Through red­dit I found the story of The Ghost in the Machine, the story of a man who had a ghostly vis­ion, a grey blob out of the corner of his eye. I won’t retell the whole story, but he even­tu­ally tracked it down to a 19Hz stand­ing wave where he’d had the sight­ing. 19Hz is sus­pi­ciously close to what is doc­u­mented to be the res­on­ant fre­quency of the human eye­ball in vivo. The belief is that a vibrat­ing eye­ball — per­haps in con­junc­tion with other doc­u­mented effects of “uneas­i­ness” due to infra­sonic ambi­ence — leads to ghostly visions.

The 19Hz hypo­thesis was bolstered by tak­ing it to other notori­ously haunted places.

As I dug deeper and did more research, the whole thing felt a bit too neat and tidy, as if I were play­ing out a Fringe plot. Sup­port­ing the whole hypo­thesis is a NASA tech­nical report from 1976, which some­how adds to the 1-​​hour drama aesthetic.

I still have to go through the NASA tech­nical report in detail, but I had a bit of jeal­ousy when I got to the pre­face and saw it was actu­ally a Ph.D. thesis. Every now and then I get a twinge of thesis envy. Could there pos­sibly be a more badass thesis than determ­in­ing the res­on­ant fre­quency of human eye­balls? For NASA? In truth, if I were doing my Ph.D. thesis in 1976, there’s no doubt I’d be doing some­thing bor­ing and computer-​​related. Sigh.

I’m actu­ally really dis­ap­poin­ted no one’s actu­ally tried out — or pub­lished, at any rate — this 19Hz hypo­thesis exper­i­ment­ally. I need to set up some sub­woof­ers around cam­pus and see if any ghost sight­ings come out of it.

Through reddit I found the story of The Ghost in the Machine, the story of a man who had a ghostly vision, a grey blob out of the corner of his eye. I won't retell the whole story, but he eventually tracked it down to a 19Hz standing wave where he'd had the sighting. ...