- Aug 9
- 13 min read
Updated: Aug 16
By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor
Welcome back to Speaking Paranormal.
Years ago, long before I investigated anything, I worked as a host at a funeral home.
There was a young man whose brother had died suddenly at work, and who had been the one to find him. He was standing in line waiting to go into the visitation when he came over to me, and he was in shock, though I am not sure he knew it yet. He told me he had not said a word to his family since finding his brother. Not to their mother. Not to his brother's widow. He had no idea what he was supposed to say to either of them.
What I told him was this. Express your sorrow at the loss. Tell them how much you loved your brother. You are grieving too, and you are allowed to be. And then I told him the thing I told everyone in those years, because it is the part nobody anticipates. Check in with the family three months after the funeral. For the first few weeks they will be buried in food and flowers and visitors, and then somewhere around the third month all of it stops, and that is when the isolation arrives, and that is when it hits hardest.
I have thought about that conversation many times since I started investigating, and it is where this article begins, because grief silences people. So does fear. So does the suspicion that you will sound insane if you say the thing out loud. And when someone finally does work up the nerve to speak, how you receive it determines whether they ever speak again.
That problem sits at the center of today's terms.
Part One looked at the words investigators use when asking whether something is trying to communicate, and Part Two looked at the tools and disciplines that decide whether an investigation produces anything worth trusting. Both of those installments had equipment in them. A recorder, a meter, a spectral analysis, something that makes a file you can hand to another person and say, here, look at this yourself.
Apparitions, shadow people, and the language of attachment and possession have no such buffer. The only instrument in the room is a human being. There is an account, and there is your judgment about how to receive it, and everything I have written about baselines and controls still applies but applies at one remove, because the primary data is a report rather than a recording.
Let me be clear about the purpose of what follows. It is not to decide whether these experiences are paranormal. It is to understand the vocabulary investigators use and to examine what current research can and cannot tell us about the experiences behind the words.
When someone experiences the paranormal, that experience is real to them. Whether the cause ultimately proves to be psychological, environmental, neurological, paranormal, or simply unresolved is precisely what responsible investigation exists to find out.
I should add one thing, since what follows spends a good deal of its length on ordinary explanations. Ordinary explanations do not always arrive. I have investigations where I ruled out everything I could think of and something was still standing there unaccounted for.
That uncertainty is not an embarrassment to me. It is one of the reasons I keep doing this work.
The reason I go through the mundane this carefully is not that I expect it to win every time, but that anything still standing after perception, environment, grief, memory, and health have been accounted for deserves to be taken far more seriously, and I want to be believed when I say so.
Apparition: The Most Studied Word in This Article
An apparition is the perception of a person, animal, or figure that is not physically present. In popular usage it means a ghost. In the research literature it means something broader and considerably more interesting, because the study of apparitions is one of the oldest sustained research programs in this entire field, and it did not begin with ghost hunters. It began with philosophers and physicists.
In 1886, Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers, and Frank Podmore published Phantasms of the Living, a two-volume collection of apparition reports gathered with an attention to corroboration that most modern investigation does not match. They were particularly interested in what came to be called crisis apparitions, cases in which someone reports seeing a figure of a person who, unknown to them, was dying or in grave danger at roughly that moment. Their method was to ask whether anyone else could confirm the timing, whether the account had been written down or told to a third party before news of the death arrived, and whether the witness had any ordinary way of knowing.
A few years later, the Society for Psychical Research went further and conducted a Census of Hallucinations, surveying people on a scale nobody in this field has attempted since and asking a simple question.
Have you ever, while fully awake, had a vivid impression of seeing, hearing, or being touched by something that no physical cause could account for?
Roughly one respondent in ten said "yes".
Sit with that number for a moment, because it reframes everything.
The experience of seeing something that is not physically there is not rare, and it is not confined to the unwell. It is a common feature of ordinary human perception, reported by healthy people who go to work the next morning and say nothing about it to anyone.
