What it studies
Reported psi phenomena and anomalous experiences: extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, apparitions, mediumship, near death experiences, out of body experiences, and possible survival of consciousness after death.
Section I
Orientation
Parapsychology is not the same thing as ghost hunting. That distinction matters.
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What it is not
Not automatic proof of spirits, demons, aliens, magic, or religion. Those are interpretations. The raw data are reports, observations, measurements, histories, experiments, and patterns.
The working attitude
Respect the witness. Question the claim. Preserve the record. Test ordinary causes. Keep the mystery if mystery remains. Do not inflate it to sell a podcast.
How this connects to spirituality
Parapsychology and spirituality overlap when unusual experiences raise questions about consciousness, death, meaning, prayer, mysticism, and the unseen structure of reality. They are not the same thing. Spirituality asks what an experience means. Parapsychology asks what happened, how we know, and whether the claim survives disciplined scrutiny.
For the broader religious and philosophical side, see the companion page: Spirituality, perennial wisdom, and independent religious thought.
Section II
Core Concepts
Learn the vocabulary before arguing with anyone. Precision costs nothing. Imprecision costs everything.
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Psi
A neutral label for claimed anomalous information transfer or mind-matter interaction. Avoids declaring the mechanism before we know it.
Extrasensory perception
Claimed information acquisition beyond known sensory channels. Includes telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and remote viewing.
Psychokinesis
Claimed influence of mind or intention on physical systems. Modern research focuses on random number generators rather than bent spoons.
Survival research
Research into whether some aspect of consciousness continues after death. Covers mediumship, apparitions, deathbed visions, reincarnation cases, and NDEs.
Mind to mind
Claimed direct communication between minds without ordinary sensory contact. Experiments often use sender and receiver designs.
Mind to target
Claimed perception of a hidden or distant target without ordinary access. Remote viewing is a structured version of this claim.
Future information
Claimed knowledge of future events not inferable from present information. Difficult because it challenges ordinary causation.
Encounter reports
Reports of seeing or sensing persons, animals, or presences not physically present. May involve grief, place memory, sleep states, crisis events, or unknown factors.
Section III
Evidence Map
Not all evidence is the same. Some categories have decades of experiments. Some are mostly case reports. Some are cultural noise wearing a bedsheet.
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Area
What is studied
Best evidence type
Status
Ganzfeld telepathy
Sender and receiver experiments using mild sensory reduction.
Controlled experiments and meta-analysis.
Disputed
Remote viewing
Structured description of hidden or distant targets.
Blind judging, target pools, government program records.
Mixed
Precognition
Possible future-oriented information effects.
Lab experiments, forced-choice tasks, preregistered replications.
Highly contested
Psychokinesis
Possible mental influence on random physical systems.
Random event generator studies and replication attempts.
Highly contested
Mediumship
Claims of communication with deceased persons.
Triple blind and quintuple blind reading protocols.
Research active
Near death experiences
Reports during close brush with death or clinical crisis.
Medical records, interviews, cross-cultural comparison, prospective studies.
Strong experience data
Haunt cases
Recurring anomalous events associated with a person or place.
Case logs, environmental controls, witness separation.
Variable
Reincarnation cases
Children reporting previous life memories.
Early documentation, family independence, verified statements.
Case-based
Stargate and remote viewing
The United States funded and evaluated remote viewing programs for intelligence purposes. The historical record is important because it shows both serious official interest and the practical problem: information that looks intriguing in a lab is not automatically useful in operations.
Bem and precognition
Daryl Bem's 2011 paper brought precognition claims into mainstream psychology debate. It also became a major example in the replication crisis. That is useful even if you doubt psi, because weak methods and publication bias do not become harmless just because the topic is strange.
Section IV
Research Methods
Good parapsychology looks boring from the outside. Controls, blinding, statistics, logs, null results, and patience. The fun stuff comes later, if it survives.
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Blind and double-blind design
A person cannot leak information they do not have. Good protocols isolate the claimant, the sitter, the experimenter, the judge, and the target material where possible.
Target control
Target pools must be large enough, randomized, and protected from sensory leakage. A sloppy target pool can manufacture hits through chance and ambiguity.
Effect size over drama
A statistically significant result can still be small, fragile, or useless. Ask about effect size, confidence intervals, replication, and preregistration.
Contemporaneous notes
Write it down before interpretation. Memory edits itself. It does not ask permission.
