Post edited 1:08 pm – March 20, 2011 by Oubliette

I have been a fan of Prof. Wiseman for many years now.  Many thanks for the link above.  He is quite the skeptic when it comes to ghosts.  However, he is intensely interested in the psychological aspects of the phenomenon.

Being familiar with his work in the Edinburgh Vaults, and knowing that something occurred there that he can't quite figure out, just ups the ante for me as far as something going on that can be called a haunting.  The answer may lie in the brains of our ancestors and thus passed down to us re: certain environments evincing fear responses. 

In the Vaults (and covered more in an article I just can't find at the moment), the rooms that correspond to reported activity, both by the general public and his test subjects, seem to be wide, with low ceilings.  Is it the similarity to an unknown cave that produces the odd perceptions?

However, this may be of interest regarding that experiment:

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Wiseman himself said afterwards: "The events that have been taking place in the vaults over the

last 10 days are much more extreme than we expected"

In true scientific style, the tests were distributed between vaults with a reputation for

being haunted and those with no such background. Although the subjects – and even

Wiseman himself – were unaware

which was which, they reported anomolous experiences far more frequently in the "haunted"

chambers.

Wiseman remains a skeptic about the existence of ghosts, but the results still impressed

him:

"Had the public experiences been randomly distributed between the vaults then you really

couldn't conclude anything, what you can conclude is that there is something going on in

some sense, that these vaults are in some senses producing an experience.

"That's why I think scientists can be quite excited about this, because suddenly there's

an effect to work with, something to untangle that is a little bit of a mystery."

So science hasn't proved the existence of ghosts and it hasn't told us exactly what

happens in the ancient depths of Edinburgh Castle. But it has shown us that

something strange really is happening.

External Links:

http://www.wyrdology.com/edinb…..seman.html

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Of much interest to me also is the theory of low-frequency sound waves, sometimes coming from quite a long distance away, that can produce audio and visual hallucinations.  This was covered in a documentary where actual physicists (as opposed to paranormal "experts" who go around waving equipment they don't understand) were investigating a supposedly haunted place and found that it was receiving these waves from an unknown source.  In any case, it sounds as valid as the EM theory is made out to be.

The other article discussing Wiseman's Edinburg experiment spoke of an odd occurence: a participant (all of them had no knowledge beforehand of the Vaults and their activity) claimed to have seen an apparition of a man in the same room where "leather apron", who was I believe a cobbler, has been sighted numerous times.  How to explain this?

What really puzzles me is the Covenanter's Graveyard and the Black Mausoleum of Bloody George MacKenzie.  Here we have activity that can actually be traced to a particular event and year.  It even resulted in the gates being locked by the City Council due to a number of people becoming ill or physically hurt.  Now one can only get in via a tour group.  But that's another post altogether!