By Nancy L Zingrone, Associate Editor
The Psi Encyclopedia (PE) is sponsored by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). The PE was founded in 2014 by journalist and SPR member Robert McLuhan. As its ‘principal architect’, McLuhan began building an extraordinary resource for students, psi researchers, experiencers, mediums, historians — indeed for anyone seriously interested in psychic matters. Earlier this year, McLuhan retired and James Matlock and his team took over. Four of Matlock’s team had been contributing to the PE under McLuhan, and four of us are new. See New Team, Old Direction.
This blog describing the PE site organisation is written to be posted on our social media platforms as an introduction to the PE.
The Site Header
The PE’s header has a robust search function that you can use to find what you are looking for on the site. Additionally, on the footer there is a link to a Sitemap that provides a schematic view of the site’s structure.
Along with the search box, the PE header has two menus listing the pages of the site. The pages listed on the upper menu are the most general one: ‘About,’ ‘Articles A-Z,’ ‘Links Library,’ ‘Contributors’, ‘Supporters’, the ‘Editor’s Blog’ — what you’re reading now — and a ‘Login’ for the admin team.
Below that, in the black bar, are the category pages. The categories are broken into sub-categories, as described next.
Categories and Sub-categories
Here are the PE categories and sub-categories, with links to them:
- ‘ESP & Psychokinesis’ with categories ‘Overviews & General Topics’, ‘Psychics & Spontaneous ESP’, ‘Sitter Groups and Macro-PK’, ‘Poltergeist (RSPK)’, and ‘Experimental Parapsychology’ which has the following sub-categories ‘Research Methods,’ ‘Tests & Results,’ ‘Theoretical Models’, ‘Participants’, and ‘Researchers.’
- ‘Mind & Body’ with ‘Consciousness & Psi’, ‘Dreams & Psi’, ‘Distance Healing and Psychotherapy,’ and ‘OBEs, NDEs & End-of-Life Experiences.’
- ‘Survival of Death’ with ‘Overview & General Topics’, ‘Hauntings & Apparitions’, and ‘Psychic (Mental) Mediumship’.
- ‘Reincarnation’ with ‘Overview & General Topics’, ‘Case Studies’, ‘Past Life Regression,’ and ‘Researchers’.
- ‘General Topics’ with “Miscellaneous Anomalistics’ and ‘Publications’.
- ‘Researchers & Authors’ with six sections that start with ‘Born before 1850’ to ‘Born 1970 to 1999’ in increments of 30 years.
- ‘Organisations’ with ‘Membership Societies’, ‘Professional, Educational & Support Bodies,’ and ‘Research Units’; and finally,
- ‘Sceptical Views’ with ‘Controversy’ and ‘Sceptics’.
These categories and sub-categories will continue to expand as more entries are added. Each sub-category has an ever-increasing number of pages with photos and images for each specific entry, along with the title and a description of the entry. All these pages are very interesting and a quick way to get the range of the entries under the section title. The ‘Researchers and Authors’ category is particularly fascinating because it is subc-categorised by 30-year age cohorts and each page gives you a sense of who was contributing to psychical research and parapsychology in each era.
Sections of the Home Page
The Home Page starts with a welcome to the PE. This is followed by several sections, each with its own heading.
The first section is ‘Featured’. The contents of this section are changed periodically. Currently, it contains an article about the extraordinary American parapsychologist and past editor of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, Rhea A White; the medieval scientist Francis Bacon (1561–1626); an entry on Animals in Psi Research; a photo of Albert Einstein in Eminent People Interested in Psi; Psi Research in Brazil; Why Do Ghosts Wear Clothes?; and Maroczy Mediumistic Chess Match. Each entry in this section has a photos or image, a brief description of the entry, and a link to it.
In the next section, ‘Key Topics’, eight entries are displayed: Remote Viewing with a photo of Ingo Swann; Near-Death Experiences (Overview), with an image representing the tunnel of light often seen in these experiences; the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), with a photo of its headquarters in London; Psychokinesis Research (Overview), with an image of two dice; Clinical Parapsychology, with a photo representing that specific therapeutic approach; Reincarnation: An Introduction, which covers beliefs, evidence, criticisms and more, represented with a bust of Pythagoras; Psychedelics and Psi, with a psychedelic image and Altered States of Consciousness and Psi, evoked by the image of an eye.
The next section is Recent Additions. Here, new entries and existing entries that have been updated substantively are highlighted in the order they are added. New entries are uploaded twice a week to the PE and notifications of the new PE are posted to Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, X and Bluesky. For the first three platforms, the first paragraph and highlights at the beginning of each entry are posted. The links to the entry and the author(s) are also listed in the post, and the image at the top of the entry is used as well. Because X and Bluesky allow only 280 and 300 characters respectively, the description is edited and only the PE link is used, along with the image of the entry.
