When psychic Andie Hudson opened her “healing rooms” in London back in the 1990s, one of her earliest clients was a woman in her 30s who was confused by a recent sexual experience. “To begin with, she said she was in a deep sleep until she felt a heavy weight pressing down on her,” Hudson recalls. “When she awoke, the fear dissolved as she experienced a warm presence caressing her body all over.” Arousal soon followed, as did “the most amazing kiss she’d ever felt.”
Hudson immediately recognized the experience as a textbook example of spectrophilia –– a term used to describe sexual attraction to and sexual encounters with ghosts. This woman hadn’t been experiencing some kind of intense, sexual dream, either; according to Hudson, she’d simply been blessed with a visit by a horny spirit.
It’s not just average, everyday clients that describe spectrophilia stories. Anna Nicole Smith repeatedly had “amazing sex” with a ghost in her Texas apartment, whereas Kesha wrote an entire song about going to “the bone zone” with several ghosts –– at one point, she even claimed her vagina was “haunted.” This begs the question: Is ghost dick good?
When it comes to ghost sex, there’s not much that celebrity psychic Patti Negri doesn’t know. Throughout her decades of experience, she’s met plenty of clients who say they’ve gotten down and dirty with invisible phantoms. There is such a thing as ghost rape –– more on that later –– but Negri says that when these boned-up spirits are good, they’re great. “Everything is heightened,” she explains when I ask what it feels like to be fucked by a ghost. “For those who enjoy it, it’s supposed to be really, really good –– imaginine increasing your best orgasm tenfold. I hear it’s fabulous!”
To get specific, the stories these mediums share with me usually begin with a sense of heightened pressure on the shoulders, thighs and various other erogenous zones, followed by a wave of arousal. Negri says it’s not uncommon for penetration to occur, as well as orgasm. “The difference is that penetration by a ghost isn’t usually warm like a human body,” she explains. “It’s basically like using a sex toy or a cucumber, something like that.”
Hudson largely corroborates these descriptions, although contrary to Negri’s account, most of her clients have reported the feeling of a “warm, human body,” as well as a feeling of temporary paralysis in their muscles, unable to move under the weight of a spirit. “Some felt a sense of being lifted off their beds in the middle of the night, and others said they could feel their bodies being licked and touched by magical hands,” she says. “I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.”
It happens to guys, too. “One man told me his story of having sex with a female spirit who sat on top of him for hours, giving him endless pleasure to the point it was difficult for him to get back to sleep,” Hudson continues. “He was late for work the next day!”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, those who have experienced spectrophilia themselves are pretty hard to track down. The last few years have seen a steady slew of articles about women like Amethyst Realm and Amanda Teague, both of whom have either fucked or married (or both) ghosts. Mainly, they’re wheeled out for morning talk shows and mocked in the comment sections, meaning that spectrophilia is primarily treated as tabloid fodder.
That said, plenty of these experiences help grief-stricken loved ones find closure –– either they deliberately summon dead lovers with the help of a medium, or they describe being revisited by late lovers in meticulous detail. “I have a close friend whose husband died young of cancer,” Negri explains. “She told me about this experience where he came to her in a very loving way, and recreated the kind of foreplay they had when he was alive. It felt like this beautiful sense of closure for her, so she went with it.”
“If you believe in spirits and you believe your late grandma can watch over your kids, why is it suddenly impossible when it comes to sex?” Negri asks. Actively summoning a horny ghost means tapping into your seductive side –– “You can’t seduce a spirit in sweats,” Negri jokes –– which is why she thinks these stories are brushed under the rug. “It’s too many taboos at once,” she says.
In fact, a medium named Adrien, a representative of Love and You, agreed to speak to me only after expressing extreme skepticism about the media’s treatment of spectrophilia. “It’s a phenomenon that’s misunderstood by anyone who hasn’t researched it,” he explains. “Before DNA testing, if a man got a woman pregnant out of wedlock, he’d just say the devil got her pregnant. It’s been used as a scapegoat, unfortunately.” A quick dig into the history of ghost sex confirms this –– some of the earliest examples are succubi and incubi, seductive demons who, in the worst of cases, fucked their victims to death.
On that note, Adrien explains that not all spectrophilia experiences are of the sexy, consensual kind. “People can be attacked by an entity,” he explains. “We can speculate that these are ghostly or demonic presences, but how much do we really know?” In these cases, “cleansing rituals, prayers and meditation” can banish a predatory spirit. When it lives in your house, moving can suffice –– although Adrien cites the case of Doris Bither, who moved various times but still reported being repeatedly sexually assaulted by three ghosts.
These stories run the gamut of good, bad and ugly –– in that sense, sex with a phantom is pretty much like sex full-stop, just a little colder. Thankfully, the vast majority of spectrophilia stories seem to be consensual, or summoned with the aid of sex-positive psychics like Hudson and Negri.
Thus, ghost dick is only really “good” if you’re willing to suspend disbelief and lean into the idea of being fucked by a boned-up spirit. If that’s the case, there’s every chance your resulting orgasm will be out of this world.
Jake Hall
Jake Hall is a freelance journalist, fashion features editor and author. Their debut book 'The Art of Drag' is scheduled for release in May 2020.
