5:45 on a Friday and it looks like we might have a bit of a problem.

Oh well, I'm still leaving.

Houston, we have a problem....

Ok, as long as your problem doesn't involve astronauts stranded in space, I say you're good to go....

Everything I know about astral projection I learned from Alex Chilton.

Each room is different, and filled with relics,
That will disorient you like psychedelics.
Thirty thousand monks at his direction,
Practicing things like astral projection.

Dalai! Dalai Lama!
Dalai! Dalai Lama!

I think Jonathan Richman met someone on the Astral Plain once....

And didja' know that scientists know how to reproduce this sensation?

I read that!

A friend of mine wrote a blog post about some of the frequencies that may causes people to see "ghosts."

Like, a toaster can resonate at the same frequency as your eyeball, causing a weird visual hallucination, and magnets can give you that sensation of having the hairs on the back of your neck raise and give you goosebumps. So if you are lying on a very old spring mattress that has become magnetized over time, that eerie feeling that your room is haunted could go away with a new mattress and box spring.

So the ghost wasn't in the mattress after all?

Eyeballs have frequencies?

Well, see, with all that magnetisation it's less a mattress and more a machine.

So the ghost wasn't in the mattress after all?

No, no...the ghost is in the machine.

I swear, it's like you people aren't paying attention at all.

transport herself to the eighth dimension.

Is she going to start singing "Age of Aquarius" next??

eta: wait, no, that was 5th Dimension. So is the 8th Dimension song "Age of Taurus"?

Here's the thing I was reading:

The biggest culprit when it comes to ghostly sounds and sightings might be infrasound, low-frequency sound waves below the range of human hearing, that can nevertheless have tangible effects: feelings of nervousness, for example, or hyperventilation, or even a sense of another presence in the room. There's even speculation that these sound waves vibrate at the resonant frequency of the human eyeball, causing visual hallucinations.

Vic Tandy was a strong proponent of the infrasonic theory, and even pegged the specific guilty frequency -- 18.9 Hz -- before his untimely death in 2005. Officially, he was affiliated with the school of international studies and law at Coventry University, but he was also the unofficial "chief ghost buster." (Perhaps Bill Murray will play him in the film version of his quest.) He wrote two papers for the journal of the Society of Psychical Research: one citing infrasound as the cause of a "haunting" in a laboratory in Warwick, and another citing infrasound as the source of a "ghost" in the cellar at Coventry Cathedral. Lots of otherwise sane people felt uneasy descending into the cellar, sensing some kind of presence, and occasionally -- as in the case of a visiting journalist -- seeing the face of a woman peering over their shoulder.

As for the Warwick laboratory, Tandy himself worked there, and could personally attest that the effects of infrasound feel very real indeed. He was working late one night, and suddenly felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. At the same time, he caught a glimpse of a gray apparition out of the corner of his eye, that disappeared when returned to face it. The culprit? A newly installed extractor fan. "When we finally switched it off, it was as if a huge weight was lifted," he told the Guardian in July 2000, and he suspected there may also be a connection between infrasound and "sick-building syndrome." I have a strong suspicion that Ernie the Ghost's spooky effects were at least partly due to something like infrasonic vibrations from that old mainframe -- because when Terry and her colleagues got rid of it, the "ghostly presence" disappeared. Regardless, Tandy died before he could complete his investigation into why some people are affected by infrasound and others, apparently, aren't.

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