Is it possible to dress up like a ghost and fool people into thinking they’ve seen the real deal? Happily there is published research to answer this question, research carried out at no lesser institution than Cambridge University. For six nights in the summer of 1959, members of the Cambridge University Society for Research in Parapsychology took turns dressing up in a white muslin sheet and walking around in a well-traversed field behind the King’s College campus. Occasionally they would raise their arms, as ghosts will do. Other members of the team hid in bushes to observe the reaction of passersby. Although some eighty people were judged to have been in a position to see the figure, not one reacted or even gave it a second glance. The researchers found this surprising, especially given that the small herd of cows that grazed the field did, unlike the pedestrians, show considerable interest, such that two or three at a time would follow along behind the “ghost.” To my acute disappointment, “An Experiment in Apparitional Observation and Findings,” published in the September 1959 Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, includes no photographs.

Several months later, the researchers revised their experiment, changing the venue and adding “low moans” and, on one occasion, phosphorescent paint. One trial was set in a graveyard right off a main road and clearly in the sight line of drivers in both directions. Here observers hid in the bushes not only to record reactions, but to “avert traffic accidents” and “reassure anyone who became hysterical.” But again, not a single person of the hundred-plus who saw the figure thought it was a ghost, including two students from India. “Although we are superstitious in our country,” the men told one of the researchers, “we could see his legs and feet and knew it was a man dressed up in some white garment.”

In their final effort, the research team abandoned traditional ghost-apppropriate settings and moved the experiment into a movie theater that was screening an X-rated film. The author of the paper, A.D. Cornell, explained that the X rating was chosen to ensure no children were traumatized by the ghost, as though that somehow explained the choice of a porn theater as a setting for a ghost experiment. This time the “ghost” walked slowly across the screen during a trailer. The phosphorescence was not used this time and presumably low moans were deemed redundant. No mention is made of the specific images showing on the screen behind the ghost, but clearly they were a good deal more interesting: The audience was polled after the film, and forty-six percent of them didn’t notice the man in the sheet. Among those who did, not one thought he’d seen a ghost. (One man said he’d seen a polar bear.)