Why We Sense Somebody Who Isn’t There

For 10 months, Ernest Shackleton and his crew, bound for the South Pole, were stranded in Antarctic ice. The massive pressure of the ice was slowly crushing their ship, HMS Endurance. When the ship began to break apart, the men abandoned it and camped on the ice. A few weeks later, the Endurance sank. The freezing days dragged on, but the men saw hope when their icy campground began to splinter, revealing a watery lane for their small boats.

In May 1916, the explorers set off for land, battling violent winds, currents, and ice floes. They rowed until their bodies were ragged. Soon they began seeing things: “resemblances to human faces and living forms in the fantastic contour and massively uncouth shapes of berg and floe,” Shackleton wrote in his account of their survival, . During a 36-hour trek