this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
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I believe the poster is referring to The Ghost in the Machine, Published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol.62, No 851 April 1998 (pdf)
Ok, that's a paper that attempts to explain the feeling that a building might be haunted. There's nothing in there about causing people to hallucinate. They talk about the supposed "resonant frequency of the eye", but then they say:
If the values are that vague, then there is no resonant frequency. There may be frequencies that transmit vibrations to the eye, but with a big enough speaker you can cause anything to vibrate.
The closest the get to hallucinations is to say that "the eyeball would be vibrating which would cause a serious "smearing"of vision. It would not seem unreasonable to see dark shadowy forms caused by something as innocent as the corner of V.T.’s spectacles." So, no hallucinations, just some blurry vision that might vaguely count as an excuse for seeing a ghost if your eye is vibrating significantly. Notice that that's all just speculation, saying "this seems like it could be possible" rather than actually testing for that hypothesis.
We had slightly different readings.
He experienced a visual disturbance in his periphery manifesting as the false perception of a person. Even without it being interpreted as a person, that's a textbook mild hallucination.
He cited two sources inline with ranges narrower than 8-40Hz which indicate that vision can be affected at the same frequencies he measured in the lab. He even noted that everyone would have slightly different resonant frequencies.
No, it's not a full research paper, but it is the citation you requested.