by Catherine Auman
Despite the disdainful glances from mainstream science, sex with ghosts is a hotter-than-hot topic in popular culture. From bestselling books and classic movies to long-running television series, the public’s appetite for ghostly sex appears to be trending and flourishing. Celebrities who’ve come out of the spectral closet and announced they’ve had sex with ghosts include Bobby Brown, Lucy Liu (“It was sheer bliss”), Kesha, Joyce Behar (“more than one”), and Anna Nicole Smith (Thompson, 2022).
Actually, there exists a long history of people reporting encounters with disembodied lovers, including the existence of numerous manuals and occult techniques teaching how to do it, that is, how to summon a ghost to bed.
Actually, there exists a long history of people reporting encounters with disembodied lovers, including the existence of numerous manuals and occult techniques teaching how to do it, that is, how to summon a ghost to bed. As expected, the academy takes a dim view of spectrophilia, the scientific term for the erotic love of ghosts, and the subject may reach the Boggle Threshold (Hunter, 2023), a term coined by Renée Haynes to denote an occurrence that stretches the incredulity of even the most open-minded.
Not the incredulity, however, of those who claim to have been visited at night by a ghostly lover, nor for the imaginative reader or viewer. Romance novels, for example, comprise over half of all books sold (Curcic, 2023), and of that genre, the fifth biggest-selling category is paranormal romance, which includes sex with the non-living. Paranormal romance is among the fastest-growing of all categories, especially among Gen Z. The New York Times (White, 2022) in its yearly roundup of outstanding books states:
My unabashed most-loved book of 2022? That would be The Dead Romantics (Berkley, 345 pp., paperback, $17), by Ashley Poston. The plot: A romance ghostwriter on deadline loses her father, and then encounters the ghost of her hot new editor, who cannot pass over until she finishes her latest manuscript. The feelings: swoony. The sentences: truly breathtaking. This romance has haunted me since I finished it, and it has become the standard by which I’ve judged everything else from this year.
Beyond bestselling and critically acclaimed books, spectrophilia has captured the imaginations of moviegoers. In the classic film Ghostbusters (1984), the character played by Dan Ackroyd is startled awake in the middle of the night by a phantasmically-gorgeous female ghost performing a sexual favor on him. By the look on his face, it appears he enjoyed it. Ghostbusters followed in the lineage of other vintage films about sexy ghosts such as Topper (1937), starring Cary Grant, about a fun-loving ghost couple (whom we assume had sex), and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) about a widow who falls in love with a ghost. As with most movies of that era, the audience is never told for certain whether the love was consummated, but it is intimated and assumed.
Earlier this century, the romcom Just Like Heaven (Water, 2005) starred Reese Witherspoon as the ghost and Mark Ruffalo as the human, and they obviously had quite the hots for each other. Instead of answering the question of how ghosts and humans have sex, they lay in bed together merely engaged in a G-rated touching of hands while staring soulfully into each other’s eyes. Steven Spielberg himself had optioned the rights from the book for the film. There are so many films in the genre that Marino (2022) even compiled the 10 Most Touching Paranormal Romance Films, Ranked.
Instead of answering the question of how ghosts and humans have sex, they lay in bed together merely engaged in a G-rated touching of hands while staring soulfully into each other’s eyes.
Danny Phantom, on television for three years, was an action-adventure series starring a teenage boy who was a human-ghost hybrid superhero. Being a teenager, Danny had erotic feelings for just about anything that moved. Another series, Being Human, running for four years, was a show starring a werewolf, a vampire, and a ghost who lived together as roommates. Sally, the ghost, possessed the body of a live woman in order to have sex with her objects of interest.
In 1998, Oprah Winfrey featured a woman on her show who described her intense experiences of having sex with a ghost. Other television talk show hosts who have spotlighted guests describing this phenomenon include Conan O’Brien, Stephen Colbert, Drew Carey, and The View, all of which speak to the subject’s popularity. Furthermore, Grey’s Anatomy fans will recall waiting three seasons to finally hear Izzy’s hot sex with the ghost of her dead fiancé, Denny.
Outside of the romanticizing of popular culture and the scientific trivialization of deeply weird phenomena, there exists a long history of people who believe they have experienced sex with ghosts, either willingly or against their will. There is also a significant subculture of those who believe sex with ghosts or the otherwise disembodied is a desired phenomenon that can be summoned and relished. As is usual in response to those who report deeply weird experiences, there are attempts to discredit their accounts and their characters.
