The Mounting Evidence for Terminal Lucidity

In my October 2025 post "Terminal Lucidity Helps to Discredit Claims That Brains Make Minds" (which you can read here) I discussed dramatic cases of terminal lucidity.  The term "terminal lucidity" can be defined in two different ways:

(1) a case in which someone who had seemed to largely lose his mental faculties suddenly regains such faculties very near the end of his life, typically on the last day of his life;

(2) a case in which someone with extremely high brain damage retained his mental faculties to the end of his life. 

Reports of terminal lucidity appeared as early as 1936, as shown in the 1936 article below (from page 603 of the September 17, 1936 edition of the journal Light).

In my post I discussed the first six of the 13 reports of terminal lucidity I will discuss in this post (some of which involve multiple cases):

(1) On page 603 of the September 17, 1936 edition of the journal Light, which you can read here,  we read this: "The Rev. Cruwys Sharland related how a one-time pupil of his, after suffering for many years from disintegration of the brain, when approaching his death, suddenly recovered complete mental control and gave those present a long circumstantial account of a walking tour he had undertaken when quite a boy, in company with Mr. Sharland, then his tutor. Every detail was correct, every fact rightly placed, as Mr. Sharland himself testified. "

(2) On the same page 603 of the September 17, 1936 edition of the journal Light, which you can read here,  we read this: "M. G. W. Surya writes of a friend of his who was summoned to the asylum in which his brother had for years been confined with complete softening of the brain. He found his brother perfectly normal and anxious to make certain suggestions to him. He died the same day, and autopsy revealed that the brain had entirely disintegrated.....Similarly, the well-known Berlin anatomist, Benecke, assured his students that Schinkel, the architect, died in possession of all his faculties, in spite of the fact that his cranium was subsequently proved to have been, ' so to speak, empty.' ” 

(3) At the bottom of page 79 of the book you can read using the link here, we have an account by a person who says this about her grandmother: "An hour before she passed, this old lady suddenly woke up from the stupor that she had been in for six long years." We then hear an account of the grandmother speaking well, and acting as if she saw apparitions of the dead (a common occurrence for the dying, even those without any brain problems). 

(4) On page 410 of the book Irreducible Mind we read this:  

"Myers (1892b) had referred to the 'sudden revivals of memory or faculty in dying persons' (p.316)...The eminent physician Benjamin Rush...observed that 'most of mad people discover a greater or less degree of reason in the last days or hours of their lives' (p. 257). Similarly, in his classic study of hallucinations, Brierre de Boismont (1859) noted that 'at the approach of death we observed that ... the intellect, which may have been obscured or extinguished during many years, is again restored in all its integrity' (p. 236). Flournoy (1903, p. 48) mentioned that French psychiatrists had recently published cases of mentally ill persons who showed sudden improvements in their condition shortly before death. In more recent years, Osis (1961) reported two cases, 'one of severe schizophrenia and one of senility, [in which] the patients regained normal mentality shortly before death' (p. 24)." 

(5) The paper "End-of-Life Experiences and the Dying Process in a Gloucestershire Nursing Home as Reported by Nurses and Care Assistants" is one that  asked questions of workers at  Kingsley House, a small facility handling no more than 31 persons at a time, and reporting only about 13 deaths per year. We read of these results, coming from the ten who responded: "7 reported unconscious or confused residents who unexpectedly became lucid enough just before they died to interact with relatives and carers," a phenomena sometimes called 'terminal lucidity.' "

(6) The year 2021 scientific paper "Spontaneous Remission of Dementia Before Death: Results From a Study on Paradoxical Lucidity" discusses many cases of terminal lucidity.  We read this:

" Detailed case reports of 124 dementia patients who experienced an episode of paradoxical lucidity were received. In more than 80% of these cases, complete remission with return of memory, orientation, and responsive verbal ability was reported by observers

of the lucid episode. The majority of patients died within hours to days after the episode..... More than 80% of the patients in this study appeared to have experienced a full, albeit brief, reversal of often profound cognitive impairment in advanced and end-stage dementia."

In the paper we read this: "Macleod (2009) observed 100 consecutive deaths in a hospice in New Zealand and found six cases of unexpected, spontaneous return of cognitive functions and verbal ability within 48 hr before the death of the patient."

(7) Recently there was published the paper "Terminal Lucidity in a Pediatric Oncology Clinic," which reported some similar cases of terminal lucidity. You can read the full paper here. One or more of the  authors interviewed the physicians involved in the cases.  Before discussing its fascinating account of terminal lucidity in a patient identified as Patient One, I should mention that the term "encephalopathic" typically refers to a severe brain pathology, most often involving a brain infection or a failure of the immune system to protect the brain from infection. In the paper we read this about this Patient One:

"The patient was a three-year-old Hispanic female with prolonged medical treatment history for her diagnosis of hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH), a complex and often life-threatening medical condition resulting from an uncontrolled and ineffective immune response, leading to extreme inflammation in many organs/tissues. After over a year of intense treatments, she underwent an umbilical cord blood transplant, which is the only known cure for this condition. Unfortunately, the transplant was rejected, and while attempts were made to find another option for a second transplant, she had a re-emergence of her HLH and was admitted to the hospital for chemotherapy and immunotherapy. Despite some initial improvements, she developed progressive organ damage and deterioration over the next several weeks, prompting transfer to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), with worsening liver and pulmonary failure. She became severely jaundiced and encephalopathic, and was no longer speaking, eating, or responding to parents/providers. The ICU physicians were worried that she was an aspiration risk, prompting intensification of Do Not Resuscitate/Do Not Intubate (DNR/DNI) conversations with her parents. As all the known treatments available were exhausted and her condition worsened, the focus shifted to providing palliative care. Although initially resistant, after nearly two weeks of intense conversations with parents (including family members and a Catholic priest) and further deterioration in their daughter’s condition, a DNI and modified DNR status change was agreed. That evening, the patient awoke and asked for her usual comfort items (i.e., Lion King movie, parents, toys) and food. She showed no indication of mental impairment and regained the ability to sit up in bed and participate in coloring and other simple age-appropriate tasks. She spoke using logical, organized full sentences, and had multiple conversations with her parents that evening, which they and the bedside nurse described as 'like a miracle.' During the conversations with her parents, she reviewed all the important people in her life and prayed for them. She indicated awareness of transitioning to death and reassured loved ones of the need not to be concerned about her. She also seemed to be communicating with people who were not visible to others. After several hours, she asked to 'go to bed' and returned to her comatose state. During the next 24-48 hours, she never awoke again, and she ultimately died peacefully of cardiac arrest in her parents’ arms."

(8) In the same paper we read of a Patient Three:

"The patient was a 19-month-old boy who underwent a bone marrow transplant at 16 months of age for ill-defined immune deficiency. He was recovering with typical transplant complications until he developed fevers and progressive neurologic symptoms with loss of ability to communicate, loss of motor function, and loss of cognition.... Prior to the lucid event, he was not responding to healthcare providers and was giving parents only minimal response/eye contact. Three days prior to his death, he became much more alert and interactive, in stark contrast to his steady decline of the prior three months, which was preceded by his parents having decided they would not proceed with further life-saving medical interventions (i.e., surgeries, intubation, etc.). He was noted to be able to move, talk, eat, and communicate for 24-48 hours prior to a rapid decline and death. On the night before his death, he communicated with his parents that he 'was ready to go home' and that 'he and parents would be OK' using verbal and sign language. He talked about joining his brother who was a still-birth, and he told his parents he was going to be fine. Subsequently, he returned to severe mental impairment and died within 24 hours."

A new paper was recently published providing some additional examples of terminal lucidity.  The paper (which you can read here) is entitled "Terminal Lucidity in Children: A Contemporary Case Collection." The paper's cases include these cases:

(9) Case #2 of the paper was a 9-year-old male who had suffered from leukemia for 1-2 years, which had resulted in "severe" mental impairment (apparently much worse than the "mild" mental impairment reported for Case #1). In his last 1 or 2 hours, he experienced a big change from his long previous state of being semicomatose, nonresponsive and mumbling. He "regained awareness of surroundings," "regained ability to speak with others in logical, organized sentences," had "awareness of impending death, but no fear," and "reassured loved ones and said “ 'goodbye.' " His mental impairment suddenly improved from "severe" to "none,"  He also acted as if interacting with deceased loved ones not visible to others. This lasted between 10 to 59 minutes, and within 2 hours of the start of such lucidity, he was dead. 

(10) Case #3 of  the paper was a 7-year-old female who had suffered from leukemia. In her last hour or two her mental impairment improved from "severe" to "none."  Shaking off a semicomatose state, she "regained awareness of surroundings," "regained ability to recognize and interact with others," "regained ability to speak in logical, organized, complete sentences," and had "awareness of impending death." She also acted as if interacting with deceased loved ones not visible to others. This lasted between 10 to 59 minutes, and within an hours of the start of such lucidity, she was dead. 

(11) Case #6 of  the paper was a 16-year-old male suffering from chronic kidney failure, and also very bad seizures. In the 2-5 days before death his mental impairment went from "severe" to "none." He "regained awareness of surroundings," "recognized and interacted with others," "seemed to have a sense of peace and acceptance of his situation," "demonstrated greater clarity" and acted as if he had "met deceased others." We read this: "One week after going into the coma, he returned to a waking state and appeared to have full consciousness. My parents and the medical staff were completely taken aback by his clarity."

(12) Case #7 of  the paper was a male child suffering from chronic kidney failure. At some point in the hour before death (for about an hour) his mental impairment went from "severe" to "none." He "regained awareness of surroundings," "recognized and interacted with others," "regained ability to understand spoken language," and acted as if he had "communicated with deceased others." 

(13) In the paper here, we read of a case of terminal lucidity:

"The person had a diagnosis of mixed Alzheimer’s disease and Cerebrovascular Accident with severe cognitive impairment. The lucidity episode was observed by the therapist and family and lasted 1–3 minutes. The person was reported to have been noncommunicative with restricted or no speech and could not convey her needs. Her limited verbal responses were completely off-point. During a visit by family, the person was suddenly able to communicate and respond appropriately. She talked about significant people, places, and life events that family remembered, both positive and negative. There was an increase in clarity of thought and the person suddenly remembered how to play an instrument. The person died one week later."

---

The paper here studied 92 patients with severe dementia and difficulties with verbal communication, and found that 57% of them displayed "episodes of lucidity" or EL. 

A phenomenon related to terminal lucidity is the phenomenon of deathbed visions, often involving someone on his deathbed claiming to see an apparition or vision of a deceased person, or such a person experiencing a vision of some otherworldly realm or landscape.  The recent paper on terminal lucidity notes a high overlap between terminal lucidity and deathbed visions. It states this:

"An intriguing feature that many children reported, which is also consistent with descriptions of lucidity in adult samples, is the presence of and communicating with nonvisible entities, a phenomenon known as deathbed visions (Barbato, 2024; Claxton-Oldfield, 2024; Fenwick & Fenwick, 2008; Fountain & Kellehear, 2012; Houran & Lange, 1997). Ten of our child cases appeared to experience deathbed visions as part of their TL [terminal lucidity] episode, suggesting a synchronous relationship between these phenomena."

The following account of a deathbed vision was published in 1921:

Pinker Misspeaks On Psychic Phenomena

 In two previous posts I documented bad misstatements of Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. In my 2014 post "Pinker's Fallacious Case Against the Self and Soul" I documented some misstatements Pinker made in a Time magazine article. One of Pinker's bad misstatements in his article was this claim: "Surgery that severs the corpus callosum, separating the two hemispheres (a treatment for epilepsy), spawns two consciousnesses within the same skull, as if the soul could be cleaved in two with a knife." That is the exact opposite of the truth. The surgery in question that severs the two halves of the brain does not produce two minds, but leaves people with a single unified mind, contrary to what is predicted by the dogma that brains make minds. 

Pinker here took an experimental result that very strongly argues for the existence of something like a soul and argues against the claim that the mind is the product of the brain, and misstated the experimental result as being the opposite of what it was.  His misstatement here  was every bit as bad as someone saying that people have taken pictures from outer space that show planet Earth is flat, which is the exact opposite of what happened.  Read the appendix of this post for more on this topic. 

In a 2018 post I looked at some of the many misstatements and cases of bad logic in Pinker's book "Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress." An example of the  bad misstatements Pinker made in that book was this statement: "A momentous discovery of 20th-century theoretical neuroscience is that networks of neurons not only can preserve information but can transform it in ways that allow us to explain how brains can be intelligent.” To the contrary, there is no understanding at all of how a brain could possibly be generating intelligence, nor is there the slightest speck of evidence that neurons store learned information. It is now the year 2025, and not a speck of anything a human ever learned has ever been found in a brain by microscopic examination. The failure to discover any trace of learned information in brains by microscopic information is one of the strongest reason for rejecting claims that brains store human memories. 

