedly attracted little but ill fortune, death and disease, the members of the Thirteen Club proved remarkably healthy and happy. At the Club’s thirteenth dinner in 1895, Fowler reported that the death rate of Club members was slightly below that of the general population. The positive effects of breaking superstitious taboos were underlined by the comments made by one-time Club leader J. Arthur Lehman in 1936:
My advice to anyone that wants real luck and happiness and health is to break every possible known superstition today … All of the members of the Club that I can remember had good luck … I’m 78 now and I defy you to find anyone happier or healthier than I am.
Walking on Hot Coals and Things that go Bump in the Night
Some people appear to be able to walk on fire, crossing unharmed across a long bed of burning coals with a surface temperature of approximately 1000-degree Fahrenheit. The scientific explanation for this amazing feat is that the thermal conductivity of ash-covered wood embers is very low and, providing the bed of embers is relatively short, very little heat will be transferred to the walkers’ feet. However, many firewalkers earn a good living expounding a more extraordinary explanation. According to them, they use the power of their mind to create a magical “energetic” force field that protects them from harm, and claim to be able to teach this skill to others. Whereas science would predict that people could walk across approximately 15 feet of embers without being burnt, the paranormalists boast that they can walk any distance safely.
In 2000, I worked with the BBC science show, Tomorrow’s World, to stage a dramatic test of this claim. The program spent a large sum of money burning 50 tons of wood to create a 60-foot long bed of red-hot embers. Live on television, the alleged miracle mongers put their paranormal theory to the test, which resulted in each jumping off the bed around the 25ft mark with second degree burns to their feet. I interviewed the firewalkers afterwards and discovered that they had a different explanation for their failure. One spoke about how the bright television lights had prevented him from entering into the deep trance needed for a successful demonstration. Another explained that her Guardian Angel had unexpectedly left her a few moments before the start of the walk. It was a remarkable demonstration of how belief in the impossible can be bad for your health, and even second-degree burns hadn’t caused them to question their allegedly paranormal abilities.
Fortunately, most people do not think that they possess superhuman abilities. Many, however, believe that they have experienced equally strange phenomena. About a third of people believe in ghosts, and around one in ten claim to have actually experienced one. I have no idea whether ghosts actually exist, but I am fairly sure that people are quite capable of fooling themselves into believing that this is the case. For many years my colleagues and I have carried out various unusual experiments into the psychology of ghostly experiences. Britain has more than its fair share of haunted homes, and much of the work has taken place at some of the best-known “haunted” locations in the country. We were the first researchers to be invited to investigate the alleged ghostly-goings on at an official Royal Palace, spending ten days at the splendid Hampton Court on the outskirts of London. In other work, we staged a study in a series of apparently haunted vaults deep under the historic streets of Edinburgh, Scotland.
Most of the studies have involved getting members of the public to carefully walk through the locations in a systematic way, and describe any strange and unusual phenomena that they experience. Then, by examining the type of people who report these experiences, and the places in which they tend to report them, one can slowly start to piece together the psychology of the haunting.
We have discovered that some people are far more sensitive to the presence of alleged ghosts than others. Many volunteers will wander through a “haunted” location and experience absolutely nothing, whilst a few moments later another person will walk through exactly the same spot, instantly feel uneasy and report a weird sense of presence. Those who experience strange phenomena tend to have very good imaginations. They are the type of people who tend to make excellent hypnotic subjects, and often cannot remember whether, for instance, after the leaving the house they have actually turned off their iron or simply imagined doing so. It seems that they are able to convince themselves that a spirit may really be standing right behind them, or hiding in a dark alcove. As a result, they genuinely feel scared and cause their bodies and brains to produce lots of the signals associated with fear, such as the hairs on the back of their neck standing up and a sudden sense of cold.
The work also suggests that context plays a vitally important role in the proceedings. This was brilliantly illustrated in an experiment published in 1997 by a collaborator of mine, American psychologist Jim Houran. Jim took over a disused cinema that had absolutely no reputation for being haunted, and had two groups of people walk around it and rate the number of unusual phenomena they experienced. One group of people was told that the place was associated with lots of ghostly phenomena and so they were on the look out for non-existent spirit activity. The other was told that the theatre was currently undergoing renovation, and that they were there to rate how each room made them feel. Each of the two groups had visited exactly the same locations in the cinema, but perceived them through completely different mind-sets, causing the “ghost-buster” group to report significantly more unusual experiences than the other group.