Repeatability
The central criticism of parapsychology is replication. Any serious claim should welcome independent replication under improved controls.
Human subjects matter
Grief, trauma, fear, and religious conviction are not lab toys. Protect witnesses. Do not exploit vulnerable people for content.
Minimum evidence standard for a claim
A useful claim should include who, what, when, where, original notes, environmental conditions, chain of custody for media, names of witnesses, what ordinary explanations were tested, and what would count as disconfirmation. Without that, it is a story. Stories can matter, but they are not the same thing as evidence.
Common sources of false positives
Sleep paralysis, hypnagogic imagery, grief hallucinations, carbon monoxide, infrasound, electrical faults, rodents, settling structures, plumbing, pareidolia, suggestion, religious framing, bad camera compression, reflections, hoaxes, and plain old panic.
What makes a case interesting
Multiple independent witnesses, early documentation, accurate unknown information, controlled conditions, physical traces with chain of custody, event recurrence under observation, and failed ordinary explanations after competent review.
Section V
Field Protocol
For home cases, haunt reports, unusual experiences, crisis apparitions, object movement claims, and similar fieldwork. Keep it clean.
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Field investigation anchor: Loyd Auerbach & OPI
Any serious parapsychology field guide should include Loyd Auerbach and the Office of Paranormal Investigations. Auerbach's work is useful because it does not treat field investigation as entertainment first. It treats hauntings, apparitions, poltergeists, witnesses, and evidence as casework.
Start with Auerbach's books, especially ESP, Hauntings and Poltergeists and Hauntings & Poltergeists.
01
Intake without leading the witness.Ask open questions. Do not mention demons, spirits, portals, curses, or pet theories. Let the witness describe the experience in their own words.
02
Establish consent and boundaries.Use a written agreement. Explain what you will inspect, record, photograph, publish, and keep confidential. People deserve clarity.
03
Separate witnesses.Interview witnesses separately before they compare stories. Shared memory can become group folklore in about four minutes.
04
Build a timeline.Record dates, times, weather, sleep patterns, medication changes, family stress, home repairs, electrical issues, pets, visitors, and neighborhood activity.
05
Inspect ordinary causes first.Check HVAC, plumbing, wiring, pests, loose windows, structural movement, appliance cycles, drafts, mirrors, carbon monoxide, and noise sources.
06
Document the environment.Use photos, video, audio, floor plans, compass readings, temperature, humidity, EMF readings, and baseline notes. Record instrument model and settings.
07
Control your team.No whispering during EVP attempts. No wandering alone. No theatrics. No provoking. No pretending an app with a skull icon is scientific instrumentation.
08
Preserve media properly.Keep original files. Do not overwrite metadata. Log who handled each file. Edited clips are for presentation, not analysis.
09
Classify findings.Use categories: explained, likely explained, insufficient data, anomalous but weak, anomalous and documented, or requires follow-up.
10
Report plainly.Tell the client what you found, what you did not find, and what you recommend. Do not scare people to look important.
Section VI
Research Traditions
The field has lanes. Learn all of them. Knowing only one produces partisans, not researchers.
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Classic investigation
The older tradition: apparitions, mediumship, telepathy, crisis cases, hauntings, and survival questions. The Society for Psychical Research is the historic anchor.
Laboratory parapsychology
Controlled tests of telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, random event generators, forced-choice tasks, and ganzfeld designs.
Applied parapsychology
Practical investigation of hauntings, apparitions, poltergeists, witnesses, and physical settings. This is where Loyd Auerbach and OPI belong.
Consciousness after death
Mediumship, near death experiences, deathbed visions, reincarnation cases, and apparitions. This lane overlaps most directly with spirituality.
Mind and ontology
The philosophical side: whether consciousness is produced by the brain, transmitted through it, or something more fundamental. The hard problem is still hard.
Useful doubt
Skepticism should test claims, not perform smugness. The best skeptical work finds errors, fraud, and weak controls while still taking witnesses seriously.
Section VII
People Worth Reading
Not a sainthood list. Some are advocates, some are critics, some changed the field by making everyone argue harder about method.
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William James
Philosopher and psychologist who took psychical research seriously while keeping a careful, pragmatic frame. Essential for anyone studying religion, experience, and consciousness.
Frederic W. H. Myers
Central figure in early psychical research and author of Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death.