On page 426 of the book  Pinker stated, "Nor are the computational and neurological bases of consciousness obstinately befuddling." The truth, quite to the contrary, is that no one understands or can credibly explain any neurological or computational explanation for consciousness or intelligence or human memory. In my post I stated "Pinker again and again claims that he and his colleagues understand deep things that they do not at all understand. " In the past five years it has been widely acknowledged by neuroscientists and psychologists that we do not understand how a brain could produce consciousness, contrary to Pinker's silly boasts on this topic. 

Below are some of the scientists who told us the truth on this topic:

• "Despite substantial efforts by many researchers, we still have no scientific theory of how brain activity can create, or be, conscious experience.” -- Donald D. Hoffman Department of Cognitive Sciences University of California, "Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem."
• "Little progress in solving the mystery of human cognition has been made to date." -- 2 neuroscientists, 2021 (link). 
• " We don't know how a brain produces a thought." -- Neuroscientist Saskia De Vries (link). 
• "You realize that neither the term ‘decision-making’ nor the term ‘attention’ actually corresponds to a thing in the brain." -- neuroscentist Paul Ciskek (link). 
• "We know very little about the brain. We know about connections, but we don't know how information is processed." -- Neurobiologist Lu Chen. 
• "The neuroscientific study of creativity is stuck and lost." -- Psychologist Arne Dietrich,  "Where in the brain is creativity: a brief account of a wild-goose chase."
• "How creative ideas arise in our mind and in our brain is a key unresolved question." -- nine scientists (link).
• "The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Were we able even to see and feel the very molecules of the brain, and follow all their motions, all their groupings, all their electric discharges if such there be, and intimately acquainted with the corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem,...The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable."  -- Physicist John Tyndall (link).
• "But when it comes to our actual feelings, our thought, our emotions, our consciousness, we really don't have a good answer as to how the brain helps us to have those different experiences." -- Andrew Newberg, neuroscientist, Ancient Aliens, Episode 16 of Season 14, 6:52 mark. 
• "Dr Gregory Jefferis, of the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge told BBC News that currently we have no idea how the network of brain cells in each of our heads enables us to interact with each other and the world around us."  -- BBC news article (link). 
• "The mind-brain problem, i.e., how our conscious experience is related to material brain processes, has been debated by philosophers for centuries and remains one of the deepest unsolved problems in science." -- 12 scientists in the year 2024 (link). 

In that 2018 post and my my 2014 post  I documented quite a few misstatements of Steven Pinker on the topic of parapsychology and psychic phenomena. Steven Pinker fails to show signs of serious scholarship on these topics, and routinely speaks erroneously when he writes on them. 

I find more evidence of Pinker's shallow, lazy scholarship of these topics when I go to his website at www. stevenpinker.com. Doing that on my I-Pad, I got my entire I-Pad screen filled up with a huge image of Steven Pinker's head.  I'm not sure why any scholar who wants to be taken seriously would have an image so oversized filling up the first page of his web site.  It's the kind of visual you might expect on, say, the home page of some young actress hoping to become a starlet. 

Not Pinker, just a guy like Pinker

A year 2022 article on Pinker's website shows Pinker's failure to seriously research the topics of psi, ESP and telepathy. He gives us this very untrue statement: "Also, the classic claims for ESP in controlled experiments cited by Horowitz, such as those of J. B. Rhine and his intellectual descendants, have been exposed as artifacts of investigator bias, leakage of information, selective reporting, overinterpretation of coincidence, questionable research practices (such as post hoc data exclusion), and outright fraud."  No such thing ever happened. The experiments of Duke University professor Joseph Rhine have never been successfully debunked, and stand up very well as very strong evidence for ESP and telepathy.  The separate-buildings experiment of Riess was about as strong as a result in favor of telepathy as anyone could ask for.  In a test requiring 1850 card guesses, an unnamed woman in a different building guessed an overall average of 18.24 cards correctly per 25 cards, rather than the expected average of only about 5 cards correctly per 25 cards, with the number of correct guesses being 979 more than expected by chance. 

The Ganzfeld experiments in recent decades have been laboratory experiments that very well-replicated the phenomenon of ESP shown by Rhine's experiments, with results consistently showing an average hit rate of 30% or more, much higher than the expected by-chance hit rate of only 25%.  Far from being debunked, results like those of Rhine have been well-replicated in recent decades. By claiming that Rhine's results were overturned, Pinker has told us the opposite of the truth. The latest result of an ESP test is the result reported on page 62 of the year 2025 document here. It is a test of 240 participants conducted at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland's largest university), by two professors. The researchers used the long-successful Ganzfeld protocol, which for many years has produced results of around 30% to 32%,  well above the result expected by chance (only 25%).  The tests were done in a "ganzfeld laboratory" in a "quiet and secure basement room of a university building," in the years 2023 and 2024. We read that "Seventy-two hits were obtained out of 240 sessions, a 30% hit-rate," a success well above the result expected by chance, only 25%.

At the end of his statement I quoted above claiming that Rhine's research was discredited, Pinker gives four references, numbered 11, 12, 13 and 14. Reference number 11 is to a Skeptical Inquirer article by Blackmore that does not mention any research by Rhine. Reference 11 is to a paper by Hyman that has no detailed discussion of the research of Rhine, but merely the very false claim that "Rhine's data are no longer used to argue the case for psi." Reference 13 is to a paper that does not mention Rhine or his research. Reference 14 is to a paper that does not refer to Rhine or his research. So none of the papers or articles that Pinker has cited back up his claim that Rhine's research was debunked. Rhine's research was enormously convincing evidence for ESP, and Pinker has done nothing to discredit such research, while providing only bad citations to try to back up his claim that such research was discredited. 

We have two hundred years of extremely convincing written evidence in favor of clairvoyance, a large fraction of it written by reliable and distinguished sources such as scientists and doctors. Some of that evidence is discussed in the 18 posts you can read here. A relevant quote from a 19th-century authority is below:

"The distinguished Parisian Professor of Medicine, Rostan, gave at the time his corroborative testimony to the existence of this power in the article ' Magnetisme,' in the ' Dictionnaire de Medecine,'  wherein he remarked : 'There are few facts better demonstrated than clairvoyance' ....Innumerable instances are recorded of the possession of the faculty of clairvoyance by persons in the normal state, in sleep [hypnotism], and in some abnormal conditions of the system, " -- Edwin Lee, MD, "Animal Magnetism and Magnetic Lucid Somnambulism" page 103 and page 133.

The scientist Joseph-Philippe-François Deleuze stated on pages 129 to 130 of an 1817 book that more than two thousand somnambulists (hypnotized people) had been observed since 1784, and also that the majority of them were observed to see with their eyes closed (which is clairvoyance), while also stating that in France more than 50,000 people had witnessed such phenomena. In subsequent decades extremely strong evidence for clairvoyance would continue to appear -- for example,  the cases discussed  here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, 

here and here.

The denial of this century's professors of the reality of clairvoyance is a case of denialism as bad as what would be going on if professors claimed that meteorites have never fallen to the earth. Pinker is the kind of thinker who apparently cannot be bothered to seriously read up on two hundred years of evidence for clairvoyance and telepathy, and who resorts to dumb armchair circular-reasoning arguments against their existence. He says, "If ESP really existed, not only would the laws of physics have to be overturned, but life would be unrecognizable." Nonsense. Whether ESP or telepathy exists has very little or nothing to do with physics, a topic Pinker does not appreciably write about.   And there is no reason why our understanding of physics or life has to stay unmodified.

At no point in the article does Pinker show any signs of being a serious scholar on the topic of telepathy research or research into paranormal phenomena.  I defy anyone to produce a single article or paper or book Steven Pinker wrote in which he sounds like a deep and diligent scholar of the anomalous, the paranormal, parapsychology or psychical research.  Deep scholars of these topics bury their noses in old books, and quote abundantly from original source materials. We don't get that when Steven Pinker lazily pontificates on these topics, sounding like a dabbling dilettante making the tiniest of efforts while just "phoning it in." None of Pinker's generalizations about these topics can be trusted, because he shows no signs of diligence in studying these topics. Psi denialists such as Pinker seem to senselessly follow a rule of "discard or ignore all clues that offend me," like the people I describe in my post here. 

We got a more recent example of Pinker's lazy, shoddy scholarship about spooky phenomena in his year 2025 article on the topic of terminal lucidity. Terminal lucidity is a phenomenon in which some very sick person  believed to be very close to death or with a very damaged brain or demented mind suddenly shows a brief period of intellectual clarity before dying from his disease. This often can occur after a long period of stupor or mental incapacity. 

Pinker's article shows zero signs that Pinker has studied any of the cases of terminal lucidity. All he gives us is some armchair reasoning and gaslighting, and a bunch of rhetorical questions. It's just the kind of "can't be bothered to make a few Google searches" affair that we might expect when Pinker is writing about unexplained phenomena. He mentions not a single specific case in which terminal lucidity was claimed. 

Here are some terminal lucidity cases that help discredit the false claims about the human mind that Pinker likes to make. On page 603 of the September 17, 1936 edition of the journal Light, which you can read here, we read this: 

"In one of his lectures last year to the L.S.A., the Rev. Cruwys Sharland related how a one-time pupil of his, after suffering for many years from disintegration of the brain, when approaching his death, suddenly recovered complete mental control and gave those present a long circumstantial account of a walking tour he had undertaken when quite a boy, in company with Mr. Sharland, then his tutor. Every detail was correct, every fact rightly placed, as Mr. Sharland himself testified. 

Psychica quotes several analogous cases from the German Wahres Leben. A young girl, imbecile for eight years, one morning informed the doctor of the asylum in which she lived that she would die the following night—which she did—and discussed various points with him with full mental awareness. M. Martensen Larsen has recorded the case of an Army doctor confined for homicidal mania, who, just prior to his passing, recovered his sanity and wrote several letters asking the forgiveness of those he had attempted to injure. M. G. W. Surya writes of a friend of his who was summoned to the asylum in which his brother had for years been confined with complete softening of the brain. He found his brother perfectly normal and anxious to make certain suggestions to him. He died the same day, and autopsy revealed that the brain had entirely disintegrated.

How can we account for his complete lucidity before death ? 

Similarly, the well-known Berlin anatomist, Benecke, assured his students that Schinkel, the architect, died in possession of all his faculties, in spite of the fact that his cranium was subsequently proved to have been, ' so to speak, empty.' ” 

We have here not just one but three different cases in which it is stated that someone with the most severe brain damage seemed to gain or have normal mental function shortly before dying. In two cases it is reported that the person acting normally or with normal cognition just before death had the most extreme disintegration or wasting of the brain, leaving basically no brain left. 

The year 2021 scientific paper "Spontaneous Remission of Dementia Before Death: Results From a Study on Paradoxical Lucidity" discusses many cases of terminal lucidity.  We read this:

" Detailed case reports of 124 dementia patients who experienced an episode of paradoxical lucidity were received. In more than 80% of these cases, complete remission with return of memory, orientation, and responsive verbal ability was reported by observers

of the lucid episode. The majority of patients died within hours to days after the episode..... More than 80% of the patients in this study appeared to have experienced a full, albeit brief, reversal of often profound cognitive impairment in advanced and end-stage dementia."

In the paper we read this: "Macleod (2009) observed 100 consecutive deaths in a hospice in New Zealand and found six cases of unexpected, spontaneous return of cognitive functions and verbal ability within 48 hr before the death of the patient."

