As the 19th-century anthropologist George Frazer explained in his classic work, The Golden Bough (1890), souls were seen as the 'creature within' which animated the body. The belief in ghosts as souls of the departed is closely tied to the concept of animism, an ancient belief that attributed souls to everything in nature.
Sometimes the term "ghost" is used synonymously with any spirit or demon however, in popular usage the term typically refers to the spirit of a deceased person. Alternative theories expand on that idea and include belief in the ghosts of deceased animals. In traditional ghostlore, and fiction featuring ghosts, a ghost is a manifestation of the spirit or soul of a person. Typically, a ghost-hunting team will attempt to collect evidence supporting the existence of paranormal activity. Ghost hunting is the investigation of locations that are reportedly haunted by ghosts. This is in contrast to many pseudoscientific explanations for other nonparanormal phenomena, which, although very bad science, are still couched in acceptable scientific terms. The explanations for these allied phenomena are phrased in vague terms of "psychic forces", "human energy fields", and so on. Thus, paranormal phenomena include extrasensory perception (ESP), telekinesis, ghosts, poltergeists, life after death, reincarnation, faith healing, human auras, and so forth. What sets the paranormal apart from other pseudosciences is a reliance on explanations for alleged phenomena that are well outside the bounds of established science. The paranormal can best be thought of as a subset of pseudoscience. On the classification of paranormal subjects, Terence Hines in his book Pseudoscience and the Paranormal (2003) wrote: The definition implies that the scientific explanation of the world around us is normal and anything that is above, beyond, or contrary to that is para. The word consists of two parts: para and normal. The term paranormal has existed in the English language since at least 1920. The standard scientific models give the explanation that what appears to be paranormal phenomena is usually a misinterpretation, misunderstanding, or anomalous variation of natural phenomena.
In contrast, those who argue for the existence of the paranormal explicitly do not base their arguments on empirical evidence but rather on anecdote, testimony, and suspicion. Proposals regarding the paranormal are different from scientific hypotheses or speculations extrapolated from scientific evidence because scientific ideas are grounded in empirical observations and experimental data gained through the scientific method. Notable paranormal beliefs include those that pertain to extrasensory perception (for example, telepathy), spiritualism and the pseudosciences of ghost hunting, cryptozoology, and ufology. Paranormal events are purported phenomena described in popular culture, folk, and other non-scientific bodies of knowledge, whose existence within these contexts is described as being beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding.
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