J. B. Rhine
Brought experimental parapsychology into the modern laboratory at Duke University through card guessing and statistical ESP work.
Loyd Auerbach
Parapsychologist, investigator, educator, Director of OPI. One of the clearest bridges between formal parapsychology and practical haunt casework.
Louisa E. Rhine
Important for spontaneous case collections and the study of everyday psi reports, not just laboratory trials.
Jessica Utts
Statistician known for serious analysis of psi data, including remote viewing and replication debates.
Charles Honorton
Major figure in ganzfeld research and the automated protocols designed to answer earlier criticism.
Dean Radin
Researcher and author associated with experimental psi, meta-analysis, and consciousness research. Read critically.
Julie Beischel
Windbridge researcher known for controlled mediumship protocols and applied research around grief.
Bruce Greyson
Psychiatrist and near death experience researcher, known for the Greyson NDE Scale and clinical studies.
Ian Stevenson
University of Virginia psychiatrist known for investigating children who reported previous life memories. Foundational and dense.
Jim B. Tucker
Continued child past-life memory research at the University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies.
James Alcock
Psychologist and critic of parapsychology. Read critics directly. It keeps your work honest.
Etzel Cardeña
Thorsen Professor of Psychology at Lund University, director of CERCAP, and editor of the Journal of Parapsychology. His 2018 review of the experimental evidence for psi in American Psychologist is one of the more rigorous recent attempts to summarize the state of the research.
Susan Blackmore
Started as a believer, earned a PhD in parapsychology, ran her own experiments for years, found no evidence, and became one of the field's most thoughtful critics. Her trajectory is more useful than most of the debates she walked away from.
Rupert Sheldrake
Biologist and former Royal Society Research Fellow known for morphic resonance and practical telepathy experiments with animals and people. His work is contested by mainstream science, and worth reading for that reason as much as any other.
Section VIII
Essential Reading
Start with primary sources and serious surveys. Avoid books that mistake confidence for evidence. There are many of those.
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An Introduction to ParapsychologyHarvey J. Irwin and Caroline A. Watt. Good general academic entry point.
TextbookESP, Hauntings and PoltergeistsLoyd Auerbach. Practical handbook covering psi, hauntings, poltergeists, famous cases, and field investigation.
Field guideHauntings & Poltergeists: A Ghost Hunter's GuideLoyd Auerbach. Accessible guide to ghostly phenomena, hauntings, poltergeists, and what parapsychology can and cannot say about them.
HauntingsPsychic DreamingLoyd Auerbach. Covers telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, out-of-body experience, and psi in dreams.
DreamsA Paranormal CasebookLoyd Auerbach. Case-based material from decades of paranormal investigation. Useful for learning how field cases actually behave.
CaseworkParapsychology: A Handbook for the 21st CenturyEdited by Etzel Cardeña, John Palmer, and David Marcusson Clavertz. Serious modern survey.
ReferenceThe Conscious UniverseDean Radin. Advocacy-oriented but important for understanding the pro-psi argument.
Psi researchEntangled MindsDean Radin. Explores psi claims, consciousness, and quantum analogies. Read critically.
ConsciousnessAfterBruce Greyson. One of the stronger modern introductions to near death experience research.
NDEConsciousness Beyond LifePim van Lommel. Near death experience research from a cardiologist's perspective.
NDELife Before LifeJim B. Tucker. Accessible entry into child past-life memory research.
ReincarnationReturn to LifeJim B. Tucker. More recent case material from the UVA reincarnation research tradition.
ReincarnationTwenty Cases Suggestive of ReincarnationIan Stevenson. Foundational case-based work. Dense but historically important.
Case researchHuman Personality and Its Survival of Bodily DeathFrederic W. H. Myers. Classic psychical research. Old, but historically central.
ClassicThe Varieties of Religious ExperienceWilliam James. Not strictly parapsychology, but essential for religious experience, mysticism, and consciousness.
ClassicThe Trickster and the ParanormalGeorge P. Hansen. Useful for the unstable, social, and symbolic nature of paranormal claims.
TheoryThe Elusive ScienceSeymour Mauskopf and Michael McVaugh. Serious historical study of experimental psychical research.
HistoryThe Search for Psychic PowerC. E. M. Hansel. Skeptical classic. Read it because friendly fire is not the only kind of fire.
