Spiritual Evidence Map
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Anomalistic Psychology: Exploring Paranormal Belief and Experience

Christopher C. French, Anna Stone · 2014 · Palgrave Macmillan

Spiritual Evidence Map/Last updated May 10, 2026/Claims v1.0.0-provisional/Sources v1.0.0/Scores provisional

Summary

Textbook treatment of anomalistic psychology, surveying conventional psychological explanations for ostensibly paranormal experiences.

Why it matters here

Major reference for the sceptical / cognitive-explanation side of psi-style claims.

Editorial note

Publisher and ISBN metadata verified through Bloomsbury and library catalog records.

Linked claims

Evidence score 5/10
After-death communication

Around half of bereaved adults report sense-of-presence experiences. Common, meaningful, hard to verify.

Evidence score 5/10
Hypoxia and neurochemistry explain NDEs

Hypoxia, hypercarbia, REM intrusion, endogenous DMT, and ketamine models reproduce many NDE features. Veridical cases resist the model.

Evidence score 4/10
Apparitions

Reports stretch back centuries. The few collective and 'crisis apparition' cases are intriguing; controlled study is essentially impossible.

Evidence score 4/10
Clairvoyance

Often subsumed under remote viewing in modern parapsychology. As an everyday claim, very poorly supported.

Evidence score 3/10
Ghosts are spirits of the deceased

Reports stretch back centuries and across every culture. Most well-investigated cases reduce to pareidolia, infrasound, expectation, or fraud; the broader 'soul of the dead' reading is essentially unverifiable.

Evidence score 1/10
Humans can physically levitate

A tradition rich in reports — Joseph of Cupertino, Daniel Dunglas Home, TM 'yogic flying' — but zero reproductions under controlled conditions. The investigated cases reduce to fraud or illusion.

Evidence score 4/10
Intuition can exceed normal inference

Most 'intuition' is unconscious inference. A small subset of presentiment studies suggests something else may also be in play.

Evidence score 4/10
Mediums can obtain anomalous information about the deceased

Most claimed mediumship is reproducible by cold reading. Some controlled lab studies (Beischel and others) report small but anomalous effects.

Evidence score 8/10
Near-death experiences are real, structured experiences

A consistent core experience — peace, light, life review, OBE — reported across cultures and prospective hospital studies.

Evidence score 4.5/10
Precognition

The reported experience of knowing, sensing, dreaming, or picturing a future event before it happens — sometimes called premonition, presentiment, future sensing, or anomalous anticipation. Real as a common human report; controversial as evidence the future is being directly perceived.

Evidence score 3/10
Psychokinesis

Famous macro demonstrations have collapsed under scrutiny. Lab work on random event generators shows very small effects, hotly disputed.

Evidence score 5/10
Remote viewing

The CIA's declassified Stargate program ran for two decades and reported above-chance results. The official 1995 review judged the operational utility insufficient.

Evidence score 3/10
Shadow people are external entities

Most reports happen at sleep boundaries or in peripheral vision — exactly where the brain is most prone to producing humanoid silhouettes. The 'external entity' reading is a much larger claim.

Evidence score 5/10
Telepathy

Decades of ganzfeld and card studies report small effects at meta-analytic level. Critics argue methodological flaws explain them.

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