Two years ago I finished my degree at a university in Massachusetts. It’s a prestigious institution with a rich history, and I decided to stay on and try to work on a master’s. My major is in physics, with a specialism in electrical engineering, and towards the end of my fourth year I spent a lot of time networking and socializing with doctors and professors, hoping to land a good graduate program.
Now a few decades ago, some bright spark who had somehow got himself to be university president decided that administration would be much easier if the departments were alphabetized rather than grouped by faculty. He reorganized half the campus before the end of his tenure; he left physics in place - since the building has had significant work to be suitable for the subject - and now, physics is next to psychology, parapsychology, and paranormal studies. Go figure.
This meant that the cafeteria a minute’s walk from the physics building also serves those other departments, and it can often be hard to discern somebody’s subject by looking. At least, that’s my excuse for when I met Doctor Caruso. I got chatting to him in the line for lunch, and mentioned that I was an electrical engineer looking for a masters supervisor.
Caruso’s eyes lit up. He was a tall man, thin and wiry; he claimed to be a Bostonian-Italian, but he had no accent and I doubt he could have pointed to Italy on a map. He told me he had a project he was working on, a new type of battery, and he really needed an electrical engineer to help him. He even had a budget that would stretch to my entire tuition.
I said yes almost immediately. He brought the paperwork to my lab the next day, and we signed. He wanted me to start right away, but I hadn’t even finished my finals, and besides I wanted a break from studying! Reluctantly, he agreed that if he could send me over some specifications for me to think through, he could wait until August.
So that’s what I did. I really did want a break, but when me and a few friends took off to Europe for a couple of weeks after exams, I downloaded the specs to my tablet, and ended up studying them a couple of hours most days, sometimes in our hostel room, sometimes by a pool or a café.
What Caruso wanted was mostly very sensible. Unusual, but logical. Essentially it was a way of collecting energy from work, converting it into electric current, and storing it in a battery. What made it weird was that he wanted to collect energy from a large number of tiny fluctuations - and those fluctuations were varied. Normally you would choose one: convert the motion of a fluid with a turbine, extract work from a heat differential with a Stirling engine, convert pressure into electrical current via the Piezoelectric effect, and so on. Caruso wanted all of these, and more - but in a tiny package an inch or two across. Essentially it looked like he was trying to squeeze every last bit of available energy out of the environment, at microscale, but with the capability of scaling up to an arbitrary size.
While I was on holiday I was determined not to call Caruso, or even email him. I still managed to fill three notebooks of diagrams and calculations before I got back to the US in the middle of August, so excited was I to get working on this project. It was a lot of work, and I spent months tinkering before a problem arose.
Jenny, one of the administrators in the physics department, called me into her office. She asked me about the procurement forms I’d been submitting, and who they were for. I explained, showing her the paperwork I had with Caruso’s signature on it. It was only then that I learned Caruso was, in fact, not a physicist. He was in paranormal studies.
We’d met in the lab plenty of times, and had meetings and discussions in the cafeteria; but I realized I’d never actually been to his office. I excused myself and called my supervisor, asking him to explain himself. He arrived at Jenny’s office about twenty minutes later, apologized for the misunderstanding, and arranged for money to be transferred over to cover the costs.
Jenny was happy, but I was not. I asked him to come to the lab to check on something, closed the door, and gave him an earful. I don’t think the closed door did much for privacy; I showed none of the respect usually due to your supervisor, and even the radio astronomers on the roof could probably hear me.
Surprisingly, Caruso was not upset or angry. He didn’t raise his voice; he just waited until I’d run out of steam (which took quite a while). Then he looked at me, said “I’m sorry”, and invited me to his office in para.
I’d never actually been to the paranormal studies building. For all its spooky reputation, and the occasional weird rumors coming out of there, it looked very respectable. I don’t think the building had been redecorated since the department had moved there in the eighties, but it was clean, well kept, and a lot tidier than most of the physics building. If you didn’t read the titles of the books on the shelves, it could have been mistaken for psychology, or mathematics, or even an accountant’s or lawyer’s offices. Caruso’s office was much the same; he had an old but nice wooden desk with a desktop computer and half a dozen books pulled from the shelves behind it, but apart from a half-empty coffee mug, everything was very clean.
He even had a couple of armchairs in there. In physics, you’re lucky to get an office chair with wheels; he took one chair and I took the other, and I felt like we should break out smoking pipes and discuss classic literature.
Of course, that’s not what we did. Caruso apologized again, and promised to tell me exactly what he was doing.
It was about ghosts.
It took every ounce of restraint in my body not to roll my eyes. I resolved to let him finish talking - the same courtesy he had granted me half an hour earlier - and then make up my mind.
