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So I'd gone to bed in my flat in southeast London. I was lying on my side on a low platform bed and a man, a giant man, hunched over wearing this kind of long black hooded cloak came into my bedroom. I double locked the front door so this was really scary. I thought someone had broken in.
He floated towards me. He didn't have a face, but I felt like he had a face. I felt like there was a kind of a green glow coming out of the face and he had these kind of horrible teeth, which I couldn't see. He didn't have a face, but I felt like they were there. He walked slowly towards the bed, almost kind of hovering. I was trying desperately to roll over, to escape, to hit him, to attack him, and I couldn't do it.
And after a couple of seconds, he leaned right over the bed and screamed in my ear this kind of deep guttural noise. It was loud, high pitched. And I was trying again to move to cover my ears with my hands or my arms and I couldn't do it. It just seemed to go on and on and on and then stopped and he turned around and floated out of the room, through the front door, out into the corridor and left.
What would you do if you saw a ghost?
When Sarah Cox saw that strange, faceless man hover up to her bed two years ago, she knew exactly who to call. I was trying at the time to remember all the details because I wanted to tell Chris about the experience. She knew she had to tell Chris French, professional TV ghost doubter. Well, that's right. I mean, for my sins, I have worked on some truly dreadful TV programs, but they're great fun to do. One of those shows was Haunted Homes.
Tonight on Haunted Homes, we visit a house in Wolverhampton whose inhabitants claim to be terrified of spirits that haunt the corridors. Chris was the resident sceptic. We did one programme which was in a radio station. Any spirit people? Any spirit children? One of the things that people had reported hearing for a very long time was some kind of ghostly sneeze. Oh, my... OK, we thought we...
I just heard like a sneeze noise. Somebody went, "Echoo." We've got it all on film. You could actually hear this kind of sound. It doesn't sound like much, but that sound right there, that's the sneeze they recorded.
The people making the program were very intrigued by this and kind of confronted me the next morning with this recording. But I made the point that, you know, yes, OK, it might be the sound of a sneeze, but it could be 101 other things. The next night, Chris's co-host had a strange look on his face and he was pointing at the wall. I thought, well, what's this? Is it going to be ectoplasmic snot? What's it going to be? It was an automatic air freshener.
So we hung around for a couple of minutes and sure enough, that was the noise it made. That's what we'd recorded. Unfortunately, when they edited the program together, they did have time to make quite a lot of having recorded this ghostly sneeze, but they didn't have space to fit our explanation in. So the viewers would never know that we knew what was causing that noise. This week on Unexplainable, we've got enough space for the air freshener and some big questions too.
Like, why do people think they see ghosts? And how should they deal with the experience? Chris thinks a lot about these questions because he isn't just a TV ghost skeptic. I'm a professor emeritus in the psychology department at Goldsmiths University of London. And he's essentially dedicated his career to understanding why people see ghosts.
Even though he doesn't necessarily think they're real. I personally don't think they are, but a very important part of being a skeptic, for me at least, is to always be open to the possibility that you might be wrong. So why would Chris study something if he doesn't think it's real? The main reason is because so many people do believe in ghosts. I mean, survey after survey shows very high levels of belief.
If psychology's got nothing to say about that, it's missing out on a big part of human experience. There's a really interesting area there to explore. If there are no such things as ghosts and spirits and so on, why do so many people believe in them? And why do a fairly sizable minority claim to have had personal, direct experience of them? Psychology doesn't have perfect answers to these questions, but it can help begin to make sense of them.
It starts by taking these experiences seriously. I think these experiences do need to be taken seriously. I mean, most of the time when people think they've had some kind of ghostly encounter, they're not lying, they're not making it up, they're not suffering from any kind of serious psychopathology. They've just had a weird experience that they personally can't make sense of.
And when we talk about seeing ghosts, what are we talking about exactly? I think it's important to maybe get away from that notion of seeing ghosts. When we talk about ghosts, it tends to summon up an image of a kind of translucent figure coming through the wall. But it's other, often much more subtle cues that they're picking up on. Things like a very strong sense of presence, feeling as if there's someone in the room watching you. A smell of...
of perfume or tobacco, a whole range of other quite subtle sensations, but things that people can't explain.