For example, this widely reported phenomenon of otherworldly sex appears to be too weird for even that great chronicler of the strange, the Fortean Times. Murdie (2015), in his article Ghost Watch, stated, “Regarding a handful of ghost encounters claiming a sexual element I have heard personally, I unfortunately concluded that these came from attention-seeking individuals or arose with people who had undergone traumatic childhood experiences and abuse” (p. 12). The article continues documenting women who have reported such experiences in such a mocking and scornful tone that since the author is male and all the subjects female, one cannot help but call out sexism.
Jeffrey Kripal, the noted scholar of the history of religion, however, is not so disrespectful. In the 2017 film Love and Saucers, he offers the irrefutable point that the whole of Christianity is based on the belief that the Virgin Mary had sex with a ghost, albeit a holy one. So, whether conscious of it or not, all Christians have gone along with the belief that sex with ghosts is ontologically sound. The Christian Bible is rife with stories of women whom angels visited and consequently bore their children. One of the better known is from the Old Testament: Abraham’s wife, Sarah, was 92 years old and had never conceived until the night angels visited her and nine months later gave birth.
...the whole of Christianity is based on the belief that the Virgin Mary had sex with a ghost, albeit a holy one.
People have been reporting sexual experiences with ghosts and other unearthly beings since the beginning of recorded history (Beckley & Casteel, 2018; Hanegraaff & Kripal, 2008). As early as 2400 BCE, Gilgamesh, the hero of the epic that bears his name, was said to be the son of a spirit-father who appeared to his mother in a dream. Many heroic or godlike beings were claimed to have been fathered by a human woman and an incorporeal father, including Buddha, who was born of his mother, Maya, and a celestial being; the ancient Egyptian god, Ra; several superhuman Mexican figures; and the shamans of Siberia. In Greek mythology, Zeus and his fellow gods were constantly raping and impregnating human women.
All over the world and in all ages, there are reports of children being born of a visible, earthly mother and an invisible, unearthly father. It seems to be a way ancient writers built a hagiography, or a biography of a saint. Genghis Khan’s mother, it is said, was impregnated by a bolt of light. Merlin, the magician of the King Arthur legend, was said to have been given birth by a human mother who had been visited at night by an incubus.
A nightly visit from an incubus was a constant threat running rampant throughout the Middle Ages and continues into the present day in many non-Western cultures (Molendijk et Al., 2020). People were and are terrified of being woken up in the night by a spirit having sex with them, often violently and aggressively. Sometimes, it is believed, these encounters leave behind deformed children. In China, widows were not allowed to remarry because it was assumed their husbands would return and make love to them in the Borderland between wake and sleep (that is, the hypnogogic state).
There were not only the long-held beliefs that people had sex with ghosts, angels, and beams of light, but also with demons and the Devil himself. During the European Inquisition with its subsequent witch burnings, many women and gay men were burned alive after forced confessions of having had sex with the Devil (Hanegraaff & Kripal, 2008). In fact, that constituted one of the definitions of a witch — that she or he had had sexual relations with demons and the Devil. In the Muslim world, people are and were frightened of being visited by and forced to have sex with demons called djinn.
During the European Inquisition with its subsequent witch burnings, many women and gay men were burned alive after forced confessions of having had sex with the Devil.
Mainstream reductionist science isn’t having any of it. In a 2022 study, Molendijk and colleagues interviewed 800 people about their experiences with the incubus phenomena and concluded that it is merely a sleep-paralysis disorder that occurs between wakefulness and REM sleep. Even though their results showed that one-third to one-half of the research participants reported incubus experiences monthly or even weekly, the researchers stated, “It is obvious that [the incubus experience] plays no role of significance in Western popular thinking” (Molendijk et al., 2022, p. 6).
Despite this pronouncement by the establishment, the subjects who reported incubus experiences were very clear about what had happened: a sensed presence, auditory and tactile phenomena, a feeling of pressure on the chest, and being victimized by aggressive sexual acts that left them feeling terrorized and exhausted (Molendijk et al., 2022). There seemed to be no correlation between age or gender. Incubus incidents were more likely to be reported by subjects of non-Western origin.
