SEPT 14, 2003

Professor to set up ‘haunted house’ in bid to find truth about ghostly sightings

By Alfred Lee
STRAITS TIMES EUROPE BUREAU

LONDON – Professor Richard Wiseman is planning to buy a home in the English countryside.

The older the better, and it should have about 10 rooms, including three or four bedrooms, a living room, a hallway and, hopefully, creaking floors and staircases.

Then, instead of re-decorating it to make it a comfortable family home, he will turn it into the world’s first scientifically created haunted house.

Prof Wiseman is Britain’s most famous ‘ghost hunter’, whose research into the paranormal, apparitions, parapsychology and weird happenings has been reported in serious newspapers and magazines around the world and in more than 40 articles in international academic journals.

He is convinced that of the tens of thousands of people in scores of different countries who say they have seen spirits or have had eerie feelings, many must have seen or experienced ‘something’.

So, he is setting up his designer haunted house, where spirits will feel at home, to see if rational explanations can be found for people having shivers down their spine and even ghostly sightings.

The home will have elements found in various buildings where visitors frequently report seeing ghosts: draughts, temperature changes from room to room, cold spots, odd electromagnetic fields, eerie lighting, flickering candles and very low-frequency infrasound vibrations.

Some rooms will be dark, others well lit. There will be strange noises, subtle movements of air and visual effects.

If you are visiting England from Singapore next year, you will be able to visit the haunted house if all goes well, along with other visitors.

Scientists will set up infrared recorders, thermal-imaging equipment, sensors and still and video cameras to record everything that happens in every part of the house.

Visitors will be asked to fill in questionnaires asking them to describe their feelings.

Did they have any mood changes, tingling in the spine, eerie sensation, sudden body chills and goose pimples, or did they see any ghostly figure?

Prof Wiseman, who teaches psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, told The Sunday Times: ‘We want to see if man-made factors can create unusual sensations in people.

‘Can spooky conditions make people see ghostly figures? Will visitors have haunted feelings?’

He said he and other scientists wanted to create a ‘perfect’ home for ghosts.

It will be in Hertfordshire, about 50km from London, to allow researchers from the university to monitor it constantly.

The home will be open at night because ghosts are traditionally nocturnal.

The ‘jackpot’ in the experiment would be that if ghosts did exist, one would come to stay at the house.

‘If the cameras caught an image of a ghost, I would die a happy man,’ Prof Wiseman said.

‘But I do not believe in ghosts. I will not believe they exist until I see one myself.

‘It is much better to have an unbeliever as a ghost hunter. Otherwise, he would be seeing them everywhere.’

Prof Wiseman has led official scientific experiments to try to find ghosts at Britain’s most famous ‘haunted’ places.

Most recently, he carried out investigations at Hampton Court Palace in London, the home of King Henry VIII’s fifth wife Catherine Howard, who was accused of infidelity and beheaded in 1542.

Over the years, 300 tourists to the palace have reported strange encounters, many of them claiming to having seen her ghost.

To the bitter disappointment of believers in the supernatural, Prof Wiseman and his team found nothing unusual.

Prof Wiseman said: ‘We are not saying they all imagined or made up things. Clearly, many had strange feelings which were real.’