Spooky 7

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1:29that's a secret I could not participate in these experiments because I would just always be stressed out that's my secret I'm a chronic worrier yeah

Host Introduction

1:41I'm Paige and I'm Megan and this is Spooky Science Sisters hello you're listening to Spooky Science Sisters a podcast where we present to you a science-based and probably very giggly discussion on all things strange and unusual today we are going to be doing a short and spooky episode but we are going to be doing this Megan style which means it is topics that I

2:15have chosen and that I'm going to tell Paige about and I'm pretty sure that this is the most random pair of topics that I've ever selected but they are the things that have caught my eye over the last few weeks and per usual that has now become our audience's problem but this is our seventh round of short and spookies so in keeping with the fast and furious franchise naming scheme at this point I'm sure that

2:45there are some people who have like not been listening that long because we haven't done a short and spooky since episode 80 something and they're probably like what the fuck are you talking about why is this a thing but anyway you're in it now but we're keeping with the fast and furious movie franchise naming scheme which means that this episode has to be titled spooky seven when I was looking up that movie because I was like oh I have no idea what what fast and furious seven which it is furious seven so I had to figure out the

3:18naming scheme but did you know that it was directed by James Wan well so no I didn't until I read your notes but this has to be like the one weird film that's not like I can't think of anything else that he's done that's not like a horror right I think he's been a producer on some pretty like not scary stuff everything else though that he's directed is you know insidious and saw and the conjuring franchise

3:50and the like Annabelle spinoff and then like right in the middle is furious seven yeah who would have guessed saw and furious seven had like anybody working on it that was the same right had the same director so I was like well how appropriate that it's a scary movie director for this episode anyway short spooky spooky seven great but first we have to do something spooky Paige what is your

4:21something spooky for this episode I feel like you laugh because you know exactly where I'm going with this I was gonna say I feel like I have an idea what it's gonna be after tonight again for those who have listened for a while you know that there have been I don't know like if you look it happens at least once a year where we talk about my mic just like not working well tonight guys it was one of those nights and yeah we originally were gonna start recording at 8 30 it is 10 p.m uh like here's the

4:56thing I was tired at like six so it's fine yeah what about you Megan what is your something spooky my something spooky is that it was Alice's seventh birthday this week and on last Sunday we had her birthday party and the last 10 to 15 minutes of the birthday party when the parents were supposed to be showing up to pick up the kids we had a tornado warning so my something spooky is gathering up a dozen

5:30six or seven year olds who are screaming and freaking out and getting them all into the storage area to figure out if we are about to have a tornado descend on us only one person cried so it was okay hey that's pretty good yeah yeah we did all right I think they practice a lot at school or they do a good job practicing at school so they're pretty controlled so anyway spooky seven for our first study

Infrasound Study

5:56we are going to talk about infrasound and we're going to talk about a new study on the effect of infrasound that was published last month that has implications for debunking or explaining paranormal experiences so this was published in April of 2026 it is now May of 2026 for those of you listening in the future and we will put a link to that paper in the show notes so people can go ahead and access

6:30it because it is an open access paper so you can go read it and it's pretty cool all right as a refresher I think we've talked about it before but I'm not totally positive if you've read the book you already know about infrasound so there's my little sneaky plug for like go read the book because you'll learn more about it but it has been suggested as a possible source of hauntings for quite a long time since at least the 1990s and as a reminder infrasound is sound that is below the threshold of what human

7:03ears can detect and that is often defined as around 20 hertz so that's the frequency of those sound waves and I guess even that is like sort of debated so people have gone back and forth about infrasound and whether or not it affects people a lot but there are natural and artificial sources natural things could be tectonic activity like earthquakes volcanic activity in which case I assume they mean movement of magma beneath the surface creating infrasound which I think is pretty neat it's spooky it is

7:42spooky but I think like the the infrasound thing with earthquakes too is why they think like animals for example might be able to detect them like that they're coming so yeah so it's all sort of like weird little sixth sense stuff other sources can be distant storms and even the vocalizations of some animals like big cats and alligators and artificial sources can be things like traffic water moving through pipes

8:13in plumbing or heating systems fans for heating and cooling and other mechanical systems and like I mentioned whether or not infrasound actually affects people is still debated but it has been linked to feelings of dread feeling like someone is watching you and general unease and discomfort so basically feelings that people sometimes associate with haunting experiences so like feeling like there's some sort of paranormal presence

