Haunted Houses

A research article published in Frontiers in Behavioural Neuroscience in 2026 looked at the possibility that infrasound might be at least partially responsible for the sense that a place (like a house or other building) is haunted.

The researchers behind this study suspected that sounds made by old boilers and aged pipes that are below the level of human hearing—vibrations that we detect, but not consciously, the way we detect vibrations with our our aural range—may contribute to the sense of unease, anxiety, and even fear people experience in some buildings.

What they found is that subjects who were exposed to either calming music, or music that was unsettling due to the presence of infrasound, had elevated levels of cortisol in their saliva, and higher levels of self-reported irritability and sadness.

The subjects were not able to detect the infrasound directly (most humans cannot perceive sounds below 20 Hz, and they used infrasound at around 18 Hz for this study), but their self-reported irritability and the chemical makeup of their saliva suggests they responded to that added layer of vibrations both biologically and psychologically, which is what the researchers hypothesized would happen because animals that can detect sound at this wavelength also tend to avoid it, possibly for the same reasons.

This was a small study, and it only indirectly assesses the possibility that a feeling of hauntedness might be related to the production of infrasound in seemingly haunted locales. But it does line up pretty well with the sense of unease, sadness, and anxiety often reported by people who have apparently haunting-related experiences, and thus might pave the way for future studies that look more closely at that relationship.