Journal of Scientific Exploration
March 26, 2026
James Houran, Rense Lange, Brandon Massullo et al.
This online study explored anomalous, trickster-like events reported by researchers while writing about ghostly episodes. A convenience sample of 167 participants (seven credentialed frontier scientists and 160 amateur paranormal investigators) retrospectively endorsed 15 items spanning both subjective experiences (e.g., unusual dreams, emotional shifts) and objective events (e.g., missing...
Consciousness and Cognition
January 18, 2026
Marieta Pehlivanova, Rense Lange, Bruce Greyson et al.
This study presents the first comprehensive psychometric comparison of Greyson's (1983) 16-item Near-Death Experience Scale (NDE Scale) and Martial et al.'s (2020) 20-item Near-Death Experience Content Scale (NDE-C) using Rasch modeling and differential item functioning (or response bias) analyses. A total of 705 self-identified "near-death experiencers" (64% women) completed both measures,...
Journal of the Society for Psychical Research
September 24, 2025
James Houran
This research explored whether anomalous ‘dimensional-slip’ experiences—reported by an allegedly haunted woman named “Nell”—would systematically map to distinctive features of various transcendental spaces discussed in spiritual and psychological traditions. A two-part content analysis using ChatGPT-4o compared the phenomenology of Nell’s written accounts (n = 4) to an inventory of 32 classic...
Journal of anomalistics
July 24, 2025
James Houran, Debra Katz, J C Williamson et al.
This case study examines the phenomenon of dimensional-slips, i. e., anomalous distortions or perceptions of spacetime that may involve transcendental content or themes. Our investigation specifically centers on “Nell,” a known ‘haunted’ woman who documented four experiences of perceived physical transports to other realms. Using a mixed-methods approach, we employed AI-assisted content...
Spiritual Psychology and Counseling
June 1, 2025
Neil Dagnall, Kenneth Drinkwater, Giovanni Caputo et al.
1 citation
Haunted People Syndrome (HP-S) characterizes recurrent ‘ghostly episodes’ as an interactionist phenomenon emerging from people with heightened somatic-sensory sensitivities that are stirred by dis-ease states, contextualized with paranormal belief, and reinforced via perceptual contagion and threat-agency detection. We tested the applicability of this psychological model via a three-part,...
Journal of Scientific Exploration
March 31, 2025
Ciarán O’keeffe, Brandon Massullo, Brian Laythe et al.
1 citation
Auerbach et al. (2023) proposed an AECKO model to describe the features and dynamics of a poltergeist-like disturbance they investigated with virtual technology during the COVID-19 pandemic. A two-part exercise nonetheless shows that their findings fundamentally support Laythe, Houran, Dagnall et al.’s (2021) grounded theory of Haunted People Syndrome (HP-S), which was independently developed...
Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition
August 29, 2023
James Houran, Brian Laythe
4 citations
Objective: We used the ChatGPT-3.5 artificial intelligence (AI)-based language program to compare twelve types of mystical, supernatural, or otherwise anomalous entity encounter narratives constructed from material in the publicly available corpus of information, and compared their details to the phenomenology of spontaneous accounts via the Survey of Strange Events (SSE) and the grounded...
Spirituality in Clinical Practice
March 18, 2021
Brian Laythe, James Houran, Neil Dagnall et al.
27 citations
Evidence suggests that subjective and objective anomalies associated with ghostlyepisodes form a unidimensional Rasch scale and that these interconnected“signs orsymptoms”arguably describe a syndrome model. This view predicts that symptomperception—that is, the phenomenology of these anomalous episodes—can be markedlyskewed by an experient’s psychological set. This is impacted, in turn, by...
Psychology of Consciousness Theory Research and Practice
January 19, 2015
Rense Lange, Bruce Greyson, James Houran
18 citations
Latent semantic analysis—a technique to quantify qualitative data—was used on a large dataset of near death experience (NDE) accounts for which a sizable portion also had scores on Greyson’s NDE Scale. Given previous research with the NDE Scale showing there is a “core NDE” comprised of a probabilistic hierarchy of cognitive, affective, transcendental, and paranormal components, we hypothesized...
British Journal of Psychology
May 1, 2004
Rense Lange, Bruce Greyson, James Houran
98 citations
For those with true near-death experiences (NDEs), Greyson's (1983, 1990) NDE Scale satisfactorily fits the Rasch rating scale model, thus yielding a unidimensional measure with interval-level scaling properties. With increasing intensity, NDEs reflect peace, joy and harmony, followed by insight and mystical or religious experiences, while the most intense NDEs involve an awareness of things...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2000
Rense Lange, M A Thalbourne, James Houran et al.
The concept of transliminality ("a hypothesized tendency for psychological material to cross thresholds into or out of consciousness") was anticipated by William James (1902/1982), but it was only recently given an empirical definition by Thalbourne in terms of a 29-item Transliminality Scale. This article presents the 17-item Revised Transliminality Scale (or RTS) that corrects age and gender...
The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
November 1, 2000
James Houran
62 citations
Instructor of Clinical Psychiatry; Southern Illinois University School of Medicine; Department of Psychiatry; Springfield, Illinois
Psychological Reports
December 1, 1998
James Houran, Rense Lange
50 college students completed the Anomalous Experiences Inventory, the AT-20 measure of tolerance of ambiguity, and a frequency of dream recall questionnaire. Using path analysis we show that precognitive dreams can be modeled as accidental 'hits' with increased dream recall and the interpretation of such hits as 'meaningful coincidences' seems facilitated by a belief in the paranormal. As...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
August 1, 1997
James Houran, Rense Lange, Michelle Crist-Houran
30 experiences of shamanic journeys derived from Harner (1990) were analyzed based on a recent coding scheme for contextual variables proposed by Lange, Houran, Harte, and Havens. Consistent with previous research, the experiential content of the trances was quite consistent with the content of the available contextual variables, and embedded cues in particular ( r = .68, p < .001). As...