Glossary of Terms

Agent   
Term used to refer to the subject in a test of Psychokinesis or the focus in a poltergeist case.
Altered State of Consciousness (ASC)
Expression popularized by Charles T. Tart which can refer to virtually any mental state differing from that of the normal waking condition. These states include dreaming, hypnosis, trance, meditation of the yoga or Zen tradition, the hypnagogic-like state induced by the ganzfeld, and drug-induced states.

Angel       
"Messenger of God," a celestial being, benevolent in nature and if visible, appearing in human form, and possessing miraculous abilities such as teleportation, healing powers and knowledge of future events.

Anomalistic Psychology
Term used to indicate the part of psychology that investigates anomalistic psychological phenomena. That is, phenomena which have tended to be explained in terms of the paranormal, the supernatural, magic, or the occult. The term is also meant to include belief in UFOs, in astrology, and in such creatures as the Loch Ness Monster.

Anomalous
Having the quality of an anomaly.

Anomaly
Neutral term applied to a phenomenon which implies that the phenomenon is unexpected according to conventional scientific knowledge, but which does not commit the user to any particular type of explanation; sometimes referred to as paranormal.

Apparition
The physical manifestation of an entity.

Astral Travel
Belief or theory that a person's spiritual awareness can temporarily detach itself from the physical body, remaining connected by what is called the silver cord, and experience things in other locations, time frames or dimensional planes. Some refer to this as Astral Projection or Mind Projection as a ghost.

Aura
A field of subtle, multicolored, luminous radiations said to surround living bodies as a halo or cocoon. The term is occasionally used to refer to the normal electromagnetic field forces surrounding the body.

Banishing
Formal, ceremonial, procedure affected to cast an invisible presence or influence out from an area. This term can refer either to a spiritual cleansing or the closing of a magical rite, when the invoked powers are dismissed.

Bigfoot
A bulky, hair covered, bipedal humanoid which appears to possess both human and ape-like characteristics, also known as Sasquatch and Yeti, depending upon locale. Sightings of these creatures have been widely reported for centuries.

Channeling
A phenomenon in which a person purports to transmit information or messages directly from a personality or consciousness other than his or her own, usually through automatic writing or trance speaking; this other personality usually claims to be a nonphysical spirit or being.

Clairvoyance
Paranormal acquisition of information concerning an object or contemporary physical event; in contrast to telepathy, the information is assumed to derive directly from an external physical source (such as a concealed photograph), and not from the mind of another person; one particular form of extrasensory perception, it is not to be confused with the vulgar interpretation of clairvoyance as meaning knowledge of the future.

Clairvoyant
As a noun, a person endowed with a special talent for clairvoyance; not to be confused with its colloquial usage meaning a fortune-teller; as an adjective, involving or pertaining to clairvoyance.

Cleansing
A less ritualized form of exorcism, where-in a dwelling or site is purified and malevolent influences are banished through prayers, spoken as the petitioner moves through the area.

Cold Reading
A set of statements purportedly gained by paranormal means but which in fact is wholly based on broadly accurate generalizations and/or on information obtained directly from the person seeking the reading, such as can be gleaned from facial gestures, clues in conversation, and so on.

Control
A spirit presumed to speak or act through a medium.  It can also mean: An individual or group used as a standard of comparison in a control experiment.

Cryptozoology
Term used to characterize the study of "hidden animals." It includes the study of the existence of known animals in places where they were not expected to occur as well as the persistence of animals presumed to be extinct. The key trait of animals considered the object of cryptozoology is their unexpected nature. The idea of cryptozoology was suggested by the discovery of exotic animals through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They include the gorilla, the giant squid, and the coelacanth (a fish thought to be extinct for many millennia).

Deja Vu
The feeling or illusion of having previously experienced an event or place actually being encountered for the first time; also called false memory, or memory without recognition, although the phenomenon could conceivably involve precognitive or clairvoyant information.