Ghosts, he explained, may or may not exist. But that wasn’t the point. Alleged hauntings most certainly do exist, and exhibit physical manifestations. Whether they are environmental or paranormal, these effects are real, and ghost hunters have been measuring them since the nineteenth century; but until now, nobody has thought to harness them.
People who claim to have experienced hauntings describe sudden changes in air temperature, strange sounds, and feelings of dread. More macroscopic effects might include wind, or even objects moving of their own volition. All of these, Caruso told me, could be harnessed to provide energy.
“Feelings of dread?” I asked, breaking the promise to myself not to interrupt.
Caruso explained that skeptics have written this off as a number of different phenomena, but are generally keen on infrasound - sound at a frequency too low for human hearing, but that can nevertheless be sensed. Back in the 80s, a British researcher had experienced a haunting in a lab, as had several other people who worked there; he eventually traced it down to a faulty extractor fan emitting infrasound. He got it fixed, and the haunting stopped. This was a physical phenomenon with a simple explanation, but still, one that could be used to extract energy.
Caruso continued like this for some time. I was getting increasingly skeptical about the work; you could make an interesting gadget for party tricks, but I couldn’t see how our device could possibly draw enough environmental power to charge a phone, let alone supply an entire house. Caruso urged me to continue the work, replying that even if it didn’t result in anything practical, I’d still come out with a master’s thesis.
So I kept going. It was well into my second year before I had something really usable. A square of miniaturized electronics, two inches wide, that could - at best - draw 0.3 mW of power from the environment. And so last November I carried my equipment to Caruso’s office for a demonstration.
Despite its age, paranormal studies has much better environmental controls than the physics labs. We control the environment in small containers for our experiments; they control the environment for the comfort of their staff. This is nice, but it meant my galvanometer barely went above 0.1 mW. Still, this was enough for Caruso to let out a little shriek of excitement. “When can we test it in the field?”
I told him that a single module had a maximum power rating of 20 mW. It was a prototype, and far from optimized, but I’d done some calculations that showed that to power a typical US household, at best we would need so many of these connected in parallel that the final product would be the size of a large fridge. Caruso pointed out - quite correctly - that this is exactly why he’d recruited an electrical engineer, and that something the size of a fridge was a good trade-off for having electricity and fuel bills of zero.
But, I replied, even if I could get the maximum power up, there simply wasn’t the energy available in the environment to reach anywhere near that maximum.
Caruso gave me a sly look. The kind of look your co-conspirator might give you, except I wasn’t in on the conspiracy. “Just work on the electronics. Have it ready by March first. I’ll sort out the environmental problem.”
Well, this guy was paying my entire tuition, and the budget he’d arranged with Jenny was several times higher than most grad students in physics. Over the next few months I worked on an improved prototype, figured out how to automate much of the production, and built an aggregation system to route all the power to a central supply point. On my March deadline I had a device about the size of a backpack, and indeed, I fitted it all into a backpack for easy transport. I was regularly pulling upwards of 500 mW in the right conditions, but nowhere near the theoretical maximum of 200 W - enough to power a small LED, from a device that could almost run a hairdryer.
When I showed this to Caruso, he delightfully declared: “It’s ready!”
“Ready for what?” I asked.
“A proper test. Bring it here tonight, I’ll meet you on the steps outside the department at seven.”
So I did. In the last light of evening, we got into Caruso’s car and set off.
There are a lot of very old buildings in town, many dating back to pre-Civil War, and of course, this means lots of ghost stories. I’ve never gone in for that much, but I recognized the house we parked in front of. I’ve passed it plenty of times, and in the summer it’s not uncommon to see a tour guide talking about it to a group of tourists, or sometimes locals on a workplace evening out. The house is three stories tall, with wood paneling on the outside. The windows are small, with diagonal grids - I think made of lead - except for a couple which have been smashed and boarded up. Nobody has lived there for quite some time, and it shows. There is a small yard out front, mostly overgrown, and it took us a bit of effort to maneuver through the path to the front door.
To my surprise, the door was locked. Caruso, apparently having anticipated this, brought out a crowbar from his inside coat pocket. I was slightly alarmed at how easily he broke in, and made a mental note to ask him later how a paranormal studies researcher is so adept at B&E. But right now I had another burning question.
“You actually want us to draw power from a haunted house?”
“Well,” he said, pushing the busted door open, “we don’t know that it’s haunted, but we do know that several people have reported strange disturbances. Do you know the history of this place?”
I confessed that I didn’t.
