Mad About Science: Scary stuff

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Staff

I recently polled the staff at the Reader in anticipation of one of my favorite holidays: Halloween. I received some really great questions about the science of scary things. I received so many great questions that I actually had to break this article up into multiple pieces. Stay tuned for more scary stuff in the upcoming weeks, but for now… Welcome to your nightmares.

All three questions this week are from Editor-in-Chief Zach Hagadone.

“What’s the science behind ‘scary sounds’? That is, we tend to associate certain tonal frequencies as ‘ominous’ (hollow gongs) or ‘chilling’ (strumming on piano wires) or ‘creepy’ (high-octave piano or rapid violin). Why? Alternatively, what is it about the human ear that makes certain sounds unpleasant and/or existentially unsettling?”

This is a great question, and I wish I had an equally great answer for it. Unfortunately, the truth behind your most-hated jump scare is rather boring.

We are biologically coded to become more alert or fearful around sounds that fall into something called the non-vocal range — sounds that are a higher or lower pitch than our normal speaking range. The shriek of a big cat is a great example, being a high-pitched noise above the normal human vocal range. Similarly, the high-pitched scream of fear or pain emitted by humans in times of turmoil is a clear signal to other humans that something is very wrong and a member of our community needs help urgently. 

Whether or not the movie scares you, the presence of a shrill violin or imperilled protagonist’s screams makes you more alert, even if you’re trying to look cool in front of your significant other.

An added and unfair layer to the classic jumpscare is the mechanical utilization of sound. Sounds that fall in the non-vocal range immediately activate five nerves that act like an alarm bell directly to our brains. Just like with your computer or cell phone, music takes up less bandwidth than video in our brains, and hearing something terrifying allows us to react much faster than if we were to look at what caused the sound. Don’t feel bad if you jump — it just means your brain is working as intended.

Here is the second question:

“What’s all that techno stuff that ‘ghost hunters’ bring along with them on their ‘investigations’? Is there any scientific validity to that equipment? What are they actually detecting?”

There is a lot to unpack with this one. There are numerous devices present on many ghost hunting television shows, some of which are intentionally mislabeled to add to the intrigue of the show.

One of the most commonly used items in ghost hunting exercises is an EMF detector. This detects electromagnetic fields, which as the ghost hunters will tell you, “could indicate the presence of a ghost.”

It actually indicates the presence of a lot of different things, including faulty or exposed wiring, signals from cell phones or radios, power lines, household appliances or anything else that can provide a strong enough EMF for the detector to pick up.

Other devices include things like infrared cameras, which capture infrared radiation emitted when atoms absorb and release energy, which produces heat. Infrared radiation is a low frequency on the electromagnetic spectrum and our eyes can’t see it without a little help from a machine — a camera, in the case of most ghost hunting adventures. The military also uses infrared cameras for low-light scenarios, and can even use them to “see” through walls in the event that hostile forces could be holed up and waiting to ambush soldiers.

It’s important to take into account that television programs go through an extensive editing and post-production process, and none of the footage you see on TV is raw footage from the event — this is particularly true of paranormal TV shows, where effects and reactions can be stitched together after the fact to create a compelling story meant to draw you in and make you wonder. Additionally, virtually every tool marketed toward amateur ghost hunters is designed to be glitchy and unreliable, both to be affordable for a mass market and to add to the appeal of not being able to replicate a spooky situation.

Finally, Zach had one more great question:

“Related to the above: What’s the science behind people thinking they ‘see’ ghosts in photographs or video?”

Due to a limited word count, I’ll have to answer part of this in next week’s article. Spoiler alert: It involves Led Zeppelin.

However, I can tell you the phenomenon of seeing ghosts in photographs is well documented, and it’s not nearly as spooky as you might think. It all began in 1861, when a man by the name of William H. Mumler was toying around with his newfound hobby of photography. He developed an image to find the spectral form of a girl he had photographed earlier appearing in the image with someone else, laid ethereally overtop.

Images like these went “viral” by 1800s standards, creating irrefutable proof of life after death, the beyond’s means to haunt the living and forever giving a “spooky” ghost vibe to the age of early photography.

In actuality, this is an extremely common phenomenon in film and has been used to great effect in motion pictures preceding the advent of CGI. It turns out that Mumler, fairly new to photography at the time, had failed to clean the plates he had been using between pictures, and a portion of his older pictures were simply seeping into the new ones.

This doesn’t mean they didn’t have a strange obsession with photographing dead people in the 1800s, however. That’s a tale for another day.

Stay curious, 7B.