There is a familiar way of telling a ghost story. Something strange happens. A door opens. An object moves. A person hears a voice, sees something they cannot explain, or suddenly feels that someone or something is standing nearby. And then comes the question: What was it? Was it a ghost? A spirit? A poltergeist? A trick of perception? A psychological response? Something environmental? Or perhaps something we don’t yet understand?
A recent paper in the Journal of Scientific Exploration takes an interesting approach to that question. Rather than beginning with the assumption that a haunting is primarily about an external entity, the researchers ask us to look at the relationship between the person, their environment, their perceptions, and the circumstances surrounding the experiences.
The paper, “Haunted People Syndrome Redux: Concurrent Validity From an Independent Case Study,” was published in 2025 by Ciarán O’Keeffe, Brandon Massullo, Brian Laythe, Neil Dagnall, Ken Drinkwater, and James Houran.
And its central idea is fascinating:
What if being “haunted” is, at least in some cases, less about a haunted place and more about a particular person in a particular situation?
A Poltergeist During Lockdown
The case at the center of the paper began during the COVID-19 pandemic. A family living in Silicon Valley reported a series of unusual disturbances beginning in 2020. The disturbances occurred over roughly seven and a half months, and the family kept a detailed observational log recording the dates, approximate times, witnesses, and circumstances.
By the end of the period, they had documented 295 events.
The reports included a range of unusual experiences and physical disturbances. What makes the case particularly interesting isn’t simply the number of incidents. It is who was present when they happened.
According to the case material, disturbances occurred when all four family members were together and in several combinations involving the family’s teenage daughter, Emma. But there were no reported disturbances when certain other combinations of family members were together.
That pattern led the investigators to identify Emma as the apparent focus person of the disturbances. That distinction is important because the paper isn’t simply asking:
What was happening in this house?
But perhaps more importantly:
What was happening around this particular person?
The “Perfect Storm” Behind a Haunting
The timing of the case is important. This wasn’t an ordinary seven-and-a-half-month period. The family was dealing with COVID restrictions, isolation, disrupted routines, financial pressures, separation from other people, postponed plans, family disagreements, and the broader anxiety of living through a pandemic. Wildfires added another layer of disruption.
The researchers describe these circumstances as potential psychosocial stressors. And this is where we arrive at the idea of Haunted People Syndrome, or HP-S. Despite the dramatic name, HP-S isn’t simply the claim that some people are more likely to believe in ghosts. It is a model for understanding recurring anomalous experiences as an interaction between people and their circumstances.
The basic premise is that some individuals may be particularly sensitive to internal and external stimuli. When that sensitivity occurs alongside periods of psychological or environmental disruption, unusual experiences may become more likely or more noticeable. People can then interpret those experiences through existing beliefs and expectations. Once people begin looking for anomalies, perception itself can become part of the feedback loop. The researchers describe five recognition patterns within HP-S:
Thin boundary functioning/heightened sensitivity
Dis-ease states
Recurrent anomalous experiences and perceptual contagion
Sense-making through personal or cultural beliefs
Threat-agency detection
That doesn’t mean the person is imagining everything. It means that perception, interpretation, emotion, and environment can interact. That may be the key to understanding some haunting experiences.
Two Models, One Striking Overlap
The original investigators of the COVID-era case, Auerbach and colleagues, developed their own model called AECKO to describe the characteristics and dynamics of the disturbance. O’Keeffe and colleagues noticed something striking. Although the AECKO model and HP-S were developed as different frameworks, they contain substantial conceptual overlap.
Both emphasize:
Particular people who appear to be central to the experiences
Heightened sensitivities
Stressful or disruptive circumstances
Repeated anomalous events
The social environment surrounding those events
The interaction of multiple factors rather than a single cause
The researchers therefore conducted their study in two parts. Part 1 compared the AECKO model with the HP-S model. Part 2 took the original case material and subjected it to a more structured content analysis using standardized measures.
How Haunted Was This Case?
The researchers used a measure called the Survey of Strange Events, or SSE, to examine the overall phenomenology, or structure, of the reported anomalous experiences. The case produced an SSE score of 47.3, placing its overall “haunt intensity” below the average associated with spontaneous ghostly experiences in the researchers’ comparison data. Its profile instead fell closer to benchmarks derived from narratives categorized as Illicit or Fantasy.
Those labels require some explanation.