“In the 1780s a wealthy family lived here. They made their living from insuring ships engaged in the transatlantic slave trade. Supposedly the daughter objected, finding her father’s trade unconscionable. A neighbor’s diary records some of the loud arguments he overheard, often lasting for hours.
“Then one day, the daughter died, just seventeen years old. The cause of death was officially recorded as typhus, but neighbors record that there was a particularly angry exchange between father and daughter, her voice raised more than you’d expect from a person dying of fever. When they brought her body out of the house, there were several bystanders watching, some of whom claimed they saw blood on her clothes and knife wounds in her chest.”
We were inside at this point, looking around a dimly lit hallway. Caruso lit an electric lamp.
“The well-to-do back then had little they enjoyed more than gossip, and the family quickly got a reputation. The father had murdered his daughter, the mother was in on it, that sort of thing. We’ll never know exactly what happened, but we do know that a year later, on the anniversary of her daughter’s death, the mother hanged herself.” Caruso pointed to the landing above us. “Just there.”
This is exactly why I never joined those tour groups. I hate this stuff.
“The couple had two children. With the daughter and mother gone, the father and son were alone in the house. Things got strained. Apparently the son blamed his father for both of the deaths, and their arguments often turned physical. The boy, about fourteen at the time, was often seen hiding his face to try to cover the bruises. This went on for about a year.” He paused for a second. “Exactly a year. One year after the mother hanged herself, two years after the daughter died mysteriously, a fire started in the house. The building was gutted, and by the time they managed to put the fire out, the father was dead. They never found the boy.”
Caruso had also brought a backpack with him, and now he was carefully laying out its contents. He had crystals, chalk, feathers, salt - all sorts of rubbish you might find in a New Age shop. He seemed to be arranging them in some sort of pattern, and when he was done, he started drawing shapes on the wooden floor with the chalk. This clearly needed some concentration, but that only slowed his speech. He continued.
“This is a good location, and the shell of the house that remained was reasonably sturdy. So years later, somebody bought the site from the estate - some grand-niece, I think, who lived in Boston - and rebuilt it, more or less brick-for-brick, plank-for-plank. They came from out of town, New York I think, so they weren’t aware of the history, only that there had been a fire. They were a family of six - it’s a big house - three daughters and one son. Very pleasant, by all accounts. The children were young, and went to school locally. Their teachers are on record saying they had concerns.”
He left the house then. I walked around the ground floor. There were minimal facilities; a kitchen, dining room and living room, but no furniture. I saw a few electrical outlets, two per room, with decaying and yellowing plastic. I doubt any of them worked.
Caruso returned with several waist-height candlesticks. “Where was I?” He placed the sticks in a neat circle. “Oh, right, the kids. So written records from the schools say that the children were weird. They always looked tired, and complained that they couldn’t sleep. Apparently the younger girls drew frightening faces, and the boy told his teacher that he didn’t like the women he lived with. The teacher asked if he meant his sisters or his mother, and he said no - it was the other women. They wouldn’t let him sleep, and they told him everything was his fault.
“Eventually things came to a head. The girls’ school told the parents their daughters had been frightening the other girls, and they wouldn’t be welcome any more. Back then, good schools were few and far between, and soon enough the family had packed up and gone back to New York. Or wherever.”
He now began placing candles on the candlesticks.
“That was back in, I think the 1860s. The house has changed hands a few times since then, but nobody has stayed more than a year or two. It’s been empty most of the time, the last people lived here in … 1978 I think. They left without saying anything, but a reporter caught up with them in the 90s. They said that they heard crying every night, and their goldfish always died a few days after they bought them. Even squatters and homeless people stay away these days.”
The house was unheated and poorly insulated, on that spring evening. Maybe that’s why a chill ran through my body. Maybe that’s why I got goosebumps. And that whispering noise I thought I heard - well, it’s not like those old walls were any good at keeping the wind out, right? Caruso stood back from his handiwork, and actually rubbed his hands together. “It’s ready!”
“Ready for what?” I asked, already knowing the answer. He gave me a look like I was stupid. So I brought the micro-powerplant out of my backpack and set it up in the center of the arcane construction he’d built.
It was full dark outside by now, and it took half an hour to adjust the various settings on my equipment. While I’d been setting it up, Caruso had pulled out two oil-fired storm lanterns, and set them up either side of his ridiculous ghost apparatus. He turned the electric lamp off; this made sense, as my galvanometer was sensitive enough to read the electromagnetic field of the lamp if he moved it. He turned his phone off, and I did the same.