Demon
An evil supernatural being; a devil. It is said that demons are from Hell and have never roamed the Earth as human beings and they have nothing but envy and hatred toward mankind. Demons are also known as inhuman spirits.

Dermo-Optical Perception (DOP)
Term used to refer to the ability to discriminate color and brightness by means of touch, also known as skin vision, finger vision, dermal vision, digital sight.

Dissociation
A process in which a body of awareness (perceptual, memory, physical) becomes separated or blocked from the main center of consciousness; examples are trance-speaking, automatic writing, amnesia, multiple personality, and so on.

Divination
Word sometimes used to refer to the acquiring of paranormal information, frequently by the use of such various practices as tea-leaf reading, palmistry, scrying, the I Ching, Tarot cards and so on.
Doppleganger
An apparitional double or counterpart of a living person. German for doublewalker.

Dowsing
A behavioral automatism in which, generally, a dowsing rod (also called a divining rod: often a forked twig but sometimes a pendulum) is employed to locate subterranean water, oil, and so on, or other concealed items by following the direction in which the rod turns in the user’s hands. Some practitioners use their bare hands with no gadget.

Ectoplasm
A filmy, quasi-solid substance which supposedly issues from the bodies of mediums (from the mouth, nostrils, eyes, ears, navel or nipples) during trance states. In photographs, this phenomenon seems to resemble soaked muslin fabric. Whether or not it has ever been genuine, curiously, virtually no ectoplasm has been reported in the past fifty years.

Electromagnetic Fields
A physical field produced by electrically charged objects. It affects the behavior of charged objects in the vicinity of the field. The electromagnetic field extends indefinitely throughout space and describes the electromagnetic interaction. It is one of the four fundamental forces of nature (the others are gravitation, the weak, and the strong interaction). From a classical point of view, the electromagnetic field can be regarded as a smooth, continuous field, propagated in a wavelike manner, whereas from a quantum mechanical point of view, the field can be viewed as being composed of photons.

Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP)
Phenomena first reported by Raymond Bayless and popularized by Konstantin Raudive, consisting of sounds said to be the faint voices of deceased individuals, recorded on previously unused magnetic tapes and more recently digital voice recorders.

Elementals
In magical tradition and ceremony, spirits which govern the four corners of the earth and are associated with, or reside within, the four basic elements. They are called Sylphs (the east, air), Salamanders (the south, fire), Undines (the west, water), and Gnomes (the north, earth).

Empath
A person or individual with the ability to scan another's psyche for thoughts and feelings or for past, present, and future life occurrences.

Entity
In the paranormal field the word entity is meant as another term or word for spirit or ghost. If malevolent or malicious in nature, it could also mean demon.

Extrasensory Perception (ESP)
The acquisition of information about, or response to, an external event, object or influence (mental or physical; past, present or future) otherwise than through any of the known sensory channels.

Exorcism
Ceremonial expulsion of invading spiritual/demonic entities from a person or dwelling, present in virtually every worldly culture. The Jewish and Catholic Christian faiths each have a formal 'Rite of Exorcism' to be conducted by the respective Rabbi or Priest.

Extra-terrestrials
Life forms originating on planets other than our own. This term usually refers to highly advanced visitors from other worlds, who journey to our sphere in space crafts with the probable intention of observing and studying our species.
Fantasy Proneness
A personality construct that refers to a small percentage of the population “who fantasize a large part of the time, [and] who typically ‘see,’ ‘hear,’ ‘smell,’ ‘touch’ and fully experience what they fantasize”; such persons tend to be able to hallucinate voluntarily, to be excellent hypnotic subjects, to have vivid memories of their life experiences, and to report experiencing parapsychological phenomena.

Geller Effect
The ability to bend metal by paranormal means; named after the Israeli stage performer Uri Geller, who was the first person to claim publicly the metal-bending ability; the term has been largely superseded by “PK-MB,” or, more simply, “metal-bending.” See also Mini-Geller; Psychokinesis.