The grief research makes this even clearer. In 1971, W. Dewi Rees, a general practitioner in rural Wales, interviewed 293 people who had lost a spouse. He had not set out to study apparitions at all; he was investigating what helps and hinders bereavement. Almost half of the people he spoke to told him they had experienced their dead partner as present. Around forty percent described a sense of presence, roughly fourteen percent had seen them, roughly thirteen percent had heard them. Later studies in nursing homes in the United States found comparable and sometimes higher rates, and, in a finding I think about constantly, more than half of the widows in one such study had never told a single person before the researcher asked.
There is the communication problem in one sentence. Not that people hallucinate. That they don't talk about it.
They don't talk about it because they have absorbed the idea that reporting such an experience means admitting something is wrong with them. So, the experience goes underground, and the person carries it alone, and the field of paranormal investigation, which ought to be the one place these accounts can be spoken aloud without ridicule, has too often made itself another place where they can't, either by dismissing the account or by inflating it into something the person never claimed.
When someone tells me they saw their mother standing at the foot of the bed three weeks after she died, I am not going to tell them it was a ghost, because I don't know that. I am also not going to tell them it was a hallucination in the tone people use when they mean the experience didn't count. What I can tell them, truthfully, is that what happened to them happens to a great many people, that it is a documented feature of grief, that the people who report it overwhelmingly describe it as comforting rather than frightening, and that they are not losing their mind.
That is not a compromise between honesty and compassion. That is what the evidence actually says.
Whether these experiences arise entirely from bereavement, whether they represent meaningful psychological events, or whether some of them point toward something we do not yet understand remains genuinely open.
My responsibility is not to answer that question prematurely. It is to investigate each report with care and to say plainly which parts I can account for and which parts I cannot.
And it is why I began this article in a funeral home rather than a cemetery. A widow who tells nobody for thirty years and a man who cannot speak to his own mother are the same problem wearing different clothes.
Shadow People: A Category That Arrived Through a Speaker
Shadow people are described as dark humanoid figures, usually without discernible features, most often perceived at the edge of vision and gone when looked at directly. Reports frequently include a hat-wearing variant and a sense of malevolence or of being watched.
I want to be careful here, because this term occupies a different position from the last one. There is no research literature on shadow people as a distinct phenomenon. There are no census figures, no Gurney and Myers volumes, no controlled studies. What exists is a large body of consistent popular reports, and the consistency itself is the thing a communication researcher has to examine first.
The term as we now use it spread through late-night talk radio and early internet forums in the 1990s, and it spread fast. Within a few years, a loose set of experiences that people had previously described in their own idiosyncratic words had a name, a standard appearance, a characteristic behavior, and a standard emotional valence. The reports began to match each other more closely after the category existed than before.
That is not evidence that the experiences are invented. People genuinely see something. It is evidence that the shape of what they report is being supplied, at least partly, by a description they encountered before the experience rather than during it. This is the pseudoenvironment at work, the picture in our heads that we mistake for the world itself, and it is the single most important idea in my approach to this field.
Two mechanisms are worth every investigator's careful consideration here.
The first is peripheral vision. The outer edges of the retina are dominated by rod cells, which are exquisitely sensitive in low light and excellent at detecting motion, but which provide almost no color and very little detail. A dark, indistinct, roughly human-shaped form perceived at the edge of vision in a dim room is close to a literal description of what peripheral vision produces, and when you turn to look directly, you engage the detail-rich center of the retina, and the shape resolves or disappears.
A great many shadow figure reports are consistent with this, which makes peripheral perception a hypothesis every investigator should examine early and seriously. It does not automatically account for every report, and I would not want anyone to read it as though it did.
The second is more startling. In 2006, a research team led by Shahar Arzy and Olaf Blanke reported in Nature that they had induced the sensation of a shadowy person on demand. A young woman with no psychiatric history was undergoing presurgical evaluation for epilepsy, which involves stimulating regions of the brain with electrodes. When the team stimulated her left temporoparietal junction, she reported a person close behind her, mimicking her body position and posture. She did not recognize it as an illusion. Stimulate, and the shadow person appears. Stop, and it goes.
