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When Ghosts Wear Faces: Pareidolia, Mirrors, and the Threshold of the Supernatural · Eye Opener Society

• 0:03
  Hi, all. This is Anne Lund coming to you from Haunted and Waiting on the EyeOpener Society podcast.
• 0:10
  First of all, as always, I want to thank Gary for having me on this podcast.
• 0:15
  He's always been very welcoming, and I'm so excited to share my stories and
• 0:19
  my passion, which are the haunted and anything paranormal that has to do with ghosts.
• 0:25
  So, for today's topics, we are going to talk about something called pareidolia.
• 0:30
  And ghosts. And I'm going to add a little scientific explanation to what a pareidolia is.
• 0:36
  So in brief, there are moments when our brain does something pretty extraordinary
• 0:42
  and sometimes unsettling.
• 0:45
  So a face may appear in a fog or a cloud or a figure forms in a shadow.
• 0:50
  Sometimes you might hear a voice in the background that no one else seems to hear.
• 0:55
  And science sometimes calls these pareidolias.
• 0:58
  And it's the mind's tendency to perceive a meaningful pattern in something that,
• 1:04
  maybe is not so meaningful. So as an example, I always like to make these a little bit personal.
• 1:09
  This happened just a few days ago.
• 1:13
  I'm having a situation in my house with my dog, apparently seeing things running
• 1:19
  around the house barking that I don't seem to see or perceive.
• 1:23
  And in essence, it kind of looks like she's following somebody or communicating
• 1:27
  with something I can't see.
• 1:29
  So the other day I took her into the backyard and it was nighttime and it was
• 1:35
  very cold and she was breathing and smoke or a mist was coming out of her mouth because it was so cold.
• 1:43
  And in that mist, under a light that we have on a tree, I distinctively saw
• 1:48
  the shape of a person and she was barking.
• 1:52
  And this is why the mist was coming out of her mouth. So I just want I want
• 1:55
  you to picture this, she's barking, there's mist coming out of her mouth from
• 2:00
  the cold, and in that mist, I saw a figure of a person as if the person was
• 2:05
  bent over trying to pet her.
• 2:08
  I do post these videos somewhat on TikTok. If you wanna reach out,
• 2:12
  I can give you that handle,
• 2:13
  but it's not a paranormal site, so I don't wanna really share that here,
• 2:18
  but it was very weird, and it's what gave me the idea to write or to talk about pareidolias.
• 2:25
  So, if you've already followed my blog, look forward to my blog and follow it,
• 2:31
  hauntedandwaiting.blog.
• 2:33
  I'll share the story, the full story there about the dog in the mist there.
• 2:38
  Okay, and I also write about other true experiences with the paranormal.
• 2:43
  But let's get back to pareidolias for today. Here's the problem.
• 2:46
  Some of the most famous ghost sightings and paranormal photographs in history will fit a pareidolia.
• 2:53
  And yet, not well enough to be dismissed. So when perception and the environment
• 2:58
  and memory and expectation overlap, pareidolias become something more than a
• 3:03
  trick of the brain and somewhat of a threshold.
• 3:08
  So let me start off by talking about what the scientific explanation will say about pareidolias.
• 3:14
  You've got to love the science people, right? So scientifically,
• 3:18
  it's well documented. So I'm going to put it out there. It's a neurological phenomenon.
• 3:23
  It's got an explanation. and basically the human brain is
• 3:26
  evolved to prioritize patterns of recognition so
• 3:30
  when something doesn't make sense we our brain will
• 3:33
  naturally form a face or put a voice to
• 3:36
  what we're seeing because it's trying to fill in the missing spaces as to what
• 3:42
  could have been danger or what could be danger okay and it's kind of the theory
• 3:46
  of survival of the fittest the ancestors who had this skill were more likely
• 3:52
  to survive and pass on their genes, and then we get that gene.
• 3:57
  So our ancestor could have been in the woods somewhere and a bear might have
• 4:01
  been watching them through the trees.
• 4:03
  They look, they see a pattern, they go, oh, it's a bear, and it was a bear.
• 4:06
  They survived the attack because they were able to make that pattern.
• 4:10
  I guess, I think you get the idea. So that's why they think we have this skill.
• 4:15
  It kind of was passed down. Okay.
• 4:18
  So neurologically, this, this like a face actively appears, letting us know
• 4:25
  that there's somebody watching us and the brain fills in these gaps and so on and so forth. Okay.
• 4:33
  But it's a little bit annoying and I'll tell you why it's hypersensitive in a lot of people.