So how should we wrap our heads around all these things that people can't explain? I think you can divide it into two very broad categories. Okay. You have misinterpretations of things that are happening out in the real world, and another general category where people really are experiencing weird stuff. Okay, let's save the weird stuff for a bit. Yeah. Let's just start with...
the misinterpretations. What does that mean? How do those work? The two single most important psychological factors that I would point to would be on the one hand context and on the other hand prior belief. If you think about context, if you've been shown around some kind of old building and then somebody says, oh, this room is supposed to be haunted, just hearing that
your mental set so that when you go in there, then every little creak, every little change in temperature, you notice, you pay more attention to. And I think, you know, I think we all tend to do that. Is this kind of what happened on your show a lot of the time? Like assuming an air freshener is a sneezing ghost because of all the context and expectation? Absolutely.
Absolutely. They kind of realised quite early on that it was a good idea to get the sceptic out of the way because the atmosphere just didn't build up. So in the first few programmes we did, I would be in the room with people and there'd be some kind of noise and somebody would say, what was that? I can hear noises like...
Chairs scraping doors going and you know if the skeptic says oh, it's just the central heating cooling down You know, they completely dampens the atmosphere Whereas in contrast our psychic was very good at ramping up the atmosphere So in the same kind of context if someone said what was that? You know, she said oh, yeah Did you move this pillow?
This is really getting weird now. And look over in the corner there. Can you see some strange lights? Look in that corner. Something unusual in that corner. To me, it looks misty. They would end up really genuinely terrified. So what they decided to do was to get rid of me. They stuck me in a Winnebago. I used to have to watch everything on these kind of remote cameras, just the screens in front of me. And when you talk about all these misinterpretations based on context...
Are these just our brains wanting to find patterns out there? That's a very important aspect of it. I think a lot of these kinds of experiences that people report are down to the way our brains wired as a result of our evolutionary history. For much of that time, we lived in a very, very threatening environment. You know, your life really was at risk from predators. So we've got this bias to assume there is something out there.
So that explanation, the hardwired bias, that helps explain the first broad category you laid out of misinterpretations. But what about that story from Sarah we heard at the top? It really felt like there was this huge, horrible, ugly, looming character over my bed. And I did genuinely think that I was at risk of my life, that someone had broken into my house and I couldn't move. ♪
That doesn't sound like she was confusing an air freshener for a ghost sneeze. It sounds like something really strange was happening. It certainly does. I know Sarah's story, and it's a very, very creepy story. I very strongly suspect that what we're dealing with there is something called sleep paralysis. It's relatively common. It's when you're half awake, half asleep, and you realize that you can't move. So it's a temporary period of paralysis.
But it can be associated in a smaller percentage of cases with terrifying visual and auditory hallucinations that cover a very wide range of things. It feels as real as an objective perception of something out there in the real world. And do we know what causes it? We do in general terms, yeah. If you go through the kind of a normal night's sleep, you'll go through different stages and you come back up and then you go into what's called REM sleep.
And this is the phase of sleep that is typically associated with vivid dreams. And when you're in this state, the muscles of your body are actually paralyzed, presumably to stop you acting out the action of the dream. In an episode of sleep paralysis, it's as though your brain wakes up, but your body doesn't. You can see you're still in your bedroom, but you might have all this weird dream mentation and imagery coming through into normal waking consciousness. So you've got a kind of hybrid state.
And it can be, as we've seen, absolutely terrifying. This feels like it could also relate to prior belief. Like I can imagine if you believe in ghosts, you can interpret this experience as an encounter with a ghost. And if you don't believe in ghosts, you could experience this as sleep paralysis. And that's just it, right? That's exactly it. Most people we do know from our own research don't interpret these episodes in paranormal terms. But because it's a relatively common phenomenon...
it does account for an awful lot of cases of ghostly encounters. And hallucinations aren't just sleep paralysis, right? Yeah. Basically, all of us probably hallucinate to some degree or other. Hallucinations are kind of on a continuum, if you like. What do you mean by that? Well, hallucinations are very common, and we might hallucinate without it necessarily being any kind of indication of a serious underlying psychological problem.
