Thank you.
Hi, I'm Lindsay.
And I'm Marshall.
Welcome to Tumble, the show where we explore spooky stories of science discovery on our annual Halloween show.
This time, we're taking on the science of the spirit world.
Ooh, are we becoming ghost investigators?
Get ready for some paranormal podcast activities when we find out what happens when scientists try to discover if ghosts are real.
So we got a question from our listener, Lily.
Hi, my name is Lily.
I am six years old.
I live in Kaneohe, Hawaii.
My question is, are ghosts real?
I think they are real.
So Lily thinks that ghosts are real, but you know, I'm not quite sure how we would answer that on our show because like, are ghosts, super science-y.
Well, it certainly is hard to prove, but Lily has an idea of how scientists might find out.
I think scientists would find out by taking pictures and studying them.
Wait, so what would they take pictures of?
Because you can't see ghosts, right?
Like they just go to a haunted place and then like...
Get a ghost to do a good pose like, okay, everybody pretend like you're holding up the building.
Say boo.
Well, let's ask our listeners.
Do you think ghosts are real?
Why or why not?
And how do you think scientists would find out?
Think about it, because we're about to go on a ghostly journey to a time when scientists tried to do science with spirits.
To get the answer to Lily's question, I called up Ephraim Syrah-Schreier, who is an unusual kind of science expert.
What I do is I study the history of science and, in particular, the ways in which scientists have investigated the claims of people who have seen ghosts.
So he's a ghost science historian.
Exactly.
So basically he's studying how scientists in the past tried to answer Lily's question.
Are ghosts real?
He sounds like the perfect expert, but I really do need to know how someone ends up studying ghosts as a job.
Well, for Ephraim it all goes back to watching scientists chase down ghosts in a now classic ghost movie.
My interest in ghosts goes all the way back. to when I first saw Ghostbusters in the early 1980s.
Ephraim was a kid when he watched the movie and decided that he wanted to be a Ghostbuster when he grew up.
And he did.
Wait, so is being a Ghostbuster like it is in the movies?
Does he like strap on a uniform and like get lasers and stuff?
Not exactly.
We certainly don't have proton packs where you get to blast high-powered lasers at ghosts.
But I do think that some of the scenes from Ghostbusters, where you're walking through old buildings that are kind of scary and you're waiting for something to jump out at you, is actually very similar to how it's depicted in the film.
Wait, so Ephraim actually does go to creepy buildings?
Yeah, Ephraim says he's been to countless places that are supposed to be haunted and sat in on dozens of seances where people try to communicate with the dead.
So has he seen a ghost?
Not yet.
But just because I haven't seen anything yet doesn't mean that ghosts aren't real.
That's a tricky answer.
He's not quite saying that ghosts are real, but that they could be?
Could Lily be right?
Well, here's the thing with ghosts.
It's hard to know if they are real, but that doesn't stop us from trying to figure it out.
And Ephraim says there have been a lot of scientists who have tried to answer that question.
So let's take a little trip back in time.
Oh, we got a science history moment.
Let's let's get the music going here.
So the period that I mostly write about, at least at the moment, is the 19th century and really the Victorian context.
Ephraim's talking about the Victorian era, named for the time when Queen Victoria ruled Britain around 1840 until the early 1900s.
This was a time when men were wearing top hats, women were in dresses with tight waist, and steam trains were beginning to chug across long distances.
And also when they decorated things.
Science was starting to form into the shape that we know it today.
Professionals who were trained in doing different types of science, like chemistry physics, geology and biology, for example.
And at the same time, there was a new religion called spiritualism, in which people believe that the living can communicate with the dead.
So spiritualism has the word spirits in the name, so I'm assuming it's very ghost forward.
Yes.
And so ghosts became a big topic for scientists.
We have a group of people interested in ghosts from the 1850s onwards who are trying to apply empirical methods to the study of ghosts and spirits to determine whether or not they're real.
So hold on, I think we should define what an empirical method means.
Empirical methods are ways of getting knowledge through observing, gathering data and making logical conclusions.
So it means that scientists were looking for evidence to prove whether or not ghosts were real.
What kind of evidence?
The main source of evidence when dealing with ghosts is personal testimonies.
People's own account of things that they witnessed firsthand.
And the problem with testimony... is that it isn't very trustworthy.
Yeah, that's what you said to me when I told you I saw a talking camel yesterday.
Yes, I needed more evidence for that.
So to find out whether ghosts are real or not, scientists decide they need to be around where people are experiencing a ghostly presence.
How do they do that?
We'll find out right after this spooky break.
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Boo!
Ah!
We're back.
Did I scare you?
I mean, I guess a little bit.
So when we left off, we learned that scientists were looking for evidence to determine whether or not ghosts are real.
And that was because of a new religion that got its start thanks to just three sisters.
So it all really starts when three young girls, named the Fox sisters in 1848, claim to one evening have communications with the spirit of a dead person.