• 4:38
  And so I used to have a Facebook group and I had to start cutting posts off.
• 4:42
  So for instance, in marble, you might see the pattern of a face and they'll
• 4:48
  say, oh, it looks like my grandmother.
• 4:50
  Okay. Or you make a piece of toast and you say, oh, well, that looks like my dog. Okay.
• 4:55
  I kind of don't like those pareidolias and they somewhat annoy me and I was
• 4:59
  taking them off. I prefer the
• 5:02
  pareidolias where it sort of kind of appears as if it's a living thing.
• 5:09
  So you'll see people commenting on, oh, it's just a pareidolia.
• 5:13
  That's most of the time what they mean by it. But there's times when it's a
• 5:16
  little bit more than that.
• 5:18
  Okay. So let's go into some actual stories that were documented.
• 5:21
  I'm going to start with my first one. It's The Brown Lady of Reham Hall.
• 5:25
  This came around in the 1930s. It's one of Britain's most famous ghost stories. Gotta love Britain.
• 5:31
  And it's believed to be the spirit of a woman named Lady Dorothy Walpole.
• 5:36
  And the legend here says that her husband thought she was cheating on him and
• 5:41
  actually took her, sealed her up in an attic or a top floor, refused to let her out.
• 5:48
  She lived up there apparently for several years.
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  And this was in the 1700s. I guess you were allowed to do that. I don't know.
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  She eventually died, they think, of smallpox. But in this hall,
• 6:01
  okay, there are so many photographs that were taken of this woman, okay?
• 6:09
  It's one of the most analyzed ghost photographs, honestly, that it'll always
• 6:15
  come up. If you just put it in, you'll see it.
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  I will link the story in my blog to other blog posts if you're interested in that.
• 6:23
  But basically, she's just seen walking down a staircase.
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  Skeptics will tell you it's a pareidolia. You know, they'll say it's the shadows
• 6:30
  aligning with the banisters and the light bleed with a long exposure.
• 6:34
  If you like Ozzy Osbourne and you watch the Osbournes want to believe,
• 6:37
  Ozzy was constantly kind of edging Jack, his son, with, it's a double exposure.
• 6:43
  So this maybe could have been a double exposure. I don't know.
• 6:47
  But here's where science is going to hesitate. This photograph was examined
• 6:52
  multiple, multiple times, probably hundreds if not thousands of times,
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  and they've been able to prove that was not manipulated in any way.
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  The other thing about it is multiple witnesses have described seeing the same
• 7:06
  person over decades, same person.
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  So how it could just show up in a photograph, that's kind of odd.
• 7:14
  And the figure also is proportional, you know, and it's in movement.
• 7:18
  So you know it's not like the little face in the cloud this is proportional
• 7:24
  this is like as if she was actually there on the steps so and there's like no
• 7:29
  explanation how that happened so pretty credible,
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  So, and apparently it does not explain a recognition. It doesn't explain why
• 7:37
  so many people can recognize the same exact thing for decades.
• 7:41
  So that's that. So let's talk about what faces appear where they should.
• 7:46
  And then we're going to go to the Freddie Jackson squadron photograph.
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  This is in the early 1900s. This is a great photograph if you haven't.
• 7:53
  Again, I'll link that to my blog.
• 7:56
  So he was apparently Freddie Jackson with an airman, and he had passed away, obviously.
• 8:03
  And his squadron had taken this picture together, and he's in there. He's in there.
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  Even though he had died a few days earlier, I believe they said.
• 8:15
  It was a few days earlier. But he's in there. It's clear.
• 8:18
  You can look at that picture and then you could see an actual picture of what
• 8:21
  he actually looked like in life.
• 8:23
  And it's the same person, but the picture was documented as having been taken days later.
• 8:29
  So skepticles, got a lot of scientists will explain this again.
• 8:33
  Double exposure, could say a pareidolia, but I don't know. The face again was
• 8:38
  recognized by his airman friends.
• 8:41
  It matched his facial expressions features exactly. and there was no second negative ever found.
• 8:48
  So the chance of it being a double exposure I don't know. I don't know. So I,
• 8:55
  That's that one. So we spoke about visual pareidolias.
• 9:00
  That's when you see something that maybe is not there, but let's talk about auditory pareidolias.
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  So an auditory pareidolia, also known as a phantom voice, occurs when the brain
• 9:10
  finds speech patterns and random noises.
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  This typically happens when there's like a fan going in the background,
• 9:16
  an air conditioner, or just some kind of consistent white noise,
• 9:20
  and people will claim that they hear a sound through that.
