Object clues
Wear, style, weight, smell and value tell a careful observer a lot about an owner.
Essentially untested
Psychometry
Psychometry is the claimed ability of reading the history of an object by holding it. Status: essentially untested.
What people describe
Psychometry is described as reading the history of an object by holding it: impressions of the owner's personality, emotions, places they lived or events connected to the object, often with a ring, watch or photograph.
How it entered the record
The American physician Joseph Rodes Buchanan coined the term in 1842, and the geologist William Denton popularised it in "The Soul of Things" (1863), in which his wife and sister described scenes from fossils and rock samples. Psychometry later became a staple of stage mediumship and of psychics offering help to police.
The experiment
Almost none under controlled conditions
How it was run
The few attempts fail the basic requirement: the reader usually knows something about where the object came from, and scoring is by the sitter, who knows the answer.
Sample
—
Result
No controlled body of evidence exists either way.
Untested is not the same as disproven, and it is worth keeping those apart. What can be said is that the claim has been available for testing since 1842 and has attracted almost none.
That makes psychometry the oldest unexamined claim in this list — 184 years old and counting. Compare it with the ganzfeld experiments, which have produced hundreds of sessions since the 1970s, or with the AWARE study, which installed physical targets in 15 hospitals to test a claim made in the same century. Psychometry would be trivially easy to test: hand a reader ten objects with known histories and ten without, keep the histories from everyone in the room, and count. The design costs nothing and takes an afternoon. Its absence is the informative part — a claim this testable staying untested for 184 years says something about who has wanted to find out.
Claim
Reading the history of an object by holding it
Word from
Greek psyche "soul" + metron "measure"
Status
Essentially untested
Where the word comes from
Coined in 1842 by Joseph Rhodes Buchanan, an American physiologist, who meant it as "soul-measuring".
What psychology offers instead
Cold reading
Statements are shaped by the reactions of the person who brought the object.
Unfalsifiable detail
Emotional impressions about a stranger's past are hard to disprove, so they are rarely counted as misses.
How to test it fairly yourself
Use objects in identical sealed pouches, chosen and labelled by someone not present, with several owners. Ask the reader to describe each owner, then ask the owners to pick out their own description without knowing which object it came from.