Ghost Encounters Among Traumatized Cambodian Refugees: Severity, Relationship to PTSD, and Phenomenology

• Published in: Culture, medicine and psychiatry Vol. 44; no. 3; pp. 333 - 359
• Main Authors: Hinton, Devon E., Reis, Ria, de Jong, Joop
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.09.2020; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Adult; Anthropology; Awakening; Cambodia - ethnology; Clinical Psychology; Consciousness; Cosmology; Dreams; Female; Ghosts; Hallucinations; Heuristic; Humans; Male; Massachusetts; Middle Aged; Neurological disorders; Ontology; Original Paper; Panic Disorder - ethnology; Panic Disorder - psychology; Patients; Phenomenology; Post traumatic stress disorder; Psychiatry; Psychological distress; Public Health; Refugees; Refugees - psychology; Severity; Severity of Illness Index; Sleep; Sleep paralysis; Sleep Paralysis - ethnology; Sleep Paralysis - psychology; Social Sciences; Sociology; Spiritualism; Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic - ethnology; Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic - psychology; Surveys and Questionnaires; Trauma; Traumatic incidents; Visitation; Cambodia; Massachusetts; PTSD; Ghosts; States of consciousness; Hallucination; Complex trauma; Culture
• ISSN: 0165-005X; 1573-076X
• DOI: 10.1007/s11013-019-09661-6

Ghost encounters were found to be a key part of the trauma ontology among Cambodian refugees at a psychiatric clinic, a key idiom of distress. Fifty-four percent of patients had been bothered by ghost encounters in the last month. The severity of being bothered by ghosts in the last month was highly correlated to PTSD severity ( r  = .8), and among patients bothered by ghosts in the last month, 85.2% had PTSD, versus among those not so bothered, 15.4%, odds ratio of 31.8 (95% confidence level 11.3–89.3), Chi square = 55.0, p  < .001. Ghost visitations occurred in multiple experiential modalities that could be classified into three states of consciousness: full sleep (viz., in dream), hypnagogia, that is, upon falling asleep or awakening (viz., in sleep paralysis [SP] and in non-SP hallucinations), and full waking (viz., in hallucinations, visual aura, somatic sensations [chills or goosebumps], and leg cramps). These ghost visitations gave rise to multiple concerns—for example, of being frightened to death or of having the soul called away—as part of an elaborate cosmology. Several heuristic models are presented including a biocultural model of the interaction of trauma and ghost visitation. An extended case illustrates the article’s findings.