• 9:24
  And this used to happen to me at night. We have a heater that runs with a fan,
• 9:28
  and when it would play off, I could swear I heard music in the background.
• 9:33
  I could swear I heard music, people talking. It sounded almost like there was
• 9:36
  a party going on. It was very bizarre. I was the only one able to hear it.
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  In my own sense of being psychic, I think I have a little bit of clairaudience
• 9:46
  going on because I tend to hear things other people don't.
• 9:50
  So that's an auditory pareidolia, or they could say it's an auditory pareidolia.
• 9:55
  My mind is making sense of a sound.
• 9:58
  Again, the ancestors, this could have helped us if you hear rustling in the
• 10:01
  bushes and there's a tiger there, you would survive that.
• 10:05
  So that's how scientists explain it.
• 10:08
  But historically, these have been documented.
• 10:12
  So the ancient temples all across the world have echo chambers,
• 10:17
  and they've specifically built these chambers.
• 10:20
  There's a bunch of them in Europe, a few in Italy that I've been to,
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  that they were built in such a way so that you could hear divine speech.
• 10:28
  They were built to attract a speech that you couldn't hear otherwise.
• 10:32
  So it was really believed at that time that the dead did try to speak to us.
• 10:38
  Soldiers under stress have reported hearing their needs, okay,
• 10:41
  or loved ones coming through under really terrible times.
• 10:45
  Okay? That's another odd one that happens. Science, again, will explain it.
• 10:51
  But then again, this is when you struggle.
• 10:53
  Multiple people hear the same phrase, the same sentence, okay,
• 10:58
  at the same time, or voices that are responsive.
• 11:01
  So you speak back to the voice, it answers you, or you ask a question, and it answers you.
• 11:08
  Or what about the times there are multiple recordings in the same area,
• 11:12
  but at different times, and the same voice comes through with the same message.
• 11:18
  All documented cases, you can probably research yourself and you'll see.
• 11:22
  I know my husband and I, one time, we consistently heard, it happened two or
• 11:27
  three times, the voice saying, get out.
• 11:29
  And we would hear it at the same time in the house that we're in right now, years ago.
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  So, I mean, yeah, maybe my mind made it up to sound like that,
• 11:39
  but how did his mind make it up to sound exactly the same on multiple occasions?
• 11:45
  So let's talk now, we're going to go back to visual and we're going to talk
• 11:48
  about mirrors, windows, and reflective things, which they call triggers.
• 11:53
  I'm going to do another podcast on scrying.
• 11:56
  So scrying is when you see something, again, it's not a pattern,
• 12:02
  but you'll look in a reflective surface and you kind of see something in that.
• 12:06
  But I put it under an auditory visual pareidolia because it could kind of be that.
• 12:11
  So mirrors are consistently used in hauntings or in describing hauntings,
• 12:19
  and it's believed that they're pareidolia amplifiers.
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  So in low light, the brain might struggle to see a reflection clearly,
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  and it could distort things and make it seem like, let's say,
• 12:30
  a face. So this matters because mirrors appear constantly in ghost reports.
• 12:35
  So the Myrtles Plantation in Louisiana.
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  The children's hands on the myrtles appear in the mirror.
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  Even in Disney, if you go to Disney, the Haunted Mansion, every mirror in the
• 12:48
  Haunted Mansion has a ghost in it.
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  My own stories with mirrors, I went to Arizona many times, and there's a haunted
• 12:58
  city called Jerome. If anybody's ever been to Arizona or been to Jerome,
• 13:01
  you're going to know it's a ghost town.
• 13:02
  It's very haunted, but there is an asylum there. and I have captured pictures
• 13:07
  of an Indian woman in the mirrors and in the glass casings that are in the hallway.
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  I've captured that. I saw that and there was nobody there with me,
• 13:16
  but you can clearly see her face there.
• 13:19
  So it happened to me also at the 1776 house here in New York State where I had
• 13:24
  a wine glass and I captured the picture of a woman in the wine glass,
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  another area known to be haunted.
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  So these things happen a lot of times in areas that are known to be haunted.
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  So it's not your typical mirror.
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  It'll be like in a house that's known to have a history.
• 13:39
  So let's talk about the Borley Rectory in England. There's a figure that's said
• 13:43
  to haunt the mirrors and the windows in this rectory. And this story is kind of sad.
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  It happened in the 1700s. This story was that a nun had fallen in love with a monk and was found.
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  And as punishment, she was sealed into the walls of the rectory.
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  And she died in the walls. And after that, she began to haunt the building.
