Northern Ghost Research & Investigation Team - UK

In the 1990s, computer expert Vick Tandy from Coventry University had heard ghost stories from colleagues at a medical equipment manufacturer where he worked, however he never took them seriously and considered the stories as nonsense.

Then one night while working in a laboratory he suddenly began to feel uncomfortable and broke into a cold sweat, he then felt that he wasn’t alone in the room and that someone was watching him, at this point he saw what looked like a grey figure slowly immerging from his left side.

As the figure approached, Vic could make out it's arms and legs and a sort of fog where its head should have been, needless to say Vic was terrified.
However instead of running away like most people would have, he decided to stand up and face the apparition, but as he did so it quickly faded and vanished completely.

As soon as Vic Tandy had recovered from the shock of what he had encountered and being someone who had never believed in these sorts of things, he decided that there had to be a rational explanation for what he had experienced and set about looking for answers.

After much time spent pondering on what it could have been, and various theories not giving him the answers he was looking for, his breakthrough came quite by accident, as Vic's hobby was fencing and he had a competition coming up and needed to modify one of his foils.

He brought it back to his laboratory and clamped it into his vice and went to gather some other things he needed. When he returned Vic noticed that the blade was vibrating up and down quite frantically.
Vic then realised that the movement of the blade was oscillations caused with low frequency sound waves.
But he had to be sure, so he decided to measure this sound and did several tests which revealed the existence of a standing wave which was trapped in his laboratory exactly where he had been working when he had seen the apparition. This was infrasound!

It took a while for scientists to discover the source of the infrasound but eventually, they discovered that it was caused by a newly fitted extractor fan which was making the air vibrate at around 19 cycles per second. When the fans mounting was altered the standing wave left and so did the ghosts.

Vic Tandy concluded that infrasound has two effects, it causes a person to hyperventilate which triggers feelings of anxiety and fear; and it also causes the eyeball to vibrate and blur ones vision which can produce an optical illusion like the apparition he and others had witnessed.
After this discovery Vic Tandy decided to visit other alleged haunted locations to see if infrasound was the cause, however out of all the sites he visited he only found two that had infrasonic activity.

Vic Tandy published all the results of his research in the magazine of the Society of Physical Research which united many British Parapsychologists to work together to find reasonable explanations for paranormal phenomena. Vic’s research has helped give explanations for many types of unusual phenomena and test for infrasound are now carried out by most Paranormal Research Groups while investigating alleged haunted locations.