The Case in Brief
Why the Most Common Piece of Ghost Hunting Gear Is Also the Most Misunderstood Walk into almost any paranormal investigation and you will find…
Why the Most Common Piece of Ghost Hunting Gear Is Also the Most Misunderstood
Walk into almost any paranormal investigation and you will find at least one person with an EMF meter, watching its needle or lights for the telltale jump that signifies the presence of something not usually seen. It is by far the most recognizable piece of equipment in the hobby, simple enough to buy while on your way to your first investigation and common enough that television crews rarely bother filming a walkthrough without one. What they do not realize is the peculiar nature of the premise that leads to the use of these meters.
Electromagnetic field, the same physical process whichpowers your toaster or Wi-Fi router, would also be a medium of communication for a ghost, or possibly be quietly rearranging the inside of your skull even before the ghost arrives. Both ideas have actual scientific research backing them, and have been tested for their effects in ways that complicate the usual view of this equipment.
The EMF Meter’s Unlikely Path From Safety Tool to Ghost Detector
The device currently most synonymous with paranormal investigations, the compact K-II meter with its array of colored lights, was not designed to search for ghosts. K-II Enterprises first sold the unit in the late 1980s as a home safety device, meant to keep track of distances between large power sources like wiring, appliances, and power lines, during a period of heightened awareness aboutpotentially dangerous long-term electromagnetic field exposure.
Paranormal investigators later adopted the meter for almost the opposite reason. If the alleged cold spot, headaches, or other abnormal sensations at a location were being caused by an ordinary electrical source, that was one fewer paranormal phenomenon to investigate, and an EMF sweep became a routine task to rule out the mundane.
Somewhere down the line, the logic got turned on its head. A reading that existed to eliminate a mundane possibility increasingly becomes seen as evidence for a paranormal one, on the theory that a spirit might itself generate or interact with an electromagnetic field powerful enough to trigger a handheld meter.
Detractors of this approach point out that the meters most commonly used, including the K-II, are calibrated to seek out fields at 50 or 60 hertz, which is the frequency of a household current, not the brainwaves of a living (or dead) person, and that such meters are notoriously susceptible to false positives from walkie-talkies, cell phones, and other radio-frequency interference likely to appear at an active location, making an isolated spike of EMF difficult to build into a conclusive argument for anything at all.
The Temporal Lobe Theory: Can a Field Produce a Presence?
Beneath the debate about equipment, there are more interesting scientific questions, upon which researchers have been preoccupied for decades: whether electromagnetic fields may affect the brain in such a way as to produce the sensation of an unseen presence.
Most notably the late Canadian neuroscientist Michael Persinger, who devoted a considerable amount of his professional life to studying the functions of the temporal lobes. These areas of the brain are responsible for memory, emotions and a sense of self. His theory was that magnetic fields could interact with them in a manner similar to the interaction between the magnetic fields produced by the Earth and the human brain.
An abnormally strong field may produce an abnormally strong stimulus, which may in turn be erroneously interpreted by the senses as a presence of some paranormal entity.In his experiment, which he later formalized in a 2002 issue of the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease , he tried weak magnetic fields applied to the temporal lobes of the Faye Healey, one of the participants of the study, and later measured how often a sense of presence appeared to her.
The device which he constructed for this experiment and later popularized as the “God helmet” may very well be the key to solving the mystery behind ghost hunting, paranormal research and haunted houses, as the entire concept behind the God helmet is rather similar to a different set of experiments conductedon the temporal lobe: it has been established that stimulating the temporoparietal junction (which resides largely in the temporal lobe) may provoke out-of-body experiences and a sensation of a phantom presence nearby.
When Scientists Tried to Replicate the God Helmet
Science seeks results that replicate, findings that hold up under the scrutiny of another party attempting to test and observe the same effects, and Persinger’s results were no different. An experiment in 2005 run by a Swedish research team under the guidance of Pehr Granqvist performed a double-blind version of the experiment, with neither the participants nor the administering researchers knowing if the magnetic field equipment was active for a given session, that complicated the matter: participants who experienced sensed-presence and other mystical effects were just as likely to have been under an active field as under an inactive one, and the trait most predictive of a given subject reporting such an experience was suggestibility, a general personality trait of being open to suggestions from external sources, not a measurable property of the field itself.
A later study by Granqvist and a fellow researcher the next year sought to understand why some participants still reported strange experiences even without an active field, finding that priming the participants beforehand with certain religious concepts made it more likely that they would report an experience consistent with the concepts they’d been introduced to beforehand, effectively using existing frameworks for understanding mystical or supernatural phenomena a subject might already possess, and the results were no less valid for having been achieved through such a process.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that the original participants were lying about sensing a presence or that their reported experiences weren’t genuine in some sense, but it does mean that the simplest theory of the temporal-lobe hypothesis, that exposing someone to a field reliably produces an effect regardless of other factors, has failed the usual tests scientific findings are expected to undergo, and that expectation and personality can be at least as responsible for such an outcome as anything measured in a physics lab.
Building a Haunted Room to Test the Theory
A separate, more elaborate experiment sought to address the issue from a slightly different angle. Whereas the first experiments isolateda single variable in a controlled setting, psychologist Christopher French and a team of collaborators built a purpose-designed room and deliberately manipulated both complex electromagnetic fields and infrasound, the low-frequency sound already associated with reported feelings of unease in paranormal research, to see if the combination could reliably produce the physical sensations reported most frequently by investigators who claim to have encountered a haunting.
The project, published in the journal Cortex in 2009, took the approach of addressing the situation as it is in a real haunted building, deliberately combining the two environmental factors most frequently blamed for paranormal sensations to see what would happen. Experiments of this type are important to investigators because they can test the theory under a set of more realisticconditions than a purely lab-based study might offer.