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  And her image would come out in the mirrors and in the windows of this rectory
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  many times. You can look for pictures. It's pretty unsettling.
• 14:19
  But the critics, again, will say that this is pareidolia.
• 14:24
  But in the 1930s, a famous investigator, Henry Price, if you don't know him,
• 14:29
  look him up, conducted multiple seances.
• 14:32
  There and was able to communicate with this said ghost. I'll link his story into the blog.
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  But he was able to come up with a lot of information about this woman that no one else really knew.
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  So the fact that she's appearing in windows, in mirrors, kind of odd, kind of odd.
• 14:48
  And again, several, several sightings, several sightings.
• 14:51
  So let's go on to the next pareidolia because we've done visual,
• 14:56
  we've done audio, and we're going to do something called palpatory.
• 15:10
  Apologies if you heard the phone ring, another bizarre situation.
• 15:14
  Again, my phone's been acting up, but let me move on with what's called a palpatory pareidolia.
• 15:21
  So we've talked about visual, we've talked about auditory, now we're going to talk about touch.
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  And this again refers to the brain's tendency to interpret a touch,
• 15:31
  such as feeling a hand brush past you, maybe pressure on the skin,
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  or maybe feeling somebody behind you, some kind of touch.
• 15:41
  These are common. So you know what cold spots are reported in castles, historic homes.
• 15:47
  It's when you feel like a cold coming through or just a touch.
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  So a lot of times, a lot of stories documented about people feeling hands on
• 15:58
  them, hands on their shoulder, hands on their head, on their clothing, a tug on their hair.
• 16:03
  Again it's been explained neurologically but and
• 16:08
  it seems to occur under heightened emotional states
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  or fatigue again if we go back to the situation with the Borley rectory with
• 16:16
  this nun that was sealed up in the walls she was also known to walk around tugging
• 16:21
  at clothing so that was a common thing that you'd be somewhere in the rectory
• 16:25
  and she would tug your clothing so so that's interesting.
• 16:30
  All right, so let's move on basically to my criticism of the scientific community,
• 16:36
  which is consistently, even within friends and family, called me crazy.
• 16:43
  But let's just criticize them a little bit. Pareidolia may explain why a person
• 16:49
  might notice a face or a voice or feel something when nothing is there. It might explain that.
• 16:54
  It can also explain how the brain fills in those gaps, okay?
• 16:59
  But what it does not do was it does not explain the origin, the consistency,
• 17:04
  or the correlation to a place, a time, or just a story. When,
• 17:10
  the tug correlates to a story, or the face correlates to an actual person that
• 17:17
  lived in the house, or the sentence that you hear correlates to an actual situation
• 17:22
  that occurred in a haunted castle,
• 17:25
  that's a little bit too much for me to place on science. It just doesn't explain it.
• 17:31
  And how someone who has no knowledge of a given place in history can be spot
• 17:35
  on when hearing said name or seeing said face.
• 17:39
  And only the serious paranormal researchers will look into this.
• 17:44
  Scientific community does not. It dismisses it.
• 17:47
  So without a baseline control, how can you say what it actually is?
• 17:52
  So I am going to do in the future two other, they're not pareidolias,
• 17:59
  they fall under phantom, phantom smells and phantom tastes.
• 18:03
  But, you know, look forward to that one. That's going to come in the future.
• 18:06
  But in closing, pareidolia may not be evidence of ghosts, but it may be a mechanism
• 18:11
  that allows us to perceive across a threshold.
• 18:15
  Maybe it softens our brain's filter. You know what I say about those filters?
• 18:19
  Okay, we have been taught not to pay attention to these things.
• 18:22
  So maybe it softens that a little bit.
• 18:24
  Maybe it invites us to put meaning into something that's a little bit ambiguous.
• 18:28
  And in that, it could open a door.
• 18:31
  So if ghosts are real, pareidolia may be how we notice them. You know, it just may be.
• 18:37
  Either explanation is unsettling. But I just want to throw it out there.
• 18:42
  It could be something that's actual.
• 18:45
  Way of us to communicate or to perceive what's unperceivable otherwise.
• 18:51
  So thank you for listening thus far. And please follow Gary's blog,
• 18:56
  podcast, Haunted and Weeding, that I'm on, as well as his Eye Opener Society. He's on all the venues.
• 19:04
  He's got other podcasts there as well.
• 19:07
  He has Sunset Childs. He has Elaine's Oracle, and he does his own meditations.
• 19:12
  So please, If you don't, give him a follow.
• 19:15
  And again, you can find me on hauntedandweaning.blog. And I hope to see you somewhere. Thank you.