Ghosts in New York City

One evening in the eighties I got on a train at the Princeton Dinky Station, on my way to New York. Stepping into the compartment I saw Katherine Ramsland already there. I hadn’t seen her for a while, and thought she was teaching at Rutgers — asking about her classes, she just laughed. No, she had quit the teaching job for more interesting things to do.

Katherine was on her way to spend the night in the fabulous if aging Chelsea Hotel, famed for its literati, suicides, a murder, and stories of spooky phenomena. The people she would meet there were ghost hunters, planning to detect any ghostly presence by scientific means. Exactly what would they do? She was not too sure yet, but one plan was to chart temperature differences in the room, during the night, using an infrared thermometer. Why would the thermometer be infrared, I wondered, was it to keep it from reflecting visible light? But no, I had misunderstood, this was a new kind of thermometer, still in beta stage, that used infrared light, it could just be pointed at someone to read their temperature. In fact, Katherine told me, all the technology ghost hunters used was digital, electronic, state of the art, the old devices did not work for them.

They had more plans, she told me with an amused smile. There was a hanging tree in Washington Square Park where many people had reportedly been executed in past centuries — already some digital sound recordings had interesting, puzzling features.

We met the next week, and several times more, as Katherine entered further into the ghost hunters’ world. In the Chelsea they had also used an EMF meter to detect fluctuations in the electromagnetic field. But the important finding was certainly in the temperature chart constructed from many carefully recorded readings: there was a central area, about one meter above floor level, in the middle of the room, that was much colder than the ambient temperature.

I asked her what was the norm, did they have temperature charts for other rooms as a comparison? She laughed: did I think they would spend long cold nights taking temperatures where there weren’t likely to be any ghosts? And she had to walk with care: the critical scientific spirit was welcome, anything construable as hostile skepticism wasn’t. But she had brought me a digital recording, made at midnight in the Princeton Cemetery, near the grave of Aaron Burr. It was not easy to make out … if it was a voice, it was someone repeating himself, upset that no one was listening, but I could not distinguish the words.

Then she took out her digital video camera and I watched short infrared movies of spheres and globs or ‘orbs’ floating around in a dark room. The ghost hunters claimed they were ectoplasm, as it were unformed ghosts. Could they be optical phenomena, I wondered? There would be a way to test that. Think of a rainbow: if we are at some distance from each other and both say we see the rainbow, we will actually see it at slightly different places on the clouds. So what about stationing several infrared cameras in the room, and triangulating? If the cameras all located the orbs in the same place they would be physical, otherwise not. Katherine thought this was a good suggestion, scientific in spirit, so could be welcome.

Some time went by. Now millions of people know Katherine Ramsland through her books, but then it was still quite easy to meet her in a bookstore cafe. She was only just getting into vampires, and I asked her to please be very careful … it sounded like a very scary scene.

After a while I asked her if the ghost hunters had gone for my idea of triangulating with differently oriented video cameras.

No, they hadn’t. They had just said, “What does he know about ghosts?”