On February 25th 2016 I was awoken abruptly from my sleep at about 3am. I couldn’t identify at first what woke me, all I knew was that I had an overwhelmingly bad feeling. It didn’t take me long to realize that a thunderstorm was raging outside. It was quite loud, and the lightning lit up my entire room in a way I have never encountered before. Despite this, I felt very sure that it wasn’t the noise or light that had woken me. Instead I felt it was the sickening sense of dread that inexplicably hung over me. I have never been disturbed by thunderstorms before; on the contrary I have always found them exciting, sitting on my porch growing up and watching them roll in. But on this early morning something seemed very wrong. I got out of bed and stood in my room uncertainly, trying to decide what to do. Now on top of the unexplained fear other symptoms were emerging: nausea, heart palpitations. Soon the feeling of panic was smothering, and it seemed to be filling my room to the point that some part of my brain begged me to run away, to flee outside into the storm. Luckily I had an epiphany after remembering something I had recently learned, and I fought the urge. Then suddenly, the feeling was gone as abruptly as it had come. The storm quieted, the thunder became more distant. I slipped back into bed and fell asleep wondering what the hell had just happened to me.

The February 25th storm was pretty severe for the Boston area. It brought hurricane force winds recorded at up to 76mph, knocked power out for thousands, and downed many trees. But I think it also caused another phenomenon that few may be aware of.

Sound is measured in frequency of waves. This chart gives an idea of who can hear what.

Humans have a mid range of audible hearing. But just because we can’t hear other frequencies doesn’t mean they aren’t there. And that means they can still effect us. Infrasound is a very low range of frequency, anything below 30 HZ. That means the waves are farther apart. Giant animals like elephants and blue whales use infrasound to communicate, possibly as more of a ‘feeling’ in their bodies than an actual sound. It’s hard of course for humans to try to imagine something they are literally incapable of experiencing. But some humans can experience infrasound in a different way.

Because of infrasound’s frequency it can effect our bodies. In the 1980s an engineer named Vic Tandy was working late at the Coventry University Laboratories, long rumored to be haunted. Suddenly he noticed a ghostly gray blob in his peripherals. He looked to it quickly, but it had vanished. Not one to be easily spooked, Vic set out to find a scientific explanation for the hauntings. He noticed that materials he was working with were vibrating, and he got the idea to look into the possibility of low frequency sound waves. Sure enough he found the culprit in the shape of an old fan in the lab, near his desk in the direction he had seen the blob. Though ‘silent’ to him, it was giving off 18.98 HZ sound waves. That frequency happens to be very close to the resonating frequency of the human eyeball, and explains the bizarre distortions in vision. The waves, which were almost exactly the length of the lab, also explained people who got uneasy feelings there in general. After turning off the fan, a weight seemed to be lifted from the space, and work could be continued as usual.

In 2003 Richard Lord, an acoustic scientist at the National Physical Laboratory in England, set out to further explore the effects of Infrasound. He and his colleagues used a concert hall of test subjects, and added occasional infrasound into the performances without informing the guests of when. 22% of concert goers identified an increase in negative emotions during the parts of the show where infrasound was present. Complaints included unease, nausea, sorrow and panic. It seemed to illustrate that not everyone is effected the same by infrasound, and some may feel it’s effects more strongly.

Many things both natural and man made can cause infrasound. Whales, elephants, volcanos, nuclear bombs, and yes, even intense thunderstorms, can cause infrasound. One of the big complaints against wind turbine construction argues that the massive structures can cause infrasound that will effect surrounding communities. Infrasound is even used by the government to monitor nuclear activity in other countries. It is possible that infrasound is what warns many animals of oncoming natural disasters such as earthquakes.

Author Donnie Eichar believes that infrasound caused by a Karman Vortex Street could have been the cause of the untimely deaths of the Dyatlov hikers of Russia. A Karman Vortex Street is a bizarre phenomenon in fluid dynamics in which air/water/etc moves around a rounded or even object in a way that causes swirling vortices.

These vortices can gain incredible speed and power, and today engineers and architects design structures with this in mind, making sure to add spirals, fins, or uneven sides to structures to prevent a KVS.

As for the Dyatlov hikers, the mountain they were camping at the base of had an evenly rounded top, and some believe that if wind hit the mountain just right, it could have created these tornado like vortices. Hearing a roaring tornado bearing down on you would surely terrify anyone, but would it be enough to terrify the hikers out of their tent into certain death toward the roaring itself? Possibly, if the vortices were creating infrasound. The panic caused by the infrasound could have made the hikers irrational enough to flee their tent, improperly clothed, into the subzero night. I can attest to encountering that same inexplicable urge, fought back only by my realization that I was likely experiencing an explainable natural phenomenon. The hikers would have had no knowledge of infrasound or Karman Vortex Streets. They had always survived based on their instincts, which were now screaming at them to evacuate their tent.

The theory makes a lot of sense, more than any other put forth. Though it would have had to have been a bizarre set of coincidences to lead to the final deadly outcome, sometimes fact is stranger than fiction.

But if all of this is true, then hasn’t it essentially been proven that ghosts aren’t real, just products of low frequency sound waves resonating the human body? Well not quite. Infrasound has been located in several ‘haunted’ sites, but certainly not all. I will always maintain that the paranormal aspects of our world are simply things that haven’t been identified yet by science. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in ghosts of course. But it does mean that I am also very excited by the idea of discovering a frequency that resonates eyeballs into seeing ghosts!

Have any of you possibly experienced Infrasound? Let me know in the comments!