There Was Always Someone Standing Behind Me in the Lab, Turned Out to Be a Fan

Coventry, England, had an engineer named Vic Tandy, who worked at a small company making medical equipment. There was a lab in the company building that people said was haunted: if you were alone in there at night, you'd feel someone standing behind you, feel cold, your hair would stand on end, and you'd see a grey shadow out of the corner of your eye.

One night, it was Tandy's turn to stay late alone. He was working with his head down when he suddenly saw a greyish thing appear from the corner of his vision and slowly drift toward him. He turned around in fright, but there was nothing there.

The next day, he remembered his hobby was fencing, so he brought a sword and clamped it in a vise in the lab, wanting to sharpen it. He noticed the tip of the sword kept shaking, though no one touched it. He traced the cause and found it was a newly installed exhaust fan next door; when it spun, it emitted a very low sound, around nineteen hertz. Human ears can't hear such low sounds, and this is called "infrasound."

He turned off the fan, the sword stopped shaking, and the creepy feeling disappeared.

In 1998, he wrote this up in an article titled "The Ghost in the Machine," published in a journal of the Society for Psychical Research. Later he also checked a famous "haunted cellar" in Coventry and measured low-frequency sound around nineteen hertz there too. The article has been widely cited to explain some "haunted houses": possibly ventilation ducts, motors, subways, or even nearby highways.

In 2003, British psychologist Richard Wiseman conducted a similar experiment at a London concert hall, playing music with infrasound to the audience; many said they felt uneasy, cold, or wanted to cry, though some said the effect was inconsistent and not everyone experienced it.

So if your room makes you inexplicably uncomfortable, first check whether there are fans, water pumps, or transformers nearby.

#Paranormal #网络转载 #科学