Paranormal Phenomena. Different Aspects of Paranormal Experience By Jessica Tremaine
Experiences perceived as paranormal are not uncommon. A house that has the presence of a spirit, a demonic possession or exorcism, telepathy or ESP, some people even claim to have seen an actual ghost or apparition. The list goes on and on. The question of whether paranormal phenomena exists or not has been the topic of many debates, and decades of study. There are approximately 73% of people that believe in the paranormal (Merced). Why do people experience these phenomena? Does belief influence experience? To this day most of the studies are inconclusive at best, with no real definitive proof in favor of one answer or the other.
The real problem in studying a paranormal event is often times they are very difficult to replicate, therefore it is hard for the study to get enough accurate data. When there is a paranormal event that can not be replicated it is generally documented to appease the effected person or persons that experienced these phenomena and then stuck in a file drawer somewhere. These cases are rarely given a second glance.
There are however some significant paranormal cases that do catch attention. One of the most famous cases of paranormal phenomena in history was the haunting of the Amityville House. It all started in on November 13th, 1974. It was around three in the morning when Ronald DeFeo Jr crept through his family’s home with his loaded rifle. He went into each of his siblings’ bedrooms and then into his parents’ bedroom and shot and killed everyone in their beds as they slept. Just about a year later the Lutz family moved into the house. It was soon after that when the Lutz family began to experience paranormal events (38 Real HH; Lovecraft).
They reported these events starting with small disturbances that they found odd and unsettling. Odd things like George Lutz would wake every morning around three am and find himself down at the boathouse. (He would later learn that this was the time that the murders occurred). He would also wake to the sound of the front door slamming shut, and when he would race downstairs, he would find the family dog sleeping soundly in front of the door. He asked his family and nobody else heard the door slamming. George’s wife Kathy began to have nightmares about the murders that took place in the home. She could tell you which order they occurred and which rooms they happened in. After that their children started sleeping face down, just how the murdered children were discovered after they were killed. All of these things started happening within just a few days of moving into the home (38 Real HH; Lovecraft).
Things escalated very quickly for the Lutz family. Their daughter Jodie had a “friend” that was a demonic pig-like creature with glowing red eyes. After hearing this from her daughter, Kathy began to see the glowing red eyes watching her and saw hoof prints outside of their window. The couple began seeing a demon-like figure around the house, and Kathy would often times feel an unseen force touching her. She even got welts on her chest caused by this force one night when it was levitating above her bed. One terrifying night in January, George and Kathy Lutz, after living in this house for only 28 days, had finally had enough. Things in the home were getting out of hand and they simply couldn’t take it anymore. They packed up a few of their belongings and fled to Kathy’s parent’s house with great haste, where they stayed until they could have movers go to retrieve the rest of their belongings. They didn’t want to discuss what happed that last night in the Amityville House. They said it was too horrific to relive, but they did say, they refused to return to the home for any reason. They were able to get their story told, however (38 Real HH; Lovecraft). There are many more highly publicized haunting stories like this that derived from very real events. That should make you wonder, if there are so many of these paranormal occurrences, why is there not a better system for studying them?
Throughout the years this has been a topic of interest for paranormal researchers, psychologists, parapsychologists, and scientists around the world. Scientists, however, rarely study the paranormal directly due to lack of government funding and the fact that most of their colleagues do not support this type of research and they view paranormal events with extreme skepticism. But paranormal phenomena can sometimes occur in human diseases, and because of this, some of these phenomena do in fact come under scientific scrutiny (Schnabel). In one paranormal study that focused on why people have ongoing paranormal experiences called, “Neurological and Robot-Controlled Induction of an Apparition”, Switzerland researchers led by Olaf Blanke, developed an illusionary experience that makes people feel that they are in the same room as a ghostly presence or the “feeling-of-a-presence”, (FoP). This study showed astonishing results from this simulation. It revealed that the when the person was feeling like they were in the presence of a ghost, it was because of mismatched sensory and motor information that confuses the brain and creates these feelings of a phantom presence (Pelletier; Schnabel).
In this study, a team of scientists designed a room involving two robots. One robot would sit in front of the participant, and one would sit behind them. The participant was blindfolded and asked to put their hand inside of a device connected to the front robot and move it around. Their hand movements were then transmitted to the robot that sat behind them, which prompted that robot to put its “hand” on the participants back. It would then mimic the participants hand movements in real-time. This made the participant feel like they were touching their own back because the robot was so in-sync with their own hand movements that their brain was able to adapt to the feeling and could not distinguish the difference between the participants hand and the robots’ “hand” (Pelletier; Schnabel).
The second part of this experiment is where things took a very interesting turn. This time when the participant put their hand in the device and moved their hand around, there was a split-second delay between their hand movements and the robots’ touch. After three minutes of delayed touching, several participants felt that there was something in the room with them. Other participants counted the presence of up to four “ghosts” in the room. Several of the participants asked to end the experiment before it was over because the feeling of a presence was so overwhelming, they couldn’t handle it and wished to leave (Pelletier; Schnabel).
This study suggests that when the robot has a delayed touch from the participants hand movements, their brain interpreted that touch as belonging to someone else. This triggered the part of the brain that also gets signaled when people experience hallucinations and schizophrenia (Pelletier; Schnabel).
This study shows just how easy it can be to disrupt the signals to our brain depending on environment and sensory information. Scientists predict that believers in the paranormal are more vulnerable to developing casual illusions than non-believers because there is a bias in the information they experience. In similar studies they found that paranormal beliefs correlated with these types of illusions, and it was entirely by the believers’ tendency to expose themselves to more cause-present information (Blanco,F et al.).
