Mirror Chamber Led 24 of 30 People to Sense a Dead Loved One's Presence

Most of the 30 volunteers who sat in a dimly lit mirror chamber in a new psychology study came away feeling that someone who had died was near, according to ScienceAlert. One woman said she felt her hair being stroked. The researchers found that people with a stronger creative fantasy tendency described more vivid, realistic experiences, but they stress that this does not explain everything that happened.

The work comes from researchers at the University of West Georgia and Northwest Missouri State University and was published in the Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition. It is a small study with several important limits, described below.

The setup in five numbers

• 30 participants. Half had synesthesia, a condition in which senses or concepts automatically link, such as letters appearing as colors. The other 15 had all reported a ghost experience in the past, as had some in the synesthesia group.
• 15 minutes. Before the mirror session, each person spent this time recalling someone who had died, including the person's looks, voice, movements and personality. They could bring photographs or keepsakes, or draw the person.
• 45 minutes. This is how long participants gazed into a mirror in a small chamber called a psychomanteum. Black velvet covered the walls and ceiling, a reclining chair faced a tilted mirror so people could not see their own faces, and a dim lamp stood at the back. Steady pink noise masked outside sounds.
• 24 of 30. That many reported sensing a presence on the post-session questionnaire.
• Two fantasy scales. A creative fantasy scale was linked to more vivid and realistic experiences. A separate imaginative fantasy scale showed no significant link.

What the team found, and what surprised them

Participants pressed a button whenever they sensed a presence or had strong visual imagery. Afterward they rated how vivid and real the experience felt and how much space it seemed to take up. Lead author Christine Simmonds-Moore, a psychologist at the University of West Georgia, told ScienceAlert the experiences were often highly emotional but positive. Some people described a chance to say goodbye or to revisit unresolved matters.

The researchers had expected people with synesthesia to report stronger experiences. They did not: the two groups did not differ significantly in whether they reported a presence or in how they rated it.

Simmonds-Moore cautioned that the creativity link does not show that creativity caused the encounters. She suggested that personality, expectations, the bond with the person who died and a mild dissociative state during long mirror gazing might combine. A strong fantasy tendency, she said, "contributes toward the recipe for ghosts."

The specks, the random numbers and the caveats

The team also tracked electromagnetic fields and changes in the time between heartbeats. An infrared camera filmed the mirror area, and an electronic device generated random numbers so the researchers could look for links with participants' experiences. A team member who did not know which sessions involved unusual experiences reviewed the footage. Small specks appeared both with and without people present, and their overall frequency did not differ significantly.

Sessions that contained specks were, however, associated with more reported unusual experiences and with different random-number output. The generator's overall output did not differ significantly from chance. This link turned up only in an additional analysis after the researchers had examined the data. Simmonds-Moore called it "an intriguing post hoc finding" that needs replication.

The team tried to recreate the specks by tugging the velvet, mimicking people shifting in their seats, moving the lamp and blowing dust toward the lens. Only changing the angle of the mirror or swinging it produced specks, and these were fainter and smaller than the originals. Dust, airborne particles and small mirror movements remain possible explanations.

Why it matters: what the study does and does not show

For readers, the main takeaway is about how the mind works. The study suggests that a felt presence of someone lost can be produced in a darkened room by memory, expectation and prolonged gazing, and that creative fantasy tendencies may shape how vivid it feels.

The authors list several limits. The study was small and was not registered in advance, and it involved many statistical comparisons, which raises the risk of chance findings. Many participants already had prior ghost experiences, which limits how widely the results might apply. The findings do not demonstrate communication with the dead or establish a treatment for grief.

What comes next

Larger experiments could probe how memories and surroundings contribute to a felt presence, according to the report. Simmonds-Moore said her team plans related work using a "wind phone," an unconnected telephone that people use to speak to deceased loved ones.

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Around Prague, based on reporting by ScienceAlert