Recently there was published the paper "Terminal Lucidity in a Pediatric Oncology Clinic," which reported some similar cases of terminal lucidity. You can read the full paper here. One or more of the  authors interviewed the physicians involved in the cases.  Before discussing its fascinating account of terminal lucidity in a patient identified as Patient One, I should mention that the term "encephalopathic" typically refers to a severe brain pathology, most often involving a brain infection or a failure of the immune system to protect the brain from infection. In the paper we read this:

"The patient was a three-year-old Hispanic female with prolonged medical treatment history for her diagnosis of hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH), a complex and often life-threatening medical condition resulting from an uncontrolled and ineffective immune response, leading to extreme inflammation in many organs/tissues. After over a year of intense treatments, she underwent an umbilical cord blood transplant, which is the only known cure for this condition. Unfortunately, the transplant was rejected, and while attempts were made to find another option for a second transplant, she had a re-emergence of her HLH and was admitted to the hospital for chemotherapy and immunotherapy. Despite some initial improvements, she developed progressive organ damage and deterioration over the next several weeks, prompting transfer to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), with worsening liver and pulmonary failure. She became severely jaundiced and encephalopathic, and was no longer speaking, eating, or responding to parents/providers. The ICU physicians were worried that she was an aspiration risk, prompting intensification of Do Not Resuscitate/Do Not Intubate (DNR/DNI) conversations with her parents. As all the known treatments available were exhausted and her condition worsened, the focus shifted to providing palliative care. Although initially resistant, after nearly two weeks of intense conversations with parents (including family members and a Catholic priest) and further deterioration in their daughter’s condition, a DNI and modified DNR status change was agreed. That evening, the patient awoke and asked for her usual comfort items (i.e., Lion King movie, parents, toys) and food. She showed no indication of mental impairment and regained the ability to sit up in bed and participate in coloring and other simple age-appropriate tasks. She spoke using logical, organized full sentences, and had multiple conversations with her parents that evening, which they and the bedside nurse described as 'like a miracle.' During the conversations with her parents, she reviewed all the important people in her life and prayed for them. She indicated awareness of transitioning to death and reassured loved ones of the need not to be concerned about her. She also seemed to be communicating with people who were not visible to others. After several hours, she asked to 'go to bed' and returned to her comatose state. During the next 24-48 hours, she never awoke again, and she ultimately died peacefully of cardiac arrest in her parents’ arms."

No such thing as terminal lucidity should occur if your brain was producing your mind. Once a mind-producing brain had deteriorated, such a deterioration would be irreversible. A brain producing a mind would no more suddenly restore itself in the hours before death than a book missing many of its pages would suddenly restore such pages. Terminal lucidity is one of endless examples of paranormal phenomena that collectively show the irrationality of the materialist dogmas that Pinker cherishes the most, with brain physical shortfalls and accidentally unachievable biological organization doing even more show to show the irrationality of such dogmas. 

Pinker's very frequent "holier than thou" lectures about the virtue of rationality (in which he sells thinkers like himself as Men of Reason) should not prevent us from getting insight as to how irrational his materialist belief system is. A small fraction of the aspects of such irrationality are discussed in my 2018 post and my 2014 post about Pinker's writings. A major reason why people fail to perceive the irrationality of the materialist belief system of thinkers like Pinker is that those selling such a belief system have typically hidden their irrationality by using a thick layer of misstatements, like some bald, very wrinkled old man who hides his old age by using a toupee and a thick layer of makeup. Once we study, list and strip away such misstatements, the mask of rationality is pulled away, and we can see the underlying irrationality. There is nothing rational about claims such as the claim that a human body so supremely systemic and having so very many just-right interdependent components arose because of a mere  accumulation of copying errors. 

In his career Pinker got very absorbed in studying history and linguistics, which may have been a case of getting sidetracked from the studies he should have done before making the kind of statements about minds, souls, brains and biological origins that he has made.  While Pinker frequently appeals to dogmas about brains and biology, I rather doubt that he is a very deep and very broad scholar of brains and biology and the full spectrum of human mental capabilities, human mental experiences and human mental performances.

When Pinker makes erroneous biology statements like "the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain" and "the organization of our mental modules comes from our genetic program," or when he refers most erroneously to "the genetic recipes that build the mind" (as he does on page 20 of the book here), he sounds like someone who has fallen "hook, line and sinker" for the worst "old wives' tale" myths about DNA and its genes (which do not have any such thing as a program or specification of how to make a brain or any of its cells or any of the organelles of such cells, and do not have any specification of anything like a mental module or a mind, or a recipe or program for making any such thing). A sufficiently deep study of the human brain and the sky-high information-rich fine-tuning and hierarchical organization of human bodies not specified by DNA or its genes, and a sufficiently deep critical study of neuroscience research (combined with a sufficiently deep study of medical case histories and the full spectrum of human mental experiences and the full spectrum of human mental performances) will very much undermine and discredit the type of dogmas that Pinker likes to preach. 

Sounding a note similar to one of my criticisms above, a Harvard authority states, "Pinker has strong opinions on how religious people think, yet he seems not to have done the work of actually reading religious thinkers." 

Pinker is one of the key figures in evolutionary psychology, one of the worst junkyards of unscientific and unfounded speculation in academia. Sitting on their armchairs, evolutionary psychologists spend endless hours making cheesy impossible-to-test speculations such as "you have such and such a mental trait because cavemen needed such and such a trait for such and such a reason," or "people still act in such and such a way because evolution made cavemen act in such and such a way for such and such a reason." It is ironic Pinker has criticized Rhine, who was much more of an experimental scientist than Pinker. Rhine spent the prime of his career gathering valuable hard laboratory data, something very different from Pinker's "just-so story" evolutionary psychology tall tales that are the opposite of hard data. The article "Why Jeremy Epstein Loved Evolutionary Psychology" explains some aspects of evolutionary psychology that are morally troubling. 

But it seems some people do think Pinker wrote a good book promoting optimism about mankind's progress and a good book on language; and a visit to his site will allow you to find out about such  works if you are interested. 

Appendix

This appendix will support my claim that Pinker made a false claim when he claimed in his Time article that "Surgery that severs the corpus callosum, separating the two hemispheres (a treatment for epilepsy), spawns two consciousnesses within the same skull, as if the soul could be cleaved in two with a knife.)"

See  this scientific paper "The Myth of Dual Consciousness in the Split Brain." The actual facts about split-brain surgery are related here by a surgeon who has performed such an operation. He states this about split-brain patients:

"After the surgery they are unaffected in everyday life, except for the diminished seizures. They are one person after the surgery, as they were before."

The surgeon states: "In a rational scientific community in which evidence and reason held sway, split-brain surgery would be hailed as compelling evidence for dualism and the immateriality of the intellect and will."

Physician Michael Egnor states the following about Sperry's research:

"The neuroscientist Roger Sperry studied scores of split-brain patients. He found, surprisingly, that in ordinary life the patients showed little effect. Each patient was still one person. The intellect and will – the capacity to have abstract thought and to choose – remained unified. Only by meticulous testing could Sperry find any differences: their perceptions were altered by the surgery. Sensations – elicited by touch or vision – could be presented to one hemisphere of the brain, and not be experienced in the other hemisphere. Speech production is associated with the left hemisphere of the brain; patients could not name an object presented to the right hemisphere (via the left visual field). Yet they could point to the object with their left hand (which is controlled by the right hemisphere). The most remarkable result of Sperry’s Nobel Prize­–winning work was that the person’s intellect and will – what we might call the soul – remained undivided. The brain can be cut in half, but the intellect and will cannot. The intellect and will are metaphysically simple."

The article here in Psychology Today describes the bizarre experiment that was used to make the groundless claim that split-brain patients have two minds. It was some experiment based only on visual perception, using some very strange experimental setup unlike anyone normally encounters. The article shreds to pieces claims that results from such an experiment shows that split-brain patients have two minds:

"Not so fast. There are several reasons to question the conclusions Sperry, Gazzaniga, and others sought to draw. First, both split-brain patients and people closest to them report that no major changes in the person have occurred after the surgery. When you communicate with the patient, you never get the sense that the there are now different people living in the patient's head.

This would be very puzzling if the mind was really split. Currently, you are the only conscious person in your neocortex. You consciously perceive your entire visual field, and you control your whole body. However, if your mind splits, this would dramatically change. You would become two people: 'lefty' and 'righty.' 'Lefty' would only see what is in the right visual field and control the right side of the body while 'righty' would see what’s in the left visual field and control the left side of the body. Both 'lefty' and 'righty' would be half-blind and half-paralyzed. It would seem to each of them that another person is in charge of half of the body.

Yet, patients never indicate that it feels as though someone else is controlling half of the body. The patients’ loved ones don’t report noticing a dramatic change in the person after the surgery either. Could we all — patients themselves, their family members, and neutral observers — miss the signs that a single person has been replaced by two people? If you suddenly lost control of half of your body, could you fail to notice? Could you fail to notice if the two halves of your spouse’s or child’s body are controlled by two different minds?"

A 2020 paper states this about split-brain patients: " Apart from a number of anecdotal incidents in the subacute phase following the surgery, these patients seem to behave in a socially ordinary manner and they report feeling unchanged after the operation (Bogen, Fisher, & Vogel, 1965; Pinto et al., 2017a; R. W. Sperry, 1968; R. Sperry, 1984)." 

A very relevant case  reported is that of an 88-year old man (identified as H.W.) who tested very well on a test of mental functioning, getting the maximum possible score of 30. But it was found that the man had no corpus callosum. The corpus callosum is the main part of the brain that links the two brain hemispheres.  A man who has no corpus callosum is equivalent to a split-brain patient. As an article reports:

"Given the importance of the callosum for connecting the bicameral brain, you’d think this would have had profound neuropsychological consequences for H.W. In fact, a detailed clinical interview revealed that he’d led a normal, independent life – first in the military and later as a flower delivery man. Until recently, if H.W.’s testimony is to be believed, he appeared to have suffered no significant psychological or neurological effects of his unusual brain...Brescian and her colleagues conducted comprehensive neuropsych tests on H.W. and on most he excelled or performed normally. This included IQ tests, abstract reasoning, naming tests, visual scanning, motor planning, visual attention and auditory perception."

The article has a very clear title telling us the truth about this matter:

This Elderly Man Was Born With His Brain Hemispheres Disconnected. Did It Affect His Life? Hardly.

But the corresponding scientific paper sounds as if was written to try and make this case as unlikely as possible to be noticed. We have this title: "Case study: A patient with agenesis of the corpus callosum with minimal associated neuropsychological impairment." Agenesis is a word meaning "absence," one that would only be used by someone trying to get as few people as possible to notice an absence.

Making a generalization about people born without a corpus callosum connecting the two sides of the brain, a scientific paper states this:

"The major anatomic feature of Primary AgCC is the absence of the corpus callosum....Primary AgCC has surprisingly limited impact on general cognitive ability. Although the full-scale IQ may be lower than expected based on family history, scores frequently remain within the average range."

We hear no mention of any "two minds in one body" effect. Another paper states this, using the term "agenesis of the corpus callosum" which means a failure of someone's body to ever have  the corpus callosum connecting the two halves of the brain:

"In the 37 adult cases of agenesis of the corpus callosum, 19 (51%) had some degree of intellectual impairment, with the remainder being judged to have a normal IQ. Of those with learning difficulties, two thirds had a mild impairment, and one third had a moderate or severe problem."

You can find papers on the condition of being born with no corpus callosum by searching on Google Scholar for papers having the phrase "agenesis of the corpus callosum."  You will not find any discussion of "two minds in one body" in such papers about split-brain equivalent patients, which helps show that the claim of such an effect is groundless.   

The paper "Outcomes Associated With Isolated Agenesis of the Corpus Callosum: A Meta-analysis" tells us that for those with complete agenesis of the corpus callosum (complete failure of the corpus callosum to appear) "abnormal cognitive status occurred in 15.16% (95% CI, 6.9–25.9) of cases," which is fewer than 1 case in 6. The same paper tells us that for those with partial agenesis of the corpus callosum (partial failure of the corpus callosum to appear) "cognitive status was affected in 17.25% (95% CI, 3.0–39.7) of cases," fewer than 1 in 5.  This suggests the great majority of people born with split brains and no corpus callosum have normal minds, and nothing like split minds or two minds in one body. 

120+ Types of Paranormal or Anomalous Experiences

It may be useful to attempt a classification scheme for reports of the paranormal or anomalous. For the sake of including as many types of observation reports as I can, I will use the broad term "paranormal or anomalous," which includes not only phenomena that are currently inexplicable but also various types of unusual observations that might be explained within the framework of mainstream science.  I will propose a numerical system in which integer numbers such as 3 stand for a particular class of experiences, and decimal numbers such as 3.1 or 3.2 stand for particular types of experiences within such a class. 

The classifications below are intended to be moderately exclusive, but not totally exclusive. A particular anomalous experience may simultaneously be an example of two or more of these types. 

First I will present the classes and types of this classification without any examples, and without sentences clarifying the names I use. Then I will give the same classification scheme with explanations and examples. 