Infrasound and the Paranormal
Does this research mean that all ghostly experiences are the result of an over-active imagination? Not necessarily. Work carried out by the late Vic Tandy suggests that some ghostly experiences may have really been the result of something strange in the air. Vic was an electrical engineer by training, and spent much of his time looking into phenomena that pricked his curiosity, including conjuring and ghosts. In 1998, he was working at a company that designed and manufactured life support equipment for hospitals. The firm ran a small laboratory that Vic shared with a couple of other scientists. This laboratory also had a reputation for being haunted, with various cleaning staff reporting feeling rather odd in the building. Vic had always put this down to suggestion, or perhaps the result of the various small furry “animals that inhabited parts of the building. That was until he himself had a rather strange experience. Working alone late at night, he started to feel increasingly uncomfortable, and cold. Next, he had the distinct impression of being watched, and looked up to see a indistinct grey figure slowly emerge in the left side of his peripheral vision. The hair on the back of his neck stood up and, as he recalled, “It would not be unreasonable to suggest that I was terrified.” Vic eventually built up the courage to turn and look at the figure. As he did, it faded away and disappeared.
Being the good scientist he was, Vic thought that maybe some of the bottles cawing anaesthetic agents might have leaked, causing him to hallucinate. A quick check revealed that this wasn’t so. Stumped and stunned, he went home.
The following day, he was going to enter a fencing competition and so brought his foil into the lab for last minute repairs. As he damped the foil into a vice, it started to vibrate frantically. Although some may have been tempted to attribute the movement to poltergeist activity, Vic again searched for a rational explanation. This time, he found one. By carefully sliding the vice along the floor he was able to observe that the movement was at its maximum in the centre of the laboratory, and petered out towards each end of the room. Vic figured out that the room contained a low frequency sound wave that fell below the human hearing threshold. Further investigation confirmed his suspicions. He traced the source of the wave back to a newly fitted fan in the air extraction system. When the fan was switched on, the fencing foil vibrated. When the fan was turned off, the foil remained stationary. But could Vic’s discovery explain the seemingly ghostly phenomena?
Vic knew that although these waves, usually referred to as “infrasound” can’t be heard, they carry a relatively large amount of energy, and so are capable of producing weird effects. In the 1960s, NASA scientists were eager to discover how the infrasound produced by rocket engines might affect their astronauts during launching. Their tests showed that it did possess the potential to vibrate the chest, affect respiration, and produce gagging, headaches and coughing. Additional work suggested that certain frequencies can also cause vibration of the eyeballs, and therefore distortion of vision. The waves can also move small objects and surfaces, and even cause the strange flickering of a candle flame. Writing about his experiences in the pages of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Vic speculated that some buildings may contain infrasound (perhaps caused by strong winds blowing across an open window, or the ramble of nearby traffic), and that the strange effects of such low frequency waves might cause some people to believe that the place was haunted.
The idea is plausible, because infrasound is deeply strange. It can be produced naturally from ocean waves, earthquakes, tornadoes, and volcanoes. The 1883 Krakatoa eruption produced infrasound that circled the globe several times and was recorded on instruments worldwide. These low frequency sound waves are also a byproduct of nuclear explosions, thus explaining the network of infrasonic listening posts that constantly monitor the environment for possible evidence of nuclear bomb tests.
Sarah Angliss, a long-standing friend of mine, studies acoustics and produces sound installations for museums and other public spaces. One evening we were chatting about ghosts, and Vic’s low frequency sound hypothesis. Sarah was also interested in infrasound, and suggested that we team up and conduct an experiment. We needed an event that would attract large numbers of people, and one in which they could rate how they felt while infrasound was either present or absent. Sarah had the idea to pipe infrasound into certain musical pieces being played at a live concert, and discover if the secret sound wave affected the way in which the audience felt about the music. Could it, for example, induce the types of strange experiences often associated with the presence of a ghost, such as a sense of presence, sudden feelings of cold, and a tingling on the back of the neck?
Sarah led a crack squad of engineers and physicists to build a high-tech infrasound wave generator that allowed us to produce infrasound at will. In reality, this was a seven-meter long sewage pipe with a low frequency speaker in the middle. Sarah was present when the system was first turned on, noting:
… the pipe began to resonate strip lights, furniture and other loose odds and ends. As the pipe made very little audible noise, this was an odd experience. Seeing objects vibrate for no apparent reason, it is easy to imagine how infrasonic energy could be mistaken for a ghostly sighting.
Teaming up with my Ph.D. student at the time, Ciaran O’Keeffe, and National Physical Laboratory acousticians Dr. Richard Lord and Dan Simmon, we hired one of the main concert rooms on London’s South Bank and staged two unusual concerts.
