Why Do People Feel the Presence of ‘Ghosts’? Scientists Are Starting to Understand

New research reveals how spirituality and psychology shape our encounters with unseen presences.

You’re alone in a room. It’s dead quiet. There’s nobody behind you.

And yet, somehow, you could swear someone is there.

You can’t see them or hear them. There’s no movement, no footsteps, no shadow slipping across the wall. But the sensation is unmistakable. Something, or someone, seems to be sharing the room with you. How creepy is that?

For centuries, experiences like these have inspired ghost stories, religious revelations, and tales of supernatural encounters. But psychologists have another name for the phenomenon: felt presence. And they’re beginning to understand why it happens in some people — and why it’s much more common than you might believe.

The new study published in the journal Psychosis suggests that how people experience these invisible visitors depends partly on their beliefs and psychological state.

Researchers found that people who frequently felt connected to a god, spirits, or some higher power, and who also reported more unusual perceptions associated with psychosis, were especially likely to sense an unseen presence. For these people, the encounters tended to feel more vivid, happen more often, and cause greater fear or distress.

The Strange Science of Feeling Someone Who Isn’t There

Psychologists have studied felt presences for a long time, although the phenomenon remains poorly understood.

Unlike a conventional visual hallucination, a felt presence doesn’t necessarily involve seeing anything. People may simply have an overwhelming conviction that another being is nearby, lurking like a spectre.

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Sometimes the presence feels friendly, even protective. Other times, it seems threatening. People have described invisible companions during periods of grief, religious experiences, sleep paralysis, and extreme physical exhaustion.

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In a 2023 review published in The Lancet Psychiatry, researchers including Joseph Barnby, Sohee Park, and Tatiana Baxter proposed that at least some of these encounters may arise from how the brain keeps track of our own bodies and distinguishes ourselves from other people. When these processes are disrupted, the brain may create the compelling sensation that someone else is nearby, even without sight or sound to confirm it.

And these experiences aren’t especially rare, either.

A 2024 Dutch study involving 10,447 people found that 1.6% had experienced a felt presence in the preceding month. Some described feeling watched. Others reported sensations resembling a hand resting on their shoulder, despite nobody being there.

Crucially, researchers emphasize that sensing an invisible presence is not, by itself, a sign of mental illness. In fact, one of the most interesting things about felt presence is how widely it appears across otherwise unrelated circumstances.

A grieving widow might sense her deceased husband sitting beside her. A religious practitioner might experience the presence of God. An exhausted mountaineer might feel an invisible companion following along a dangerous route.

The underlying sensation can be remarkably similar, even when people offer completely different explanations for it.

Baxter and Park, both psychologists at Vanderbilt University, approached felt presence from a new angle. They wanted to find out how religious or spiritual beliefs affect the experience of sensing an invisible presence, particularly among people who report unusual perceptions associated with psychosis risk.

When the Invisible Becomes Frightening

To investigate, Baxter and Park analyzed responses from 337 adults who completed an anonymous online survey conducted between 2020 and 2022.

Participants answered questions about their spiritual experiences, unusual perceptions associated with psychosis risk, and encounters with unseen presences. The researchers examined not just whether people had experienced a presence, but how often it happened, how vivid it felt, and whether it inspired pleasure or distress.

About 60% reported experiencing at least one felt presence in the past.

This figure is striking, although it shouldn’t be interpreted in any way as a population-wide prevalence. The researchers recruited volunteers through social media and mailing lists, likely attracting people already interested in unusual experiences.

The team then divided participants into four groups based on their spirituality scores and responses to a questionnaire screening for psychosis-like experiences.

One group stood out. People who frequently felt connected to God, spirits, or a higher power, and who also reported more unusual perceptions associated with psychosis risk, had the most intense encounters with unseen presences. They sensed these invisible visitors more often, felt their presence more vividly, and found the experiences more disturbing.

Among people with higher psychosis-risk scores, those who also felt a strong connection to God, spirits, or a higher power described their encounters with invisible presences as more vivid and disturbing. Those who reported fewer spiritual experiences generally found these encounters less upsetting.

Yet the most surprising finding concerned the pleasant experiences.

Here’s where the findings took an unexpected turn. People who reported more unusual perceptions associated with psychosis risk were more likely to describe their encounters with invisible presences as both frightening and pleasant. Some encounters apparently brought comfort, while others caused distress.

But believing in God, spirits, or a higher power didn’t necessarily make these experiences more comforting. Among participants with elevated psychosis-risk scores, those who reported stronger spiritual experiences actually found their encounters more disturbing.

The researchers suspect that how people explain an invisible presence may influence how they feel about it. Sensing a deceased loved one nearby might bring comfort. Believing that an evil spirit is watching you could be terrifying.

In an earlier study, Baxter and Park found that people with elevated psychosis-risk scores were more likely to interpret unseen presences as malevolent supernatural beings, including the devil.

Scientists Have Even Created Ghostly Presences in the Laboratory

So, what actually causes the sensation that someone is there when nobody can be seen? One explanation concerns how the brain constructs our sense of self.

Your brain constantly combines information from your muscles, skin, vision, and other senses to determine where your body is and what it is doing. Under ordinary circumstances, these signals work together seamlessly. There’s your body and there’s the outside world.

But when they become mismatched, the brain may interpret information originating from your own body as belonging to somebody else.

In a remarkable experiment published in Current Biology in 2014, neuroscientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne used robots to induce ghostly sensations in healthy volunteers.

Participants controlled a robot with their hands while another robotic device touched their backs. When the movements and touches happened simultaneously, the volunteers generally understood the sensations as consequences of their own actions. But when researchers introduced a slight delay between the movements and the touch, some participants began sensing another person nearby.

Earlier, in a 2006 study published in Nature, scientists electrically stimulated a particular brain region in a woman undergoing evaluation for epilepsy. The stimulation repeatedly produced the sensation of a shadowy figure behind her, one that seemed to mimic her body movements.

These experiments suggest that at least some ghostly experiences can emerge from the brain’s own machinery for distinguishing self from other.

But they don’t explain every instance of felt presence.

Culture is a factor

Culture and expectations may also play an important role. In a 2021 study involving more than 2,000 participants, Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann and colleagues investigated reports of gods and spirits across religious communities in the United States, Ghana, Thailand, China, and Vanuatu.

They found that vivid spiritual experiences were associated with two factors: cultural beliefs about whether supernatural forces can interact with the mind, and an individual’s tendency to become deeply absorbed in thoughts, images, and sensations.

In other words, our expectations about the invisible world — and this includes what others tell us we should expect — may help shape what we experience as real.

For some, the experience becomes a comforting connection with someone they’ve lost. For others, it becomes a terrifying encounter with something they cannot identify.

Whether actual ghosts exist is something that science can never answer, in the same way science can never prove whether Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy exists. But the scientific method can investigate why an unseen presence sometimes feels so undeniably real.