8:51you know they'll attribute it to like making them feel uncomfortable and bad so the other thing here is that it seems like sensitivity to infrasound would have been important for us in an evolutionary sense because having some innate sense that a storm is coming or a predator is nearby would be valuable and to me it seems reasonable that some people could be more sensitive than others so maybe this is an issue for you know people who are

9:21particularly sensitive to infrasound and maybe that's why it's been sort of nebulous as to whether or not affects people because it only really affects certain people I don't know anyway so this new study that came out was done by a group of psychologists and neuroscientists at McEwen University and the University of Alberta which are both located in Edmonton Alberta in Canada this is not their first attempt to experiment with infrasound in a way that could explain paranormal claims they previously played infrasound on hidden speakers in a commercial

9:59haunted house attraction to see if it made people more scared which I love that's such a creative idea I guess they did say that people seemed to walk faster when the infrasound was present but the results that they got from monitoring people's like the official results that they got from monitoring people's startle response and the EEGs that they were monitoring were overall inconclusive they couldn't tell

10:32for sure if it had an effect and I guess just for some context here and the thing that's weird about infrasound to me is like you can have infrasound that's quote-unquote really loud at like a high decibel level that if it were audible to human ears would really really hurt your ears so I don't know it's just really weird to think of something that's like really loud but we can't actually hear it I

11:02don't know that's just sort of creepy inherently well we've all played like the mosquito trick on adults right like as kids the mosquito trick like the it's it's called like the most I think it's called like the mosquito soundbite but like the really really really high-pitched oh yeah yeah yeah and like I remember as like kids we would you know pull out our phones and put it on our phones and play it and thought it was like so funny that all the kids could hear it but like no one of the none of the adults could yeah yeah because at some point you lose the ability to hear that so like I don't

11:35know it's not much different than that yeah I mean it makes sense but it just yeah it's weird yeah it is weird it's also weird to be in the age group now to know that I used to be able to hear that but I can't yeah I know that's a real bummer you know knowing oh man I'm past past that age we just had a whole discussion in the group chat earlier about being like oh I'm so decrepit now so uh yeah so I don't know infrasound just is sort of inherently spooky to me for that reason

12:09so there I would argue simplifying things a little bit more to do this new study but they did get some significant results from it so in this new study participants were asked to sit in a room for I think a period of five minutes and just listen to music and the music they played was either calming or it was unsettling music and 50 percent of the time infrasound was added at a frequency of 18 hertz

12:41after the participants were done they surveyed them so asked them some questions about their emotional state and they collected saliva samples and what they found was that the ones that had infrasound added showed a spike in their cortisol levels in their saliva and cortisol is a hormone that's released when we get stressed out it's sometimes called the stress hormone and this was regardless of the type of music that was playing in the room the participant was in that is so cool yeah right

13:17like it was that you know if they were unsettling music playing and the infrasound was added like their body started to produce cortisol if it was the calming happy music didn't matter the infrasound went on and they started to see spikes in their cortisol levels like it just inherently stressed them out so the addition of the infrasound also contributed to participants feeling more irritated uncomfortable or generally sad and again this was regardless of the type of music playing so for example someone

13:54who was listening to the happy calm music once the infrasound kicked on they started to just find it kind of annoying which i think is sort of a funny thing but yeah they just like started to get sort of you know uncomfortable and annoyed by it as soon as the infrasound was on so it's a really cool experiment because you know it's one of these ones where we can definitively show hey it has an effect on people it's stressing people out and so for a believer or for a more suggestible person who walks

14:28into an old creepy building where there's a source of infrasound they might attribute any negative feelings to again the presence of something paranormal so it's basically just a way that we can prime people to believe that they've had a paranormal experience which is pretty cool it is super cool yeah i wonder if anyone has ever been able to hear below funny hurts like i mean in like recent days

15:01like in the last you know couple hundred years oh so that's part of the debate because i waded through some older papers that you know talked about the debate of whether or not infrasound actually affected people and some of them some of them came down to like what even was infrasound because one paper pointed out that people have been able to like hear down to a frequency of like one and a half hertz under the right conditions so yeah and like i don't i don't know i don't really know what specifically