The Fox sisters became a media sensation, and others started to claim that they could talk to spirits too.
These people were called mediums and they all had different ways to show people that ghosts were present at gatherings called seances.
Scientists start to hold sittings with them when they have seances and try to test whether or not they can determine how the incredible phenomena that people are witnessing at these gatherings is produced.
Huh, so what kind of testing are we talking about here?
Well, scientists set up what they called controls to try and prevent human trickery.
As an example, if people are claiming to be poked by spirits during the course of a seance, The scientist starts to create all types of controls to limit the possibility that it's one of the sitters at the table who is actually the person behind those pokes that people are feeling, or whether it genuinely is some disembodied presence that's going around poking people.
Wait, so the medium would be like, the ghost is here to poke you.
Poke, poke.
That's a ghost.
That's definitely a ghost poking you right now, Lindsay.
Ow.
That's just one example of the ways that mediums would try to prove these spirits were in the room.
And the scientists would try to make sure that there was no way for the medium's friends to be actually doing the poking or whatever.
Hmm.
Yeah, I mean, I guess that's a possibility.
So, like, how did it work out?
I think a really great example of a scientist is Alfred Russell Wallace.
And Alfred Russell Wallace is especially interesting because he's the co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection.
Oh, so this is like the Wallace who's up there with Charles Darwin.
Yes, he was a very serious and well-regarded scientist, but he also believed in ghosts, because he believed he had met one during a near-death experience and he wanted to find out if that experience was real.
What he starts to do is have regular sittings with a high-profile medium named Agnes Elizabeth Guppy.
Wait, Guppy?
Like the little fish?
Celebrities had better names back then.
Yes.
Mrs. Guppy, as she was known, was very famous for incredible feats of ghostly powers.
So, for example, it was very common for her to levitate off the ground during her seances, at least according to witness testimonies.
Levitate like she could hover in the air.
Yes.
And when Alfred Russell Wallace sat with her on numerous occasions, he had all types of controls to try and keep her in her seat.
And yet she would inevitably, even with all these controls in the case in place, like tying her up or holding her down would end up in the air and then eventually on top of the tables.
That's incredible.
So was she fooling him or was she actually being picked up by ghosts?
Well, Alfred Russell Wallace didn't believe that he was being fooled.
He said it was real.
And he said it was real because he did one of the things that scientists do to empirically test, and that's to repeat.
The same test, over and over again, with the same set of controls to limit any possibility of cheating.
And time and time again, these incredible phenomena kept happening.
So he's like, I can't prove that it's not real.
So it's real.
But of course Mrs Guppy always had close friends in the room with her and they could have conspired with Mrs Guppy to create an illusion that fooled someone like Alfred Russell Wallace.
So Ephraim thinks that Mrs. Guppy tricked a brilliant scientist?
Yes, because Wallace's controls might have had an obvious weakness.
He already believed that ghosts or spirits were real and that people could be psychic.
And so he's looking for evidence to confirm the idea that he already had.
Oh, so you're saying that he might not have been looking to disprove what Mrs. Guppy was doing.
He wanted to prove that ghosts were real, so he just found what he wanted.
Yeah.
And remember how Ephraim said that the problem with studying ghosts is that the best evidence is people's stories about their experiences.
Yeah.
So that's true even when the story is coming from a respected scientist.
Alfred Russell Wallace couldn't settle the questions of whether ghosts exist on his own, because people are always going to ask questions about his story.
And many people since have come up with ways that Mrs. Guppy could have been fooling him.
Well, Mrs. Guppy, and this is a really important point, was never caught cheating.
For this reason, Mrs. Guppy is still seen by many believers as someone who did truly talk to ghosts.
And back in her day the idea of a person levitating through spirit power may not have seemed so impossible.
I think it's also important to remember that, especially in the later part of the 19th century, there's so many new types of technology that seem to function by invisible energy.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Like, wasn't that around the time when the telegraph was invented?
And if that's not ghosts, I don't know what is.
How can you send signals invisibly across oceans?
Why not across the veil?
There's a lot of similarity between those new communication technologies and what spiritualists are claiming.
So it helps to explain why there were so many believers, even scientific believers, who supported it.
Yeah, sure.
So would I know of any other scientific believers?
Definitely.
One was the inventor of the light bulb.
The famed American scientist Thomas Edison, who a lot of people don't know was also deeply interested in spirits.
And in 1920, he actually created plans to make a spirit phone.
A spirit phone?
Like, ring, ring, am I speaking with my great, great, great grandmother?
Exactly.
The plans were kind of hazy.
And unfortunately, Edison didn't end up inventing it.
I mean, I guess that makes sense.
But were there scientists who just like didn't buy any of this?
Yeah, there were a bunch.
And they brought in some better techniques.
Very famous scientist from the 1850s named Michael Faraday created a contraption that could sense whether or not people were unconsciously moving during table tilting.
