The Curious Cases of Haunted People Syndrome

Some people report ghost experiences throughout their lives. New research could provide a psychological framework explaining why they feel constantly haunted.

Nell was convinced that something sinister had been following her and her family for over a decade.

As she tells it, everything started in 2011, when the family — Nell, her husband Rod, her daughter Jill*, and her daughter’s then-boyfriend — decided to check out the property directly behind their San Antonio, Texas house. Out the back gate they went, finding the remnants of building supplies and not much else among the brush. It smelled like manure, but there were no horses around. Nell felt uncomfortable, and headed home while the family poked around some more.

A week later, a man dressed in all black showed up at their front door. He spoke with a heavy Eastern European accent. Nell hung back while her husband talked with the mysterious man, who despite the raging Texas heat wore a leather jacket and boots. They needed to stay off his property, the man in black said.

Then weird things, unexplainable things, began to occur. With Rod away working on an oil rig, Nell woke up one morning with a bite mark on her left breast that she had no memory of receiving. The following night a loud crash startled her awake. “I got up to see what happened and saw the light in my office was on. This room is directly across from my bedroom, and it was filled with dense, deep, amber-color whirling fog from floor to ceiling,” she said. Immediately Nell phoned Jill to come get her out of the house. The following morning, the fog remained in the office. It was still there the day after, when Rod got home from the oil rig. Only on the third day did the office fog finally begin to lift. One of Jill’s German Rottweiler dogs also turned up dead, with the cause a suspected drug overdose.

“It was after the fog that all hell began to break loose,” Nell said. “It seems to me that it came from that property [behind my house], that something was released…I know it sounds odd, but this whole thing is very odd and to continue after all these years and seems to [sic] follow us and intensify more as time passes.” Nearly every day since, Nell, Rod and Jill saw and experienced all kinds of phenomena ascribed to hauntings: apparitions, odd smells, and sensing presences, among others.

What happened to Nell and her family was the subject of the first case study of Haunted People Syndrome, a fairly new psychological framework developed by researchers Jim Houran and Brian Laythe, with additional collaborators. (Houran and Laythe have also spoken with Ghost Notes about the psychological overlap of trauma and ghost belief.) Haunted People Syndrome, or styled as HP-S for short, is the result of a specific kind of person being in a stressful environment. “These are people that continually feel as if they are the center of this kind of ghostly paranormal activity,” Houran and Laythe told me over a video call in June. With HP-S, Houran, Laythe and their collaborators are trying to provide a reproducible set of criteria to help people who report consistent hauntings, as well as clinicians without specialized knowledge in psychology of the paranormal — what is known as the field of parapsychology.

Over the course of two months, Houran and Laythe were in close touch with Nell and her family. “Many phone calls and several in-person visits,” Houran says. “As well as to conduct environmental studies of their house at the time.” The study hints that the family dynamic was not the healthiest. Pressed for details, Houran stays mum, saying he does not have the consent to share. “Let’s just say that was, and remains, a highly complex case.”

The set of patterns that became the core criteria for HP-S emerged somewhat accidentally. Houran, a longtime parapsychology researcher, was reviewing an academic textbook he had co-edited two decades prior on hauntings and poltergeist activity. It was the first of its kind, he says, and he thought it might need redoing. Instead, Houran and a group of multidisciplinary scientists conducted an independent review of research on hauntings. “Some very clear patterns came out from those reviews, so clear that we also started seeing the connections among those reviews of how these different areas actually overlap and reinforce each other,” Houran says. A recent survey of the general population for what researchers call “high-intensity HP-S patterns” suggests between 5-8% of the U.S. population — over 27 million people — show above-average HP-S indicators, Houran says.

In order to determine whether a person is experiencing HP-S, Houran and Laythe stressed that two elements must be present at the same time. “The general recipe is for these events to happen, you need the right kind of person in the right kind of environment,” says Houran. “It’s an interaction between psychological and physical.” From there, as outlined in their first 2021 study, five recognition patterns are present in HP-S:

1. High transliminality

2. A distressing environment

3. Psychological contagion

4. Threat agency detection

5. Sense-making mechanisms

Let’s break this down one-by-one:

1. High transliminality

As Ghost Notes has previously written, transliminality is a trait in which a person has highly porous mental boundaries. They are super-sensitive to pretty much everything: their environment, emotions, and physical sensations. Houran calls it a “perceptual-personality variable,” meaning a person links their perception of events around them to how their personality reacts to uncertainty. With HP-S, a transliminal person “can detect and respond to things that normal people either don’t notice or don’t care about,” says Houran.

2. A distressing environment

The transliminal person would also need to be in an environment causing them psychological stress. Houran and Laythe note that both the bad kind of stress, like being in financial debt, and the good kind of stress, like starting a new job, can create the tense environment for HP-S to occur. A term that can be used to describe this psychological state is “dis-ease” — when a person’s normal state of ease is disrupted or imbalanced.