General Extrasensory Perception (GESP)
A non-committal technical term used to refer to instances of extrasensory perception in which the information paranormally acquired may have been derived either from another person’s mind (that is, as telepathy), or from a physical event or state of affairs (that is, as clairvoyance), or even from both sources; experimental parapsychologists rarely use the term “telepathy” because of the difficulty, in tests of so-called telepathy, of excluding the possible operation of clairvoyance.

Ghost
The apparition or spirit of a deceased person.

Hallucination
An experience having the same phenomenological characteristics as a sense-perception, and which may lead the experient to suppose the presence of an external physical object as the cause of that experience, but in which, in fact, there is no such object present.

Haunting  
The more or less regular occurrence of paranormal phenomena associated with a particular locality (especially a building) and usually attributed to the activities of a discarnate entity. The phenomena may include apparitions, poltergeist disturbances, cold drafts, sounds of steps and voices, and various odors.

Hypnagogic State
Term referring to the transitional state of consciousness experienced while falling asleep, sometimes characterized by vivid hallucinations or imagery of varying degrees of bizarreness; sometimes used to refer also to the similar state of awareness experienced during the process of waking up.

Hypnopompic State
Term coined by Frederic Myers to refer to the transitional state of consciousness experienced while waking from sleep; the term “hypnagogic” is sometimes used to refer to this state also.

Hypnosis
A condition or state, commonly resembling sleep, which is accompanied by narrowing of the range of attention, is characterized by marked susceptibility to suggestion, and can be artificially induced.

Incubus
Stemming from medieval lore, a demonic entity capable of sexually arousing and sometimes assaulting human females. Cases of apparent incubus attacks continue to be documented, suggesting a germ of reality behind the myth.

Indigo Child(ren)
Refers to children who, according to the New Age movement, represent a higher state of human evolution. The exact nature of Indigo children, and the attributes associated with them varies between different New Age believers and communities with some believing that they have paranormal abilities, such as the ability to read minds, and others believing that they are otherwise normal children who distinguished from non-Indigo children by more conventional traits such as increased empathy and creativity. The term itself is a reference to the belief that such children have an indigo colored aura.

Inhuman Spirit
Inhuman spirits are exactly what the name implies. These spirits are inhuman and have never been a human. They exist as an entity of their own. Some claim that inhuman spirits are demons or evil spirits that were cast out of heaven with Satan. These spirits roam the earth in search of someone whom they can possess.
It is believed that inhuman spirits harbor extreme hatred towards humans and that all of their activities are designed to pave the way to breaking the person's will and taking possession of their body.

Intuition
Somewhat ill-defined term referring to the faculty of coming to an idea directly, by means other than those of reasoning and intellect, and indeed often outside of all conscious processes; the source of these messages is often said to be in the normal, mundane, unconscious, but it is often also said to be the result of mystical or paranormal processes. The word sometimes refers to the process, sometimes to the product of intuition.

Jersey Devil
In the Pine Barrens region of northern New Jersey and New York, for more than two and a half centuries there have been reports of a very strange and singular creature described as having an equine head, glowing, reddish eyes, stork's legs, forelimbs with claw-bearing paws, a pointed tail and membranous, bat-like wings. It emits a shrill, piercing scream, and has been sighted rifling through garbage, standing in paths and roads, and flying just above the tree tops. One rather indistinct photo of this Jersey Devil has produced, but to the best of my knowledge, no one has yet recorded its ear-splitting cry.

Ley Lines
The ley lines and their intersection points are believed by some people to resonate a special psychic or mystical energy often including elements such as geomancy, dowsing or UFOs, stating that, for instance, UFO's travel along ley lines (in the way that one might observe that cars use roads and highways). This belief postulates that points on lines have electrical or magnetic forces associated with them.