Is that to say that some people might just regularly hallucinate without necessarily having a major underlying psychological issue? Well, they do. And even there, there's a kind of continuum. So some people hardly ever have any of these kind of anomalous experiences. Other people at the other extreme might be somebody who's going through a psychotic breakdown. But there's also all points in between. And
And there's a kind of an area where people might have quite a lot of these experiences. They might hear voices, they might see things that other people don't see and so on, but not actually be worried about it and maybe even think it's a gift. And there is a case that can be made that lots of mediums really are hearing voices. It's just that the voices are not, in my opinion, the voices of ghosts.
If a lot of people hear voices in their heads, while also not necessarily going through a psychotic breakdown, how should they deal with experiencing things that aren't there? That's coming up after the break. Support for Unexplainable comes from Greenlight. People with kids tell me time moves a lot faster. Before you know it, your kid is all grown up, they've got their own credit card,
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Unexplainable. We're back. I'm Noam Hassenfeld. In the first half of the show, we heard from a psychologist about how things like cognitive biases and sleep paralysis can explain a lot of ghostly encounters, but not all of them. At the end there, we also talked about this idea that for some people, hearing voices in their heads might just be part of life.
It's more hearing than anything else, but sometimes I see as well. When Jess Dorner hears voices, she hears them in a very specific way. It happens in my right ear. It varies randomly in the middle of silence. It will crinkle and crackle. And I've had it checked out by doctors and, you know, it's not perforated and nothing's wrong with my ear. No physical trauma. The voices started in her cousin's basement.
So it was 2008 and I was all by myself trying to get to bed. And I started seeing my grandmother who had been passed for several years. And she said, you know, Jessica, I know you can see me and I know you can hear me and you got to do something about it.
From that point on, Jess started hearing her grandmother's voice every few days. And then I started seeing my brother-in-law's father who passed away. And he was very excited to know that I could see and hear him as well. At first, it was unsettling. You know, it is scary the first time you realize, like, what's happening. I felt like I was going to end up in a mental institution because I didn't know how to control it.
So she decided to be honest about it with the people closest to her. I had told my family, my mom and dad and sister, and they just believed that I believed that and supported me, you know, and said, well, what can we do? You know, do you need help? And I was very, very fortunate to be able to meet people who could point me in the right direction.
Jess eventually went to the Healing in Harmony Center in Glastonbury, Connecticut. It's a spiritual wellness center that, among other things, offers classes to self-described psychic mediums like Jess to manage and control the voices they hear. I learned that there were other people going to that center in Glastonbury that I could relate to and who could relate to me. And maybe we weren't having exactly the same story and situation and experiences, but at least we were doing it together.
In the last few years, the type of work going on at centers like this has started to interest not just psychic mediums, but research scientists too. Because sometimes just that single symptom of hearing voices can be enough to diagnose someone with psychosis, which means they have a serious mental health condition. So researchers are starting to look at these communities and they're wondering, what does it mean to be a healthy or non-clinical voice hearer? And when does it become something more problematic?
At this point, these questions are far from answered. I've heard psychiatrists sort of speculate that there are a lot of people just sort of walking around, probably experiencing hallucinations just as part of their day-to-day life. But since they've found ways to get by, we would never know. Joseph Frankel wrote a story for The Atlantic about Jess and other healthy, non-clinical voice hearers who experience auditory hallucinations. We're talking about sensory hallucinations independent of psychosis.
And what exactly is the criterion of a hallucination? Like, what kinds of things are we talking about here? I think we experience things all the time in our lives that we might not think of as hallucinations, but...
you know, really do sort of meet the criteria. I think the best example I've been given is the phantom phone vibration, you know, when you're just sort of sitting at your desk and you feel like someone's texting you and... Yeah, yeah, you feel like it's in your pocket and then maybe your phone isn't even in your pocket. Exactly. That is technically hallucination. Yeah, we were talking about this sort of continuum of hallucinations in the first half of the show.
