Black Mold & Ghouls
When it comes to exploring the paranormal, Astonishing Legends is no stranger to confronting occam’s razor. Sometimes that bump in the night is a rusty pipe...and sometimes it’s not. We’ve heard of the theory with ergot poisoning and the Salem Witch Trials...but what about another mold? Could black mold be responsible for some of the things that go bump in the night?
Have you ever gone Urban Exploring or visited an ill-kept older home and gotten the shivers or an otherwise ‘weird’ feeling that something was just off about the house? Well, that may be a biological response to toxic mold. Shane Rogers, a professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Clarkson University has a penchant for the paranormal.
Dr. Rogers said, in an episode of Science VS., “ Ghosts? Maybe just fungal spores festering in old buildings with inadequate ventilation and poor air quality. Both scary in their own right, to be fair. Being in a spooky place at night could set the scene for you to be on the lookout for ghosts, and mold might be what pushes you over the edge to make you believe Casper just passed by.”
At this time, the connections between mold and its ability to make people see, well, ghosts are tenuous at best. However, Dr. Rogers makes a good point when he connects older houses and the reports that they are haunted. However, he did plan a study to collect air samples and potential mold samples at reportedly haunted buildings.
Now, there are plenty of hauntings reported in buildings and structures that are well kept-up, but when one thinks of a haunted house it is more than likely that a dingy, abandoned Victorian usually comes to mind rather than a circa-1998 pre-fab.
Although scientific studies may be tenuous, there are a few real-world examples. For example, the Looney Gas Building incident which occurred in 1924. This took place at New Jersey’s Standard Oil Refinery. Employees at the refinery began losing their short term memory, experiencing a lack of coordination, and unprovoked rage and even delirium. However, the causes were later traced to tetraethyl lead. It wouldn’t be surprising, then, if mold could have similar disorienting experiences. Especially in a home, where people spend a specific amount of time.
So, what do we actually know about black mold and what it does to humans? Well, it can wreak all sorts of havoc but from a neurological standpoint. Black mold produces something called trichothecene mycotoxins, which are neurotoxic. Although it’s a cool word, what does neurotoxic mean? It means that what the mold produces can kill neurons in the brain and actually impair a person’s mental capabilities.
In addition to killing neurons, they can also cause several kinds of nervous disorders, including tremors and even personality changes. Other symptoms can include seizures, anxiety, memory problems disorientation, brain fog, and hallucinations. So, could this lead one to think your house is haunted? Most likely. However, it may take prolonged exposure to the home to experience these kinds of intense neurological effects. So, would casual ghost hunters or visitors experience the same haunting sensations that those who inhabit the haunted house feel? Probably not.
This blog does not remove the fact that there could be ghosts...but there is a chance that some of the ghostly activity may be chalked up to something a little more terrestrial.
The header image is entitled Mansion in the Santee/3 and is by Flickr User Trevor Marron, and is licensed under Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0).