Hey, it's Flora, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Old creepy houses are a horror cliche. But why? Why do old abandoned houses freak us out?

My next guest has a theory, and it has to do with a rumble that you cannot hear, but is very real.

Dr. Rodney Schmaltz, professor of psychology at McEwen University in Edmonton, Alberta, is here to tell us about his new research.

He studies pseudoscience.

Rodney, welcome to the show.

Happy to be here.

Do you think of yourself as a Ghostbuster?

I do not.

I am an educator.

But I teach a class on scientific skepticism, and we do, in fact, go ghost hunting to debunk the tools you see online and on TV.

But I would say I do, what I do is a little bit different than ghost busting.

Do you have an interest in spooky thing, spooky houses?

I'm interested in why people have these experiences.

So I haven't seen any good evidence for the paranormal or for ghosts, but I do believe that

people are genuinely experiencing something.

And that's what I'm

interested in. What's that something? Why do people feel like they've had these experiences?

Well, let's get into your study, because you had a hypothesis that people are feeling something.

What were you testing? We were looking at the impact of infrasound. And infrasound is a low-frequency

sound below 20 hertz. We can't consciously hear it, but we can feel it. The way I like to describe it is imagine you're at a concert and there's a lot of bass and you kind of feel that tension in your chest and the hair on the back of your neck might go up, but you know what it's from. It's from the music. But imagine a lower level experience like that, maybe not

quite as intense, but you can't hear anything. And infrasound is caused by things like in old

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