There was just enough light to read the display. For a long time it varied between about 300 and 500 mW, about average for my tests. We sat there watching it for about an hour before it started to rise. 600 - 700 - 800 mW - that was the highest I’d ever recorded! And it went further. Over just a couple of minutes, I watched as the reading increased. 900 - 1,000 - 1,100 mW.
I heard a sound. I’d never heard anything like it - and I haven’t in the months since, except in my nightmares. It was like a gale of wind, filled with whispers, almost intelligible. The sort of sound where you know it makes sense, but you can’t quite figure it out yourself. And above it, a shrill scream of terror - though whether the sound was the result or the cause of terror, I can’t say. My blood ran cold, and I felt my feet rooted to the spot. I had just enough wherewithal left in me to look at the display.
It was stable now. 2,800 mW.
This was almost exciting enough for me to ignore the sounds, which were surely just the wind rushing through the upper floors above us. And I may have been able to calm myself - had I not witnessed what happened next.
The candles flickered. I distinctly remembered that they all rose up and blew outwards, away from the center. And in the middle of them was a face. A woman’s face, but about twice as big as a face should be, and it was clear that the screaming was coming from her.
The candles, and the storm lanterns, blew out. I could see nothing.
Seconds earlier, my fight-flight-freeze instincts had settled on freeze. Now they switched modes. I turned and ran for the door. It was only a few feet behind me, and despite the pitch-darkness, I found it and pushed it open - only to remember that it opened inwards. Panic rising in my guts, I fumbled for the door handle for what felt like an eternity, grasped it, yanked open the door, and tumbled out into the path. I ran to the end of the street before I dared look back.
Caruso was there, calmly walking to his car, with my device in his hands. He got in and turned the engine on, dazzling me with his bright headlights, and drove my way. When he reached me he opened the passenger window. “Need a lift?”
I have no idea how he was so calm. I just wanted to run far, far away. My legs were like jelly, though, and I didn’t think I could even make it all the way home. Caruso dropped me off, said he’d call me tomorrow, and headed away into the darkness.
I didn’t go into the lab the next morning. I had barely had any sleep, and really didn’t want to talk about it, but around ten, Caruso called me. I refused to go in, so he invited himself round to mine. I wish I’d walked home, rather than let him know where I live.
I almost didn’t open the door when he arrived. I let him into the hallway, but no further. He was very excited, speaking rapidly, and more energetic than I’ve ever seen him before. When he started talking about returning, I told him point blank that I was out. There was no way I was ever stepping foot in that house again, and he could stick his power plant … well, you get the idea.
Money isn’t everything. Remember that. No matter how much somebody wants to pay you, some things are just not worth it.
Caruso brought a brown paper packet out of his jacket and handed it to me. I opened it; it was full of fifties.
“Ten thousand dollars. Call it hazard pay. Just one more test, tomorrow night, then you never need to go back. You can finish your masters in the lab, no more field trips.”
Even with my tuition covered, I was barely making my rent. Ten thousand would pay off my debts, and cover my costs to the end of my masters, maybe more. I accepted.
I spent the next two days making adjustments to the device. It drew multiple watts in the previous test, enough to power a small light bulb, so I built a new display, a 10 by 10 grid of bulbs which would come on in sequence to show the power draw. One bulb would be 2 W, and all hundred would be the maximum 200 W. I met Caruso in front of paranormal studies around seven on March third, and we set off once more to that cursed house.
It looked just as it had two nights earlier. The door was still busted open, and we set everything up the same way as before. I came prepared this time; I had secretly hidden several flashlights in my pockets, as well as some high-intensity lightsticks I’d got from a hardware store, and I had a pair of thermal imaging goggles I’d “borrowed” from the lab - I wore them on my forehead, turned off to avoid causing interference with the device. They were only for emergencies. I’d considered a weapon, but what use would that be against a ghost? Besides - I told myself - ghosts aren’t real. We had been in the dark, in an eerie house with a bad reputation, and Caruso had just told me a spooky story. In that state of mind, of course my brain would conjure up a phantom face. I remembered how he had been so calm walking out of the house; no doubt he hadn’t seen anything, and it was all just my imagination.
I turned on the device to test it before Caruso had lit the candles. I was getting 1,200 mW already, and the first bulb was clearly visible in the darkness. He then lit the candles, one by one, and I watched the power increase. The heat engines in the device should be able to draw something from the candles, but only about 20 mW. The second bulb lit up, then the third, then the fourth. Over 8 W!
Again I heard whispering. No, I told myself, it’s just the wind. It was the wind two days ago, and it’s the wind now.
The power draw was steady now, with seven bulbs lit up. Still a long way from maximum, but far more than it had any right to be. Something suddenly occurred to me.
