For many this is not merely myth but instead a very real experience; Silver describes one supposedly real-life account of “one brazen lhiannon-shee, in 1898, followed a farmer right into his house and was thought, by the man, to be his wife. Puzzled when she did not answer his questions, he asked his actual wife if she saw the fairy woman, at which, with a hideous grin, the shee walked through the door and vanished.”

While it’s impossible to know what, exactly, Kesha, Blasick, and others experienced, some psychological phenomena can give the impression of a sexual ghostly lover. These experiences—sometimes scary, sometimes sexy, but always realistic to the person experiencing them—are the result of normal brain misperceptions and illusions.