15:37those conditions are but maybe it's just like it has to be loud enough for them to really hear it at that super low frequency but yeah that's why it's it's controversial still because there's debate as to like what infrasound even really is sure yeah today though like man i feel like you're just surrounded by it all the time right you know which is probably to your point right well yeah and i don't know it's like kids are always like walking around talking about seeing weird shit and like i mentioned

16:09earlier like they do they can they can hear a wider range of sound than adults can so i just wonder if there's like kids out there who are running around and are able to hear oh because yeah because kids tend to just have more hallucinatory or yeah what some people might call paranormal experiences so maybe it has to do with them being more sensitive to sound waves yeah yeah that could be it i don't know we should just become social scientists and psychologists and just start doing experiments

16:40i definitely need another career change i think probably yes no i don't i just need to read interesting papers by people who do those experiments and then talk about them on the internet i'm already stressed out enough that's a secret i could not participate in these experiments because i would just always be stressed out that's my secret i'm a chronic worrier yeah exactly con el under three dollar menu the mcdonald's un mcchicken es solo unos cincuenta resulta que ser el

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Mold and Archaeologists

17:57okay so that is short and spooky topic number one new study about infrasound so our second topic is about mold new research about mold okay so way back in episode 53 we had annelise bear on the show to talk about all things mummies and ancient egypt and we talked

18:31about the pharaoh tutankhamen commonly nicknamed king tut and the supposed curse on his tomb so as a reminder famously the financier for the excavation of that tomb george herbert the fifth earl of carnarvon who is also known as lord carnarvon died of a combination of sepsis and pneumonia just two months after he and howard carter who is the archaeologist opened and entered king tut's burial

19:03chamber and of course the press ran away with that story declaring that his death was the result of the curse of the pharaohs and even though it was really just that it was 1923 and antibiotics didn't exist yet and lord carnarvon was already known to struggle with respiratory problems so you know they make it this big curse they make it very mysterious but you know this guy had some health problems already so and apparently he got like an infected mosquito bite or something so that was part of the sepsis thing

19:37like listen that should be a lesson be grateful for modern medicine because you could cut your face shaving on a mosquito bite and then you know two months later you're dead so big oof big oof everybody take your medicine and shut the fuck up i'm a little sensitive about that right now okay so there's probably not a lot of mystery here as to to why he died based on the age and his health problems but some historians and scientists have proposed that there was something in king

20:14tut's tomb that did play a role in lord carnarvon's death and that something is mold specifically a type of mold called aspergillus flavus that is a common soil fungus that can infest harvested grain and cereal crops but any moist warm environment will do so it can infect human tissue where if inhaled it can cause severe respiratory illness known as aspergillosis or if ingested has toxins

20:54that can harm the kidneys and liver even to the point of being carcinogenic meaning it can cause cancer cancer so you know this is all stuff i didn't need to know yeah i was good i'm not eating a lot of moldy grain so i'm probably okay so we know that king tut's tomb was undisturbed since he died around 1324 bce because the seal was still present on the door so carter and lord carnarvon were truly the first people

21:29to enter his burial chamber in over 3 000 years which is crazy and mold spores can remain dormant for centuries so you can imagine you open up this old room the air starts circulating again and stirring things up and you might get exposed to something nasty and there was a significant amount of grain and bread that were left as offerings in the tomb so the aspergillus flavus may have been on that

22:01and it may have been carnarvon that got sick rather than carter because carnarvon's health was already poor in the respiratory department so basically you know he probably got a pretty standard illness it may have been helped along by this infection that he got from this mosquito bite but the fact that he was sort of immunocompromised makes him more sensitive to being affected by this fungus that may have been present or guy yeah so i will say because of that lord carnarvon's death being related to mold

22:34is debated people have gone back and forth on it but we do have more definitive evidence of aspergillus flavus playing a role in the deaths of archaeologists that happened 50 years later in 1973 so a group of 12 archaeologists opened the tomb of 15th century polish king kosmer the fourth in order to carry out some conservation work and 10 of them would end up dying over the next few years

23:07oh no yeah and at least four of those deaths were within a few weeks of opening the tomb and i say at least because the others are a bit harder to nail down time wise like some official sources papers that have been published will say that all 10 died within a few weeks but then others say it took you know a few years for the last ones to die and that some of them may have been related to cancer but they were all certainly premature uh some sources say it was up to 15 people who ended up dying but again

