Paranormal terminology

thumb|right|An engraving of the Hammersmith Ghost murder case|Hammersmith Ghost appears in Roger Kirby's Wonderful and Scientific Museum, a magazine published in 1804. The "ghost" turned out to be an old local cobbler who used a white sheet to get back at his apprentice for scaring his children.

thumb|Bronze statue of the Assyro-Babylonian demon king [[Pazuzu, , Louvre]] A demon is an evil or malevolent supernatural entity. Historically, belief in demons, or stories about demons, occurs in folklore, mythology, religion, occultism, and literature; these beliefs are reflected in media including fiction, comics, film, television, and video games. Belief in demons probably goes back to the Paleolithic age, stemming from humanity's fear of the unknown, the strange and the horrific. In ancient Near Eastern religions and in the Abrahamic religions, including early Judaism and ancient-medieva

thumb|right|Hypnotic Séance (1887) by Richard Bergh thumb|thumbtime=7|Photographic Studies in Hypnosis, Abnormal Psychology (1938)

thumb|right|The Ganzfeld experiments that aimed to demonstrate telepathy have been criticized for lack of replication and poor controls.

thumb|right|An artist's conception of spontaneous telekinesis from a 1911 issue of the French magazine La Vie Mysterieuse

reception of information via extra senses

Brainwashing is the systematic effort to get someone to adopt a particular deception, loyalty, instruction, or doctrine, usually without being noticed. It is also a term that refers in general to psychological techniques that manipulate action or thought against a person's will, desire, or knowledge. It attempts to damage individual or group attitudes, frames of reference, beliefs, values or loyalties by demonstrating that current thinking patterns and attitudes are wrong and need change. It is said to reduce its subject's ability to think critically or independently, to allow the introduction

thumb|300px|Diagram by the French esotericist Paul Sédir to explain clairvoyance

parapsychological and spiritual concept

a belief that animas, demons, extraterrestrials, gods, or spirits can take control of a human body

thumb|The Ghost of Barbara Radziwiłł by [[Wojciech Gerson. Ghosts are a common form of the undead.]]

Precognition (from the Latin 'before', and 'acquiring knowledge') is the purported psychic phenomenon of seeing, or otherwise becoming directly aware of, events in the future.

controversial interpretation of out-of-body experiences

parapsychology recordings with anomolous haunting sounds investigated as spirit voices

A psychic is a person who claims to use powers rooted in parapsychology, such as extrasensory perception (ESP), to identify information hidden from the normal senses, particularly involving telepathy or clairvoyance; or who performs acts that are apparently inexplicable by natural laws, such as psychokinesis or teleportation. Although many people believe in psychic abilities, the scientific consensus is that there is no proof of the existence of such powers, and describes the practice as pseudoscience.

paranormal phenomenon

medicine based on a hypothetical transfer of "energy"

thumb|French parapsychologist [[Charles Richet coined the term xenoglossy in 1905.]]

Bilocation, or sometimes multilocation, is an alleged psychic or miraculous ability wherein an individual or object is located (or appears to be located) in two distinct places at the same time. Reports of bilocational phenomena have been made in a wide variety of historical and religious contexts, ranging from ancient Greek legends and Christian traditions to modern occultism.

Cards used to conduct paranormal experiments

in modern spiritualism: writing produced involuntarily

rising of a human body and other objects into the air by mystical means

thumb|The medium Daniel Dunglas Home was an alleged practitioner of pyrokinesis.

In traditions of mysticism and the paranormal inspired by Tibetan Buddhism, a tulpa is a materialized being or thought-form, typically in human shape, that is created through spiritual practice and intense concentration. The term is borrowed from the Tibetan language. Modern practitioners, who call themselves "tulpamancers", use the term to refer to a type of willed imaginary friend whom practitioners consider sentient and relatively independent. Modern practitioners predominantly consider tulpas a psychological rather than a paranormal phenomenon. The idea became an important belief in theoso

Supposed paranormal phenomenon

thumb|300px|Great Pyramid of Giza

practice of claiming to capture supernatural entities in photos

apparent deformation of objects using magic tricks

Retrocognition (also known as postcognition or hindsight), from the Latin retro meaning "backward, behind" and cognition meaning "knowing," describes "knowledge of a past event which could not have been learned or inferred by normal means." The term was coined by Frederic W. H. Myers.

Extrasensory perception associated with supernaturally knowing the history of an object

thumb|upright=1.35|Captain Science reading an alien's brain

alleged creation or appearance of matter from unknown sources

range of phenomena reported by dying people

thumb|right|220x220px|An alleged "thought photograph" obtained by Tomokichi Fukurai. Thoughtography, also called projected thermography, psychic photography, nengraphy, and nensha , is the claimed ability to "burn" images from one's mind onto surfaces such as photographic film by parapsychic means. While the term "thoughtography" has been in the English lexicon since 1913, the more recent term "projected thermography" is a neologism popularized in the 2002 American film The Ring, a remake of the 1998 Japanese horror film Ring.

purported ability to "see" visuals via the skin

a subtle state, level, or region of reality

Pseudoscience belief that pyramids confer impossible powers

paranormal transference of an article from one place to another, or an appearance of an article from an unknown source

Empath (; ) is a term for people with an unusual high level of empathy.