British scientists say boo to spooks

MUMBAI: Some years ago, during a ghost-busting trip in the Konkan region, this correspondent spent a peaceful night in a cremation ground under a bakul tree. Unlike the legendary King Vikramaditya, however —who is said to have single-handedly taken down a suicide's corpse that was hanging from a banyan tree—I wasn't alone. With me were a couple of activists from the rationalist organisation Andha Shradha Nirmulan Samiti, along with a local schoolteacher and his pregnant wife, all waiting to greet the Phantom of the Forest, or Agya-Vetal, as the supposedly spectral emanation was called in those parts. Believers said the ghost may have been put off by the crowd, which was so palpably sceptical. Had it chosen to manifest itself, however, how would it have done so? Would we have been treated to the so-called classic form, a guard-like giant thumping the ground with a staff adorned with jingling bells? (The Vetal also reportedly had a weakness for betal nuts. However, the moment you gave him one, the nut supposedly fell through the hole in the ghost's hand. On no account were you to bend before the spirit, to retrieve the fallen nut; because if you did, you would promptly be hit on the head, to be paralysed or enslaved forever.) We also wondered if the spectre would be more discreet, opting instead to reveal itself by a merest hint or whiff, or a sudden change of temperature? Going by the latest research, this is just what ghosts are about. A chill in the air, low-light conditions and even magnetic fields, all these may trigger feelings that there is a 'presence' in a room, according to British psychologists. The scientists emphasise that that these are nothing but 'feelings' produced by certain environmental conditions, which do not validate the existence of ghosts in any way. 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 it also provides no evidence that ghosts are 'real', he adds. The Hampton Court is allegedly haunted by the spirit of Catherine Howard, the executed fifth wife of King Henry VIII. The volunteers, asked to face their fears, were also told to put down any out-of-the-way experience they may have, such as the sounds of footsteps, things going bump and grind in the night, feeling cold or discerning a 'physical' presence in the room, along with additional notes made on the location, intensity and periodicity of the experience on the floor plan of the house. They were also asked to reveal prior conditioning or knowledge about the hauntings. In a 'normal' or a nonhaunted setting, these encounters were expected to be evenly or randomly distributed, as against a jinxed setting that had a 'resident' ghost in a particular pantry or cellar. The latter did indeed turn out to be the case in the most classically haunted areas of Hampton Court such as the Gregorian Rooms and, no marks for guessing, the Haunted Gallery. A similar result was obtained in the Edinburgh vaults,which were considered to be the location of the most unusual 'encounters'. Paradoxically, however, the scientists concluded that while 'hauntings' may exist, ghosts do not. Dr Wiseman told the BBC, People do have consistent experiences in consistent places, but I think that this is driven by visual factors mainly, and perhaps by some other environmental cues (to which people may even be responding unconsciously).'' He also alluded to what skeptics have called the prior knowledge hypothesis, the fact that you get spooked under certain environmental conditions because you expect to be. Curiously, Dr Wiseman's research found little if no evidence that people's prior knowledge mattered. If anything, it made them veer away from having experiences in the known haunted areas,'' he told BBC correspondent Arran Frood.