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Welcome back to DEAD Time. This month, we’re going to examine the correlation between science and the unexplained. The National Institutes of Health defines psychology as “the scientific study of behavior and experience” and parapsychology as the study of “anomalies of behavior and experience, called paranormal experiences.” Why do some people experience frequent paranormal activity while others live their entire lives without seeing or experiencing anything supernatural? To answer this question and address the relationship between science and the paranormal, I reached out to an academic and expert in both psychology and parapsychology.

Brandon Massullo is a clinical therapist, author, and parapsychologist, with graduate degrees in clinical counseling from the University of Toledo and psychological research methods from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Brandon also studied parapsychology at the University of Edinburgh and has done extensive research on environmental sensitivity and ghostly encounters. His research has been published in academic journals including Frontiers of Psychology, Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, and the Journal of the Society of Psychical Research. Brandon is also the author of the book The Ghost Studies: New Perspectives on the Origins of Paranormal Experiences.

Recently, Bloody Disgusting had the pleasure of talking with Brandon Massullo about his research into various types of paranormal phenomena including Haunted Person Syndrome and Environmental Sensitivity, as well as theories on the connection between the science of psychology and paranormal activity.

Bloody Disgusting: As a clinical therapist, why did you decide to pursue parapsychology as well?

Brandon Massullo: I always wanted to be in parapsychology, but there is not a lot of money in parapsychology or a lot of open positions [laughs]. So, most of the people who do research in parapsychology have different jobs or sometimes different degrees. I got into clinical counseling kind of to pay the bills. So, I was a full-time therapist for about four years and then I decided to go overseas and study parapsychology after that. I wanted to make sure I had a career to fall back on, if you want to think about it like that.

BD: Let’s talk about the intersection of psychology and paranormal activity. How do you think the two are connected?

BM: Oh gosh, you can’t separate psychology from pretty much anything. Anytime you involve a human you involve psychology. We all come with our emotions, we all come with our thoughts, we all come with our history, our beliefs, our experiences, and our culture. That comes with us everywhere we go; we can’t leave that at home. We’re all emotional beings for sure. We’re anxious, we’re sad, we’re happy, we’re angry, sometimes all at once. So, anytime someone encounters a ghostly occurrence or enters a haunted house or does anything like that, telepathy or ESP, there’s always psychology involved to some degree. It’s always there. When it comes to paranormal, in recent years, research has kind of moved toward it’s not just the right person in the right setting. More or less, anyone who goes to a haunted house, the ghost is always going to be this discarnate entity that’s hanging around.

So, anyone who walks through the house, they’re going to see the ghost and the ghost is going to see them or there is some sort of interaction going on. But we’re finding more and more it’s not so much the right setting, it’s the right person in the right setting. So, psychology plays a big role in that. If you take a hundred people into a haunted house, how come a hundred people aren’t having experiences? It has to do with a person and what they bring to the table. It’s sort of bidirectional or interactional, so the house and the environment are working with the person, so it’s sort of a back-and-forth relationship.

BD: I’ve been reading your research on Haunted Person Syndrome. It’s so fascinating! Can you tell me a little bit about how that came about?

BM: There are a lot of researchers who have been working on that, not just me. There is a book by a group of parapsychologists called Ghosted, which kind of highlights the past five to eight years of research into ghostly encounters and it came up with this Haunted People Syndrome. Basically, what it does is it looks at and it can say, “These types of people are going to have way more paranormal experiences and ghostly encounters than other people.” That has to do with psychological characteristics, environmental cues, and sort of social context. So, this is your people who have environmental sensitivity, people who have transliminality, which is sort of a psychological component that has to do with mental boundaries and a lot of stimuli going into their brains, thin boundary people, affordance, which has to do with the environment, the atmosphere, immersion, like if you walk into a place and feel connected to it, and paranormal beliefs and religious beliefs. The environment plays a big part in things, too. There is a lot of research that says electromagnetic fields, infrasound, and EMF tend to impact this as well.

BD: Why do you think the environment affects certain people, and not others, and how would you explain someone who has paranormal activity in multiple locations?

BM: I think of environmental sensitivity as a continuum; we all sort of sense the environment. Certain people are just better at it. So, if I go into a paint store with my wife, I see five colors; my wife sees five hundred colors. She’s just able to determine slight differences between the different colors. There are people called supertasters. You can blindfold them and give them M&M’s and they can tell you what color an M&M is just by tasting it. Their sensitivity to taste is super, super high. We’re all on this continuum. Some people are just far, far intensely sensitive to things in the environment. So, if you and I walk into a room and we sit under fluorescent lighting and we sit on a chair that’s just been wiped with a bleach rag and we’re next to someone who has a lot of Old Spice on, I might be okay with that. You might get headaches from the fluorescent lighting, you might get nauseous from the Old Spice cologne, and you might get a rash from the cleaning agent. We’re both in the same spot at the same time and we’re both experiencing the same things, but you are reacting to them differently. So, you’re just a little bit more environmentally sensitive.