Class 1 Extrasensory Perception (Non-Hypnotic)

1.1 Telepathy

1.1.1 Experimental Telepathy

1.1.2 Spontaneous Telepathy 

1.2 Clairvoyance 

1.2.1 Spontaneous Clairvoyance

1.2.2 "Traveling" Clairvoyance

1.2.3   "X-Ray" Clairvoyance

1.3 Precognition

1.4 Retrocognition

1.5 Transposition of the Senses

Class 2  Trance Phenomena and Hypnotic Phenomena

2.1 "Past-Life" Recollections

2.2 Hypnotic Insensitivity to Pain

2.3 Amnesia of Hypnotic Experience

2.4 Hypnotic Insensitivity to Sound 

2.5 Hypnotic Hyper-Suggestibility 

2.5.1 Hyper-Suggestibility While Hypnotized

2.5.2 Post-Hypnotic Suggestions  

2.6 Hypnotic Clairvoyance 

2.6.1 Hypnotic "Traveling" Clairvoyance

2.6.2 Hypnotic "X-Ray" Clairvoyance

2.7 Hypnotic Transposition of the Senses  

2.8 Trance Exaltation of Thinking

2.9 Anomalous Healing Under Hypnosis

2.10 Hypnosis at a Distance or Telepathic Knockouts

2.11 Anomalous Time-Keeping Abilities

2.12 Hypnotic "Community of Sensation"

2.13 Suspended Animation

2.14 Hypnotic Induction of Bodily Changes 

Class 3  Out-of-Body Experiences (OBE)

3.1 Spontaneous OBEs Without Being Near Death

3.2 Willed OBEs

3.3 Near-Death OBEs 

3.3.1 Veridical Near-Death OBEs. 

Class 4  Near-Death Experiences (NDE)

4.1 Near-Death Experience With OBE

4.2 Near-Death Experience Without OBE

4.3 Shared-Death Experience

4.4 Terminal Lucidity 

Class 5  Apparition Experiences and ADC (After-Death Communication)

5.1 Wraith Sighting 

5.2 Apparition of Person Who Died Long Ago

5.3 Shared Apparition Sighting 

5.3 Deathbed Apparitions and Visions

5.3.1 Veridical  Deathbed Apparitions and Visions

5.3.2 Luminous Anomalies Occurring at the Time of Death.  

5.4 Miscellaneous Spontaneous Manifestations Attributed to Deceased

5.5 Apparitions of the Living  

5.6 Angelic Apparitions

5.7 Marian Apparitions or Saint Apparitions  

5.8 Aiding Apparitions

5.9 Mysterious Orbs Seen With the Unaided Eye

5.10 Apparitions of the Self 

5.11 "Haunted House" Apparitions and Auditory Phenomena.  

5.12 Premonitory Apparitions  

Class 6  Cryptozoology Experiences 

6.1 Bigfoot and Yeti Sightings

6.2 Monster Sightings 

6.3 Miscellaneous Creature Sightings 

Class 7  UFO Experiences 

7.1 Visual Sightings of UFO

7.2 UFO "Close Encounters" 

7.3 Reported "Alien Abductions"  

7.4  Earth-lights, Spook-lights or Ghost-lights

Class 8  Anomalous Photographic Experiences

8.1 "Spirit" Photography 

8.2  UFO Photography

8.3  Ghost Photography

8.4 Orb Photography 

8.4.1 Photography of Colored Orbs

8.4.2 Photography of "Speeding" Orbs

8.4.3 Photography of Striped Orbs

8.4.4 Photography of Orb Pattern Repetitions 

  8.5 Thoughtography 

 Class 9  Psychokinesis, Apports and Poltergeist Activity 

9.1 Intentional Psychokinesis

9.2 One-Event Psychokinesis or "Poltergiest" Activity 

9.3 Recurrent Mysterious "Poltergeist" Activity  

9.4 Apports 

 Class 10  Anomalous Healing Activity 

10.1 Unexplained Disease Reversals

10.2 Sudden Healing Events 

10.3 Psychic Healing and Psychic Diagnosis. 

10.4 Faith Healing 

Class 11  Mediumistic Events 

11.1 Medium Readings Showing Hard-to-Explain Knowledge of the Deceased 

11.2 Levitations

11.3 Materialization

11.31  Partial Body Materializations

11.32  Full-body Materializations 

11.4 "Spirit Controls" 

11.5 "Disembodied Voices"  

11.6 Automatic Writing  

11.7 Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP)

11.8 Instrumental Trans-Communication 

11.9 Ouija Board Activity 

11.10 Raps and Other Inexplicable Sounds

11.11 "Spirit Lights"

11.12 Table Tipping   

11.13 Mediumistic Precognition 

11.14 Inexplicable Musical Phenomena 

11.15 Anomalous Smells 

11.16 Temporary Body Distortions 

11.17 Sense of Presence Corresponding to a Deceased Person  

11.18 Sense of an Unseen Unidentified Presence 

       11.19 Mediumistic Painting and Drawing  

11.20 Planchette Writing 

Class 12  Seemingly Supernatural Events 

12.1 Public "Miracles" 

12.2 "Angelic Appearances"  

12.3 "Spirit Announcements"

12.4 Warnings From Mysterious Voices 

12.5 Inexplicable Sounds or Voices 

12,6 Inexplicable Object Movements or Displacements 

12.7 Inexplicable Device Activity 

12.8 Reported Teleportations

12.9 Transfigurations 

12.10 Rainfall Selectivity 

      12.11 Bilocation  

12.12 Mysterious Images Arising on Walls or Floors 

 

 Class 13  Possession and Similar Phenomena 

13.1 Long-term "Body Borrowing" 

13.2  Temporary "Possession"

Class 14  "Past-Life" Recollections 

14.1 Childhood "Past-Life" Recollections

14.1.1 Childhood "Past-Life" Recollections With Birthmarks

14.2 Recollections Suggesting the Non-Earthly Pre-Existence of the Soul 

Class 15  Visionary Experiences 

15.1 Premonitory Visions

15.2  Mediumistic or ADC-type Visions

Class 16  Dream Phenomena 

16.1 Premonitory Dreams

16.2  Visitation Dreams   

16.3  Dream Telepathy

16.4 Lucid Dreaming 

16.5 Death Notification Dreams 

16.6 "Notification From the Dead" Dreams  

16.7 Clairvoyant Dreams 

16.8 Dream Series Repeating Themes of Death and Life After Death

16.9 Pre-Birth Dreams and Visions 

 Class 17  Premonitions While Awake 

17.1 Premonitory ESP

       17.2 Premonitions of Danger

Class 18  Mystical Experiences

18.1 "Cosmic Consciousness"

18.2 Christian Mystical Experiences

18.3 Buddhist Mystical Experiences

18.4 Muslim Mystical Experiences 

18.5 Hindu Mystical Experiences

 Class 19  Linguistic Anomalies

19.1 Xenoglossy

Class 20  Skin and Sensation Anomalies

20.1 Mirror Touch Synesthesia

20.2 Exteriorization of Sensibility 

20.3  Phantom Limb Pain

20.4 Stigmata and Skin-writing 

20.5 Mysterious Scents 

20.6 Anomalous Insensitivity to Heat 

20.7 Anomalous Chills

20.8  Synesthesia 

 

 

Class 21  Tool-Assisted or Object-Assisted Psychic Abilities

21.1 Dowsing

      21.2 Crystal Gazing

21.3 Psychometry 

21.4 Slate Writing 

 Class 22  Synchronicity Phenomena

22.1 Clocks Stopping at the Time of Someone's Death

22.2 Unaccountable Sensations at the Time of Someone's Death

22.3 Unaccountable Sounds at the Time of Someone's Death

22.4 Unaccountable Fallings at the Time of Someone's Death 

 Class 23  Anomalous Mental Influence on Living Systems

23.1 Anomalous Change in Mental States After a Person Silently Wished Such a Change. 

23.2 Anomalous Change in Physical States After a Person Silently Wished Such a Change 

23.3 Anomalous Detection of Observation of the Self by an Unseen Observer 

   

 

             

Now let me give the same classification with some links, explanations and examples.

Class 1 Extrasensory Perception 

1.1 Telepathy

1.1.1 Experimental Telepathy.  Some examples of ESP under experimental conditions are discussed here, here and here. 

1.1.2 Spontaneous Telepathy. Louisa Rhine was one of the leading researchers of cases of spontaneous telepathy. Her book Hidden Channels of the Mind can be read here.  Another book focusing on such experiences can be read here. Some examples from Mark Twain can be found here.

1.2 Clairvoyance 

1.2.1 Spontaneous Clairvoyance. An example is when someone reports the approach of an unexpected unseen visitor who very soon arrives at her doorstep. Some examples can be found here. 

1.2.2 "Traveling" Clairvoyance and Remote Viewing. See 2.6.1 below for a discussion of "traveling" clairvoyance in hypnotized subjects. Remote viewing may be described a kind of "traveling" clairvoyance that can occur with training for subjects who are not hypnotized. As discussed here and here, research into remote viewing was long funded by the US government, with many successes reported. 

1.2.3   "X-Ray" Clairvoyance. This type of clairvoyance involves things such as the ability to correctly read through heavy blindfolds, or to correctly describe the contents of sealed letters and closed boxes, or to see within a human body.  Some examples can be found here, here and here.  Below is a quote from Alfred Russel Wallace, on page 245 of the December 22, 1876 edition of The Spiritualist:

" Dr. Edwin Lee, a well-known physician, in his book on  Animal Magnetism, has given, from personal observation, a minute account of the clairvoyance, of Alexis [Didier] at Brighton, which occupies twenty-five pages. Among a great variety of most remarkable tests, he frequently read passages in books brought at random a number of pages in advance of the page opened, but at the level of a line indicated. Numbers of these tests are recorded, the words read always being found at the level indicated, but not always at the exact number of pages in advance asked for. The evidence for this, as well as for many other forms of clairvoyance, is overwhelming, and the tests applied of the most varied and stringent character."

1.3 Precognition. See my 16 posts here for some examples. 

1.4 Retrocognition. Retrocognition can be an inexplicable  knowledge or sensing of things that occurred in the past. In my interesting post here, I discuss the topic, stating this: 

"What I find is that for every case in which one of my dreams seems to match well something that soon happens (which may be an example of precognition), there are roughly an equal number of cases where one of my dreams seem to match well something that happened one day or a few days previously (but which I had no knowledge of). The latter examples may be cases of what is called retrocognition, which means an anomalous knowledge about something that happened in the past."

1.5 Transposition of the Senses. See the six posts here for examples in which someone seems to be able to see through some part of his body (such as his fingers) other than his eyes. 

Class 2  Trance Phenomena and Hypnotic Phenomena

2.1 "Past-Life" Recollections. Some related books can be read here. Perhaps the most well-known work on this topic is The Search for Bridey Murphy, which can read here.

2.2 Hypnotic Insensitivity to Pain. See the "Phenomenon #2" section of this post for a discussion.  The main relevant work on this is the book here by Dr. James Esdaile, who reported that hundreds of major operations occurred in India under his supervision, involving subjects who had no anesthesia but reported no pain during amputations or removals of large tumors, because they had been told to feel no pain while hypnotized. Another book documenting the same thing is the book "Numerous cases of surgical operations without pain in the mesmeric state" by John Elliotson MD, which can be read here. 

2.3 Amnesia of Hypnotic Experience. This is the phenomenon of not remembering what happened when you are put under hypnosis. See the "Phenomenon #1" section of this post for a discussion. 

2.4 Hypnotic Insensitivity to Sound. See the "Phenomenon #3" section of this post for a discussion.

2.5 Hypnotic Hyper-Suggestibility 

2.5.1 Hyper-Suggestibility While Hypnotized. See the "Phenomenon #5" section of this post for a discussion.

2.5.2 Post-Hypnotic Suggestions. See the "Phenomenon #6" section of this post for a discussion.  

2.6 Hypnotic Clairvoyance 

2.6.1 Hypnotic "Traveling" Clairvoyance. Nineteenth century literature on hypnotism contains many accounts of people under hypnosis who (when guided on a kind of mental journey by someone familiar with a place) could correctly list all kinds of details of places they had never physically seen. Some examples can be found here, here,  and here.  

2.6.2 Hypnotic "X-Ray" Clairvoyance. Such clairvoyance may involve an ability to detect the contents in sealed envelopes, locked boxes or even a human body. Some examples can be read here and here. 

2.7 Hypnotic Transposition of the Senses. This occurs when someone under hypnosis may appear to be able to see with the fingers, the stomach, or some part of the body other than the eyes. Quite a few examples are discussed in the posts here.  See the "Phenomenon #7" section of this post for a discussion.