On Facebook, the PE entries are also posted by the pages of the Parapsychology Foundation, Parapsychology Foundation Psychic Explorers Club, The Alvarado Zingrone (virtual) Institute for Research and Education (the AZIRE), Parapsychology Online, Study of Human Experiences Project, and the online course page of ParaMOOC. We are very grateful for all those other followers and readers who have shared our entries to their organisations and friends, especially Tom Ruffles who posts our new entries on the SPR page.
The last section on the Home page is Explore the Psi Encyclopedia. This has a description of each of the categories in the second menu at the top, accompanied by three individual examples of entries in each category. One of the wonderful things about the Home page that happens with this section is that if you leave the Home page, when you get back the three examples have changed. This also happens if you reload the page. While writing this blog, I kept reloading the page for about five minutes just to see what the next three would be. Although I am a bit chagrined to mention this, it is probably a great recommendation if you have elementary or high school students using the PE.
What to Expect when Clicking on an Entry
The entries themselves are very well-written, signed, and closed to editing by anyone other than the PE admin staff. The current content of the Encyclopedia is over 750 entries and growing. The list of future entries is quite long as well. Just as McLuhan’s authors and editors from 2014 to April 2026 did, the current team are working to produce new entries and updating the current entries as fast as possible, within our budgetary constraints (on which more in a future blog).
The structure of the entries includes a table of contents, an image or photo to represent the topic or individual, an Addenda section that includes the author(s), the word count, the original creation date and the last updating date. There is also an example of the citation for those who are citing the entry, and the AI acknowledgement notice. In biographical entries, recommended books written by the individual during their lifetime including autobiographies, biographies if available, and a selection of short academic works the individual wrote are included in the entry. In the future we are hoping to have complete bibliographies of the individuals’ publications. And, of course, the ‘Works Cited’ list of citations in the entry and then the Endnotes comprise the last sections in the entry. At the bottom of the page, there is a ‘Previous’ recommendation and a ‘Next’ recommendation.
The length of the entry depends on the content that needs to be presented. For example, the Patterns in Reincarnation Cases written by James Matlock, comprises seven sections, and three of these have several sub-sections.
Value for Students, Researchers and Educators
For students, researchers, and educators, the information that is being amassed in this amazing resource is a substantive grounding in the field. It can both enrich a student’s basic knowledge, and guide new researchers to the essential literature, methods, theories, and progress in our understanding of the phenomena. For educators, PE provides materials that can supplement their regular offerings with clear and balanced content including images of their predecessors, significant buildings, depictions of experiences, and so on. Access to the body of knowledge of the field as presented by authors who know the content and have packaged it in a readable substantive encyclopedia serves as a font of enthusiasm, inspiring interested individuals to contribute to this field in the future. And that is an important goal.
To use as an example the entry on one of us (James Matlock), KM Wehrstein wrote it and uploaded it on 5 August 2019, and it was last updated on 12 April 2026. Not only are the life and career outlined, but his research, positions, awards, books, articles, web posts, videos, podcasts and audio files are also available. The entry on the ‘father’ of the Psi Encyclopedia, Robert McLuhan, was written by Melvyn Willin, uploaded on 5 May 2026, and last updated on 6 May 2026. It has similar sections as well as a list of McLuhan’s PE articles. Over the last three weeks, McLuhan has posted five excellent videos about aspects of psi research and parapsychological phenomena for his YouTube channel. In the future, that list will be in the founder’s biography as well.
The point of this is that students, researchers, and educators can find not only the information about the field and its phenomena but also get to know many of its historic authors and researchers. A good amount of those are active today, and whether they are, as Robert L Morris used to say, ‘Proponents’ or ‘Sceptics’, both groups are contributing to the progress of the field.
The search field at top and centre of all pages provides a variety of entries depending on the keywords used. The topmost menu bar provides an overview of the content, past and present. But the organised second menu bar parses that content in a way that can save time for students, researchers, educators, and authors. In that menu, there are the most important sections of the field, with categories of each, and then sub-categories in drop-down menus as well. Within each entry there are links to other relevant entries, such as other researchers or writers and specific aspects of various methods and phenomena.
One of us (Nancy L Zingrone) at the California Institute of Human Science and Dr Christine Simmonds-Moore at the University of West Georgia have used PE entries in teaching courses in parapsychology. The access to clear and well-written descriptions of basic phenomena through to complex theories is important whether the course is experimental or historical. We will resume this discussion in our next blog.