We find these people who are highly environmentally sensitive, and they also have way more ghostly experiences. An environmentally sensitive person might have a lot of migraines, they might have fibromyalgia, or they might have multiple chemical sensitivities, but they also have way more paranormal experiences as well. So, theoretically, ghosts are happening in the environment and obviously those who are more sensitive to the environment may be picking up on things more than the general population. Perhaps that’s why they’re having more paranormal experiences. It could also be that maybe they’re sensing things and maybe misattributing them to ghosts. So, if there is a room with a lot of electromagnetic field disturbances or fluctuations, they can’t see that and they don’t know that, but they do know that they’re having weird feelings and maybe sense a presence, it feels like the temperature is changing, and maybe they’re irritable, so they might attribute that to being a ghost. People who are sensitive to the environment seem to have way more ghostly experiences.

BD: Tell me a little bit about your book The Ghost Studies: New Perspectives on the Origins of Paranormal Experiences.

BM: I wrote the book in 2017, and it looks at different ways to explain ghosts. So, it’s different hypotheses or theories about what ghosts are. Science really hasn’t figured it out. The first written word for ghost was in 3000 BC on a clay tablet. Ever since then we’ve been trying to figure out if they’re real or not [laughs]. We really haven’t come any closer than we were in 3000 BCE. I think a lot of times amazing encounters are explained away by science as hallucinations or misinterpretations or overactive imaginations, so people were kind of struggling to find answers. When we’re struggling to find answers, we kind of go to TV or the internet, so a lot of the paranormal insights or comments about what ghosts are was coming from paranormal reality TV and things like that. So, I decided to write a book and come up with some new perspectives on what these things might be. So, that’s what The Ghost Studies is. It’s a look at what ghosts might be based on data rather than faith or belief.

I take a look at it, not so much that ghosts are these external entities that are kind of floating around us, but maybe it has a little bit more to do with entanglement or telepathy or residual type things like imprints. Basically, what I have are a lot of firsthand accounts of ghostly encounters and then I go over them and talk about what hypotheses can come from that. I have a couple of theories in there about telepathic distress signals between two people and getting stuck in the environment. It’s a little heady [laughs] at points, but I think that what is essentially in a short sense is it’s a different way to look at what ghosts are. I think most people who are interested in ghosts walk away from that at least thinking differently. We talk a lot about crisis apparitions. Have you ever heard about crisis apparitions?

BD: No, I’m not familiar with that term.

BM: Crisis apparitions are the best thing in the paranormal field, and they’re often not really discussed. Let’s say I’m lying in bed one night at 1:00 a.m. and the ghost of my aunt appears above my bed and says, “I love you,” and then disappears. I fall back asleep and when I wake up the next morning, I get a call saying, “Hey, your aunt died at 1:00 a.m. last night.” So, the time I saw my aunt as an apparition and she said, “Goodbye,” was the exact time that she passed away and she lives thousands of miles away from me. So, you have a crisis event that coincides with a paranormal experience or a ghostly experience. So, I’ve never had a ghostly experience in my entire life, but it coincided with the moment that my aunt passed away. You have these situations where people undergo crisis, so obviously if my aunt passes away it’s a psychological crisis. She’s going through quite a bit of distress, and it impacts the whole body and somehow some sort of telepathic message, or entanglement, occurs, so you have communication at a distance between two people, and it comes in the form of a spirit or ghost or apparition.

BD: So, do you think the person having a paranormal experience in a crisis like this is manifesting it or do you think it’s two-way communication?

BM: When we think of telepathy we think of reading people’s minds, but a lot of times telepathy, or what nowadays is called entanglement, which is just communication between two minds at distances, is communication of thoughts and emotions. So, let’s say my daughter breaks her arm and she’s hundreds of miles away from me and I’m sitting at home, and I get a sharp pain in my arm right at the time my daughter breaks her arm. That’s communication at a distance, something is going on there. Like if I’m thinking about a person and then I get a phone call from that person and they say, “Hey, I was just thinking about you,” there is some sort of communication happening there. I think sometimes ghostly encounters can fall into that as well. If someone is going through a life-altering situation, a crisis event, sometimes we reach out to others. If I’m in a crisis, I want to get help, right? But maybe my aunt doesn’t have time to do that, but she sends out some sort of distress signal that’s picked up by me and it comes in the form of an apparition of her saying, “I love you. Goodbye.”

So, it’s not so much that there is a ghost in my house, but it’s just this telepathy or entanglement in the form of an apparition or a projection. Sometimes this occurs in someone who never dies. There is an example in the book where a husband is at home on the computer and his wife is out with her friends. She gets into a horrible car accident and the husband is at the computer and turns and looks to the side and sees his wife sort of covered in blood and holding her left arm. So, he automatically freaks out. Later he finds out that she got into a car accident and never died or lost consciousness. But she got into a car accident and broke her left arm. So, somehow when she was in a crisis or distress, she sent some sort of distress signal to the husband saying, “Hey, I’m in danger. Come help.” And it came out in the form of an apparition.

For more information on Brandon Massullo’s work in parapsychology, please visit his website. You can read his detailed case studies and research here.