Wait, Michael Faraday?
He's involved with physics or electronics, right?
Yes.
He did physics and chemistry and he basically laid the foundations for modern electricity, among other brilliant inventions.
But he also invented a device to disprove the claim that spirits were moving tables during these seances.
So it could measure whether or not some pressure was unconsciously being applied by one of the people around the table.
Huh.
So how did that work?
Well, it was something you would put your hands on that would show that the tiniest muscle movements could actually sway the table, even if you weren't trying to move it, proving that it wasn't spirits moving the table.
Okay, so that seems like a pretty good example of using the tools of science to figure out what was going on.
Right, so there's all these examples of scientists trying to prove or disprove the evidence.
But what about Lily's idea of taking photographs?
Could that be a good tool to catch ghosts?
Well, Ephraim said that what was called spirit photography was huge.
Photography is a technology that's emerging at the same time that a belief in spiritualism is emerging.
Again, spiritualism is the idea that we can communicate with ghosts.
Okay.
And so people were like, let's see if we can take some pictures of ghosts.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Spiritualists think well, we can use this to create physical evidence that shows definitively that ghosts are real.
These days, we know that you can change or manipulate a lot in a photo.
But back then, people trusted that what they saw in the pictures was real.
It's natural for them to say, well, a photograph is physical evidence.
It's not testimony.
Everyone can see it.
In other words, Photographs could be more than somebody's story about an experience which was hard to prove.
Photographs could be real proof.
Maybe not.
And inevitably, people start capturing what are called spirit impressions on photographic plates.
Now, just like mediums, scientists start to expose the methods behind making spirit impressions.
These photographic plates would often have ghostly blurred images on them before the photo of the living was taken on top.
One spirit photographer was caught when a doctor spotted one of these so-called spirits in the images alive and well on the street.
That's probably pretty good proof that he wasn't a ghost.
But where does that leave us?
Did scientists ever find the answer to Lily's question?
Like, do we know whether ghosts are real or not?
Well, let's think back on all that we've learned in our journey through time.
We found out that important scientists were taking ghost investigations very seriously.
And while some scientists wanted to believe that ghosts were real, others discovered that a lot of the evidence presented for ghosts was trickery and illusion.
But people like Ephraim are still investigating claims of ghosts, because there's always a possibility.
I still want it to be real.
I mean, it would be amazing if it was real.
And that's why I still study it because it would be great to find evidence that confirms it.
Unfortunately, I've never had any evidence that convinced me of it.
Okay, so ghosts could be real, but so far we don't have solid scientific evidence that they are.
And I guess that means that we can always be curious about it.
Exactly.
So I asked Lily if learning about how scientists studied ghosts made her interested in trying it out herself.
I would not like to study because it would creep my brains out.
I hear you, Lily.
It would creep my brains out too.
Me too.
But if you are a person who's interested in studying ghosts, Ephraim says that the opportunity to become a real-life Ghostbuster will always be there for you.
You just need one example where you can't explain it away for a belief in ghosts to persist.
So it's just going to last forever, that question.
Now that you've learned about how Ephraim studies the ghost investigations of the past and present, here's some advice about what questions to ask if you think you've seen a ghost.
First ask yourself what it is that you think you saw, where you were when you saw it, what that space looked like and what else was going on at the time.
Then, try to come up with some other explanations that might explain what you experienced.
Work through those questions one by one and test out all the arguments against your experience being caused by spirits.
If you do that, Ephraim says you'll be doing what professional, modern-day Ghostbusters do.
Let us know about your ghostbusting experiences.
Email us at tumblepodcast at gmail.com to tell us all about it.
Thanks today to Dr Efrem Sarah Schreier, associate professor at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
Special thanks to Lily for her great question and her mom for helping out with recording.
You can learn more about Ephraim and his research and find a transcript of this episode on the blog on our website, sciencepodcastsforkidscom.
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If you want to listen to our show in Spanish, you should check out Tumble en Español, adapted and hosted by our good friends Nuria and Alvaro.
Find it at tumbleinespanol.com or search for Tumble en Español wherever you get your podcasts.
Rebecca Cunningham is our assistant producer.
Sarah Robertson-Lentz is our managing editor and created the episode art.
Mixing and mastering is by Gary Calhoun James.
I'm Lindsay Patterson, the executive producer of the show, and I wrote this episode with help from Michal Richardson.
I'm Marshall Escamilla, and I make all the music for Tumble.
Tumble Science is a production of Tumble Media.
Thanks for listening, and stay tuned for more stories of science discovery.
Ooh, here I come from the end of the episode.
And, of course, I'm actually here doing all of our birthday shoutouts because it's the end of the episode and that's just what we do.
So before we get to birthdays, we want to let you know that, if you want to hear the whole interview from this episode about ghosts, Lindsay posted that to our Patreon today.
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