Not a ghost story per se but for a semester in college I helped run the human lab rats through pharmaco overnighters. It was a good study job. Plenty of time to read while the experiments went on.
One study was a 3 night stint. Overnighters paid extra, for both the subjects and us techs. Check in Friday about noon, check out Monday morning. They brought in these huge saline sensory deprivation tanks. I tweaked my back hauling upteen 50lb bags of epson. They'd inject them with some ketamine precipitate probably cooked up by some hippe prof to maximize total mental insensate. They had to like a colostomy exam prep and be totally cleaned out, otherwise they'd swallow their own shit.
The first two studies were boring. Dialing in the properties I guess. Subjects reported feeling of hovering and existential bliss. They begged to come back. Sometimes they did. Chasing psychopomps or that eternal edging orgasm. Another tech would play with this sound system. Mostly droning chomatic subtones, but they settled on static. Not from a deturned TV, but the solar backscatter piped in from Ft Davis.
Our acid-shocked narconauts slingshotted right out of the known universe into interstitial dimensions beneath and behind our own, into transmaterial spheres where sentience is matter, and if they went out as enhanced but effectively empty vessels, then they seldom came back that way. Like human crab traps, we lowered them into the psychotronic abyss, and they routinely came back possessed of something elseβfellow travelers out of time and space, and stranger predators and parasites of the immaterial planes.
Once the study really got ramped up, we had too many volunteers to monitor at once. We had new protocols for the Travelers, the specific modifications to make them perfect narconauts. I just got them higher than God and watched the dials.
When the eye sees nothing, that part of the brain shuts off, but when it sees color but no shade or shape, the brain starts inventing shit. The ganzfeld effect: stare into a whiteout snowstorm and youβll see a black mouth spilling out ultraviolet worms, all kinds of shit your brain throws up there to make sense out of the infuriating absence of meaningful sensory data.
Truth is, after a couple of crypto-psycic trips it got boring. Drain the tank, scrub it. Hand out the envelopes of cash. Mostly they returned with stories. Orbiting planets. Vagina-like orifices with seven fold symmetry. A few didn't come back. We were hardly ever sure with any of them, completely, whether they were just insane or whether they came back changed. Mentally, I mean. Ah well. Austin has a lot of homeless schiziods and hippie burnouts. What was a few more? Maybe I should tried it myself. It was fucked up, but you see that long enough and you begin to think maybe you're missing out.
Itβs like that fear of heights that isnβt really the fear of falling, but the creeping certainty that, given half a chance, for no good reason at all, youβll throw yourself off the ledge. Anyway, that's part of the reason I like to dig holes. It's the depth. Very grounding. The wandering human mind is psychic flypaper. Some things can just be, I dunno. Too open.