“Caruso”, I said, fearing the reply, “that girl died on a certain date. Then the mother died on the same date a year later. Then the house burned down -”
“Yeah, that’s right,” he replied. “March third. Tonight.”
Damn ghost stories.
“What are we getting?”
How could he be so calm? I told him we were on 15 W.
“Not enough. I was worried about this. The ghosts are too old. We need something fresher.”
That didn’t sound good. I was getting seriously worried, and questioning whether all this was worth ten thousand bucks.
Caruso went back to his bags and pulled out a small plastic box. Inside was a mouse. And while I’d decided against weapons, he had apparently brought a six-inch knife.
“What? Caruso, no!” I shouted, but it didn’t help. He took the mouse, which was just waking up, to the middle of the circle, and slit its throat.
The wailing sounds, that I’d been so desperate to pretend had just been the wind, intensified. The candle flames flickered and grew. And I saw blue light streaming out of the mouse’s corpse, like ribbons fluttering in the wind. More bulbs lit up - the second row was partly on now. We were pulling 25 W of power - and it stayed there.
My heart was pounding. Adrenaline pumped through my veins. Somehow I managed not to turn and flee. I turned on my thermal goggles; they would make next to no difference to such a high power draw. The room was mostly dark, but the candle flames, bulbs, Caruso, and slowly-cooling mouse cadaver were bright white.
“Still not enough”, said the glowing thermal image of Caruso. “A mouse isn’t going to cut it, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
“What? What are you saying? You want to kill twenty mice over these things, then sell them in a department store?”
“No, spectral energy doesn’t work like that. Two mice wouldn’t work, it needs to be one large sacrifice. Something with a bigger … soul, if you will.”
What the hell was Caruso talking about? He said nobody had tried this before, but who knows what he’d read in those kooky books on his shelves?
Then it dawned on me. He meant people. He wanted to build hundreds of these, thousands, and kill a human being over each one.
Two centuries earlier the house had been the scene of a violent confrontation over the ethics of slavery. Now history repeated itself - except somehow, this lunatic had managed to find something even worse. He argued that these devices could halt global warming and stop oil wars. I argued that murder was wrong, no matter what. He said it would save more lives than it cost. I shouted him down, called him evil, a psychopath.
Even more animated than before, Caruso stepped closer. He got right in my face, and yelled that we had to do this. I pushed him away. He pushed me back. I aimed a punch at him; he dodged, and hit me in the face.
This knocked my goggles off. Oh, how I wish he had done anything else. The ghosts hadn’t shown up in infrared, but now I saw them, clear as day. A young woman, bleeding from her belly; an older woman, with a rope around her neck; a man with charred and blackened skin. All of them were glowing in the darkness, standing just ten feet away, watching the fight.
Then I noticed something I hadn’t realized. Caruso was still holding the knife. I had to get it out of his hand before he decided to use me as his next test subject. I went to grab it; he swung it at me, and I leaped out of the way just in time. I’m not sure exactly what happened next; there was a scuffle, either he grabbed me or I grabbed him, and we wrestled for a few moments until suddenly Caruso stopped fighting. He staggered back, blood gushing from his abdomen.
I looked down. Somehow, during the struggle I had got the knife, which was now in my blood-soaked hands.
Caruso fell to his knees, just inside the circle. He tried to say something, but I couldn’t make it out. Then he slumped to the ground.
The screaming intensified. Blue light streamed from his corpse, flooding the room. The light bulbs all lit up, brighter than ever. As I turned to run, the candles blew out and the bulbs, pushed far beyond their capacity, exploded all at once. I grabbed the door handle, clearly lit up in the bright blue light, opened the door, and ran.
It was about midnight, and I got home without anybody seeing my bloody hands. Nothing followed me from the house. That’s probably my only good news.
The next morning, after I’d got over the five shots of whiskey I had to calm myself down, I called a lawyer, and then the police. Everybody knew I was working with Caruso, and his car was parked outside the house; it wouldn’t be hard to connect the dots when he was reported missing.
I’m being charged with involuntary manslaughter. I told the police everything, with a few obvious exceptions. Seeing that I’d voluntarily turned myself in, and cooperated with the police, the judge set a low bail; ironically, she put it at ten thousand dollars, and I got a friend to pick up the package from my house.
My court date is in a few months, and my lawyer says I’ve got a good chance of claiming self-defense. I might not have to spend a single night in prison. But the university kicked me out, my device is in police evidence, and I haven’t had a restful night’s sleep in months. I wake up screaming most nights, and I pray that the visions I see sometimes in the day are just trauma, rather than the ghosts of that family. And Doctor Caruso.
And the mouse.