Hauntings and ghostly presence are not the only kinds of paranormal phenomena that scientists and researchers have been trying to prove throughout the years. Psychic abilities are among the top paranormal phenomena debates. Between the years 1974 and 2004, there was a study of more than three thousand trials, all called the “Ganzfeld” trials, that’s goal was to prove if people could actually possess psi, (extrasensory perception or psychokinesis experiences), abilities.
The process of these Ganzfeld experiments was to have two people in different rooms try to telepathically send and receive the same images. There was a “sender” who would be in an isolated room and they would be shown random images that they would then have to try to mentally send to the person known as the “receiver”. The “receiver” would also be in an isolated room known as “the red room”, and they would be put into a kind of sensory deprivation state. Their sight, sound and smell would all be dulled in hopes that their extrasensory perception would be heightened. They would then say out loud any images that popped into their mind. The researchers would then compare the images of the “sender” and the images the “receiver” experienced to see if they were the same (Tylor; Parker).
During those thirty years, the Ganzfeld experiments had a combined positive rate of 32%. Which means averaged out over the thirty years with over three-thousand trials, 32% of the time the “sender” and the “receiver” “saw” the same images. The odds of that is thousands of trillions to one! In later Ganzfeld trials of smaller sessions, the success rate of psi abilities went up. One that had 128 sessions was 47% positive, another was 50% (Taylor). The findings from these trials cannot be ignored! The continuous positive results of these experiments clearly show something significant that goes beyond coincidence, probability, or statistical coincidence.
This study brought outrage and controversy by skeptics. There was a counter experiment that was quickly put together by parapsychologist, Rey Heyman, so these skeptics could disprove the Ganzfelds’ findings. The counter experiments did in fact have contradictory results to the Ganzfeld trials. Keep in mind that they only did a total of eight studies and they matched up individuals who had previously had negative results for possessing any kind of psychic abilities (Taylor). The counter experiments were extremely bias and did not deter the Ganzfeld researchers from continuing their trials.
This study shows it is possible to explain away evidence of paranormal phenomena with experimenter bias if you are looking for a particular outcome. These scientists felt scared or threatened by the positive results that something unexplainable was real, and they needed to disprove it for their own peace of mind. Or perhaps they felt their careers were based on false facts. Whatever the reason, the fact of the matter is they tried to rationalize a paranormal phenomenon that was proven time and again to exist by years of sound, legitimate experiments.
Paranormal phenomena will continue to be a topic of interest by researchers, whether it is to prove or disprove its existence in our reality. There are several factors that come into play to create the conditions for a paranormal experience. Some can be explained by scientific studies and how our brains can play tricks on us, and some paranormal phenomena, try as we may, are unexplainable.
Works Cited
“38 Real Haunted Houses and the Stories behind Them.” Places You’ll See, 24 Dec. 2017, www.placesyoullsee.com/38-real-haunted-houses-and-the-stories-behind-them/.
Blanco, F, Barberia, I, Matute, H. “Individuals Who Believe in the Paranormal Expose Themselves to Biased Information and Develop More Casual Illusions than Nonbelievers in the Laboratory.” PLoS ONE (2015) e0131378. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0131378
“Ghosts Debunked: Research Can Create Ghosts in the Lab, Tests Conducted by Swiss Doctors.” Bing, TomoNewsUS, 2014, www.bing.com/videos/search?q=swiss%2Brobot%2Bstudy%2Bparanormal&view=detail&mid=A029670C7BA4F68A204EA029670C7BA4F68A204E&FORM=VIRE.
Lovecraft, H.P. “The Amityville Horror.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 8 Mar. 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amityville_Horror.
McAndrew, Frank T. “How the God You Worship Influences the Ghosts You See.” The Conversation, 23 Mar. 2019, theconversation.com/how-the-god-you-worship-influences-the-ghosts-you-see-84163.
Merced, Matthew. “The Uncanny: A Biopsychosocial Perspective.” American Journal of Psychotherapy, vol. 71, no. 1, July 2018, pp. 39–49. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1176/appi.psychotherapy.20180004.
Moore, David. “Three in Four Americans Believe in Paranormal.” Gallup.com, 16 June 2018, news.gallup.com/poll/16915/three-four-americans-believe-paranormal.aspx.
Nees, Michael A., and Charlotte Phillips. “Auditory Pareidolia: Effects of Contextual Priming on Perceptions of Purportedly Paranormal and Ambiguous Auditory Stimuli.” Applied Cognitive Psychology, vol. 29, no. 1, Jan. 2015, pp. 129–134. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1002/acp.3068.
“Paranormal America 2017 – Chapman University Survey of American Fears 2017.” Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, 2017, blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/2017/10/11/paranormal-america-2017/.
Parker, Adrian. “Ganzfeld.” Ganzfeld | Psi Encyclopedia, 2019, psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/ganzfeld.
Pelletier, Melissa. “The Brain Science Behind Paranormal Experiences: We Finally Put Ghosts to Rest.” NuSkool, 2017, www.nuskool.com/learn/lesson/brain-science-paranormal/.
Schnabel, Jim. “Swiss Neuroscientists Induce Spooky ‘Feeling of a Presence’ in Healthy Volunteers.” Swiss Neuroscientists Induce Spooky ‘Feeling of a Presence’ in Healthy Volunteers, 2014, www.dana.org/News/Swiss_Neuroscientists_Induce_Spooky_Feeling_of_a_Presence_in_Healthy_Volunteers/.
Taylor, Steve. “Open-Minded Science.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 2019, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-darkness/201901/open-minded-science.