CriticismParapsychology: Science or Magic?James Alcock. Skeptical critique from a psychologist. Not optional if you want credibility.
CriticismThe Psychology of the PsychicDavid Marks and Richard Kammann. Skeptical psychology of psychic claims, perception, and error.
Criticism
Section IX
Reputable Sources
Use these before wandering into content farms, breathless YouTube channels, or someone selling a $900 spirit certification with a stock photo owl.
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Psi Encyclopedia
The best general reference for psychical research topics, figures, historical cases, and technical concepts.
Visit Psi Encyclopedia →Society for Psychical Research
Founded in 1882. Historic center of scholarly psychical research. Key source for serious study.
Visit SPR →Parapsychological Association
International professional organization for scientists and scholars studying psi phenomena.
Visit the PA →Rhine Research Center
Research, education, courses, lectures, and the Journal of Parapsychology tradition.
Visit Rhine →Office of Paranormal Investigations
Founded by Loyd Auerbach. Hauntings, apparitions, poltergeists, case consultation, and applied field parapsychology.
Visit OPI →Windbridge Research Center
Controlled mediumship research, grief application research, and research medium screening.
Visit Windbridge →Rhine Education Center
Online courses in parapsychology, investigation, altered states, research methods, and related fields.
Visit Rhine Education →CIA Reading Room
Declassified government material on remote viewing and related programs. Read primary documents.
Search CIA Reading Room →University of Virginia DOPS
Division of Perceptual Studies, known for near death experiences, past-life memory research, and survival questions.
Visit UVA DOPS →
Section X
Skepticism Without Laziness
Bad believers and bad skeptics share the same disease: they already know the answer. The symptoms differ. The disease does not.
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The goal is not to protect a belief. The goal is to protect the question long enough for evidence to do its job.
Useful doubt
- Checks sensory leakage.
- Looks for fraud without assuming everyone is lying.
- Understands statistics.
- Distinguishes weak evidence from no evidence.
- Allows uncertainty to remain uncertainty.
- Reads the case before explaining it.
Cheap dismissal
- Explains cases before reading them.
- Uses ridicule as a method.
- Confuses worldview protection with science.
- Ignores witness psychology.
- Treats all anomalies as identical nonsense.
- Performs skepticism for an audience.
Section XI
Field Glossary
Short definitions for fast use. If a term matters to the case, research it deeper before using it in a report.
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- Apparition
- An experience of seeing or sensing a person, animal, figure, or presence not physically present.
- Crisis apparition
- An apparition or sensed presence reported around the time of a distant person's death or crisis.
- EVP
- Electronic voice phenomenon. Alleged voices on audio recordings. Extremely vulnerable to noise, expectation, and pareidolia.
- Ganzfeld
- A sensory reduction method used in telepathy experiments, usually involving sender and receiver roles.
- Hit
- A correct or apparently correct match between a claim and target information. Hits must be judged against chance and ambiguity.
- Miss
- An incorrect statement or failed match. Serious evaluation counts misses. Salesmen do not.
- Poltergeist
- A case pattern involving noises, object movement, and disturbances, often centered around a person or household.
- Remote viewing
- A structured attempt to describe a distant or hidden target without ordinary access.
- Sitter
- The person receiving a mediumship reading or participating as the target subject in some survival research contexts.
Section XII
Practical Study Path
A sane route through the subject. Not glamorous. Glamour is how nonsense gets a mortgage.
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01
Read one general textbook.Start with an academic overview before diving into cases, YouTube, or pet theories.
02
Learn the history.Study SPR, Rhine, Duke, ASPR, ganzfeld debates, PEAR, Stargate, Windbridge, UVA DOPS, OPI, and modern skeptical criticism.
03
Study research methods.Learn blinding, randomization, effect size, p-values, preregistration, replication, file drawer effects, and cold reading controls.
04
Read critics.Do not hide from Alcock, Wiseman, Hyman, Blackmore, or skeptical reviews. If your view cannot survive criticism, it was decoration.
05
Study field investigators.Read Loyd Auerbach and others who treat hauntings as disciplined casework, not theater.
06
Build a case file template.Use consistent fields: witnesses, timeline, environment, media, ordinary causes, analysis, conclusion.
07
Keep claims modest.Say "unexplained under current review" when that is all you have. It is not weakness. It is adult supervision.
Section XIII
Related Pages
This page belongs in the larger adamhinds.net field guide network.
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