Real-World Sources of “Paranormal” EMF Spikes
Whatever the results of any single study, investigators dealing with a real location have to deal with a far more mundane and immediate problem: ordinary buildings are saturated with electromagnetic fields that have nothing to do with anything unexplained.
Household wiring running through walls and ceilings, dimmer switches, refrigerators, microwaves, and LED lighting all emit detectable fields, and a modern investigation team rarely shows up without a pocket full of phones, Wi-Fi hotspots, and other wireless devices that add on top of them, and nearby power lines can influence indoor readings from outside of the building, and metal furniture, ductwork, and reinforced concrete can reflect or concentrate fields such that one corner of a room reads very differently from another a few feet away, independent of anything supernatural happening in either.
The standard approach of more careful investigation teams is a deliberate baseline sweep at the very beginning of a session, walking the entire location with a meter before anything unusual has supposedly happened, disabling nearby electronics one at a time to see which readings vanish, and logging results across multiple passes rather than trusting a single number, and a reading that only appears once, in one particular spot, and cannot be reproduced on a second pass is deserving of far less confidence than one that persists after every obvious mundane source has been ruled out, and even then the temporal-lobe research above suggests that a real field reading and a real subjective experience are not necessarily evidence that one caused the other.
Electrosensitivity: A Real Experience Without a Confirmed Cause
A related medical phenomenon provides an oddly compelling parallel. A few people report a cluster of symptoms such as headaches, fatigue, dizziness, trouble concentrating, and irritability that they link to nearby electromagnetic fields such as from phones, Wi-Fi equipment, or power lines, a condition variously called electromagnetic hypersensitivity or electro sensitivity. The World Health Organization has acknowledged since 2005 that the symptoms experienced by these people are real and can be severely limiting, but nearly fift y controlled studies looking for a direct link to actual electromagnetic fields have not been able to find one, and in several of the better-controlled trials, participants report feeling significantly more ill specifically when they believe they are being exposed to increased fields, regardless of what is actually happening, an effect that researchers have attributed in part to suggestion, sometimes called a nocebo effect, rather than to actualelectromagnetic exposure.
The parallels with paranormal investigation are hard to ignore. In both cases, a person experiences something real and distressing like a headache, and waves of unease, the definite sense of another presence in the room, and in both cases, controlled research keeps finding the same uncomfortable truth: that the measured electromagnetic field and the subjective experience are far less closely connected than either paranormal investigators or electro sensitivity sufferers would like to believe. Neither makeseither group’s experience fake, but it does strongly suggest that expectation, suggestion, and the narratives we bring to a room shape our perceptions at least as much as any meter can capture.
What This Means for Your Next Investigation
None of this answers the question of whether or not a location is haunted, and none of it should. What research like this is good for is providing a more honest basis for the equipment most professional investigators are likely to possess to begin with. An EMF meter is legitimately useful as a means of dismissing a mundane power source before moving on to trickier explanations, and a thorough baseline measurement that’s actually noted down and revisited rather than skimmed over is as close to a responsible part of a serious investigation as many casual nights out in the paranormal ever get. The point at which these tools become less reliable is the moment an anomalous reading is taken as confirmation of anything, because the same research that led many people to bring an EMFmeter in the first place also highlights exactly how a field, a suggestion, or even just an expectation might each result in the sensation of a field.
Investigators who want to conduct experiments that take science seriously rather than cherry-picking bits that seem to support the paranormal should think about doing some of their own analysis alongside the standard equipment: taking notes on what parts of the team knew the backstory to a particular location beforehand, and what people later reported sensations consistent with, might prove a more valuable exercise in separating out the effects of environment from those of suggestion. It might not answer the bigger questions that launched an entire industry into existence, but it acknowledges the involvement of the investigators themselves as a factor that needs to be controlled for, rather than being dismissed out of hand.
Do you trust an anomalous EMF reading as confirmation of the paranormal, or is this kind of research more likely to convince you to be wary of the equipment you’re using? Let us know in the comments below.
Sources consulted for this post include Michael A. Persinger and Faye Healey, “Experimental Facilitation of the Sensed Presence: Possible Intercalation Between the Hemispheres Induced by Complex Magnetic Fields,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Vol. 190, No. 8 (2002), pp. 533–541; Pehr Granqvist, Mats Fredrikson, Patrick Unge, Andrea Hagenfeldt, Sven Valind, Dan Larhammar, and Marcus Larsson, “Sensed Presence and Mystical Experiences Are Predicted by Suggestibility, Not by the Application of Transcranial Weak Complex Magnetic Fields,” Neuroscience Letters, Vol. 379, No. 1 (2005), pp. 1–6; Pehr Granqvist and Marcus Larsson, “Contribution of Religiousness in the Prediction and Interpretation of Mystical Experiences in a Sensory Deprivation Context,” Journal of Psychology, Vol. 140, No. 4 (2006), pp. 319–327; Christopher C. French, Usman Haque, Rosie Bunton-Stasyshyn, and Rob Davis, “The ‘Haunt’ Project: An Attempt to Build a ‘Haunted’ Room by Manipulating Complex Electromagnetic Fields and Infrasound,” Cortex, Vol. 45, No. 5 (2009), pp. 619–629; Luke Galen, “Overlapping Mental Magisteria: Implications of Experimental Psychology for a Theory of Religious Belief as Misattribution,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, Vol. 29, No. 3 (2017), pp. 221–267; the World Health Organization’s published findings on electromagnetic hypersensitivity; and reporting on EMF meter history and false-positive readings from Higgypop and Haunt Gears.
