In Japanese folklore, ghosts are considered to be restless spirits prevented from a peaceful afterlife. It features real people telling me about experiences they’ve had that they feel could be paranormal. It is widely claimed that Albert Einstein suggested a scientific basis for the reality of ghosts, based on the First Law of Thermodynamics: If energy cannot be created or destroyed but only change form, what happens to our body's energy when we die? Until the emergence and spread of atheism in the 18th century, belief in the soul and an afterlife was almost universal. I was that child who obsessively pored over those old books like the Usborne World of the Unknown in the school library.

Each episode features a new story, told by the person it happened to; ordinary people who have experienced the extraordinary. He is also a clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE). Decreasing anxiety has also been hypothesised as a potential method by which to reduce sleep paralysis. It could be to do with a misunderstanding or lack of awareness of perfectly natural phenomena and so ostensibly paranormal phenomena is regarded by people as unexplained because they do not have an explanation for it.

It brings out fascinating conversations about phobias – the key one being triskaidekaphobia and friggatriskaidekaphobia – fear of the number 13 and fear of Friday 13th , respectively. Ghosts featured in Mesopotamian religions, and traces of these beliefs influence the subsequent Abrahamic religions that have shaped the modern world. This can cause us to perceive structures around is that don't exist, according to Jennifer Whitson at the University of Texas. The uncanny, the mysterious, the eerie, and the spooky are all qualities associated with ghosts, meaning that explicable experiences that embody these qualities may be falsely imputed to ghosts. While ghosts are a nebulous concept, there are different archetypes and categories that reappear in fiction.

We only tend to remember the things that we pay attention to, so in the case of ghost experiences that involve unexplained sound or movements, it may simply be that a person is too absorbed in one thing to notice the reasonable explanation for another.I feel like I would love to see evidence of the paranormal, and, sometimes, when I have been in supposedly ‘haunted’ locations, I have found myself almost willing something to happen, thinking “come on spirits, chuck a plate at me,” but then, when I really consider it, I think “be careful what you wish for,” because when I see the impact of these experiences on the witnesses I talk to, I realise they really have been life-changing, both in terms of the level of fear they feel, but also the implications of what this means, how it changes your very concept of reality. Hindu mythology includes figures like Baital, a malevolent spirit who takes demonic possession of corpses from cemeteries, and Pishacha, a flesh-eating demon. Founded in 1862, it is believed to be the oldest such organisation in the world, and counted both Charles Dickens and S ir Arthur Conan Doyle among its members. In one study, bringing a lucky charm into a memory test significantly improved subjects' results, while another golf putting experiment showed that those using what was considered a "lucky" ball performed better. Of course, it's all made up, like speculating on the different races of fairies or dragons: there are as many types of ghosts as you want there to be.

One final consideration: Virtually all ghostly experiences involve impediments to making accurate perceptions and judgments – bad lighting, emotional arousal, sleep phenomena, social influences, culture, a misunderstanding of how recording devices work, and the prior beliefs and personality traits of those who claim to see ghosts. Danny will also invite viewers to get in touch with their own explanations, and provide case updates in which he explores viewers’ theories on the stories.Today, few people accept that bit of lore, but it's likely that many of the signs taken as evidence by today's ghost hunters will be seen as just as wrong and antiquated centuries from now. Our brain is constantly bombarded with information - colour, sounds, pressure - which it must make sense of in a process known as bottom-up processing . The scary story features recognisable tropes that children will love, such as a creepy fairground and a haunted house.