Presence: The Strange Science and True Stories of the Unseen Other

A psychologist's journey to understand one of the most unusual experiences known to humankind: the universal, disturbing feeling that someone or something is there when we are alone.

These experiences of sensing a Presence when no one else is there have been given many names—the Third Man, guardian angels, shadow figures, "social" hallucinations—and they have inspired, unsettled, and confounded in equal measure.

While the contexts in which they occur are diverse, they are united by a distin...