But where's the line between feeling a vibration in your pocket and something like schizophrenia? Yeah. So I think what we would say is that we wouldn't think about the single symptom. Schizophrenia is not a matter of just having a hallucination. We're talking about patients who are also experiencing pretty intense emotional upset, feelings of paranoia, not being able to concentrate, not being able to sleep. But I think sort of the general rule here is that
You want to think about whether or not a person is suffering themselves, whether they're able to function in their day-to-day life, and whether they're
you know, inflicting suffering on other people. And Jess was part of a research study on people who hear voices, right? Yeah. She met Philip Corlett and Albert Powers, a psychologist and psychiatrist who are doing research at Yale, looking at populations of people who hear voices and don't necessarily experience it as a negative thing to see what lessons can be gleaned from those people's experiences and
to possibly help people who are in distress due to the voices that they hear, as well as due to other symptoms of schizophrenia. And what did they find from talking to this community? What kinds of factors tend to be correlated with people who hear voices and also aren't suffering? There were three big factors that seemed to be associated with people who had more positive relationships to their experience.
So for one, they found that those people were more likely to describe a positive or at least neutral reaction when they first told someone that they were hearing voices. So in the case of Jess, that was her mom. If my family didn't listen to me, I wouldn't be able to be here right now. You know, I might have been put on meds and gone to a facility and I...
You know, not being met with judgment or an extremely negative reaction when they first talk about it.
Okay, so number one, getting a positive reaction when they tell people. What's number two? The degree of control over the voice. People in the non-clinical group were much more likely to report being able to control the voices that they hear, or rather to influence them, to interact with them in a way that achieves effects that they need in order to live their lives. So, you know, in Jess's case, she's able to talk back to the voices she heard when she was at work and to set boundaries with them.
Talking back to the voice in firm but kind ways. Right? Like, I can hear it, but it's in my head.
A lot of it has to do with practice. Once you get it and you figure out your routine, it's just a matter of building those skills, basically. And that's what I did for the last five, six years that I've been honing in on it. Having a community of people who you're able to discuss these experiences with and who don't see them as an emergency can be quite helpful.
And what's the third thing that tends to be associated with hearing voices and also not suffering? Their understanding of the voice as something positive. It sounds pretty simple, but it's a pretty big deal, right? In the case of this community of psychics, these are people who are seeking out these experiences and who are understanding them as something that's, you know, in some way nurturing and special. And that on its own is really huge.
So three things, positive reactions from people they tell, ability to control the voices, and just an overall positive feeling towards the voice. Yeah, a sense that the voice is something positive, not like someone that's out to get them.
And when we think about the voices themselves, is there any theory there that can explain what's actually going on in the brain when people hear voices in their heads? So the simple and somewhat frustrating answer is no one knows for sure. There's a lot of research that's being done on this. One idea of a piece of it is that when you move your arm in space, even if you have your eyes closed, you know that that's your arm and you know where you're moving it. Sure, yeah. One thought is that people who hear voices...
might lack this with their own inner speech. The idea being that the voices they hear might be coming from inside the house, so to speak, and they just don't recognize it. So in that situation, you're saying they're either talking to themselves and not recognizing their own speech as their own, or maybe just thinking thoughts and not recognizing
fully recognizing that those thoughts are their own. Yeah, I think that's fair to say. They don't recognize that the thoughts that very much do not feel like their own thoughts to them are coming from within their own brains. And this is just like one theory, I guess, to explain something that is ultimately pretty mysterious? It's not the whole picture, for sure. And there are holes in that theory, for sure.
And how does Jess understand these voices herself? Does she see them as hallucinations? In my conversations with Jess, she understood these voices to be the people in her life who she'd lost speaking to her.
And, you know, given how serious this issue can be, why not just say, OK, play it safe. Everyone who hears voices should go to a hospital because maybe they have psychosis. Right. So I think an example that really, I think, demonstrates where that can get dangerous is the psychologist Eleanor Longdon, who herself hears voices and travels around the world speaking about this. She even has a pretty, pretty impactful TED talk.
