Citation

Using a sample of self-reported “spontaneous” accounts  (ostensibly sincere and unprimed, N = 426), we calibrated a 32-item,  Rasch-based “Survey of Strange Events (SSE)” to quantify the  phenomenology of ghostly episodes while assessing response biases  related to experients’ age and gender. This inventory included  psychological experiences typical of haunts, and physical manifestations  common to poltergeist-like disturbances. Results supported earlier  suggestions that “spontaneous” accounts have a predictable (cumulative)  behavioral pattern and show a unidimensional factor structure. Further,  compared to spontaneous accounts, we identified strong response biases  on the SSE across four control conditions (i.e., Lifestyle, Primed,  Fantasy, and Illicit). Statistical modeling successfully predicted group  memberships with good accuracy, corroborating that spontaneous  experiences differ systematically in certain ways from “impostors.” The  SSE is a robust measure of overall intensity of ghostly episodes (Rasch  reliability = 0.87) and serves as a standard operationalization of  specific anomalies in surveys, fieldwork studies, and investigations  that code free-response data or spontaneous case material for  quantitative analysis.
Keywords: ghost, haunt, phenomenology, poltergeist, psychometrics, Rasch scaling