I just read this thread about spooky experiences dopers have had, and even for a generally skeptical person like myself, it’s hard to read something like that and not get goosebumps.
Apparently there are a LOT of different houses in which freaky/unexplained/spooky/disturbing things frequently happen. And it occurs to me that it should actually be possible to do a reasonably scientific double blind test of “spookiness”. Basically, if there’s a particular house that the locals all claim is haunted, you find 6 similar houses with the same general age/architecture/construction in the same general region. You prepare them all for people to stay the night. Then you get 7 people from out of town, who can’t possibly know that 123 hill street is supposedly haunted, and have the 7 of them rotate spending the night in each house, making sure to not let them interact with anyone who knows which house is “haunted”. Then you ask them all how many spooky/disturbing experiences they had in each house, if any. If there’s a statistical bump in the direction of the “haunted” house, well, you haven’t proved anything paranormal yet, but it certainly makes it worth further careful study to see what variables there are that make that house different from the rest.
This seems like a fairly obvious idea, and one that would be potentially quite interesting. Has anyone ever done such a thing?
I actually have a distant memory of reading an article (Skeptic magazine maybe?) about this being done.
Memory is really vague here, but IIRC they were trying to test a theory that “haunted houses” were associated with a particular (naturally occuring) low frequency noise. The idea being that for whatever neurological or psychological reasons, this noise was known to make some people feel uneasy and skittish without their necessarily being conciously aware of it, and thus made them think a house was haunted. Again, from my vague memory, the results made the theory look at least semi-plausable.
Sorry I don’t remember more, but perhaps another Doper will know more of the details.
Ghost Hunters of Sci-fi channel claim that stuff that emits a lot of electro-magnetic energy (like a poorly wired or insulated light socket) also induces feelings of “being watched”, dread, headaches, and/or nausea in folks who are sensitive to that energy.
Even if true (and it seems kind of out there on the face of it), this effect surely can’t play much of a role in the classic haunted house phenomenon. Reports of haunted houses vastly predate such things as electric light sockets.
Other pre-industrial things can set up regular vibrations though. And I don’t think the claim is that these vibrations account for all haunted houses ever, just that there’s a correlation, suggesting that it may be the cause of some of them.
Sorry I can’t address the OP’s question directly – I don’t know if anything like that has been done. It might be interesting. My guess, however, would be that most “haunted houses” have something going on apart from the sort of groupthink that the OP’s idea would test for.
A great episode of This American Life in 2006 starts with a 1921 case of an allegedly haunted house. (You can listen here–no transcripts are available, but the interesting bit is just the first 5 minutes). It has all the archetypal elements - creepy sounds, ghostlike figures, etc. Turns out the house was filled with carbon monoxide from leaky gas lights. CO poisoning can account for all kinds of auditory and visual hallucinations. They fixed the gas leak, and the spooks departed the house.
Anyway, my rambling point is that I would bet that there is usually something “real” happening to make a house appear haunted. I would think that a group psychological affect would be the cause in a minority of cases. (Of course, that’s a WAG, and it’d be interesting to test it)