Evidence
Everything the Project has found so far, with its source, and with what each finding can and cannot support said plainly underneath it.
Peer-reviewed, random sample, published instrument. This is the strongest evidence on the page and the only category that can support a prevalence claim.
8%
of 1,113 randomly selected young people in war-affected northern Uganda were experiencing cen, the local form of spirit possession.
Neuner, Pfeiffer, Schauer-Kaiser, Odenwald, Elbert & Ertl · “Haunted by ghosts: Prevalence, predictors and outcomes of spirit possession experiences among former child soldiers and war-affected civilians in Northern Uganda” · Social Science & Medicine · 2012
14.3%
the severe form among those abducted as child soldiers, against 3.7% of those who had not been abducted. Close to four times the rate.
This is the only figure the Project holds that points at cause rather than at prevalence. A dose-response relationship — more exposure, more of the thing — is what makes a phenomenon a research object rather than a curiosity. It does not establish what cen is; it establishes that whatever it is, it tracks something.
Same study. Figures are for the severe presentation as defined in the paper.
Large-sample polling, self-reported. Supports claims about how widespread the experience is; does not speak to what is happening in any individual case.
1 in 4
adults across ten African countries say they have personally witnessed a spirit being driven out of a person — rising to 48% in Ethiopia, and running to 21% across parts of Asia.
Pew Research Center · surveys of religious belief and practice across sub-Saharan Africa and Asia
A practitioner's caseload, reported by the practitioner. Direct and present-tense, which polling is not; unblinded and unaudited, which polling is. It is evidence that a clinician is seeing something, not yet evidence of what.
25–30%
of those arriving at the Takiwasi Centre, an ayahuasca research and addiction treatment centre in Peru, are carrying an infestation or worse — and most do not know it.
Dr. Jacques Mabit · founder, Takiwasi Centre, Tarapoto, Peru
An estimate given in an interview, not from a study. Included because it is what practitioners in this field say when asked, and because leaving it out would misrepresent the state of the evidence. It carries no weight against the categories above and should not be cited as though it did.
25%
of people carry demonic affliction — distinct, he holds, from any psychological cause. Fr. Ripperger reports this as the figure his colleagues independently arrived at.
Fr. Chad Ripperger · interview, Shawn Ryan Show
Peer-reviewed, and not about possession. Findings from fields that study parts of this object under other names. They support claims about what has and has not been examined; they establish nothing about possession itself.
2nd
most prevalent hallucination modality in the general population, after auditory. Touch is the one sense that reports contact, and it reports it constantly.
This is a ranking, not a rate. The Dutch national cohort the review cites puts yearly incidence at 0.31%. What the finding supports is that tactile experience is second in order of frequency — not that it is common in absolute terms. The same review calls its own literature “overly neglected”.
van Ommen et al. · Frontiers in Psychiatry · 2021 · citing NEMESIS-II · 10.3389/fpsyt.2021.728397
62%
of an interviewed psychotic sample reported bodily hallucinations.
Same paper. An interviewed clinical sample, not a random one.
10yrs
of Wellcome Trust funding for Hearing the Voice at Durham University, across nine or more disciplines — all of it on the auditory modality. There is no equivalent anywhere for touch.
Hearing the Voice · Durham University · Wellcome Trust · 2012–2022
Voices that arrive as persons — adversarial, adaptive, the same character returning — are a named open problem in the field’s own journals, not a fringe observation.
Alderson-Day, Woods et al. · Schizophrenia Bulletin · 2020 · 10.1093/schbul/sbaa095. See also Alderson-Day et al. 2021 on illusory social agents · PMID 34541680
The sense of a presence beside you has been induced experimentally in a neurology laboratory, by delaying sensorimotor feedback.
Blanke et al. · Current Biology · 2014 · 10.1016/j.cub.2014.09.049
Sleep paralysis is the one corner of this territory with an agreed structure: a three-factor model, built from large samples and replicated. It is the method template the rest of the programme borrows.
Cheyne, Rueffer & Newby-Clark · 1999. Cheyne · Dreaming · 2003 · 10.1023/A:1025373412722
43%
of an interviewed schizophrenia-spectrum sample reported sexual hallucinations, which the authors call “probably the most neglected types of hallucination”.
The same paper reports a strong association with childhood trauma (odds ratio 8.7) and reads these experiences as re-experiencing. That is the leading interpretation and the Project does not dispute it here.
Blom & Mangoenkarso · Frontiers in Psychiatry · 2018 · 10.3389/fpsyt.2018.00193
The Project's argument is that this has never been studied properly. These are the things that do not exist, and every one of them is a reason the Project exists rather than an embarrassment to it.
Every figure here is quoted as its source states it. Where a figure is an estimate rather than a measurement, the page says so beside it.
Corrections, and anything we have missed, to hello@metanoiaproject.ie — including sources that cut against the argument.
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