2.8 Trance Exaltation of Thinking. See the "Phenomenon #10" section of this post for some examples. 

2.9 Anomalous Healing Under Hypnosis. Such a case is discussed here. When hypnotism was called Mesmerism, animal magnetism and artificial somnambulism (between 1780 and 1850), there were innumerable reports of anomalous healings under hypnosis. Referring to cures under hypnosis, page 20 of the 1907 document here states the following: "The following is a list of celebrated European doctors from 1784 to 1837 who produced personal magnetic phenomena reported, with their processes and cures, in their published books :— Dr. Orelut; Dr. Gardanne ; Dr. Wurty ; Dr. Paulet; Dr. Peletin ; G. Baldwin, English consul at Alexandria; Count Panin, ambassador of Russia; Count de Redern ; Dr. d’Eslon, of the Academie of Medicine of Paris ; General de Puysegur ; Prof. Deleuze ; Dr. A. Bertrand ; Dr. A. Roullier; Prof, de Lausanne ; Colonel Masson ; Major Pitman, of the English Army ; Prof. Corbaux ; Dr. de Villem et; Dr. Thiriat; Prof, du Commun ; Baron du Potet; Dr. Cheron, Prof, and Chief Director of the Val-de-Grace, Paris ; Dr. Lullier; Dr. Fournier; General de Prescy ; Dr. A. C. Savary; Dr. Foissac, Acad. Med., Paris; Dr. Husson, A.M.P. ; Dr. Bourdois, A.M.P. ; Dr. Fouquier, A .M .P .; Dr. de Mussy, A.M.P. ; Dr. Guersant, A.M.P. ; Dr. Hard, A .M .P .; Dr. Leroun, A .M .P .; Dr. Mare, A.M.P. ; Dr. Thillaye, A.M.P. ; Dr. Oudet, A .M .P .; Dr. J. Cloquet; Dr. C. W. Hufsland, Physician-in-chief to the King of Prussia; Dr. Klein, Physician-in-chief to the King of Wurtemburg ; Dr. R e il; Dr. Broekm ann; Dr. Wienholt; Dr. Nordkoff; Dr. Wolfart, Prof. Academy of Berlin ; Dr. Kieser ; Dr. W. A rn d t; Dr. van Echenniayer, prof.; Dr. J. Weber ; Dr. Stieglitz, physician to His Majesty the King of England, at Hanover ; Dr. F. H. Hufsland, prof, at Yena ; Dr. Hermann ; Dr. Heine ; Dr. Kohler ; Dr. Schmidt, physician to the court of Germany ; Dr. Formey ; Dr. Oppert; Dr. Kluge ; Dr. Sprengel; Dr. Marcard ; Dr. de Cederschold, of the court of Sweden; Dr. Malfatti, of the court of Vienna; Dr. Muck, of the court of Bavaria ; Dr. Fischer ; Dr. Joerdeus ; Dr. J. Hamel, physician to the Emperor of Russia ; Dr. Muller, physician to the Emperor of Russia ; Dr. de Stoffregen, physician to the Empress of Russia; Dr. Brosse; Dr. Lichtenstaedt; Dr. de Koerber; Dr. de Themmen ; Dr. G. Barker ; Dr. Hendriksz ; Dr. Crosne ; Dr. Siemons ; Dr. Vitringa-Coulon ; Dr. van der Plaats ; Dr. van Houten ; the chemist Boler ; etc., etc., etc." 

2.10 Hypnosis at a Distance or Telepathic Knockouts. A phenomenon in which a hypnotist can induce a trance in an unseen person is reported here and here.  On the page here we are told, "In 18 of 25 trials Janet and his colleague Gilbert were able to induce a trance in their hysterical subject Leonie at distances varying from 1/4 to 1 mile." The page here tells us the experiments of L. Vasiliev at the University of Leningrad were overwhelmingly successful in producing trances at a distance in subjects, with a 90% success rate, with most of the people trying to produce the trances being in different rooms, and the trance almost always occurring within a few minutes of the remote attempt to make the person entranced. 

2.11 Anomalous Time-Keeping Abilities.  See the "Phenomenon #8" section of this post for a discussion. 

2.12 Hypnotic "Community of Sensation." It has been very frequently reported that a hypnotized person may instantly feel sensations felt by the person who hypnotized him. A set of experiments on this effect is reported in the "First Report of the Committee on Mesmerism" pages 225-229 of Volume 1 of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (April, 1883), a committee including the illustrious names of Frederic Myers,  Edmund Gurney, Frank Podmore, George Wyld M.D. and the eventually knighted physicist W.F. Barrett.  We read this on page 226: "Thus out of a total of 24 experiments in transference of pains, the exact spot.was correctly indicated by the subject no less than 20 times."  Similar results were obtained by Dr. Edmund Gurney and reported in his paper "An Account of Some Experiments in Mesmerism," published on page 201 of Volume II of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research ( June 1884). As reported on page 205, a hypnotized subject identified with high accuracy tactile and taste sensations occurring in a hypnotizer sitting behind him. 

 2.13 Suspended Animation. It has often been reported that certain mystics or holy men in India have an inexplicable ability to suspend their normal bodily functions, and live for long periods without food, water or air. An example of such a claim can be found at the link here, where we read the following:

"This  same  fakir  was  buried  by  the  Rajah  of  Lahore,  in  a  grave dug  in  the earth,  the  soil  pressed  down  around  his  coffin,  a  foot  of  soil  covering  it,  which was  afterwards  sown  with  barley.  At  the  end  of  four  months  he  was  taken  out alive,  to  the  surprise  of  the  rajah  himself."  

2.14 Hypnotic Induction of Bodily Changes. Pages 199-208 of the book Irreducible Mind gives some fascinating examples in which bodily changes such as skin marks and bleeding and breast enlargement were apparently produced by mere hypnotic suggestion.  

Class 3  Out-of-Body Experiences (OBE)

3.1 Spontaneous OBEs Without Being Near Death. This would be the rare case of suddenly seeming to be outside of your body, in an effect that you did not will and was not a response to being near death. A case of a subject reporting many such spontaneous OBE experiences is described here.  We read this on page 694, in which the text uses SAC to mean "state of accreted consciousness":

"Mr. M reported his SACs occurred multiple times daily spontaneously or at will, while in a waking or active state such as standing, working at a computer, driving a car, etc., or when resting such as sitting or lying down. Mr. M reported he would be walking or performing regular daily activities at work, when suddenly he would spontaneously slip out-of-body and into the SAC. The SAC experiences would be extremely vivid, real, and a clear sense of separation between the Self and the physical body would accompany each SAC. The surroundings as described by Mr. M, when in SAC, would appear in brighter colors than what is considered normal under a regular state of consciousness. 'Under SAC I perceive colors that are not visible when in the physical body.'  Moreover, with each SAC, Mr. M reported feelings of disembodiment experienced in varying intensities, and an enhanced perception of reality." 

3.2 Willed OBEs (Astral Projection). Willed out-of-body experiences are often called astral projection. A relevant book is "The Projection of the Astral Body" by Sylvan J. Muldoon, which can be read here. 

3.3 Near-Death OBEs. It is very common in near-death experiences for people to report viewing their bodies while kind of floating above them. 

3.3.1 Veridical Near-Death OBEs.  A veridical near-death OBE is when someone having a close encounter with death reports moving out of his body, and is able to recall observational details that are later verified. Some interesting examples can be found here.

Class 4  Near-Death Experiences (NDE)

4.1 Near-Death Experience With OBE.  Many near-death experiences include an out-of-body experiences (OBE) in which someone may report floating out of his body and observing it from above. A scientific survey of a group of hospital patients found that 10% of patients with cardiac arrest had a near-death experience (NDE), with 19 of these 27 patients who reported an NDE reporting an out-of-body experience (OBE).  A different study found that "Of the 30 interviewable survivors of cardiac arrest, 7 (23 percent) described experiences classified as NDEs by scoring 7 or more points on the NDE Scale." Of these reporting a near-death experience in this study (11), 90% reported out-of-body experiences.  A Dutch study found 18% of cardiac arrest survivors reporting a near-death experience, but with only a minority of these reporting an out-of-body experience. 

4.2 Near-Death Experience Without OBE.  Many other near-death experiences do not include any element of the observer seeming to be out of his body. 

4.3 Shared-Death Experience.  Dr. Raymond Moody Jr. has coined the term "shared-death experience" to refer to a near-death experience in which more than one observer reports anomalous or mystical events. His book on this topic can be read here.  A vivid eyewitness account of such an experience can be found on pages 56-61 of the master's thesis here. 

4.4 Terminal Lucidity. Terminal lucidity occurs when someone who had long suffered from dementia suddenly seems to return to a normal, lucid state of mind just before dying. An example can be read on this page and the next page.  Some dramatic examples of terminal lucidity are discussed here. On page 410 of the book Irreducible Mind we read this:  

"Myers (1892b) had referred to the 'sudden revivals of memory or faculty in dying persons' (p.316)...The eminent physician Benjamin Rush...observed that 'most of mad people discover a greater or less degree of reason in the last days or hours of their lives' (p. 257). Similarly, in his classic study of hallucinations, Brierre de Boismont (1859) noted that 'at the approach of death we observed that ... the intellect, which may have been obscured or extinguished during many years, is again restored in all its integrity' (p. 236). Flournoy (1903, p. 48) mentioned that French psychiatrists had recently published cases of mentally ill persons who showed sudden improvements in their condition shortly before death. In more recent years, Osis (1961) reported two cases, 'one of severe schizophrenia and one of senility, [in which] the patients regained normal mentality shortly before death' (p. 24)."  

Class 5  Apparition Experiences and ADC (After-Death Communication)

5.1 Wraith Sighting. A wraith is defined as "a ghost or ghostlike image of someone, especially one seen shortly before or after their death." Examples can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. In a large fraction of these cases, the person reporting the apparition did not even know that the person corresponding to the apparition was very sick or near death. 

5.2 Apparition of Person Who Died Long Ago. An example is given here, and other examples are given in my posts here and here. 

5.3 Shared Apparition Sighting. Some examples when an apparition was seen by multiple people can be found here, here, here, here, here, here and here.  

5.3 Deathbed Apparitions and Visions. Some examples can be found here and here and here.   A survey of family members of deceased Japanese found that 21% reported deathbed visions. A study of 103 subjects in India reports this: "Thirty of these dying persons displayed behavior consistent with deathbed visions-interacting or speaking with deceased relatives, mostly their dead parents." A study of 102 families in the Republic of Moldava found that "37 cases demonstrated classic features of deathbed visions--reports of seeing dead relatives or friends communicating to the dying person." 

 A 1949 book states this: 

"It is a commonplace truth, observed by many physicians and clergymen, that a dying person, when conscious near the moment of death, acts or speaks as if he saw standing near loved ones who have already died. Dr. Russell Conwell told Bruce Barton in the interview quoted earlier in another connection, that he had witnessed this phenomenon 'literally hundreds of times.' "

5.3.1 Veridical Deathbed Apparitions and Visions.  Also called "Peak in Darien" deathbed visions, these are cases in which some dying person (or someone on his deathbed) sees an apparition or vision of someone he should not have known was dead, who later is found (by someone else) to have been dead at the time of this vision or apparition.  Some cases of the type are discussed in my post "They Seemed to Know of Deaths They Should Not Have Known Of." A very interesting case of this type is described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross on the page here. 

5.3.2 Luminous Anomalies Occurring at the Time of Death.  For some examples, read my post here. An example is found on page 48 of the document here, where we read a physician describe seeing this when a patient died: 

"The head of the body became suddenly enveloped in a fine, soft, mellow, luminous atmosphere. . . . The brain began to attract the elements of electricity, of magnetism, of motion, of life and of sensation into its various and numerous departments. The head became intensely brilliant; and I particularly remarked that just in the same proportion as the extremities of the organism grew dark and cold, the brain appeared light and glowing.” 

5.4 Miscellaneous Spontaneous Manifestations Attributed to Deceased.  Examples can be found here and here.

5.5 Apparitions of the Living. Some examples of people who claimed to see apparitions of other living people can be found here.   

5.6 Angelic Apparitions. A book called Seeing Angels (which can be read here) tells us that "hundreds of British people claim to have experienced visions of angels."

5.7 Marian Apparitions or Saint Apparitions. Literature of the Catholic Church contains accounts of people reporting sightings that they or others identified as visions of the Virgin Mary or some saint, including events at Lourdes, Fatima (see here), and the Zeitoun area of Cairo, Egypt (see here for a description of the latter).   

5.8 Aiding Apparitions. Very rarely an apparition may appear to offer assistance to the living. 

5.9 Mysterious Orbs Seen With the Unaided Eye. Not counting mysterious orbs showing up in photos, there are many cases of mysterious orbs seen by eyes only. 35+ examples can be read by using the link here and continuing to press Older Posts at the bottom right of the page. Looking up "ball lightning" will give additional cases.  