3. Psychological contagion

This is a known concept in the field, in which people tend to pick up on the mood or behavior of others around them. In HP-S, psychological contagion means the transliminal person in a distressing environment is more likely to look for evidence of ghosts. They report a wide range of unexplained phenomena, such as hearing knocking sounds or seeing apparitions. The phenomena also tend to occur in concentrated bursts. Houran and Laythe explain it as the person connecting dots in ways that maybe they would not have, under other circumstances.

4. Threat agency detection

Another way to phrase this is hyper vigilance. With the combination of transliminality, a distressing environment, and psychological contagion, the person is on high alert for anything they perceive as threatening. It can manifest as a feeling that something is watching them, which can then create more anxiety and fear in the person.

5. Sense-making mechanisms

This is where a person’s social and cultural beliefs come into play. How the person experiencing HP-S interprets the unexplained incidents in their home is based on their unique interpretation of the world, based on religious commitments, folklore, and stories in the media, among other influences. One person could believe their house is haunted by ghosts. Another could believe demons are present, or aliens from another planet. Some people could believe all of these interpretations, and more, could be responsible.

Although trauma does not feature heavily in existing HP-S studies, Houran and Laythe say elements of it are often present in the cases they have seen, whether in family histories or a person’s own psychological history. “Maybe not to the point where they were diagnosed with a condition, not that they’re on medication, but yes, this was not a person with a normal Norman Rockwell upbringing,” says Laythe.

“People that are high in transliminality, they already have a propensity to have these [paranormal] experiences, but they also have a propensity for social and psychological issues,” adds Houran. And with a transliminal person existing in a distressing environment, it adds fuel to the fire. “The longer I put anyone in a high stress environment, there’s going to be psychological and physical consequences,” Laythe says. “If it’s not directly trauma, if you put someone in the perception of this environment for a decade, I don’t expect them to be doing well. This isn’t parapsychology. It’s simple clinical psychology.”

While Houran and Laythe were working with Nell and her family, they recommended a few approaches to help relieve what Nell attributed to a Christian demon or the devil invading the home. Both Nell and Jill were taught visualization and meditation exercises with “the hopes of reducing emotional stimulation that fueled the family dynamic and ostensibly fostered both transliminality and Nell’s histrionic or catastrophizing reactions to the anomalous experiences.” Nell was also recommended to undergo Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy that, according to the Cleveland Clinic, is shown to be effective through dozens of clinical trials and used for a range of mental health conditions. Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the condition most often associated with EMDR therapy. In their work with Nell, Houran and Laythe wrote “EMDR has shown corresponding efficacy for psychiatric and [physical] disorders with comorbid psychological trauma and, thus, it might also be effective for aspects of HP-S.”

Although Nell and Jill initially found visualization and meditation helpful, both stopped using the techniques, finding them “tedious.” For her part, Nell was resistant to Houran and Laythe offering conclusions that clashed with her belief that the family was afflicted by evil spirits. She consulted with a local psychic and Reiki practitioner “who concluded that her family was probably cursed in some way,” says the case study. “Nell understandably seized on this agreeable opinion as it…explicitly confirmed her conviction that an external, malevolent agent was responsible for the family’s haunting.”

Despite the S in HP-S standing for “syndrome,” Houran and Laythe are careful to point out it is not a mental health or medical diagnosis. “We mean it in its most classic descriptive sense, which is a set of signs or symptoms that cluster together, but we don’t know why,” says Houran. Critics of HP-S argue the framework wants to debunk the supernatural, or assign the person experiencing it with a new kind of disease. Not so, say Houran and Laythe. “We’re not saying the paranormal can’t exist. And we’re certainly not trying to put a diagnosis on people. Rather, it’s the starting ground.”

After Nell’s case study was published, the two researchers collaborated on a third HP-S study, published in 2025, that retrospectively analyzed a 2023 case study of a Silicon Valley family during the Covid pandemic and regional wildfires. The authors concluded that reports of ghost activity can be expressions of “distress that ethically deserve supportive responses from researchers.”

HP-S seems promising, but it has a ways to go before gaining mainstream acceptance in psychology. Houran and Laythe know this; at present, they are working on “a large-scale survey of HP-S dynamics in the general population and a detailed defense of the model from recent criticisms,” Houran wrote in a follow-up email. “So far, HP-S holds up reasonably well. That said, we’re also working on a major project outlining the key weaknesses to the model, as well as exploring documented cases that don’t seem to fit the model.”

In terms of who HP-S was designed for — people who seem to be the focus of ghostly activity throughout their lives — Houran and Laythe believe the framework establishes a core tenet. “We are saying that we do think there’s a baseline level of psychology and physics that is present in most any case,” says Houran. “It’s a question of what else might be layered on top of that. That, to me, is where the field is going.”

_{* Nell and her family’s names were changed for the case study in order to protect their privacy.}

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