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.
- Status
- Essentially untested
- Word in use since
- 1842 Greek psyche "soul" + metron "measure"
Studies and word histories as set out below.
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 popularized 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.
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The experiment
Almost no controlled tests
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, named in 1842 and still waiting. The ganzfeld experiments have produced hundreds of sessions since the 1970s, and the AWARE study put physical targets in 15 hospitals. Psychometry would be easier to test than either: hand a reader objects whose histories nobody in the room knows, and count the hits.
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 Rodes Buchanan, an American physiologist, who meant it as "soul-measuring".
Named in 1842, psychometry has the longest dashed line of the eleven, 184 years without a test of its own; one would need only sealed objects and a count.
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 labeled 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.
Cite this page
AstroHot. “Psychometry: The Claim, the Experiment and the Result.” Accessed October 30, 2026. https://astrohot.com/psychic/psychometry/
For Wikipedia
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