5.10 Apparitions of the Self. A very rare phenomenon involves seeming to see an apparition of yourself. Such a thing was reported by the German writer Goethe, and is reported in the February 1905 Annals of Psychical Science, page 136, in which a man on a platform about to make a speech is surprised to see an apparition of himself, who makes the speech for him.   

5.11 "Haunted House" Apparitions and Auditory Phenomena.  Examples of such phenomena are discussed in the article beginning on page 309 of the document here. 

5.12 Premonitory Apparitions.  On page 16 of the document here, we read this: "A similar case is the one of the Lady in White, who is said to appear in the royal castle of Stockholm whenever a death at the Court is about to take place." We then read an account of such a sighting. On page 27 of the document here, we read an article describing quite a few premonitory apparitions reported as being warnings of a death soon to come, with the apparitions often having an animal form. 

 Class 6  Cryptozoology Experiences 

6.1 Bigfoot and Yeti Sightings. It is very easy to find accounts of witnesses seeing mysterious hairy creatures, particularly in dense forests. 

6.2 Monster Sightings. The most famous are reports of seeing the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland.  

6.3 Miscellaneous Creature Sightings.  Other examples of cryptozoology experiences can be found here. 

Class 7  UFO Experiences 

7.1 Visual Sightings of UFOs. The literature on visual sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOS), also called UAPs (unidentified aeriel phenomena) is extremely large. One place to go for information is the MUFON site here. 

7.2 UFO "Close Encounters." The UFO literature includes some famous "close encounter" cases such as the famous Betty and Barney Hill case. 

7.3 Reported "Alien Abductions." Some books on this topic can be read here.  

7.4  Earth-lights, Spook-lights or Ghost-lights.  These terms have been used for various types of anomalous lights that may be associated with a particular location. An example can be found in the Marfa Lights associated with Marfa, Texas. An author of the book on the topic says that after eight years of investigation, he is convinced that some of these lights are mysterious lights that cannot be explained by simple explanations such as distant headlights. 

Class 8  Anomalous Photographic Experiences

8.1 "Spirit" Photography. The term "spirit photography" refers to photos of humans seeming to show some mysterious or identified figure not physically present when the photos was taken. Arthur Conan Doyle's book on this topic can be read here.  

8.2  UFO Photography. The literature on UFO photography is very extensive. A recent interesting development was the US government's release of military photography of aerial phenomena it could not identify, such as the "GoFast" UFO, the "Tic Tac" UFO, and the "Gimball" UFO, which can be seen here.  

8.3  Ghost Photography. This includes photos showing mysterious unidentified figures which may have a vaporous, shadowy or luminous appearance. An example is the famous photo described as the "Ghost of Raynham Hall," appearing in the December 26, 1936 edition of the British magazine "Country Life." 

8.4 Orb Photography 

8.4.1 Photography of Mysterious Colored Orbs. Use the links here, here, here, here, here and here to see thousands of photos I took showing mysterious orbs with colors of blue, green, pink, orange, yellow and purple (keep pressing the Older Posts link at the bottom right of the page to see the entire series). All the photos were taken in clean dry air. 

8.4.2 Photography of Mysterious "Speeding" Orbs. To see 770 photos I took of mysterious orbs that appeared to be speeding, use the link here and keep pressing the Older Posts link at the bottom right of the page.  A subset with a "string of pearls" appearance can be seen here. 

8.4.3 Photography of Mysterious Striped Orbs. 800+ photos I took of mysterious striped orbs can be seen here. 

8.4.4 Photography of Mysterious Orb Pattern Repetitions. The page here shows some dramatic examples taken in clean dry air. Even more dramatic orb pattern repetitions can be seen in the long book that can be read online here. 

8.5 Thoughtography.  What is called thoughtography is a claimed ability to produce photographs directly on photographic film, without the use of any camera. The book Clairvoyance and Thoughtography by Tomokichi Fukurai (which can be read here) offers some interesting photos in this vein.  Page 18 of the document here is an article with some very interesting examples. The World of Ted Serios (which can be read here) is one of the main works on this topic. 

 Class 9  Psychokinesis, Apports and Poltergeist Activity 

9.1 Intentional Psychokinesis. The most famous examples include accounts of spoon-bending by Uri Geller and mind-over-matter by Ninel Sergeyevna Kulagina, who was sometimes referred to under the pseudonym of Nelya Mikhailova, and also referred to as Nina Kulagina. Her case is discussed here. 

9.2 One-Event Psychokinesis or "Poltergiest" Activity. An example may be when I captured on video my camera taking 300 photos by itself, in 13 separate bursts. You can watch the video here.   

9.3 Recurrent Mysterious "Poltergeist" Activity. Some cases are discussed here, and a case is discussed on page 260 of the document here.   

9.4 Apports. Apports include objects that seem to mysteriously appear out of nowhere. Examples can be found here and here and here.  At the 10:00 mark and the 25:14 mark in the video here, mainly involving reports of radio messages from the deceased, we have witnesses describing finding objects that they interpreted as apports from the deceased. 

 Class 10  Anomalous Healing Activity 

10.1 Unexplained Disease Reversals. There are many cases of hard-to-explain disease reversals in the medical literature. Some can be found here and here.

10.2 Sudden Healing Events. Some examples can be read here. 

10.3 Psychic Healing or Psychic Diagnosis. The case of Edgar Cayce (who seemed to make innumerable good diagnoses while entranced) is a very remarkable one in this category.

10.4 Faith Healing. Events at Lourdes, France are an example. Other examples are described on pages 132 to 139 of the book Irreducible Mind, which on page 136 gives an example of how mainstream authorities have acted to suppress evidence of faith healing. 

Class 11  Mediumistic Events 

11.1 Medium Readings Showing Hard-to-Explain Knowledge of the Deceased. See here and here for examples.  

11.2 Levitations. Examples are discussed here and here and here and here. In Chapter 2 of his book Miracles: A Parascientific Inquiry Into Wondrous Phenomena (which can be read here), D. Scott Rogo describes at length earlier reports of levitations occurring with saints such as St. Theresa of Avila or St. Joseph of Copertino (1603-1663). Many people reported seeing such events. 

11.3 Materialization

11.31  Partial Body Materializations. One of the best examples of evidence for such materialization is the book "Materialisations-Experimente mit M. Franek-Kluski" by Gustave Geley and Albert von Schrenck-Notzing M.D.  The book is in German, but with the help of Google Translate it is fairly easy to get an English translation of any page. 

11.32  Full-body Materializations. Some examples are given in the chapter here, and in the posts here, here, here and here.  

11.4 "Spirit Controls." A leading example is discussed here.  

11.5 "Disembodied Voices." A long account reporting disembodied voices during seances can be read in The Voices by Vice-Admiral William Usborne Moore.  Other such cases are described in my post here.  The book The Psychic Riddle by Isaac Funk has a long section (pages 86 - 151) describing such voices occurring at seances of the medium Emily S. French. 

11.6 Automatic Writing. Automatic writing is when someone (often in a trance-like state) holding a pen produces text that he or she says was not consciously produced.  The case of Leonora Piper (who produced much of her output in such a way) is a prominent example discussed here.    

11.7 Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP). EVP involves mysterious voices arising in audio recordings.  One of the principal works on this topic can read here.  

11.8 Instrumental Trans-Communication. Instrumental Trans-Communication involves reports of getting electronic messages from deceased people, mainly radio messages. An Italian researcher (Marcello Bacci) reported successes in such attempts for many years. See the links here and here and here for some of these reports.   

11.9 Ouija Board Activity.  The most interesting case is that of Patience Worth/Pearl Curran, discussed in the books here and here. Another interesting case is discussed on pages 313 and 314 of the document here. An ouija board message of "pray for the soul of Hugh Lane" was apparently received by persons who soon learned that on the same night Hugh Lane had died in the famous sinking of the Luisitania. 

11.10 Raps and Other Inexplicable Sounds. Reports of mysterious raps were extremely abundant in the second half of the nineteenth century. For a contemporaneous history including many such accounts, you can read the book here. In his Researches Into the Phenomena of Modern Spiritualism, the leading scientist Sir William Crookes stated the following about anomalous sounds he heard when testing mediums such as Daniel Dunglas Home: 

 "The popular name of 'raps' conveys a very erroneous impression of this class of phenomena. At different times, during my experiments, I have heard delicate ticks, as with the point of a pin ; a cascade of sharp sounds, as from an induction coil in full work ; detonations in the air ; sharp metallic taps ; a cracking like that heard when a frictional machine is at work ; sounds like scratching ; the twittering of a bird, etc. These sounds are noticed with almost every medium, each having a special peculiarity ; they are more varied with Mr. Home, but for power and certainty I have met with no one who at all approached Miss Kate Fox. For several months I enjoyed almost unlimited opportunity of testing the various phenomena occurring in the presence of this lady, and I especially examined the phenomena of these sounds. With mediums, generally it is necessary to sit for a formal seance before anything is heard; but in the case of Miss Fox it seems only necessary for her to place her hand on any substance for loud thuds to be heard in it, like a triple pulsation, sometimes loud enough to be heard several rooms off. In this manner I have heard them in a living tree — on a sheet of glass — on a stretched iron wire — on a stretched membrane — a tambourine — on the roof of a cab — and on the floor of a theater . Moreover, actual contact is not always necessary ; I have had these sounds proceeding from the floor, walls, etc., when the medium's hands and feet were held — when she was standing on a chair — when she was enclosed in a wire cage — and when she had fallen fainting on a sofa. I have heard them on a glass harmonicon — I have felt them on my own shoulder and under my own hands. I have heard them on a sheet of paper, held between the fingers by a piece of thread passed through one comer. With a full knowledge of the numerous theories which have been started, chiefly in America, to explain these sounds, I have tested them in every way that I could devise, until there has been no escape from the conviction that they were true objective occurrences not produced by trickery or mechanical means." 

For many accounts of mysterious raps, use the link here, and read all of the posts in the resulting series, continuing to press the Older Posts link at the bottom right. The series of blog posts includes many accounts of mysterious raps including a discussion of the earliest reports of this phenomenon.  

 11.11 "Spirit Lights." Reports of inexplicable lights during seances are extremely abundant. The following report of such lights was made by the eminent scientist Sir William Crookes: 

"These, being rather faint, generally require the room to be darkened. I need scarcely remind my readers again that, under these circumstances, I have taken proper precautions to avoid being imposed upon by phosphorised oil, or other means. Moreover, many of these lights are such as I have tried to imitate artiftcially, but cannot.

Under the strictest test conditions, I have seen a solid self-luminous body, the size and nearly the shape of a turkey's egg, float noiselessly about the room, at one time higher than any one present couid reach standing on tiptoe, and then gently descend to the floor. It was visible for more than ten minutes, and before it faded away it struck the table three times with a sound like that of a hard, solid body. During this time the medium was lying back, apparently insensible in an easy chair.

I have seen luminous points of light darting about and settling on the heads of different persons ; I have had questions answered by the flashing of a bright light a desired number of times in front of my face. I have seen sparks of light rising from the table to the ceiling, and again falling upon the table, striking it with an audible sound. I have had an alphabetic communication given by - luminous flashes occurring before me in tlie air, whilst my hand was moving about amongst them. I have seen a luminous cloud floating upwards to a picture. Under the strictest test conditions, I have more than once had a solid, self-luminous, crystalline body placed in my hand by a hand which did not belong to any person in the room. In i/w /ig/it 1 have seen a luminous cloud hover over a helio- trope on a side table, break a sprig off, and carry the sprig to a lady ; and on some occasions I have seen a similar luminous cloud visibly condense to the form of a hand and carry small objects about."

11.12 Table Tipping. Also called "table turning," this phenomenon (discussed here) was well-documented by nineteenth century writers, in works such as this one (and the William Stainton Moses article mentioned below). 

11.13 Mediumistic Precognition.  A case is discussed on this page and the preceding pages. 

11.14 Inexplicable Musical Phenomena. As discussed here, Sir William Crookes very carefully documented a phenomenon he described as "the playing of tunes upon musical instruments (generally an accordion, for purposes of portability) without direct human intervention, under conditions rendering contact or connection with the keys impossible." This was witnessed long before any technology allowed the possibility of such a thing. The long article "A Defence of William Stainton Moses" in pages 75-130 of the February 1905 Annals of Psychical Science contains many examples of inexplicable musical phenomena occurring at seances, particularly beginning on page 94.  Referring to a time when all musical reproduction equipment was extremely bulky and impossible to conceal, we read this about Moses (who died in 1892):

"The principal controls accustomed to manifest through Mr. Moses were in the habit of announcing their presence by means of a given musical sound, which was always the same for each of them, and served to identify them. These sounds generally imitated those of the best known musical instruments, such as the violoncello, the mandoline, the harp, the lyre, the timbrel, the double-bass, the drum, the trumpet, the trombone, the pianoforte. It will at once be understood that these instruments were not all in the seance-room. It may also be pointed out how impossible it is to imitate by fraudulent means the special sound of each of these very dissimilar instruments ; all the more when we consider that the spirit-sounds sometimes rose to such a pitch of intensity as to far surpass those emitted by the corresponding instruments. Now, to accomplish this would involve at least the possession of various material instruments, and thus it is impossible to suppose that Mr. Moses could have secretly introduced into the room, and again removed, apparatus of this kind, much less have hidden it on his own person, from which it follows that the sounds described could have no other origin than that of mediumship."