The temporoparietal junction is involved in integrating information about where your body is and distinguishing yourself from others. Disturb that integration and the brain appears to resolve the confusion by producing another person, positioned just outside your view.
I include this not to declare the matter closed. One patient is one patient, and a mechanism that can produce an experience does not prove it produced any particular experience. I include it because it is one of the few hard experimental findings that speaks directly to a term in wide use in this field, and because it tells us something worth knowing.
The sensation of a presence just behind you is something the human brain is capable of manufacturing without any external cause at all. That matters because it means neurological mechanisms belong on the list of things an investigator rules out before concluding an external presence is responsible. It does not tell us what caused any individual report, and it cannot.
I have seen this myself, and I still cannot tell you what I saw.
A few years ago my crew and I investigated a cemetery in central Wisconsin, in daylight, which is worth emphasizing. The place carried a story, as these places do, about a young woman who had died there years before, and every one of us knew that story before we arrived. What we saw were shadows moving between the headstones, back and forth, in full daylight.
I can give you a list of things it might have been. Cloud shadow crossing uneven ground. Optical effects from bright sun against hard shade. The ordinary behavior of peripheral vision in a place where all of us were primed to see something. I cannot rule any of those out, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
What I remember more sharply than the shadows is what happened to the people. The insects became unbearable. And one member of my crew went suddenly and completely quiet, and would not respond to any of us. We left. Not because I had concluded anything about the shadows, but because the investigation had stopped being good for the person standing next to me.
Afterward I told the whole crew that if any of them felt unwell in the days that followed, if the mood stayed with them or the sleep went bad, they were to contact me right away. I check on my crew and I check on my clients, every time, because I want to be sure that everyone who was there, myself included, is of sound mind afterward. If something does linger, I tell them to seek out a therapist, or to come and talk with me, and I will listen. Some I have pointed toward clergy. I am available to all of them, and that is not a courtesy I extend when I have time. It is part of the work.
Attachment, Oppression, Possession: The Words I Use Most Carefully
Here we arrive at the vocabulary that generates more controversy than anything else in paranormal investigation, and I am going to be direct about my position.
The terms come as a sequence. Attachment describes the claim that an entity has fastened onto a person rather than a place and follows them. Oppression describes an escalating stage in which the person experiences fear, exhaustion, disturbed sleep, intrusive thoughts, and physical symptoms. Possession describes the claim that an entity has taken control.
This framework comes almost entirely from religious demonology rather than from empirical research, and it has three features that require an investigator to slow down.
The first is that it is unfalsifiable. If you accept the framework, every negative experience confirms it, and any failure to find evidence can be attributed to the entity concealing itself. There is no observation that would settle the question either way, which means the question, as posed, is not a scientific one. That is not an insult to anyone who holds the belief. It is a statement about what kind of claim it is.
The second is that its symptom list overlaps almost completely with the symptom lists of conditions that respond to medical and psychological treatment. Sleep paralysis produces the sensation of a malevolent presence, an inability to move, and crushing pressure on the chest, and it is very common and entirely benign. Carbon monoxide exposure produces confusion, dread, headache, and hallucination, and it can kill you. Sleep deprivation, temporal lobe seizures, grief, trauma, and several psychiatric conditions all produce experiences that map onto the oppression checklist point for point.
The third follows from the second. This framework has been used to justify real harm to real people, and the harm has usually fallen on the vulnerable.
So, here is my practice, and I would ask anyone reading who investigates to consider adopting it. When a client describes attachment or oppression, environmental testing comes first and comes fast, and carbon monoxide detection is not optional. If the phenomena include physical symptoms, I say plainly that a medical evaluation is warranted, and I say it without embarrassment, because a paranormal investigator who lets someone go untreated in order to preserve an interesting case has failed at the only part of this work that genuinely matters.
I want to be precise about what an investigation can and cannot deliver here.