Levitation
The raising or suspension of persons or objects into the air without any apparent agency as required by known physical laws of motion and gravity.

Lucid Dream
A dream in which the dreamer is conscious of the fact that they are dreaming.

Luminous Phenomena
The paranormal production of light phenomena, generally in the presence of certain physical mediums.

Lurking Enigma    
"Lurk" means to furtively move about. A type of entity which can be visible to human observers yet appears in distorted, unidentifiable forms. Common traits reported by witnesses include glowing red or silver eyes, dark color (fur or feathers), startling speed and agility, in some cases winged and capable of flight, as with the 'Jersey Devil.' Although such nebulous creatures seem to mean us no harm, encounters with them can be terrifying, and provoke much curiosity. They are extremely elusive.

Meditation
A broad term embracing a number of techniques for achieving various altered states of awareness, with some of these altered states resulting in the ecstatic qualities of so-called peak experience. Most meditative techniques are ways of learning to still the agitation of the mind so that more subtle and valuable aspects of self and reality may be perceived. Some techniques involve concentration, in which attention is focused on a particular object and restrained from wandering, while others involve giving one’s total attention to whatever spontaneously happens, with no attempt to control or focus attention.

Near Death Experience (NDE)
Term applied to experiences undergone by persons who either seem to be at the point of death (or who are even formally declared dead) but then recover, or who narrowly escape death (as in a motor car accident) without being seriously injured; it has been suggested that there is, upon coming close to death, a core NDE made up of certain common elements, such as a feeling of indescribable peace, a sense of being out of one’ s body, a movement into a dark void or down a tunnel, seeing a brilliant light, and entering that light; there may also be reported the experience of so-called panoramic memory (life review), the encountering of an unseen presence, or being greeted by deceased relatives or religious figures.

Occult
Term refers to certain reputed sciences and practices such as magic, astrology, witchcraft, sorcery, and so on, involving esoteric knowledge or the employment of mysterious agencies.

Ouija Board   
A divining implement consisting of a small, round or more often rectangular platform with letters, numbers and various symbols printed upon it, and a planchette which, when the fingers of two participants are lightly placed along its edges, is intended to glide across the smooth surface of the inscribed platform and indicate messages. Conceived of as a parlor game in the wake of popular spiritualism, this is potentially a very dangerous tool for inviting in unpredictable, invasive forces. Experienced researchers vehemently advise against their usage.

Orb
Spherical image, usually translucent white, though sometimes of a reddish or bluish hue, which inexplicably registers on photographic film and videotape. Some people believe that orbs captured in photographs are spirit energy that usually accompanies a haunting. Some people believe that orbs are spirits. Yet others doubt their validity and describe orbs as nothing more than dust or dirt in the air.

Out Of Body Experience (OBE, or OOBE)
An experience, either spontaneous or induced, in which one’s center of consciousness seems to be in a spatial location outside of one’s physical body.

Paranormal
Term applied to any phenomenon which in one or more respect exceeds the limits of what is deemed physically possible on current scientific assumptions.

Paranormal Diagnosis
The determination of the nature and circumstances of a diseased condition by means of extrasensory perception.

Parapsychology
The avenue of paranormal studies and research relating chiefly to psychic abilities and spiritual phenomena.

Past Life Regression
A process in which a hypnotized person is mentally taken back (regressed) by the hypnotist to one or more apparent previous life-times, thus suggesting rein

Phantom Lights
Sometimes they can be attributed to blue methane flame produced by swamp gas, or electrical discharges in the form of what is termed ball lightning or perhaps even misplaced fireflies. Yet, in other instances, the phenomenon of floating lights observed over water, the edge of woods, lonely back roads and in the windows of darkened houses just can't be dismissed by ordinary explanations. These might be globules which coalesce and intensify in luminosity to the point where they become visible in dark surroundings.