I was leaving a seminar when suddenly I heard a voice calmly observe. She is leaving the room. She sort of details how the experience of first interacting with the mental health care system as a teenager, when her one symptom she was presenting with, as she tells it, was hearing this voice.
being told that this was almost certainly a symptom of schizophrenia. A hospital admission followed, the first of many. A diagnosis of schizophrenia came next. And then, worst of all, a toxic, tormenting sense of hopelessness, humiliation and despair about myself and my prospects. Being made to understand that her life was going to be very limited because of it, that actually made her experience of The Voice much more negative and
And the voice would say things that were pretty cruel to her, as she tells it. By now, I had the whole frenzied repertoire. Terrifying voices, grotesque visions, bizarre, intractable delusions. And I've been told by my psychiatrist, Eleanor, you'd be better off with cancer because cancer is easier to cure than schizophrenia. It was the experience of learning to reframe the voice and learning how to engage with it that got
got her to a pretty great place now where she was able to complete her work in a PhD program and sort of travel the world doing this advocacy. I would set boundaries for the voices and try to interact with them in a way that was assertive yet respectful, establishing a slow process of communication and collaboration in which we could learn to work together and support one another. You know, thinking about the ways that Jess and Eleanor both kind of took control of their voices, I just think about like
I don't know, I don't hear voices, but I do have OCD and I do experience kind of like inner compulsions to do random tasks. And the best way that I've personally found to deal with it is not pretending it doesn't exist, but like...
Sometimes doing the things, sometimes not doing the things, telling the urges like, hey, now is not really a good time. But like sort of creating an environment almost where the OCD is like acknowledged as a real part of me, you know? Yeah, I'm really glad to hear that that's been helpful for you. I think maybe the needle is starting to move with the understanding that the sort of running internal monologue we have, that can really have a pretty profound effect on us. Yeah.
And again, now, of course, experiences of psychosis are certainly very real. Experiences of schizophrenia are certainly very real. And people really do need help when they're suffering that much. I want to be really clear on that point. What I'm trying to get at here is more that it's about the whole person. It's about what they're experiencing. It's about what the quality of those hallucinations are and how that person is or isn't able to cope in their everyday life.
And, you know, zooming out here, I guess, what do you think it means that it is so common to hallucinate without necessarily suffering from psychosis? I guess what it points towards is it's a much more common experience than people think. It sort of points to a need to kind of reframe, culturally speaking here, the experience of having a hallucination as something that's, you know,
on the face of it, always dangerous or always negative or, frankly, always noteworthy. And I guess it also probably points to the fact that we just don't have a complete understanding of how we perceive the world. Oh, certainly, yes. There's so much out there that's unknown about really sort of what's under the hood when it comes to perception and consciousness in our experience of the world.
But with what is known, I think it's safe to say is that there are so many degrees of modulation and processing that go on between whatever we could call the world as objective and what we experience. I mean, I guess I'm just, you know, sort of thinking about the last two years and what a lot of people, well, really what everyone in the world has had to live through. And I'm thinking of a friend of mine who lost his husband and kind of, you know, last time we spoke, just very casually,
told me about how he's still here as his husband and has conversations with him. And that's just a day-to-day part of his life now. That might not be something I would have imagined to be his experience, or maybe not something I could imagine experiencing myself, but who am I to say? And I guess, frankly, what does it matter?
If you or someone you know needs help dealing with a mental health issue, the National Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has free confidential resources available 24-7 at 1-800-662-HELP. Joseph Frankel is a writer and a med student, and he's currently working on his first novel about a doctor who hears voices. Chris French, the psychologist from the first half of the show, is also working on a book with a pretty great title. It's called The Science of Weird Sh—.
This episode was produced and scored by Noam Hassenfeld. There was editing from Meredith Honnot, Brian Resnick, and Jillian Weinberger. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala. And fact-checking from me, Manning Nguyen. Bert Pinkerton is back underwater for next week. Lauren Katz heads up our newsletter. And Liz Kelly Nelson is the VP of Vox Audio. You can sign up for our newsletter or read our show transcripts or read our articles at vox.com slash unexplainable.
Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and will be back next Wednesday. We hope you have a happy and spooky Halloween.