The Philip Experiment: The Spirit Created by Scientists

After a long experiment, a made up spirit started to haunt a group’s seances. What really happened during the Philip experiment, and what does it tell us about what lengths humans go to believe in ghosts?

Sitting in a traditional seance with dimmed lights around a table, a group of people tried to make contact with the dead. They started to feel a presence, the table was vibrating and a chilling breeze entered the room. A spirit was present and answered with knocks and unexplainable echoes. 

The spirit was Philip Aylesfor. He was born in 1624 in England and was once a nobleman with military ties to Oliver Cromwell, knighted when he was 16 and worked as a spy for Charles II during the English Civil War. He gave many details of his life like that he was married to a cold, loveless woman called Dorothea and had a tragic affair with a beautiful Romani woman named Margo that he met when riding on his estate. His wife discovered the affair, accused Margo of witchcraft, and had her burned at the stake. Overcome with guilt and grief, Philip committed suicide in 1654

The seance that went for about a year was a success, everyone felt and heard the spirit. At one point the table tilted on a single leg and moved across the room without anyone touching it, getting it all on audio and tape. There was only one problem. Every part of this story was fabricated. Philip Aylesford had never existed. His life was purely a creation of the group trying to conjure it. And yet, they all ended up believing it.

In the world of the paranormal, most hauntings involve spirits of the dead lingering in our realm. But what if a ghost wasn’t the remnant of a once-living person? What if it was something else entirely—something born not from tragedy, but from pure human imagination? Enter the Philip Experiment, a groundbreaking 1970s parapsychology study that sought to prove that ghosts might not be spirits at all, but products of human thought. 

The Birth of Philip: A Ghost Without a Past

The Philip Experiment was conducted from September in 1972 by the Toronto Society for Psychical Research (TSPR), led by Dr. A.R.G. Owen, a mathematician and psychologist. The group aimed to explore the idea that paranormal phenomena, particularly ghostly activity, might not be caused by spirits of the dead, but rather by the human mind’s ability to create and project entities into reality—a concept known as thought-form manifestation or tulpas in Tibetan mysticism.

To test this theory, they created an entirely fictional ghost named Philip Aylesford. With Philip’s “history” in place, the team—eight participants, including Dr. Owen’s wife—began conducting séances without much result in the beginning. It started out first as informal meetings where they discussed his history and life, but not much paranormal was reported on by the group that called themselves the Owen Group.

They drew a picture of him and even went to England where he “lived” and took pictures. The other people in the group were unnamed but included a formerly chaired MENSA woman, a bookkeeper, a sociology student, a housewife, an accountant and an industrial designer. What they all had in common was that they were all members of the TSPR.

Then they changed tactics and created an atmosphere in a dimly lit room, just as one would when attempting to contact a real ghost. The whole experiments and their experiences started to shift. They focused on Philip’s story, visualized him, and called out to him, asking for signs of his presence.

One night, as they continued their séance, the table suddenly shook. Knocking sounds echoed in the room. At first, the group thought it was a coincidence or subconscious movement. But the phenomena intensified.

Through a system of knocks (one for “yes,” two for “no”), Philip started answering questions. When asked about his past, he responded in ways that aligned with the fictional backstory they had written. However, whenever the group asked something outside of his “history,” Philip could not answer, reinforcing the idea that his existence was completely dependent on their belief in him.

The Paranormal Activity Escalates

As The Philip Experiment progressed, the manifestations became eerier after it had gone on for a couple of months. Philip didn’t just communicate through knocks—he moved the table, made lights flicker, and even created cold spots in the room. Witnesses reported that the table would tilt, slide, and even levitate. Some claimed they heard whispers and faint laughter, though no voice was ever recorded.

At one point they had to take a break from their meetings as some of the members in the group claimed to experience strange things in their homes. They even had the seance in front of a live audience of 50 people where a lot of presence was felt, and experiences, but the televised documentation was unable to give further proof of haunting. 

Watch the televised seance they did here.

Despite all this, Philip never appeared as a ghostly figure, nor did he provide any information beyond what the participants had imagined. He was a true creation of their minds, responding only to what they had already established about him.

What Did the Philip Experiment Prove?

The Philip Experiment left researchers with unsettling conclusions. If a group of people could “create” a ghost through belief and focus alone, what does that say about the nature of hauntings? Were all ghostly encounters just the subconscious mind manifesting phenomena? Could poltergeists and spirits actually be projections of human thought?

The experiment also drew connections to psychokinesis (mind over matter)—the idea that focused human intention can physically influence the world. If the group could make a table levitate just by believing in Philip, was it possible that hauntings stemmed from emotional energy rather than actual spirits? Do we want to believe in ghosts so bad that the mind will create them for us?

The Legacy of the Philip Experiment

The experiment remains one of the most famous studies in parapsychology, inspiring further research into tulpas and the power of collective consciousness. While skeptics argue that the table movements were a result of ideomotor effects (unconscious muscle movements), believers point out that the level of activity was far beyond typical séance trickery and that the ghost of Philip was perhaps the start of it, but a true spirit really did appear. 

Although it created a lot of debate, it also created a lot of criticism in that the experience would be hard to recreate to show more consistent results.

The Philip Experiment was later repeated with different groups, creating new fictional spirits like Lilith, a French Canadian spy, Sebastian,a medieval alchemist and Axel who was said to be from the future. In each case, similar phenomena occurred, suggesting that the power of belief plays a significant role in paranormal experiences. 

The Philip Experiment forces us to ask a terrifying question: What if ghosts don’t haunt us? What if we haunt ourselves? If human minds can conjure spirits from thin air, it means the line between reality and imagination is disturbingly thin. It also raises the possibility that some hauntings might be self-created manifestations of guilt, trauma, or fear.

So next time you hear a whisper in the dark, feel a tap on your shoulder, or watch an object move on its own—ask yourself: Is something there? Or are you making it real?

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