These ‘What We Said’ Halloween Stories Prove Science Can’t Explain Everything

You ever get hit with a random 3 a.m. vibe check from the universe? Like—your phone lights up, your cat stares into a corner, and suddenly you’re whisper-praying to the ceiling fan? We tell ourselves we’re not scared while continuously scrolling TikTok ghost stories in bed..

On What We Said, best-friends-turned-cohosts Jaci Marie Smith and Chelsey Jade Curtis lean into that chaos every October, trading listener-submitted stories that make even skeptics sleep with one AirPod in. But behind the jump scares and nervous laughs is a weirdly comforting thought: science actually has a reason for almost everything that goes bump in the night.

The desert road where everything went wrong

Four college friends decide to take a sunny Arizona weekend trip. But when the conversation turns to skinwalker folklore—a Navajo legend about harmful witches who shapeshift into animals—one friend suggests they drive out to Sorro Lake at night to tell more stories. You know, the kind of decision people make in horror movies right before everything goes sideways.

About ten minutes into the drive down a dark, isolated desert road with no street lights, the energy shifts. “The conversation turned from chatty and giggly and singing to music to quiet and a rather nervous laughter,” Curtis reads. “A greater darkness surrounded our car and a sick feeling lingered all around us.” That’s when the car’s music suddenly blasts to full volume—by itself. “My phone was connected to Bluetooth and sitting in the cup holder. No one touched the volume dial. No one touched my phone.”

As they speed home in panic mode, the volume goes up and down, up and down. “I screamed at someone to turn it off,” she continues. “One of the girls smacked it off and the others held each other in sheer panic.” But it doesn’t end there. Later that night, trying to sleep, an emergency alarm starts blaring from the basement TV. When her dad investigates, he finds nothing—no alerts, no announcements, and the alarm stops the second he arrives.

While calling the car “possessed” makes for a great story, the real explanation might be less supernatural and more tech-gremlin mayhem. Bluetooth systems are infamous for random volume spikes, especially when your phone reconnects mid-drive. One second you’re vibing, the next your speakers are screaming like you just summoned something. And that midnight siren from the basement TV? Probably just a late-night Emergency Alert System test. Mix all that with a tense drive, desert darkness, and a brain already on edge, and it’s no wonder it felt like something otherworldly followed them home.

The glamping loft that children attract

A hair stylist and her coworkers book a cute Airbnb called “the glamping loft” for a Galentine’s sleepover. The place seems normal until she wakes up at 3:16 a.m.—wide awake, unable to fall back asleep until almost 7:00 a.m. “I never have issues when it comes to sleeping,” Curtis reads. “So, strange how wide awake I was at this time.”

The real activity starts the next night when her boss stays there with her husband and four kids. Around midnight, loud noises start coming from upstairs. “It sounded like furniture moving, a chair sharply scraping on the floor, an occasional ball rolling across the floor and hitting a wall, then rolling back.” She assumes it’s neighbors having a Super Bowl party. But when her husband asks “what neighbors?”—that’s when she realizes they haven’t seen anyone else enter the building. The glamping loft is on the second floor of three, and there’s only one door. They would have seen someone go up.

Her husband checks outside. The floor above is dark. Vacant office space. The noises get louder, “amplified in her youngest son’s tent” specifically. Research on the building reveals a little boy died at that intersection. When she calls the Airbnb emergency line, the representative’s first question is: “Does it sound like haunting noises?” He confirms another guest—a woman with her kids—made the same complaint.

Then comes the humming. “She started hearing humming coming from upstairs,” Curtis continues. “She tried convincing herself that she was starting to hear things because she was starting to feel delirious. However, her son turned to her and whispered, ‘Mom, do you hear that humming?’ And she knew she wasn’t making it up in her head.”

Science offers some explanations here. Old buildings are notorious for producing infrasound through wind passing through structural cavities, HVAC systems, and settling foundations. Researcher Vic Tandy famously discovered that a 19 Hz standing wave in his lab was causing feelings of dread and peripheral “ghost” sightings. When he eliminated the frequency, the hauntings stopped.

Auditory pareidolia—the tendency for our brains to find patterns in random noise—becomes more pronounced in old buildings where pipes, ducts, and wooden beams create a constant low-level acoustic environment. Add the power of suggestion after learning about a child’s death, and the brain starts interpreting those random sounds as footsteps, voices, and yes—a ball rolling back and forth.

But here’s what’s harder to explain—why the phenomena consistently happens when children are present, and why it’s always amplified near where kids are sleeping. The Airbnb confirmed only guests with children report the activity.

The bed that suddenly had company

A 24-year-old throws a New Year’s Eve dinner party at her family’s house while they’re away at a ski town. The house is over 100 years old and, according to her, “frequented by spirits”—though she emphasizes they’ve never had bad experiences. Just silly stuff like phantom footsteps. Everyone leaves around 1:00 a.m.. She cleans until 1:45 a.m. and falls asleep immediately, exhausted.

At 2:30 a.m., she wakes to banging sounds in the basement. “All I could hear was this banging sound like someone was hitting one of the metal pipes downstairs,” Smith reads. She chalks it up to the house settling and goes back to sleep. But at 3:00 a.m., she wakes again—this time to voices right outside her bedroom door in the living room. “It sounds like a group of maybe four people aggressively whispering.”

Relieved but confused, she realizes the TV is on. She didn’t touch it all night. It’s playing a medical commercial, “which has a very distinctive sound and tone to it, and it is not the same cadence as all at all as the multiple whispers.” She turns the TV off, goes back to her room, and puts on New Girl for comfort. An hour later, she’s drifting off when it happens: “I wake up to the feeling of someone sitting on the end of my bed and I go completely still,” Smith continues. “It feels like they get up and sit back down a little closer to me this time. I decide to whip around and turn my light on as fast as I can, and as soon as I do, I obviously don’t see anything.” 

Terrifying? Yes. Scientifically explainable? Also yes. For starters, old homes creak and groan when temperatures shift, especially ones with century-old pipes. That “metal banging” was probably a case of water hammer—the loud knock that happens when fast-moving water hits a closed valve and sends a shockwave through the pipes.

The TV turning on by itself might seem harder to explain, but modern devices love to auto-update in the middle of the night. HDMI-CEC or a random software ping can easily wake up a screen, play a few seconds of cable noise, then power back down as if nothing happened.

As for the chilling sensation of someone sitting on the bed, sleep experts say that’s one of the most common signs of sleep paralysis—a state where your body is still locked in REM but your brain’s awake enough to panic. Exhaustion, stress, and late nights (like hosting until nearly 2 a.m.) all raise the odds. According to the Sleep Foundation, up to 8 percent of people experience it at least once, often describing the same thing: pressure on the chest or mattress, an unseen “presence,” and total stillness. When you stack fatigue, stress, and an old creaky house, your mind can fill in the blanks faster than Netflix’s horror algorithm.

So yeah, maybe it’s not ghosts — just our brains being drama queens. Still, if your TV turns on tonight…maybe don’t investigate. For more eerie insights, tune into What We Said, streaming now on all major podcast platforms.

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