Worried Your House Is Haunted? The Spooky Sensation Might Arise From a Surprisingly Simple Source

Infrasound—noise below the range of typical human hearing—from power, heating and mechanical systems within buildings can make people feel irritated and induce a stress response, according to a new study

Sara Hashemi | Daily Correspondent

April 28, 2026

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The world is filled with sounds below the range of typical human hearing. These invisible noises, known as infrasound, can even come from within your home, stemming from old pipes, ventilation systems and air conditioning.

Even though we can’t usually hear these noises, they can put us in an uneasy state of mind and induce a stress response, according to a study published April 26 in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. The findings might explain why old houses can feel spooky, leading some people to think they’re haunted.

Some past research has found that infrasound causes adverse reactions in people, like discomfort, anxiety and sleep troubles. But other studies show little effect. “Part of it is that it’s hard to measure. It’s hard to do it in these carefully controlled environments,” says study co-author Rodney Schmaltz, a psychologist at MacEwan University in Canada who studies why people believe in pseudoscientific claims, to Nautilus’ Kristen French.  

To conduct a tightly controlled experiment, Schmaltz and his colleagues recruited 36 participants, three-fourths of whom were women. During the summer of 2023, each person sat alone in a room and spent five minutes listening to either calming instrumental melodies or unsettling, horror-style sounds meant to elicit discomfort. Half the participants were unknowingly also subjected to infrasound playing at 18 Hertz, outside the lower threshold of typical human hearing, 20 Hz.

Individuals who unknowingly heard infrasound reported feeling more irritable and described the music as sadder than those who weren’t exposed to the low-frequency noise. Saliva samples collected before and after the trials also revealed that infrasound listeners had heightened levels of the stress-related hormone cortisol following the experiment.

Importantly, the participants couldn’t detect the presence of infrasound. Even if they thought they heard it, the perception didn’t affect their cortisol levels or mood. The results hint that despite being imperceptible, infrasound can cause unpleasant feelings and stress responses.

“It is important to be clear that infrasound does not cause people to believe they have seen a ghost,” Schmaltz tells Gizmodo’s Ed Cara. “What it might do is provide unexplainable discomfort.” 

While larger studies are needed to confirm the findings, the new work suggests that infrasound might explain pseudoscientific claims. “For someone who is not inclined to think in terms of ghosts, the same sensation would probably just register as a stuffy, uncomfortable old building. For someone who is already primed, it might feel like proof of a spirit or presence,” Schmaltz tells the Guardian’s Ian Sample.

Chris French, a psychologist emeritus at Goldsmiths, the University of London, who studies paranormal beliefs and was not involved in the work, emphasizes that research on infrasound’s effects on people has been mixed. It’s “plausible” that feelings caused by these low-frequency noises might lead some people to feel a place is “haunted,” he says to the Guardian, but that could be all there is to it.

“It may be a step too far to explain alleged poltergeist activity, such as objects flying off shelves, as resulting from infrasound,” French says.

Schmaltz tells Nautilus that future work should examine longer-term exposures to infrasound. For example, people describe feeling irritated when sitting in traffic, and that’s an environment with a lot of low-frequency noises, he says. Additionally, “some data shows that people feel more tension when they’re in a more urban as opposed to rural environments.”

Further studies might also look into the effects of other frequencies below human hearing and measure responses as people listen to them, not just after sound exposures, says study co-author Kale Scatterty, a neuroscientist at the University of Alberta in Canada, in a statement. “This study was in many ways a first step toward understanding the effects of infrasound on humans.”

Sara Hashemi | Read More

Sara Hashemi is a science writer and fact-checker currently based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Sierra, The Body, Maisonneuve magazine and more.