The plan was simple. Each concert would consist of various pieces of contemporary piano music, performed by acclaimed Russian pianist, GeNIA. At four points during the concert, the audience would be asked to complete a questionnaire that measured their emotional response to the music, and note down any unusual experiences, such as a tingling sensations, or suddenly feeling cold. Just before two of these points, the auditorium would be flooded with infrasound. The two concerts would be identical, except for the timing of the infrasound. If the generator was turned on in one piece in the first show, it would turned off in that piece in the second show. This counter-balancing procedure would enable us to minimize other sources of emotional effects, such as differences between the pieces of music. We would also be careful to produce a level of infrasound that was on the cusp of perception and this, coupled with the fact that it was masked by GeNIA’s music, would help ensure that the audience was never consciously aware of its presence.
High levels of infrasound can cause unpleasant effects on people’s bodies. Clearly, we only wanted to expose the audience to levels that were safe. The potential problem was that as the infrasound bounced around the hall, there would possibly be areas of the auditorium where the waves added together to cream an unusually loud, and potentially dangerous, effect. To prevent this happening, it was important to turn on the pipe before the concert, and have Richard and Dan carefully sweep through the auditorium checking the infrasound levels.
The team assembled on the morning of the concerts, the pipe was installed at the back of the hall, named onto maximum power, and the sweep began. Thankfully, the results revealed that no parts of the hall were exposed to dangerously high levels of infrasound. Relieved, we continued with our preparations.
My role was to welcome people, explain the purpose of the experiment, and ensure that the questionnaires were properly completed. Ciaran had decided which pieces of music would include the infrasound, and so sat with Richard and Dan as they controlled the pipe. Sarah was team leader, and also presented a talk after the concert explaining the science underpinning the event. GeNIA played each of the pieces during the concert.
Carrying out these types of live events is always nerve wracking. There is usually only one attempt to get everything right and, if anything does go wrong, there is a high potential for considerable public humiliation. Pre-publicity had ensured that the event was a sell-out, and GeNIA and I waited nervously backstage as two hundred members of the public fried into the hall for the first concert. The lights in the auditorium slowly dimmed, and I walked onto the stage and welcomed people to the unique event. GeNIA played each of the pieces perfectly, the pipe was turned on and off on cue, and the audience had a thoroughly enjoyable time. Everyone completed their questionnaires at the end of the four experimental pieces of music, and handed them to us as they left the hall. I needn’t have been nervous. The whole concert ran like clockwork. About an hour later we repeated the entire process for the two hundred people attending the second concert, and then we retired to the nearest bar.
In the following week, my research assistant entered the questionnaire data into a computer, and analyzed the results. Had all of Sarah’s careful planning and preparation paid off? Had the infrasound really produced any spooky effects in our concert-going guinea pigs? If so, this would be the first experimental evidence to suggest that Vic was right to think that some alleged ghostly experiences may be due to low frequency sound waves. The good news was that, as predicted, they had reported significantly more strange experiences during the pieces when they incorporated infrasound. The effect was far from trivial, with people reporting, on average, about 22% more unusual experiences with infrasound present. People’s description of their unusual experiences made for fascinating reading. When the infrasound was flooding into the concert room during one piece, one audience member reported a “shivering on my wrist, odd feeling in stomach,” whilst another said that he had an “increased heart rate, ears fluttering, anxious.” At another point in the concert, one man said he “felt like being in a jet before it takes off,” whilst a woman reported a “pre-orgasmic tension in body and arms, but not in legs.”
The Voice of God?
We had shown that some “ghostly” experiences may be due to infrasound. However, some academics have taken the idea one step further, suggesting that the same low frequency waves might also play a key role in creating allegedly sacred experiences. Aeron Watson and David Keating from Reading University have constructed a computer model of a Scottish Neolithic passage grave. Using this model, the researchers have argued that the site has an infrasonic resonant frequency, such that a person beating a 30cm dram could produce powerful low frequency sounds. Others have suggested that some large organ pipes found in certain churches and cathedrals are also capable of producing similar effects.
As part of the preparation for the concert, the team visited several churches and cathedrals that contained especially large organ pipes, and discovered that some were indeed creating significant levels of infrasound. This suggests that people who experience a sense of spirituality in church may be reacting to the extreme bass sound produced by the pipes. Further support for the idea came from one pipe manufacturer who informally told the team that, given that the sounds from these pipes are inaudible, they can either be viewed as a very expensive way of creating a small draft, or a cost effective way of helping the congregation find God.