Poltergeist
A disturbance characterized by bizarre physical effects of paranormal origin, suggesting mischievous or destructive intent, these phenomena include the unexplained movement or breakage of objects, loud raps, the lighting of fires, and occasionally personal injury to people; in contrast to a haunting, the phenomena often seem to depend upon the presence of a particular living individual, called the focus, frequently an adolescent or child. Apparitions are rarely seen.

Possession
The invasion of the human mind by a spiritual or demonic entity, where the invading agent, for a span of time, influences or entirely subverts the personality of the human host. It is in these instances that the boundaries of psychology, religion and spiritualism are rendered less distinct.

Precognition
This is a form of extrasensory perception in which the target is some future event that cannot be deduced from normally known data in the present.

Premonition
A feeling or impression that something is about to happen, especially something ominous or dire, yet about which no normal information is available.

Psychic
Refers to an individual who possesses psi ability of some kind and to a relatively high degree. It is nowadays applied to paranormal events, abilities, research, and so on.

Psychic Vampire  
Individuals who seem to instinctively draw and absorb the psychic energies from others, usually while conversing with them.

Psychokinesis
Paranormal action; refers to the direct influence of mind on a physical system that cannot be entirely accounted for by the mediation of any known physical energy.

Psychometry
Refers to the practice in which sensitives hold an object in their hands and obtain paranormal information about the object or its owner.

Reading
The statements made by a sensitive (or as a result of the process of divination) in the course of an attempt to obtain paranormal information or messages.

Reincarnation
It is thought to be a form of survival in which the human soul, or some aspects of the self , after the death of the body, is reborn into a new body. The process is repeated throughout many lives.

Séance
A meeting of people to receive spiritualistic messages.

Sensitive
A person who frequently experiences extrasensory perception and who can sometimes induce it at will.

Shaman
A tribal medium, witch-doctor, or priest accredited with supernatural powers as originally exemplified by Siberian tribes.

Succubus
Female counterpart of the incubus, a demonic entity said to inspire lust in men, sometimes capable of physically attacking and inflicting injuries.  Following a nocturnal visitation from a succubus, the human victim will always feel ill and depleted of vitality, and inexplicably un-clean.

Telekinesis
A psychic phenomenon where-in objects are remotely displaced and moved around, solely by the powers of the mind.

Telepathy
A term that refers to the paranormal acquisition of information concerning the thoughts, feelings or activity of another conscious being.

Trance
A state of dissociation in which the individual is oblivious to their situation and surroundings, and in which various forms of automatism may be expressed; usually exhibited under hypnotic, mediumistic or shamanistic conditions.

Voodoo    
African magic traditions with a veneer of imposed Catholicism from the new world, taking root in the Caribbean, particularly the dark populous of Haiti. Similarities in origin and practices exist in the beliefs of 'Obia' (Jamaica) and 'Santeria' (Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic).

Vortex  (pl. Vortexes or Vortices)
An anomaly which sometimes shows up in still photographs taken at the site of a suspected haunting, appearing as a translucent white, tube or funnel shaped mass. Some researchers believe this may be a porthole to the spirit realm.

Warlock
Term originally meant "deceiver" or " one who misleads," in more modern parlance has become associated with a male witch.

Wicca
Wicca is a Neopagan religion that can be found in many English-speaking countries As a recognized religion, the practitioners of Witchcraft (Wicca) refer to their system as, "The Old Way" and "The Ancient Religion." Wiccans, in their rituals, align themselves with elementals and the earth's natural magnetic fields, personified by the names of ancient Greek, Egyptian and Sumerian deities.

Witch
Broadly, a practitioner of the magic arts, specifically a woman who employs charms, herbs and incantations to affect the workings of her will, also a practitioner of the Wicca craft.

Wraith
The apparition of a living person that appears as a portent just before that person's death.

Zarcanor
A malevolent spirit which attacks people while they're asleep, inspiring nightmares and sometimes even inflicting minor injuries such as scratches, bruises and what appear to be finger marks.