“One participant experienced her hair being stroked by her loved one, which was meaningful and strongly impactful,” said Christine Simmonds-Moore, lead author and a psychologist at the University of West Georgia.
Thirty subjects spent nearly an hour sitting in a dark room facing a mirror tilted toward the ceiling as part of a study published in the Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition.
Researchers designed the setup to mimic a psychomanteum, a space traditionally associated with communicating with the spirits of the dead. Half of the recruited participants had previously reported a ghost experience, while the other half lived with synesthesia, a condition where sensory pathways jumbled up in the brain commonly cause individuals to taste or hear colors.
Before entering the dark room, participants spent fifteen minutes thinking about a deceased loved one. They then sat inside staring at the upturned mirror for another 45 minutes while researchers monitored heart rates, temperature variations, and electromagnetic readings.
Participants could press a button whenever they felt a presence or experienced strong visual imagery. After stepping out of the psychomanteum, they rated the intensity of their encounters on a scale.
“Oftentimes, these experiences were highly emotional but in a positive manner,” Simmonds-Moore told ScienceAlert, noting that some individuals described opportunities to say goodbye or revisit unresolved matters.
To the surprise of the research team, participants with synesthesia did not report feeling a presence more frequently or experiencing more intense encounters than those without the condition. Instead, individuals identified as more creative through a preliminary survey reported more vivid and realistic experiences in the mirror.
The data also uncovered a correlation between geomagnetic fluctuations and the physical perception of a ghostly experience, though this link appeared exclusively among participants with synesthesia. Following the mirror experiments, the research team plans to conduct related work using a wind phone.
