all the necessary caveats apply about the
quality of reporting on random studies, but i can’t help linking to
the
bbc’s

fascinating report on what’s going on when you
sense
ghosts

or otherwise get a good case of the
howling
fantods

. ignoring the very real possibility of methodological funniness, it appears that regular
people can reliably detect “spookiness” in places that are claimed
to be “spooky”, even if they don’t know that they are supposed to
be in a “spooky” place:

“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.”

“”Hauntings exist, in the sense that places exist where people
reliably have unusual experiences,” Dr Richard Wiseman told BBC
News Online. “The existence of ghosts is a way of explaining these
experiences.””

the scientists posit that there aren’t really
any ghosts, but rather that there some subtle perceptual cues that
get consistantly interpreted as spooky. i’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that these cues
are less obvious than standing in a dimly lit, cobwebbed crypt with
organ music wafting in. it’d be interesting to see if they could
reduce the perceptual cues to their constituent parts, so that you
could more reliably manipulate the general level of “spookiness”.
until then, as one commenter aptly states, ” To the believer no
proof is required, to the sceptic, no proof is sufficient.”