The Science Behind HALLOWEEN'S “Haunted” Former Funeral Homes
When it comes to hotspots for potential “hauntings,” cemeteries and abandoned funeral homes tend to rank right up there with asylums, penitentiaries, and Civil War battlefields. At this time of year, especially, certain folks love to host pop-up events to cash in on the public’s strange yearning to experience an encounter with the dearly-dead-but-not-yet-departed — and for these crafty entrepreneurs, shuttered funeral establishments and creepy old cemeteries become prime real estate.
Here are just a few of this year’s odd offerings:
Mortuary Manor BOOkfest in Toledo, Ohio — For only $15 you can meet 20 horror and paranormal book authors, shop for some “macabre merch,” and tour the chapels, "body cooler," and embalming rooms of an 1897 funeral home that just shut down in 2025. (Ghost hunts and flashlight tours can also be purchased for an additional fee.)
The Mortuary Haunted Mansion in New Orleans, Louisiana — While this 1872 Canal Street home served as a mortuary from 1930 to 2003, “more than 20,000 funerals took place within its walls, the blood and bodily fluids of the dead swirling into a drain in the embalming room deep in the basement catacombs.” Now the property is a mecca for TV’s paranormal investigators and visitors to the Big Easy who pay $25 to $60 for admission.
Nine Lives at the Wickyards in Youngstown, Ohio — This 1901 Tudor-style mansion was built by a governor and became a funeral home in the 1940s. Now it’s a year-round concert venue and, during October, a $10-per-person haunted house attraction featuring “wooden basement coffins” (?) and “untouched former embalming rooms.”
Ugh. I’m as awed by Victorian mansions and 100-year-old historic properties as the next person (and perhaps a little more than that person, if we’re being honest), but, having watched more than my fair share of Ghost Hunters episodes back in the day, I understand that the places that are supposedly the “most haunted” are those where people suffered violent or tragic ends — and that’s rarely, if ever, at their local funeral home.
Yet, the fascination with former funeral establishments remains. Despite the plethora of factual information on the internet about what really happens when a loved one is taken into a funeral home’s care, people still want their own peek behind the curtain. Often, that opportunity comes after a funeral home has been transformed into some sort of “attraction” or has been abandoned, becoming fodder for the random “urban explorer” to “discover.” (It’s even worse when that funeral home operation left behind boxes of unclaimed cremated remains, but that’s another story altogether.)
Like it or not, many old funeral homes have everything a ghost story needs: creaky Victorian or Tudor-style bones, aging boilers, and a building full of reminders of death. Science suggests that the mechanical part, plus the plumbing, does most of the haunting — and it’s called “infrasound.”
Infrasound is sound with frequencies below about 20 hertz, which is lower than the human ear can hear. Normal hearing runs from roughly 20 Hz up to 20,000 Hz, so infrasound sits below the deepest bass note you can perceive. You can’t hear it, but your body can sometimes feel it as a vibration or pressure. Old buildings with aging mechanical systems can produce infrasound constantly, and people in those spaces may feel uneasy, irritable, or “watched” without any idea why. A 2026 study in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience found that participants couldn’t detect infrasound, yet exposure was still linked to elevated cortisol and more negative moods. The lead researchers note this kind of sound is common in older buildings, where pipes and ventilation systems create low-frequency vibrations. That echoes engineer Vic Tandy’s classic 1998 paper, The Ghost in the Machine, where a “ghost” he saw at his desk turned out to be infrasound from a newly installed extractor fan.
Then there’s the human factor. During their functional time as funeral homes, these properties were packed with grieving people, and grief does remarkable things to the senses. In a landmark 1971 British Medical Journal study of 293 widowed people, almost half had hallucinations or illusions of their dead spouse, most often a “sense of presence” of the deceased, though some reported seeing, hearing, or even feeling them. The researcher considered these experiences a normal and helpful part of widowhood, not a sign of anything wrong. But only about a quarter had told anyone, citing fear of ridicule, so it’s easy to see how a quietly shared “I felt him in the chapel” turns into building lore.
Our brains also play a little sympathetic magic. Research by psychologist Paul Rozin and colleagues found that even level-headed Americans follow the “law of contagion,” the gut belief that “once in contact, always in contact.” It’s why people recoil from a sweater worn by a serial killer, and why a room where generations of the departed have rested can feel like it’s still holding onto something.
Mix all of these things together, and add a huge dash of Halloween hype by the proprietors of these attractions, and one might better understand why places like Mortuary Manor and Wickyards exist. And here’s a word of advice: If you’re considering washing your hands of deathcare to take up, say, a career as a full-time fly fisherman or semi-professional sous chef, think about making your building’s buyer promise to never transform it into a “haunted” attraction. The entire deathcare community will thank you.