The researchers’ earlier work distinguishes between different kinds of paranormal narratives, including accounts classified as spontaneous, fantasy, lifestyle, or illicit/fabricated.
The important point is not that the researchers declared this family to be lying. They did not establish that. Rather, the pattern of reported experiences did not strongly resemble the psychometric profile they associate with a classic spontaneous haunting. That led them to conclude that the anomalies in this case were not clearly “spontaneous” in the technical sense used by their framework.
The Twist: The Events and the Context Tell Different Stories
Although the events themselves did not strongly resemble the researchers’ benchmark for spontaneous hauntings, the context surrounding the events showed substantial overlap with HP-S. The researchers found evidence for most of the model’s recognition patterns. Emma scored in the range classified as highly sensitive on the Highly Sensitive Person Self-Assessment Scale. The case material also documented prolonged stress, anxiety, and uncertainty surrounding the period of the disturbances. The family reported a diverse range of anomalous experiences occurring in clusters or “flurries.” There were reports of physical responses to the disturbances, including trembling and an instance of fainting.
Using the HP-S recognition-pattern checklist, the researchers identified evidence corresponding to six of seven assessed nuances—about 86%. A separate measure, the Haunted People Syndrome Screener (HPSS), produced a Rasch-scaled score of 59.3, which was also above the instrument's average.
So we get an intriguing result:
The case didn’t look particularly “spontaneous” when the researchers examined the reported anomalies themselves. But the human context surrounding those anomalies looked quite compatible with HP-S.
What If the Haunting Is the Whole System?
Think about how we normally investigate a ghost story. We tend to isolate the strange event.
The light turned on.
The object moved.
Someone saw a figure.
There was a strange noise.
Then we try to identify the cause. But HP-S suggests that this may be backwards. Instead of examining the strange event in isolation, we might need to examine the entire system:
Who was there?
What was happening in their lives?
What did they believe?
How frightened were they?
Did people begin looking for the next event?
Suddenly, the haunting is not just the unexplained noise. It is the relationship between the noise, the person who hears it, the people around them, the circumstances in which it happens, and the meaning everyone assigns to it. That is a much more complicated phenomenon, but a much more interesting one.
Perceptual Contagion: How a Haunting Can Grow
One of the concepts I find especially compelling here is perceptual contagion. The phrase sounds clinical, but the basic idea is something most of us can recognize. Imagine you’re staying in an old house with a friend. Your friend says:
There’s something weird about this room.
You hadn’t noticed anything. Now you notice the room. There’s a noise. You wonder what caused it. Your friend says:
Did you hear that?
Now you’re listening. A few minutes later, something shifts. Maybe the building settled. Maybe the HVAC system turned on. Maybe someone walked past outside. But now the event has context. You’re not simply hearing a noise. You’re hearing the noise in the haunted room. Once that happens, your attention has changed. The next noise gets noticed more quickly. A shadow is more salient. Your friend’s reaction becomes additional evidence. The story begins to reinforce itself. None of this requires anyone to be lying. None of it requires anyone to be irrational. It is simply how human perception works. We don’t experience the world as raw data. We experience it through attention, memory, expectation, emotion, and interpretation.
When an Event Feels Intentional
There’s another piece of HP-S that feels particularly relevant to ghost stories: threat-agency detection. Humans are extremely sensitive to signs that something or someone is acting intentionally. A branch falling from a tree is one thing. A branch falling immediately after you said something out loud feels different. A strange noise is one thing. A strange noise that seems to happen in response to you feels like something else. We naturally ask: Who did that? Or: What is trying to get my attention? That tendency can be useful, but it can also make ambiguous events feel purposeful. Once an event feels purposeful, it becomes much easier to construct a narrative that can then shape what happens next.
Why 2020 Matters
The timing of this particular case is difficult to ignore. In 2020, millions of people experienced an unprecedented disruption of their normal social and physical environments. People were isolated. Routines disappeared. Schools closed. Work changed. Fear and uncertainty became ordinary. The researchers do not claim that the COVID lockdown caused the disturbances. But they do document the unusual collection of stressors surrounding this family and treat those circumstances as relevant to the case.
There is another intriguing detail.
The researchers note that the recorded disturbances declined significantly over time, and the reduction aligned with the period when telehealth sessions began. That doesn’t prove that therapy caused the disturbances to stop. Correlation isn’t causation. But it raises another question:
What happens to a haunting when the human system surrounding it changes?