As an investigator, I do not diagnose spiritual affliction. No finding of mine will ever be that an entity has attached itself to a person, because that is not a conclusion investigation is capable of supporting, no matter how much equipment I bring. When a client's framework for what is happening to them is religious, that is pastoral ground rather than investigative ground, and the two have to be kept apart. Whatever support someone seeks on that side of the line is theirs to seek, at their own invitation, and it should never arrive as the output of an investigation.
The distinction matters more than it might sound. The moment an investigator's findings start being delivered as spiritual verdicts, the investigation has stopped being one.
What I can offer is investigation. I can measure the environment, examine the history, analyze how the account developed and who shaped it, and tell them honestly what I find and what I cannot explain. In the one investigation of my career that could arguably be described in these terms, I evacuated my crew from the building.
Not because I had concluded a demon was present, but because I could not rule out a threat and my responsibility as lead investigator is the safety of the people with me. Uncertainty is a reason for caution. It is not a diagnosis.
Putting It Together
Apparition, shadow person, attachment. Three terms describing experiences that leave no file to review, no waveform to analyze, no meter reading to compare against a baseline.
What they leave is a person and an account, and that means the discipline in Part Two has to be applied to a different kind of data. Establishing a baseline still matters, but the baseline now includes what the person believed before the experience, what vocabulary they had available to describe it, who they told first, and how the account changed in the telling. Ruling out ordinary explanations still matters, but the ordinary explanations now include peripheral vision, sleep paralysis, bereavement, carbon monoxide, and the sheer commonness of vivid perception without an external cause.
And one thing matters more here than anywhere else in this series. How you respond to the person shapes what they tell you next. If they sense ridicule, the account contracts and the useful details disappear. If they sense enthusiasm, the account expands to meet your expectations, and it does so without anyone intending to deceive.
The investigator is part of the instrument, and an instrument that alters what it measures has to be accounted for.
In Part Four of Speaking Paranormal, I want to take up the words we use at the end of an investigation, the vocabulary of conclusion. Debunked. Evidence. Proof. Closure. Those terms carry enormous weight for the people who invite us into their homes, and I think the field uses all four of them far too loosely.
Until then...Listen first. Investigate what remains.
The RCIP Takeaway
When the only instrument is a person, the baseline has to include the person. What did they believe before it happened. What words did they have available to describe it. Who did they tell first, and how did the account change in the telling. Rule out the ordinary explanations, including the medical ones, document what remains, and say plainly which parts you cannot account for.
References
Arzy, S., Seeck, M., Ortigue, S., Spinelli, L., & Blanke, O. (2006). Induction of an illusory shadow person. Nature, 443(7109), 287. https://doi.org/10.1038/443287a
Gurney, E., Myers, F. W. H., & Podmore, F. (1886). Phantasms of the living (Vols. 1–2). Trübner & Co.
Olson, P. R., Suddeth, J. A., Peterson, P. J., & Egelhoff, C. (1985). Hallucinations of widowhood. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 33(8), 543–547.
Rees, W. D. (1971). The hallucinations of widowhood. British Medical Journal, 4(5778), 37–41.
Sidgwick, H., Johnson, A., Myers, F. W. H., Podmore, F., & Sidgwick, E. M. (1894). Report on the census of hallucinations. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 10, 25–422.
Dr. Joel Ramsey is a certified paranormal investigator and paranormal research scientist with a Ph.D. in Communication from Regent University. He applies the Ramsey Communication-Based Investigation Protocol (RCIP) to unexplained phenomena and has been conducting evidence-based investigations for more than fifteen years.
The full framework behind this series, including the complete RCIP protocol and extended case studies, appears in his book The Paranormal Professor: Investigating Belief, Perception, and the Unexplained, available here. He also speaks regularly to libraries, museums, historical societies, community groups, and paranormal conferences on perception, belief, grief, and responsible investigation. For investigation inquiries or speaking engagements, contact him at paranormalprofessor@yahoo.com.
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