11.15 Anomalous Smells. On page 270 of Volume 9 of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (1893), we read about an anomalous odor phenomenon occurring at seances: 

"When we first observed this manifestation, it was attended by a great peculiarity. The odour was circumscribed in space, confined to a belt or band, beyond which it did not penetrate. It surrounded the circle to the extent of a few feet, and outside of that belt was not perceptible ; or it was drawn across the room as a cordon, so that it was possible to walk into it and out of it again—the presence and absence of the odour and the temperature of the air which accompanied it being most marked. Judge Edmunds [in his book on Spiritualism] especially notes the presence of an odour which was not diffused through the room. He describes the sensation as being like a flower presented to the nostrils at intervals. I should rather describe what I observed as a scented zone or belt, perfectly defined and not more than a few feet in breadth. Within it the temperature was cool and the scent strong, outside of it the air was decidedly warmer, and no trace of perfume was perceptible. It was no question of fancy. The scent was too strong for that. And the edges of the belt were quite clearly marked, so that it was possible, instantaneously, to pass from the warm air of the room to the cool perfumed air of this zone. I do not remember ever hearing of a precisely similar case to this, which occurred repeatedly." 

11.16 Temporary Body Distortions.  Around page 125 of the July 1889 Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (Volume 4, Number 62), a witness describes paranormal elongations of the body of the medium Daniel Dunglas Home.   We read this:

 "I watched, and saw his whole body elongated as much as nine inches or a foot....He again was elongated, and I could feel his flesh stretch and again shrink. It was most extraordinary to see him gradually lengthen." 

11.17 Sense of Presence Corresponding to a Deceased Person. A person not seeing any apparition of a dead person may report feeling a strong sense that the person is there with him.  Erlendur Haraldsson did a survey in which 100 people (out of about 900 polled) were interviewed about psychic experiences. 16 of the people claimed to have a contact with a deceased person consisting only of a sense of presence. One respondent describes it like this:

"I was running into the bedroom to look at my baby when I suddenly felt my deceased mother-in-law standing behind me. It was so clear that I thought it was my (living) mother, but no one was there. Somehow I felt this in a very convincing way." 

11.18 Sense of an Unseen Unidentified Presence. In Chapter 4 of Patricia Pearson's very interesting book  Opening Heaven's Door: What the Dying Tell Us About Where They're Going, we read about quite a few people having a sense of an invisible presence near them, one they could not identify. In his interesting book The Third Man Factor,. John Geiger compiled quite a few cases of people in great danger who felt an extraordinary feeling that an unseen person was present, a person urging them to make the extraordinary effort needed to survive. 

11.19 Mediumistic Painting and Drawing. Some people have repeatedly gone into trances and produced works of art resembling those of famous artists.  One such case is that of Luiz Antonio Gasparetto  (1949-2018), described here. 

11.20 Planchette Writing. The planchette device and mysterious effects produced by its use are described in my post here. The device consists of a small board with two wheels attached to its bottom, and a hole in which a pencil can be inserted. Some have reported that when using such a device, they received intelligible messages. In her book The Seven Purposes, Margaret Cameron describes getting many long messages using such a device, with the messages often being intelligent paragraphs.  The messages seem to suggest communication with the dead. 

 

Class 12  Seemingly Supernatural Events 

12.1 Public "Miracles." Events reported as public miracles include the events in Fatima, Portugal in 1917.

12.2 "Angelic Appearances."  Chapter 9 of the book here has some World War I accounts claiming angelic appearances, including the "Angels of Mons" incident.  Reports of deathbed appearances of angels are discussed in Chapter 10 of the book. 

12.3 "Spirit Announcements"

12.4 Warnings From Mysterious Voices. An example can be found here..

12.5 Inexplicable Sounds or Voices. An example of a mysterious voice announcing a death that occurred on the same day can be found here.  An equally spooky event involving a voice is described here and here and here. 

12,6 Inexplicable Object Movements or Displacements. Examples are given here and here.  

12.7 Inexplicable Device Activity.  A video example of such activity (an untouched camera taking 300+ photos in 13 separate bursts) can be seen here. Also in this category we can put reports of mysterious behavior by lights and electronic devices. Some examples can be found here and here  and here  and here and here.

12.8 Reported Teleportations. An Italian newspaper's reports of claimed teleportations of two small boys is quoted on page 17 of the document here.   An account of human teleportation appeared in the December 5, 1873 edition of the publication Medium and Daybreak, which you can read using the link here.   The account of the teleportation of Mrs. Elizabeth Guppy (to the ire of materialists) has the hallmarks of first-class observational evidence. The original source of such claims is the June 15, 1871 edition of The Spiritualist, a weekly newspaper. On page 170, we have a report by numerous witnesses claiming to have seen this case of human teleportation. The scientific paper here reports witnesses claiming a teleportation of inanimate objects. 

12.9 Transfigurations. On page 159 of a 19th century book, we have an account in which it is claimed that a young girl "hundreds of times"  took on the appearance of her brother who had died years before. A doctor supposedly weighed the girl, and found that during these transfigurations her weight was almost doubled. In other accounts of transfigurations, it may be reported that some person's face becomes inexplicably illuminated. In the Sept 17, 1875 edition of The Spiritualist, page 142, we have an account by A. Joy claiming that a medium named Mrs. Crocker in Chicago underwent transfigurations in which "her face entirely changed its form, size and character," to match those of certain deceased figures, such as a man with a beard.  In a book on hypnotism, Professor William Gregory seems to describe a kind of transfiguration that may occur under deep hypnosis. Using the term "mesmeric sleep" for a hypnotic state, he states this: "In the highest stages of the mesmeric sleep, the countenance often acquires the most lovely expressions, surpassing all that the greatest artists have given to the Virgin Mary, or to Angels, and which may fitly be called heavenly, for it involuntarily suggests to our minds the moral and intellectual beauty which alone seems consistent with our views of heaven." It seems that certain mediums call themselves "transfiguration mediums," and claim to produce a phenomenon in which their faces transform to resemble the faces of departed persons, possibly with the help of ectoplasm. You can find some examples by following the links after using this search query, which searches for the word "transfiguration" in the archives of the Psychic News periodical. On page 287 of the publication here, we have an account of transfiguration,  in which someone claims that a friend saw him "enveloped in a cloud of purple" with his face then taking on the appearance of deceased people.  On the page  here we have an account of transfiguration in the clairvoyant Mollie Fancher. Describing Fancher, the author says, "I have seen her at times when she was strangely transfigured ; her features were illuminated."

12.10 Rainfall Selectivity.  This is the phenomenon of raindrops seeming to fall in a very non-random way at one particular location, as if the raindrops had some preferred target area. Were you to see raindrops falling heavily on the left half of your open swimming pool, but much less frequently on the right half of that swimming pool, that would be an example of rainfall selectivity. An example of this phenomenon (very well documented with photographs) can be found in my post "When Raindrops Fall Non-Randomly: A Marvel of 'Rainfall Selectivity.' " 

12.11 Bilocation.  Chapter 4 of D. Scott Rogo's book Miracles: A Parascientific Inquiry into Wondrous Phenomena discusses reported cases of bilocation, in which someone seemed to be in two different places simultaneously.  The phenomenon may be related to astral projection (mentioned above).  A book states this: 

"Many Christian saints and monks were famous for bilocation, such as St. Anthony of Padua, St. Ambrose of Milan, St. Severus of Ravenna, and Padre Pio of Italy. In 1774 St. Alphonsus Maria de’Ligouri was seen at the bedside of the dying Pope Clement XIV, when in fact the saint was confined to his cell in a location four days’ journey away." 

 12.12 Mysterious Images Arising on Walls or Floor.  An impressive example of this type is documented on page 214 of the October, 1923 edition of Psychic Science, which can be read here. We see an image of Dean Liddell that appeared on a church wall very gradually years after he died, just above a plaque relating to Dean Liddell. The image bears a striking resemblance to the appearance of Dean Liddell, which you can see here. 

 

 Class 13  Possession and Similar Phenomena 

13.1 Long-term "Body Borrowing." Some very interesting examples are discussed here.  

13.2  Temporary "Possession." This is when someone claims to be possessed by the spirt of another person, often a dead person. An example of such a claim can be found in the "Tsunami Spirits" episode of the new version of the Unsolved Mysteries series available on Netflix. Around 35:30 a woman says, "More and more victims of the tsunami started to enter my body."

Class 14  "Past-Life" Recollections 

14.1 Childhood "Past-Life" Recollections. One of the main works discussing such cases can be read here. 

14.1.1  Childhood "Past-Life" Recollections With Birthmarks. A child may report a past life, and may have a birthmark matching the death wounds of the person he claims to have been. Ian Stevenson's Reincarnation and Biology (which can be read here) is the main work documenting such cases.

14.2 Recollections Suggesting the Non-Earthly Pre-Existence of the Soul. Some young children claim to remember a non-earthly existence before they were born.  An example of such accounts can be found in the scientific paper "Paranormal Aspects of Pre-Existence Memories in Young Children" which can be read here or here. One PhD using hypnosis on adults has claimed to have found evidence for the non-earthly pre-existence of the soul. For more information, see the book Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives by Michael Newton PhD (which can be read on www.archive.org using this link).  

Class 15  Visionary Experiences 

15.1 Premonitory Visions. An example of an accurate premonitory vision is described here. The article "Premonitory Visions Fulfilled" on page 308 of the document here discusses some remarkable cases of premonitory visions that seemed to come true.  On page 45 of the document here, we read this account:

"Some years ago, when I was staying in Colorado Springs, Colorado, U.S.A., I saw, four weeks before it actually occurred, the great fire which destroyed the town of Cripple Creek, and I described it all to some friends with whom I was having tea....I saw suddenly a number of houses on fire and the flames rapidly spreading from street to street, making a tremendous conflagration. The place I recognized as Cripple Creek, a rising mining city amongst the mountains several thousand feet higher up (altitude 10,600 feet), where I had been staying a few weeks previously, when prospecting for gold. I described the progress of the fire to my friends, and how it destroyed nearly the whole city, and where it first commenced, and the principal buildings it consumed. It was about a month after this vision that the fire occurred, exactly as I had foreseen and described it....Another instance of my foreseeing a great fire was when I was in Prescott, Arizona, U.S.A., eight years ago. I told the vision to friends at the moment of seeing it, and they asked me many questions concerning the disaster, which I answered (as it proved two weeks later) quite correctly. This time I saw the town of Prescott almost entirely destroyed by fire...Three weeks later, after my return to England, I received a letter from my friend, the Rev. Frederick Bennet (St. Luke’s Rectory, Prescott), telling me that the greater part of the town had been destroyed by fire, and there had been most exciting scenes." 

15.2  Mediumistic or ADC-type Visions. A spontaneous example not involving a medium may be found here.  

Class 16  Dream Phenomena 

16.1 Premonitory Dreams.  Examples of dreams that seemed to foretell a death are discussed here, here, here and here. Premonitory dreams or visions are discussed here and here and here.  A theory of warning dreams in the last year of life is discussed here. 

16.2  Visitation Dreams. What are called visitation dreams are dreams (seemingly unusually vivid) in which you may see a deceased love one.  

16.3  Dream Telepathy.  See here for some anecdotal examples. 

16.4 Lucid Dreaming. There is a large literature on how to have dreams in which you are aware that you are dreaming. In such dreams a dreamer may have some ability to dream as he wants to dream  

16.5 Death Notification Dreams. There are many people who seemed to have a vivid dream that served to announce someone's death. Examples can be found here and here and here and here.  

16.6 "Notification From the Dead" Dreams. An example can be found here, one in which a father gives a complex notification in a dream of a financial matter.   

