Sometimes you may read some moonshine in the science news, some bunk article promoting the latest science paper, and then ask yourself: who is to blame for this baloney, this BS? Is it one or more of the paper authors, or is it the author of a university press release, or is it some science journalist working from the press release and the paper? So you have a kind of "figure out the culprit" challenge that is a bit like playing the board game Clue.
Who was the confusion culprit?
In April 2026, we had an example of very bad BS and baloney in the science news. Quite a few "science news" web sites were claiming something like an explanation of ghosts had been found. It was all an example of fake news, because the stories were a discussion of a newly released science paper that never even mentioned ghosts.
The science paper was one entitled "Infrasound exposure is linked to aversive responding, negative appraisal, and elevated salivary cortisol in humans" which you can read here. The paper made no use of the word "ghost," no use of the word "apparition," no use of the word "spirit," no use of the word "paranormal," and no use of the word "supernatural." Some experiment was done in which some of the subjects were exposed to an inaudible type of sound called infrasound. As payment for their participation, the student subjects were paid the miserably low compensation of 1% of course credit, which is basically nothing.
No convincing results on effects of infrasound were produced. The paper tells us " Participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups: (i) infrasound on + calming music, (ii) infrasound off + calming music, (iii) infrasound on + unsettling music, and (iv) infrasound off + unsettling music, resulting in a 2×2 grouping structure." So the study group size was only 9, way too small for any reliable result to be reported. The minimum number of subjects per study group for a study like this to qualify as decent evidence would be about 15 or 20 subjects per study group. We have here another piece of shoddy research, a low-quality study.
Nothing of any interest was reported, and nothing of any relevance to the topic of ghosts was reported. None of the subjects bombarded by infrasound reported seeing a ghost or sensing a ghost or feeling spooked. The paper fails to discuss any evidence that any of the subjects experienced fear. The authors report that those who were subjected to ultrasound had higher cortisol levels, but the study group sizes are so low that such a claim is not well founded. Cortisol is not a chemical that correlates with stress.
The paper authors collected self-reports of how their tiny study groups felt. The only psychological effects associated with being subjected to infrasound were irritability, "disinterest" and sadness. None of those things have any relation to ghost sightings or feelings of being in a haunted house or suspicions that a spirit is around. And since the study group sizes are so tiny, being way-too-small for any reliable association to be reported, we have in this study nothing of any relevance to reports of the paranormal or reports of the supernatural or reports involving suspicions of ghosts or sightings of ghosts.
When writing up their paper, the paper authors have not been guilty of implying their research has any relevance to reports of the paranormal. But something very different and extremely misleading went on when one of the paper authors talked to the press.
And so we have a Fake News headline at www.futurism.com, an article with the phony headline of "Scientists Say They’ve Figured Out What Causes 'Ghosts' ”. How on Earth could the article writer possibly have got that headline to describe a science paper that made no mention of ghosts or the paranormal?
Maybe it was because one of the paper authors misspoke very badly, by trying to gin up some "ghost relevance" to his "ghost irrelevant" poorly designed study. We read this quote:
" 'What infrasound may do is supply a bit of bodily discomfort that a ghost or haunting explanation can then attach itself to,' Rodney Schmaltz, a psychologist at MacEwan University in Canada, and coauthor of a new study published in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, told The Guardian. 'For someone who is not inclined to think in terms of ghosts, the same sensation would probably just register as a stuffy, uncomfortable old building. For someone who is already primed, it might feel like proof of a spirit or presence.' ”
Schmaltz misleads us by trying to make it sound like a scientific paper that made no mention of ghosts or the supernatural has some relevance to explaining reports of ghosts. He mentions "a bit of bodily discomfort," but his paper fails to report any such thing for the people who were exposed to infrasound.
Later Schmaltz states this:
"Whether they were listening to calming instrumental music or something more unsettling, the infrasound shifted their mood and their stress response in a negative direction,” Schmaltz told The Guardian. “In plain terms, you cannot hear infrasound, but your body and your mood appear to respond to it anyway, and the response tends to be unpleasant.”
Schmaltz's low-quality study has failed to produce any decent evidence for such an effect, because the reported difference in "irritability" is so small (just barely qualifying as statistically significant), and the study group sizes so small, that no good evidence has been produced for any such effect. A paper as silly as Schmaltz's would be one that rubbed ice cubes on people's backs, with the authors then bragging to the press that this explains reports of apparitions. Of course, people reporting apparition sightings don't have ice cubes rubbed on their backs when that happened; and they also are not bombarded by infrasound.
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