Modern science states that hypnogogic hallucinations sometimes occur in the transitional stage between wakefulness and sleep, along with a state of paralysis (Molendijk et al., 2022) and therefore tries to discredit the experiences of its research subjects as mere hallucinations. It is interesting to note that Ida Craddock, the great occult scholar, sex educator, and author who advocated a sacred view of sex, referred to the state between wakefulness and sleep as the Borderland, a spiritualist term for the threshold between the material world and the after-life (Chappell, 2010). Within this Borderland, the spirits of the dead may interact with the living. She wrote extensively in her book Heavenly Bridegrooms (1918) about ongoing ecstatic sex with her ghost husband, who had died when he was 20. Her writings heavily influenced the O.T.O. and other occult groups and that great seducer of spirits himself, Aleister Crowley.
Craddock kept a detailed diary of the regular sexual intercourse she had with her husband, who lived “in the world beyond the grave.” She wrote that in order to be worthy of sustained marital relations in the Borderland, aspirants needed to train themselves to distinguish between real and illusory touches and to possess a higher code of ethics. She left instructions on the requirements necessary for a woman to conceive a child from a heavenly bridegroom (Chappell, 2010).
In addition to Ida Cradock’s work, Western occultism includes many practices and spells for summoning disembodied spirits to have sex with. Having sex with ghosts and spirits is considered a higher level of occult power than sex with human mortals. There exist several how-to manuals: Three examples are Achieving Invisibility and Having Sex with Spirits: Six Operations from an English Magic Collection ca. 1600 (Klaassen & Bens, 2022) and Sex Magic (1971) by Louis Cullen, which outlines the O.T.O.’s three-part method of invoking spirits for sex magic. Tyson’s Sexual Alchemy: Magical Intercourse with Spirits (2000) states that members of the Golden Dawn often abstained from physical sex, preferring to have intercourse with elementals. He offers practical instructions such as how to choose a spirit lover, how to establish links with them, how to go about obtaining a physical image and create a shrine, and he suggested mental and physical training and preparation, dietary advice, cleansing, consecration, rituals, and magickal exercises.
Western occultism includes many practices and spells for summoning disembodied spirits to have sex with. Having sex with ghosts and spirits is considered a higher level of occult power than sex with human mortals.
Although encounters with supernatural entities are among the most investigated deeply weird experiences, sex with ghosts might be the least. As with deeply weird experiences in general, many people are afraid to share what happened to them as mainstream science does not validate and even mocks their experience. It is likely that people who report deeply weird encounters, including sex with ghosts, will be labeled as mentally ill, of lesser intelligence, or deluded. Many authors are still labeling experiencers as pathological even though the number of reports from highly reputable people is growing. Sex with ghosts is also often dismissed as a harmless fantasy for “dumb” people, that is, women and teenagers. As we saw previously with the Fortean Times article, sexism often plays a role in that the majority of reported spectrophiliacs are female. The public seems more content to consume their spectral sexuality as fictional encounters.
Sex with ghosts is a tenet of faith for the two and a half billion followers of Christianity, the world’s largest religion. Spectrophilia is validated by Siberian shamans, Buddhist doctrine, screenwriters, celebrities, and most of the developing world. It is invited, encouraged, and ritualized by alchemists and occultists. The Chinese and Buddha’s mother believe in sex with ghosts as a tenet of their faith. According to scientific research, a sizeable minority of people believe they are copulating with spirits monthly or weekly. Perhaps these folks, while in a hypnogogic state, are accessing a portal to a reality other than our own, the Borderland consciousness where high strangeness experiences occur. It may be that sex with ghosts is a pleasure or a terror blocked out of mainstream consciousness. As the occultist Tyson (2000) states,
I do not believe that it is possible for the satisfaction of physical sex with a human being to ever equal the pleasures of sexual union with a spirit … [it] transcends mere physical sensation, just as it transcends the ordinary boundary of the skin, and the limits of human physiology. (p. xvi)
This certainly reaches and perhaps surpasses most people’s Boggle Threshold. It is indeed deeply weird to consider the extent and fascination of sex with ghosts. But then again, I don’t know, as I’ve never had the experience. Have you?
Beckley, T.G., & Casteel, S. (2018). Screwed by the aliens: True sexual encounters with ETs. Conspiracy Journal Productions.
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Craddock, I. (1918). Heavenly bridegrooms. Publisher unknown.
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In this issue of Mindfield, the contributors center their analysis on UAP from a variety of perspectives with supplemental essays on history, healing, and intuition. Mike Cifone argues that UAP require an expanded epistemology - grounded in radical empiricism and non-dual metaphysics - that acknowledges experiential, psychophysical, and anomalous data as legitimate, even when they …
by Anastasia Wasko and Jacob W. Glazier