23:41you know it gets linked again to this idea of a curse from opening the tomb so things get sensationalized a little bit but importantly a microbiologist was able to identify the presence of aspergillus flavus within kosmer's coffin or body and it's pretty much assumed that it played a role in their deaths which is crazy like that is must have been a particularly i don't know what the word is for like strong or virulent strain of it or something i have no idea but yeah so anyway so

24:16there's there's definitely more concrete link to it hurting archaeologists in that case you said it's assumed that it played a role but did they not check the bodies of the people who died so my understanding is that this all sort of happens after the fact and i think they could have done some sort of analysis like in their respiratory excretions or something to figure out if aspergillus flavus was present but i think it was like later investigations where it became an option and so they checked for it

24:50so yeah so i am not 100 sure but my impression is that nobody was specifically checked at the time that it happened so it's like it's not you know a home run hit out of the park and it's also worth pointing out i think it's the skeptoid podcast episode about king tut and this idea of there being some sort of fungus action happening that you know he mentions that archaeologists aren't wandering around worrying about this when they have to open up tombs and stuff like that on the regular

25:25so this might sort of be an overblown thing but it's at least interesting and and spooky and potentially uh killing off people so what do you mean they're not worrying about it well like it's not like people don't think it's it's not like super common right yeah okay i thought you meant they're just like don't care no it's more like this is not something that they're particularly worried about actually being a threat understood and so they're not yeah which you know maybe they should be

25:56but who knows it seems like a lot of the evidence is sort of like circumstantial or added after the fact is my point okay yes so overall though the idea of mold causing deaths and being mistaken for this curse from opening these old tombs is sort of old news but we're talking about it today because aspergillus flavus has become a promising candidate in studies looking to identify new cancer therapies and i think this was a study from last year that was kind of making the rounds uh in the news so we're you

26:31know we're a little behind in the scheme of things still talking about it in 2026 versus 2025 but i don't know is what it is my the the algorithm does what it wants to do and shows me things a year later but researchers are trying to find sources of chemicals called ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides or rips for short that's a lot easier to say that was tricky

27:03um yeah so that's a very fancy phrase the modified refers to the fact that we are genetically modifying natural peptides uh in whatever they're harvesting these from to fight infections or in this case to try and fight certain cancers so they were looking for fungal rips and they looked at a lot of different strains of aspergillus because they're common funguses fun oh my god funguses fungi who even am i

27:40found that aspergillus flavus is a potentially a good source for them so yeah long story short in the same way that you know penicillin was developed from mold the next breakthrough in cancer drugs might be from a fungus as well and i do think it's sort of ironic in this case that it's sort of a fight fire with fire situation since you're trying to use a carcinogenic mold to fight cancer but i guess

28:14that's sort of the thing with cancer causing drugs is like one of the side effects of chemotherapy is like oh this might cause cancer so very cancer yeah exactly you got to kind of pick the lesser of two evils in some cases but yeah it's just kind of a cool aspect of it that this legendary fungus that might have killed off some archaeologists might actually end up being a cancer treatment very cool yes uh yeah so those are our two short and spooky stories for today that's all i have for our

Conclusion and Theme

28:49seventh round and looking back on these two topics the theme of this episode i said there was no theme this was very random but we're gonna say the theme was hidden spooky stuff i feel like these two things are they feel like they go together better than a lot of our other short and spooky episodes you know they might but i we're gonna pretend like i had a theme here i feel like i had to come up with one at the end but yeah the infrasound study like hidden noise that you can't detect but it makes you feel

29:25weird and then the new cancer therapies but from this microscopic fungus that might make you really sick make people think that a tomb is cursed very cool that's the that's it we did it all right well that wraps up our 106th episode if you liked this episode hit subscribe and share with a friend check the show notes for links to all of our social media accounts our discord server and patreon if you have any questions about previous topics or ideas for future episodes email us at

29:59the sisters at spookyscience sisters dot com as always thank you for listening and stay spooky spooky science sisters is a proud member of the evergreen podcasts network for more information or to check out other shows please visit evergreen podcasts dot com you you you you you

30:33you you you