Ghost stories are a Halloween tradition. The true stories behind some hauntings are even stranger. Here are three ghost facts that sound made up, and every single one of them is true.
1. Why people swear they've seen a ghost
Sometimes the ghost is a sound you can't even hear. In the early 1980s, engineer Vic Tandy was working late in a lab staff had started calling haunted. He felt uneasy and watched, then saw a grey figure out of the corner of his eye. When he turned to look, it was gone.
The next day, Tandy clamped his fencing foil in a vise and watched the blade start vibrating on its own. He traced it to a newly installed extractor fan. The fan was creating a sound wave of about 19 hertz, just below the range of human hearing and close to the frequency at which the human eyeball resonates.
In other words, his eyes were vibrating enough to distort what he saw. When the fan was changed, the ghost disappeared for good. Tandy later published his findings in a 1998 paper titled "The Ghost in the Machine."
2. The haunted house that was poisoning its family
In 1921, the American Journal of Ophthalmology published a story that reads like a horror movie. A family identified as Mr. and Mrs. H moved into a gloomy old house lit by gas lamps and heated by an aging furnace. Soon they were hearing footsteps, seeing figures and feeling watched by people who weren't there.
Mrs. H became convinced an old man was walking around upstairs and following her. The whole family grew sick, tired and depressed, and even the houseplants died. Then Mr. H's brother read about gas poisoning and urged them to have the house checked.
The furnace was pumping carbon monoxide into the house instead of up the chimney. The doctor told them not to let the children sleep there another night. Once it was fixed, the "haunting" stopped. Carbon monoxide is still the leading cause of accidental poisoning deaths in North America, which makes this a good week to test your detector.
3. The house a court declared legally haunted
In 1989, Helen Ackley put her Victorian house on the Hudson River in Nyack, New York, up for sale. A New York City bond trader agreed to buy it, then learned what nobody had told him: the house had a reputation for being haunted, one Ackley had spent years promoting herself.
She'd written about her ghosts in a 1977 Reader's Digest article titled "Our Haunted House on the Hudson," and the house was even on a local walking tour. When the buyer sued to back out, a New York appeals court ruled in 1991 that "as a matter of law, the house is haunted."
Because Ackley had publicly insisted on her ghosts, she wasn't allowed to deny them in court. The judges also noted the contract promised to deliver the house vacant, which it couldn't be with ghosts living there. Not everyone was scared off: the famous mentalist The Amazing Kreskin wanted to buy it anyway.
