Proving a ghost exists would instantly stop it being paranormal
The paranormal has a built-in trap. Anything that science could confirm would simply become part of science, so no phenomenon can ever be verified as paranormal by definition. That has not stopped a century of card-guessing experiments, UFO societies, cryptid hunters and one man who filled 40,000 notes with falling frogs.
The word itself is fairly young, in English use since at least 1920. It joins para, meaning beyond or against, to normal, implying that whatever science explains is ordinary and anything outside it is something else. Psychologist Terence Hines treats the field as a branch of pseudoscience set apart by explanations phrased in vague terms such as psychic forces or human energy fields, rather than borrowed scientific vocabulary.
Belief in ghosts runs deep. Anthropologist George Frazer tied it to animism, the ancient idea that everything in nature has a soul, and noted that souls were often imagined as exact copies of the body, clothes included. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, around 1550 BCE, shows the deceased dressed much as they were in life. UFO enthusiasts split early into two camps: self-styled ufologists from the 1950s who hoped logical analysis of sightings would prove alien visits, and a more mystical wing drawn from Theosophy and spiritualism that later fed New Age movements.
Charles Fort, who lived from 1874 to 1932, is often called the father of modern paranormalism. Combing newspapers and journals such as Nature and Scientific American, he gathered reports of fish and frogs dropping from the sky, spontaneous fires, ball lightning and objects found where they had no business being. He is credited with coining the word teleportation and was perhaps first to suggest alien abduction. Fortean Times magazine still carries on his habit of collecting odd tales.
Laboratory work fared poorly. J. B. Rhine made card-guessing and dice experiments famous, but they turned out to have methodological flaws. The Parapsychological Association formed in 1957 and gained a link to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the big general science body, in 1969, while critics founded what is now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in 1976. After more than a century, no experimental result has won wide scientific acceptance.
Source: Paranormal
