Apparitional experience
Wikipedia contributors · 2024 · Wikipedia
Summary
General overview of apparitional experiences, including crisis apparitions, bereavement-related sightings, sleep-related experiences, hallucination models, and survival-oriented interpretations.
Why it matters here
Covers both the anomalistic-psychology framing and the survival-research framing, making it useful context for separating experiences from spirit interpretations.
Linked claims
Reports stretch back centuries. The few collective and 'crisis apparition' cases are intriguing; controlled study is essentially impossible.
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.
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.
Related evidence hubs
Evidence around dying, near-death experience, and what (if anything) continues.
Whether anything of mind continues.
Telepathy, precognition, remote viewing, PK.
Reports of contact with the deceased.
Psychedelic, contemplative, out-of-body experience.
Cryptomnesia, anoxia models, cold reading. Counter-anchors.