Brandon Massullo’s The Ghost Studies: New Perspectives on the Origins of Paranormal Experiences (2017) explores factors he considers contribute to people’s experiences of ghosts and hauntings, seeking answers in the intersections of psychological and physical phenomena. He draws on a wide range of case studies to build what in his estimation is ‘a new perspective on ghosts.’
Apparitional or ghostly experiences, he argues, require a number of components, ‘psychological, environmental, and bioenergetic fluctuations.’ They are triggered by a heightened state of emotion in an individual, such as a mental call for help in distress. The heightened state creates a change in that individual’s bioenergetic field and this intersects with the magnetic field of the planet, enabling it to travel long distances, in the process creating an entanglement which facilitates psychic phenomena both across distance and in time.
His theory is summed up in an equation bringing these factors together:
‘Psychological aspects (‘Overwhelming emotions related to life-threatening events, crisis events, distress, intense desire’) +
‘Changes in internal energy or bioenergetics (‘The above emotional states trigger fluctuations in internal bioenergetics, altering our human electrical field’) +
‘External information acquisition (‘Changes in internal bioenergetics alter our human electrical fields, which extend outside our bodies, linking or tuning our biological antennae to external fields in the atmosphere which permeate everywhere and interconnect all things’) =
‘Ghostly experience (Acquiring or sending information from these essentially hidden external fields leads to experiences, paranormal in nature, however needed in some way to ease, cope, communicate distress, or resolve an emotional crisis such as finding a lost dog, saying goodbye to a family member, or gaining comfort from seeing a deceased loved one).’
An individual’s latent energy can project something of his or her ‘memories, desires, feelings, preoccupations,’ into the environment, there made available to others in the form of an apparition or sense of presence. These may be directed to a particular individual with whom the agent is emotionally connected in the form of what may be termed ‘telepathic distress messages.’ Some humans have been demonstrated to have a greater electrical sensitivity than others, and they would possess a greater responsiveness to paranormal phenomena.
Such projections can linger in an environment, to be picked up by psychics able to access them and provide information on the originator’s emotions. This mechanism Massullo refers to as ‘Spontaneous Apparitional Trace Theory’. He adds there is no reason why telepathic communication should be confined to humans, and the same confluence of bioelectrical fluctuations, emotional electrical fields and the Earth’s magnetic fields would apply to animals as well.
He stresses that for complicated phenomena there is unlikely to be a single cause, and concedes his equation does not cover the whole field, such as recurrent apparitions and haunted premises, where there is no emotional connection to witnesses. Here, some other direct psi process might be in operation, or, building on the work of Michael Jawer and Harvey J Irwin, he suggests the possession of an increased environmental sensitivity, a ‘magnetic sense’ able to access energetic traces, would allow some witnesses to tap into past events.
While he is sceptical of many of the claims made by ghost-hunters, he does not rule out the possibility of the surviving consciousness of deceased individuals returning to make contact with the living, and he considers this a valuable area of research. However, he stresses the need to consider that what appears to be a ghost may not in fact entail a continuation of consciousness, even though it seems like it. He also acknowledges non-paranormal explanations for reported experiences, as found in anomalistic psychology.
A chapter covering non-paranormal explanations lists a number of natural explanations for what a witness may believe is a paranormal event. Many of these are the result of misperceptions, cognitive biases, hallucinations, fantasy proneness and so on, while some involve more fundamental mental health issues. Plus of course the possibility of fraud has to be taken into account.
The theory is carefully thought out, but there are problems. At times Massullo uses contested research for support, notably that by Sheldrake and Persinger, as if there was a consensus. Also, it has been established that near-death experiences can be had by those who are not actually at risk of death but think they are, suggesting Massullo’s emotional trigger should result in more apparitions of the living than are reported, as the subjective component would be the same whatever the individual’s situation.
More significantly, he claims that by possessing a field themselves, humans are plugged into the much stronger field generated by the planet and can use it as a transmission vehicle. One would expect the person’s to be washed out in the process, so Massullo’s theory must require some form of booster to amplify the signal. What such a mechanism consists of, and how the entanglement required between individual and environment occurs, is unclear. While such a neat solution as he propounds would be satisfying, one comes away suspecting the reality to be more complicated.
The Joy of Mere Words 