16.7 Clairvoyant Dreams. Examples can be found here and here. 

16.8 Dream Series Repeating Themes of Death and Life After Death.  See here for my very long and fascinating account of having more than 200 dreams (over a period of more than 18 months) that seemed to symbolize life after death, along with 300+ dreams about deceased people. 

16.9 Pre-Birth Dreams and Visions.   Some claim to have dreams or visions involving children yet to be born, as discussed here. Dreams of this type are sometimes called "announcement dreams."

 Class 17  Premonitions While Awake 

17.1 Premonitory ESP. Two examples may be found on this page and the next. Another example can be found on page 254 of the document here. 

       17.2 Premonitions of Danger. An example is here. 

Class 18  Mystical or Semi-Mystical Experiences

18.1 "Cosmic Consciousness." The classic work on this topic is Richard Bucke's book, which can be read here. 

18.2 Christian Mystical Experiences. In some Protestant churches, mysticism is prominent, related to "born-again experiences." The Catholic Church has had notable mystics such as St. Teresa who Bernini depicted in his sculptural masterpiece "The Ecstasy of St. Teresa."

18.3 Buddhist Mystical Experiences. A scholar of Buddhism will find many reports of extraordinary mystical experiences within this very old and diverse religion which takes very many different forms. 

18.4 Muslim Mystical Experiences. Mysticism plays a large role for some Muslims called Sufis. 

18.5 Hindu Mystical Experiences.  A scholar of Hinduism will find many reports of extraordinary mystical experiences within this very old and diverse religion which takes very many different forms. On pages 177-179 of the book Irreducible Mind we have accounts of Hindu yogis (practicioners of yoga) who seem to have shown incredible control over their breathing, heart rate or temperature, in a way suggesting the mind has greater control over the body than normally imagined. 

Class 19  Linguistic Anomalies

19.1 Xenoglossy. Some cases of people seeming to speak in languages they never learned are discussed here and  here.  

On page 9 of the document here, we have this account of xenoglossy (the reference to a guide seems to refer to a spirit guide):

"ADELA ALBERTELLI, Argentine, of Italian parentage, normally speaks only Spanish, and was educated merely at a primary school.  Yet, in trance, when she gives also clairvoyance and clairaudience, she speaks and writes in English, German, Italian, French, Dutch and Portuguese. With the help of her guide, she has written in Latin about the life of Jesus. Names and places unknown to her have been correctly spelt, and she uses signs that are not employed in Spanish. There is a poem in English, and a love-letter in German, signed, apparently, by Byron, dated August 25, 1819, headed 'Bologna,' and addressed to Teresa Guiccioli, a 16-year-old girl. Another poem is written in a language which has not vet been identified. Sometimes she uses her own handwriting; but usually, especially when foreign languages are involved, the writing changes. 'Two Worlds,' which reports this case, prints a photograph showing five distinct styles of writing." 

Below is a description of xenoglossy from the paper here:

"In 2017, I attended a scientific conference at Yale University, where I presented a speech on out-of-body experiences. What follows is a description of the individual case of a psychiatric patient presented at the conference by Samuel Sandweiss, an ex-psychiatrist from San Diego, California. His presentation concerned a mentally disabled, Christian patient who suffered from episodes of severe headaches, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, and seizure-like activity. The patient, without having any prior connection to India or Sanskrit (the oldest Indo-Aryan language), suddenly and spontaneously started to speak in Sanskrit. Two experts in Sanskrit examined the material produced by this patient and confirmed its legitimacy. Sandweiss patient provided 14 reports in Sanskrit while under trance. After careful analysis of the reports, Sthaneshwar Timalsina, a scientist and an expert in Sanskrit, found that they were actually extracts from the Vedic Revelations - which is a very profound spiritual teaching existing in four different Sanskrit languages. Revelations, identified as pieces of information containing deep wisdom from a high-level spiritual source, have been described in many traditions of the past."  

Class 20  Skin and Sensation Anomalies

20.1 Mirror Touch Synesthesia. Mirror touch synsethesia is a  rare effect by which people seem to feel tactile sensations of nearby people.  The phenomenon is so well-documented that is not even disputed by some who claim to be skeptical of all paranormal phenomena.  

20.2 Exteriorization of Sensibility. See here for some interesting accounts in which a person's sensitivity to touch seems to be outside his body.            

20.3 Phantom Limb Pain. A search for "phantom limb pain" will find many matches in mainstream sources, including assertions that most amputees experience such pain (mysteriously arising as if the amputated limb still existed). 

20.4 Stigmata and skin-writing.  Stigmata is a phenomenon where certain religious people get mysterious bleeding wounds that may be reminiscent of the crucifixion wounds of Jesus. A superficial discussion of the phenomenon is here, in a magazine with a poor record of scholarly reporting on anomalous phenomena.  Claims of extraordinary healings and other supernormal phenomena (as well as stigmata) occur in a discussion of Padre Pio here. Chapter 3 of D. Scott Rogo's book Miracles: A Parascientific Inquiry into Wondrous Phenomena has a long discussion of evidence for the phenomena. A possible explanation is one of non-miraculous (but still paranormal) mind over matter. The term "stigmata" is also sometimes used for any paranormal appearance of marks on the skin. A 19th century writer uses the term in reference to a report of words mysteriously appearing on the skin of the medium Foster. The writer then sates this: " Of this phenomenon of stigmata on the flesh, the instances are numerous and thoroughly authenticated. Ennemoser, Passavent, Schubert, and other eminent German physiologists, admit the fact as not only established as regards many of the so-called saints of the Catholic Church, but in undoubted modern instances, as in the case of the ecstaticas of the Tyrol, Catherine Emmerich, Maria Dorl, and Domenica Lazzari, all of whom exhibited the stigmata....We have witnessed repeatedly under circumstances where to doubt would have been to reject all rational proof as worthless."  The article here discusses reports that Olga Kahl had a mind-over-matter ability to will letters to appear on her skin, an ability that can be called skin-writing. 

20.5 Mysterious Scents.  Witnesses sometimes report mysterious floral scents arising around the time of someone's death. Some examples are given on pages 128 to 134 of the book here. In other cases people report smelling a scent associated with a  person, arising mysteriously after the person died. An example might be a perfume smell or a distinctive cigar smell. 

20.6 Anomalous Insensitivity to Heat. Countries such as India have provided innumerable reports of bare-footed "fire walkers" able to walk over hot coats without being burnt. A famous similar case was reported by Sir William Crookes, who reported the ability of the medium Daniel Dunglas Home to pick up hot coals in his hands, without injury. On page 103 of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (July 1889), Crookes gives this account:

"Mr. Home again went to the fire, and after stirring the hot coal about with his hand, took out a red-hot piece nearly as  big as an orange, and putting it on his right hand, covered it over with his left hand so to almost completely enclose it, and then blew into the small furnace thus extemporised until the lump of charcoal was nearly white-hot, and then drew my attention to the lambent flame which was flickering over the coal and licking round his fingers; he fell on his knees, looked up in a reverent manner, held up the coal in front and said: 'Is not God good ? Are not His laws wonderful?' "

20.7 Anomalous Chills.  A book states this:

"Another point of interest is the sensation of deadly chill, felt sometimes as a breeze and sometimes only inwardly. This phenomenon is by no means the invariable concomitant of the apparition but it IS noted often."

Sir William Crookes noted that some spooky movements of objects "are generally preceded by a peculiar cold air, sometimes amounting to a decided wind," and that on some occasions "the cold has been so intense that I could only compare it to that felt when the hand had been within a few inches of frozen mercury."  Page 188 of the October 1923 edition of Psychic Science (which can be read here) documents inexplicable large temperature drops occurring during the seances of a medium (Stella C.), including a drop of 20 degrees during a seance of April 12. 

20.8  Synesthesia. Synesthesia refers to anomalous sensory experiences that involve a kind of merging or blending of separate senses. For example, someone may report seeing particular colors of shapes when he hears a particular word or hears a particular type of tone. Other interesting examples may be found in Chapter 5 of the book "Varieties of Anomalous Experience," which can be read here.  A list of people who have had different types of synesthesia is found here. 

Class 21  Tool-Assisted or Object-Assissted Psychic Abilities

21.1 Dowsing. Read here about how a physicist got good evidence for the reality of this phenomenon, in which a person may mysteriously may be able to find underground bodies of water using a mere wooden branch. 

21.2 Crystal Gazing. Certain people claim visions when looking into crystals or crystal balls. On page 195 of the document here, you can read about a woman who is described as being neither intellectual or spiritual in a normal state, but who (apparently under hypnosis) could enter into a supernormal state in which she could use crystals or crystal balls to help her make psychic pronouncements of stunning accuracy. We read this: 

"In tracing past events with the aid of the crystal, she has never made a mistake or a false statement. Once or twice she has met people whose past she could not see at all, but she has never had a false vision of the past. Of the future events that she has foretold, the few that have had time to come to pass have proved the truth of her vision, though the possibility of one or two of them happening was denied repeatedly by the persons interested up to the day before they did happen." 

21.3 Psychometry. A writer defines psychometry as "a psychic power possessed by certain individuals which aiables them to divine the history of, or events connected with, a material object with which they come in dose contact."  In the chapter beginning here, the writer discusses some astonishing accounts of such an ability. A long work on psychometry was written by Joseph R.  Buchanan MD, and can be read here. 

21.4  Slate Writing. Slate writing is the appearance of apparently inexplicable writing on slates. The physics professor Zollner presented evidence for the phenomenon (and other paranormal phenomena) in his work Transcendental Physics which can be read here.       

Class 22  Synchronicity Phenomena

22.1 Clocks Stopping at the Time of Someone's Death. An example of such a thing is reported here, by a witness claiming that when a family member died at 9:30 pm, all clocks stopped at 9:30 pm on the day of the death, and also at 9:30 pm on the next day.  Other examples are discussed here. 

22.2 Unaccountable Sensations at the Time of Someone's Death.  An example can be found on page 245 of the document here, where we hear of a wife who said, "I felt all at once as if somebody had taken a bucket of cold water and thrown it over me, or as if a great wave had struck me, and I was drenched from head to foot," with this sensation occurring at the same her husband drowned far away. On pages 176 to 182 of the very interesting book A Glimpse of Heaven by Carla Wills-Brandon, we are given two accounts of young healthy people experiencing sudden sickly sensations at the same time a relative far away died. In one the famous actor Jack Lemmon recalls how a young friend of his suddenly was struck by nausea and dread while playing tennis with Jack. He later found out that his mother had died at the same time, 2000 miles away.  

22.3 Unaccountable Sounds at the Time of Someone's Death.  At page 126 of the document here, we read the following: "At the time at which my old nurse died, to whom I was much attached, I was sitting at 9.30 in the morning after breakfast within a yard of a glass door, on which a crashing bang was suddenly struck, there being no one present in the flat at the time except myself and nothing normal which could possibly have caused it."

22.4 Unaccountable Fallings at the Time of Someone's Death.  At page 126 of the document here, we read the following: "Other forms of death-warnings, such as the stopping of clocks, the falling of pictures, loud and unaccountable knockings and the apparent dropping of heavy weights the material counterparts of which do not exist, are common enough, but I do not know that any of these warnings are peculiar to specific families."  Within an hour of learning of a sister's death, I witnessed an inexplicable kind of "leaf shower" in which leaves at a park fell in great abundance, even though there was no strong wind, and it was not even yet autumn when the leaves tend to fall. 

Class 23  Anomalous Mental Influence on Living Systems

23.1 Anomalous Change in Mental States After a Person Silently Wished Such a Change. On page 230 of the book Irreducible Mind, we hear of an experiments in which one person attempted to produce mental changes such as excitation or calming in another unseen person located elsewhere. We are told on the next page that such experiments have been highly successful. We read, "In an overview of 19 studies conducted at three labs, Schlitz and Braud (1997) found an overall success rate of 37%, when 5% would be expected by chance (p = .0000007, effect size = .25)." In popular culture, millions believe that one person can cause another person to feel better simply by praying for such a person. 

23.2 Anomalous Change in Physical States After a Person Silently Wished Such a Change. In popular culture, millions believe that one person can cause another person's health to improve simply by praying for such a person. On page 228 of the book Irreducible Mind, we are told that six out of 13 "distance healing" studies produced significant results. Doing a Google search for "power of prayer"+"scientific study" will give more information. 

23.3 Anomalous Detection of Observation of the Self by an Unseen Observer. It has been reported that better-than-chance results have occurred in "sense of being stared at" tests, in which a person is asked to judge whether a person he cannot see is staring at him.  

In my studies of the anomalous, I will surely learn about additional types of anomalous phenomena that should be added to this list. I will be updating this post, and I will attempt to add only new items, rather than changing any numbers I originally used.