Dr. Rodney Schmaltz

Happy to be here.

I do not.

I am an educator.

But I teach a class on scientific skepticism, and we do, in fact, go ghost hunting to debunk the tools you see online and on TV.

But I would say what I do is a little bit different than ghostbusting.

I'm interested in why people have these experiences.

So I haven't seen any good evidence for the paranormal or for ghosts, but I do believe that people are genuinely experiencing something.

And that's what I'm interested in.

What's that something?

Why do people feel like they've had these experiences?

We were looking at the impact of infrasound and infrasound is a low frequency sound below 20 hertz.

We can't consciously hear it, but we can feel it.

The way I like to describe it is imagine you're at a concert and there's a lot of bass and you kind of feel that tension in your chest and the hair on the back of your neck might go up, but you know what it's from, it's from the music.

But imagine a lower level experience like that, maybe not quite as intense, but you can't hear anything.

And infrasound is caused by things like in old buildings, there's low rumbling pipes or could be old boilers as well.

It's caused by heavy machinery traffic.

So it's kind of all around us.

So in our research, what we did is we brought people into the lab and we exposed them to infrasound or not.

And we did that in the presence of relaxing music or more ambient spooky sounds, the kind of thing you'd hear in the background of a horror movie.

We took a number of measures, including cortisol.