If the experience is partly shaped by stress, attention, relationships, expectations, and interpretation, then changing those variables could potentially change the experience. That is precisely what makes HP-s interesting as a research model.
This Doesn't Mean “Ghosts Aren't Real”
It is very easy to read a paper like this and conclude that researchers are simply saying: “Ghosts aren’t real. It’s all psychology.” That’s not actually what this paper argues. The authors explicitly leave open the possibility of psi (the term used in parapsychology for purported anomalous interactions that aren’t currently explained by conventional mechanisms). They argue that you do not have to resolve that question before you can study the human experience. Suppose someone genuinely experiences something they cannot explain. We can investigate:
What did they experience?
What was happening around them?
How did they interpret it?
What physiological and psychological responses occurred?
Did the experience change when the environment changed?
Those questions remain valuable regardless of whether the eventual explanation turns out to be conventional, unconventional, or something we haven’t yet considered.
What This Study Can't Tell Us
This is essentially a single-case reanalysis. It cannot establish that HP-S explains all hauntings or even that it explains this case completely. The authors themselves acknowledge limitations in their measures and in the interpretation of retrospective case material.
There are also uncertainties surrounding how independently the AECKO model was developed relative to HP-S, something the authors discuss themselves. Perhaps most importantly, the researchers acknowledge that the evidence for some aspects of HP-S was stronger than for others.
For example, they found substantial evidence for sensitivity, dis-ease, recurrent anomalies/perceptual contagion, and threat-agency detection. But the evidence for sense-making was less clear. Science gets messy when we look closely. This model doesn’t have to explain every piece of a case perfectly for it to be useful. But neither should we turn a promising pattern in one case into a universal explanation.
What Does It Mean to Be Haunted?
Maybe this is the question underneath it all. If someone repeatedly experiences something frightening and inexplicable, does it matter whether there is a ghost? It matters if we are trying to understand what physically caused the event. But from a human perspective, there is another question. What does it mean to be haunted? That experience can affect sleep, relationships, and how safe your home feels. It can alter what you pay attention to. It can change the way you interpret ordinary events. It can become part of a person’s identity and story.
The experience can therefore be profoundly real in its consequences even when the ultimate explanation remains uncertain. That is why I think the strongest part of the HP-S approach is not that it provides an answer to the ghost question. It is that it changes the question. Instead of asking only, “Is there something in this house?” we can also ask, “What is happening between the person and the house?”
Beyond the Paper: Brian Laythe on The Why Files
If you want to hear one of the researchers behind the HP-S work discuss paranormal experiences at much greater length, Brian Laythe was recently a guest on The Why Files: Operation Podcast.
The episode is called “The Basement: Brian Laythe | Ghosts, Possession, and Shadow People,” and was released September 21, 2026. The conversation runs for nearly three hours and covers hauntings, possession, shadow people, paranormal investigations, and Laythe’s broader experiences and research.
Listen to Brian Laythe on The Why Files: Operation Podcast.
It is a useful companion to this paper because the podcast gives you something a journal article can’t: Laythe talking through the subject in his own voice.
The podcast is much broader than the specific 2025 paper, so I wouldn’t treat it as an extension of the study’s evidence. But if you’re interested in where the researchers are coming from and in the larger questions surrounding hauntings, possession, and anomalous experiences, it is worth a listen.
So, What Are We Really Studying?
The strange thing about reading this paper is that you start with ghosts and end up somewhere much closer to psychology, neuroscience, family systems, perception, and human meaning-making. You don’t necessarily have to throw ghosts out along the way. You can leave the question open. Maybe some experiences that people call hauntings have ordinary explanations. Maybe some are shaped heavily by expectation, stress, and perception. Maybe some involve social dynamics that we have not fully understood. There are experiences for which our existing explanations remain incomplete. The HP-S model does not require us to settle all of that. It asks us to look at the whole experience.
The person.
The environment.
The body.
The emotions.
The expectations.
Perhaps understanding the people who experience hauntings may ultimately tell us more about the phenomenon than arguing about ghosts ever could.
Read the Research
O’Keeffe, C., Massullo, B., Laythe, B., Dagnall, N., Drinkwater, K., & Houran, J. (2025). Haunted People Syndrome Redux: Concurrent Validity From an Independent Case Study. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 39(1), 85-106.
Read the full paper from the Journal of Scientific Exploration.