Encounters with Supernatural Entities

18 Jun Encounters with Supernatural Entities

Martins (2023) states that encounters with “supernatural” entities are among the most investigated categories of anomalous experience. Such encounters play an important part of everyday life for many people within their cultural context, and thus in their social construction of reality. The meaning of their experiences is often established by their cultural background, social pressures, belief system, and other forces from the collective.

Although encounters with supernatural entities are among the most investigated, sex with ghosts is apparently the least. Many people are afraid to share their deeply weird experiences, as mainstream science does not validate their experience, and the scientific mainstream is who decides what is publishable. It is likely that people who report deeply weird encounters, including sex with ghosts, will be labeled as mentally ill, of lesser intelligence, or deluded. Many authors are still labeling experiencers as pathological even though the number of reports from  highly reputable people is growing.

Sex with ghosts is also often dismissed as a harmless fantasy for “dumb” people, i.e. women and teenagers. As we saw previously with the Fortean Times article, sexism often plays a role in that most reported spectrophiliacs are female.

The Continuum Hypothesis as expounded by Rojcewicz (2023) is a scale to measure and locate extraordinary encounters, or the human confrontation with the anomalous. This Continuum Hypothesis intended to account for cross-cultural distribution. In referring to the above problem with mainstream scientists discounting people’s reports of extraordinary encounters, Rojcewicz states, “The coloring of experience by a participant’s psychology or cultural beliefs does not invalidate the potential reality of the event, it merely complicates it.” (p. 249).

References

Cullen, L. T. (1971). Sex magic. Llewellyn Publications.

Martins, L. B. (2023). Strange Talk: Epistemological, methodological and ethical aspects of conducting interviews about anomalous experiences. In Hunter, J. [Ed.] (2023).  Deep weird: The varieties of high strangeness experience. August Night Press.

Rojcewicz, P. M. (2023). The extraordinary encounter continuum hypothesis. In Hunter, J. [Ed.] (2023).  Deep weird: The varieties of high strangeness experience. August Night Press.

© 2025 Catherine Auman

Books by Catherine Auman

Work with Catherine