Haunted Rooms Under Test: teacher key

Ghosts, grade 10 edition, written for 10th grade. In 2003 researchers tested two famous places and a concert hall to see whether spooky experiences follow a room's reputation. The study's design and numbers show what the visitors reported and where.

Read the book. Print this page for the key.

Questions and answers

1. Why did investigators not know which Hampton Court areas were labelled haunted until all the data was in?
   • The labels were lost
   • It kept their expectations from leaking into the results (answer)
   • They were not interested
2. How long did each visitor spend alone in an Edinburgh vault?
   • About 10 minutes (answer)
   • About two hours
   • About 20 seconds
3. What did the Hampton Court magnetic field measurements show?
   • The average differed a great deal
   • Nothing was measured
   • The average did not differ, but variation was larger in the haunted areas (answer)
4. What happens in the Ganzfeld effect?
   • The brain starts filling in blanks when the eyes see a featureless field (answer)
   • The ears hear only very high sounds
   • The room gets colder
5. About what share of the 2003 concert audience reported more unusual experiences during infrasound pieces?
   • Nearly all
   • About 22 percent (answer)
   • Almost none
6. What is a control area?
   • A room with locked doors
   • A place with the loudest noise
   • An ordinary place used for comparison (answer)

Words

• enquirer: person asking
• control: comparison place
• correlation: rising together
• variance: spread of numbers
• Ganzfeld: blank-field effect