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Hauntings and Poltergeist-like Episodes as a Confluence of Conventional Phenomena: A General Hypothesis

1996; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 83; Issue: 3_suppl Linguagem: Inglês

10.2466/pms.1996.83.3f.1307

1558-688X

James Houran, Rense Lange,

Biofield Effects and Biophysics

Hauntings and poltergeist-like episodes are argued to be products of contagious reactions to ambiguous environmental or cognitive events. In particular, evidence suggests that the subjective and objective effects reported by percipients are the function of independent, nonparanormal etiologies whose constitutions have been previously established and described. According to this multivariate model, the labeling of ambiguous events as “abnormal” or “paranormal” initiates the reactive process which is subsequently sustained by perceptual contagion, i.e., flurries of paranormal observations due self-reinforcing attentional processes.