Are Ghosts a Symptom of Poor Air Quality?

In what sounds like the plot of an independent horror film, researchers from Clarkson University think there may be something to stories of haunted houses. Specifically, that people experiencing “hauntings” may be exposed to microbes known to cause psychosis in humans.

 

According to Shane Rogers, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and fan of ghost stories, the kinds of places typically associated with hauntings and ghost sightings are also ripe for various microbes. These are often older buildings which suffer from poor air quality, and provide perfect environments for things like rye ergot fungus, which can have powerful effects on humans.

Reports of depression, anxiety, and other such effects can be caused by poor air quality, and can often be found amid the ghosts of haunted locations. Shane will be taking a group of undergraduate researchers around northern New York this spring and summer in order to investigate haunted places. They plan to publish their findings in the fall.

The plan is to study the locations’ air quality, and see what potentially dangerous microbes are to be found there. The goal is to see both what kind of microbes they can find, and to further study the effects of those microbes. They will compare the air quality and microbial environments at sites with a history of hauntings against sites that have no such history. In doing so, they hope to discover what makes these sites unique.

Although the study is obviously interested in discovering an empirical cause behind hauntings and ghost sightings, Rogers says he has no interest in debunking ghost stories. Instead, he wants to better understand what causes these phenomena, and to help affected people at the same time. Hauntings, which have no doubt caused significant dread for at least some people, may end up being helpful ghosts in the long run