In 2009, a team of psychologists published the results of a haunted house they built on purpose. Ghost sightings, sensed presences, cold spots, and unexplained dread had already been linked to infrasound and electromagnetic fields, so Chris French at Goldsmiths and architect Usman Haque constructed a featureless circular chamber inside a north London flat and ran seventy-nine people through it to find out whether a haunting could be manufactured from physics alone.

It could not. Whether the machinery was running or switched off made no difference to what people experienced inside that room. What did predict a person's report was the person, and the single most powerful variable in the entire study turned out to be the ethics paperwork they had to sign before walking in.

This episode starts with Vic Tandy, the engineer who found his laboratory ghost hiding inside an extractor fan, and traces the theory forward through Michael Persinger's God Helmet, the Swedish replication that undercut it, and the argument that never resolved before he died. Then it goes into what happens in a body left alone in a dim, curved, silent room for fifty minutes after somebody has told it that something might happen. Predictive perception, the misattribution of physical arousal, and why some people meet something in that chamber while the person after them gets bored.

Eight percent of participants reported terror. Some of them were in the group where the room was doing nothing at all.

The uncomfortable question this episode holds open is whether the traffic in a haunted place runs the direction everybody assumes it does. Wiseman's work at Hampton Court and the Edinburgh vaults suggests the buildings really are doing something. What that something is stays unsettled.

Until next time, stay curious and stay strange.

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