Hello? Or should I say hello?
It's the MythBusters Halloween special, and we are testing the story currently that there
is a certain frequency of sound too low for the human ear to hear that can still make
people feel uneasy and lead them to believe that a place is haunted.
We've set up four identical houses, but only one of them will be getting the aural sound
treatment. I am sitting on that treatment.
This is a stack of 40,000W of speakers that will produce a sound that most people can't
hear. Will it make them feel like this house is haunted?
Whoa.
Ha ha ha. I really don't know.
Well, you're about to find out.
As the first set of our ten volunteers has arrived for a very strange meet and greet.
Howdy. We've got a 130 cabins up here.
He is. Although something about him seems strangely familiar.
You're going to look at four of them and one of those four.
Something bad happened.
Now, we'd like to know if.
You're sensitive enough to tell us which one.
Thank you.
With everything, said Adam and Jamie, retired to haunted Home HQ to watch the test.
Oh. Let's find out what they actually think.
Shall we unleash the contestants on our fear parade?
One at a time. Okay.
Let's bring out the first contestant.
And that first contestant is Tiffany, who heads to cabin number one.
Yes. We're staring at you.
We're all staring at you.
How do you like that?
Where she sits silently for three minutes until Adam gives the command to move to Cabin
two. Three, two.
It's like a remote control toy.
Switching to feed number two.
And then after another three minute sit, she moves on to cabin number three.
Switching to feed number three.
Confirm for me that the sound's on.
Sound is on.
Good work. Thank you.
As far as Tiffany is concerned, it's the sound of silence.
But does the sub aural sound wave induce fear?
15 seconds.
We're back in this room.
Well, it certainly seems like she's noticed something.
And after a final three minutes behind door number four, the question is, which cabin
will she pick?
If you had to pick one of these four cabins as the spookiest, which one would you pick?
Two. Two.
Can you say why? Do you know why?
It just. It just felt weird.
Felt a little lightheaded when I walked in, but it just felt really weird.
Tiffany wasn't weirded out by the sound, but she's just the start, as each volunteer is
Klaxon through the cabins.
Huh?
So which house.
Too?
I'd have to say it'd be one.
Number one.
All right. Excellent.
But so far, their intuition isn't picking the freaky frequency in cabin number three.
Maybe Number one was probably the one that I felt was a little bit more tense than the
rest.
None of the volunteers seem to know why they picked their cabin.
But at the halfway mark, it's clear it's not down to the hump.
Meanwhile, back at the cabins in the woods, it feels like something bad happened.
It didn't. But the MythBusters are testing if a freaky frequency can persuade their
volunteers, it did.
Which one felt the spookiest, too?
So far, none of the volunteers have picked Cabin three and it's haunted 19Hz.
Hum. But it seems as though candidate six is slightly spooked.
We're standing.
He just said, I get the weirdest feeling.
It's kind of freaky.
Which house do you think was haunted?
If I had to pick one, it'd probably be cabin three, I think.
What was it about it that caught your attention?
I don't know. Just the way that the flooring looked and everything inside there.
Maybe walking around inside there and feeling.
It felt a little different, though.
Yeah.
One volunteer sensed the sound, but will that trend continue into the Final Four?
So your final choice is three.
Number three.
So that's two strikes for cabin three.
But as the test continues.
I guess maybe it would have to be one.
I felt the most uncomfortable in the first one.
When I first walked in there, I felt nervous and uneasy and I think my heart rate felt up.
Number one is still number one on the spooky chart.
I would say number one, fantastic.
And that, it seems, is the final nail in the coffin for this frequency of fear.
Ten tests, ten test subjects.
And I think we can definitively state that cabin.
Three The sound we put through it did not make it the spookiest cabin.
If anything, cabin one was the spookiest cabin.
Cabin four. The least spooky.
Now, this could be because of one of two reasons.
Either because we had everyone enter the cabins in numerical order.
The newness of the experiment and the weirdness of sitting alone in a room for two
minutes made them the most frightened at the beginning and the least frightened at the
end. The other reason is that cabin one could actually be haunted.
But I don't think so.
How do you want to call this one?
Well, number three didn't get a higher score than any of the others.
So I guess the tone didn't spook anybody.
19hz was definitely not the sound of fear.
What is that over there?
Oh, this one.
Characters in horror movies have a nose for trouble.
But does that trouble have a nose?
Is there really a detectable scent of fear after their close encounters of the creepy
kind? The MythBusters have some seriously scared sweat samples.
But before they test them on human noses, they're giving them to a mechanical nose or
the gas chromatography machine.
Now, if there is some sort of chemical difference between our fear, sweat and non
fear sweat samples, this machine should be able to identify them in the parts per
billion range.
And after sniffing out the exact chemical composition of both samples, it's looking
good.
All right, Steve, what are the results of our tests?
Well, we've.
Seen differences in both the fear and non fear sweat examples in each of your tests.
Really?
Really. There's pretty good indicators that there's a difference from fear.
Well, good. That's great for our myth.
I mean, now that we know that there might be a chemical difference, let's see if it can be
smelled.
Absolutely. Because although the machine can smell the difference to confirm this myth,
the human nose must detect it, too.
All right, you guys, come on in.
I promise I won't bite.
Grant might.
So for our smell of fear experiment, it'll be double blind.
Meaning neither the volunteers nor Tory, who's administering the test, will know what
sample is what.
Now, each volunteer will be given two jars A and a B.
There are four possibilities.
Either A has the fear, B has the fear.
They both have the fear or neither has fear in it.
What'll happen is they'll mark down the results and at the end we'll tally everything
and see how they did.
It's a methodology that should leave no nose unturned and ensure a definitive result on
whether the smell of fear can be detected one by one.
The secretion sniffers are brought in.
Take a nice deep breath.
Now, according to the gas chromatography, there is a discernible difference between
samples.
It's kind of weird to be smelling another man's sweat, huh?
Yes, it is.
But is that a difference that the human nose can detect?
Had like an olfactory factory line, the test runs smoothly and the volunteers nose out
that aroma of anxiety.