Cere Junda: You touch an object and witness events connected to it. You feel its history.
Cal Kestis: It's an... echo in the Force from the object.
Cal Kestis: It's an... echo in the Force from the object.
Psychometry is a Psychic Power whereby a character receives visions upon physical contact, sometimes involuntarily. The most common form is when the person touches an object and receives information about things or people the object has associated with and/or the environment around the object. It can also manifest as touching a person and getting visions or knowledge of their history, memories, or character.
Sister Trope to Touch Telepathy (active mental communication through touch), often overlaps with it. Compare Dreaming of Times Gone By, which can convey similar information but is done through dreams rather than a psychic event.
Not to be confused with psychometrics, which is the real life branch of psychology concerned with measuring mental abilities, or with psychrometry, which is the real life study of vapors.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- In 3×3 Eyes, Parvati can use a Sanzhiyan art apparently unique to hernote to read "lingering thoughts" of people left on an object, essentially Psychometry. After giving a demonstration of her powers, Yakumo has the idea to have her use said power on the fragments of the Sacred Demon Stone in which the Big Bad was sealed to learn of a way to turn himself and Pai into humans from Kaiyanwang's memories. Unfortunately, Kaiyanwang left a trap which sends Parvati into a Lotus-Eater Machine dream world.
- Kaos from Battle Angel Alita perceives the world mostly this way (for some reason, his ordinary senses are scrambled). His power is so great that he can use the items with the full skill of their previous owners, which is quite a surprise for a bunch of assassins who invade his truck and he grabs a katana.
- The Disastrous Life of Saiki K.: Psychometry is one of the titular Saiki Kusuo's many powers. Because he cannot turn this power off he constantly wears transparent gloves that he only takes off when he needs to use his psychometry. Accidently touching a book with his unprotected hands risks giving him spoilers. In one chapter he accidently touches a book through a tear in his gloves and gets flashes of the life of somebody who previously checked out the book, which he ends up finding a lot more exciting than the book, since he only reads unpopular books because his uncontrolled mind reading powers also give him spoilers, and so he keeps touching the books in that series to try to learn more about what happened to them.
- If Pakunoda from Hunter × Hunter wants to know something about a person and get info from them, all she has to do is get in physical contact with him/her and activate her powers via a question. The only foolproof way to counter her skills is simply not knowing what she's talking about, as she's so good at it that she can even pick up subconscious thoughts and know when they're trying to lie to her.
- Kimi no Knife: Itsuki can read the minds and histories of any person or object she touches.
- Land of the Blindfolded revolves around this, with all three of its main leads having some version of this: Kanade occasionally sees the future of an object, Arou always sees an object's past, and Masahiro who can see an objects future in a controlled manner.
- Night Head Genesis: Naoya can see the memories of the objects he touches. That's how he knew the drink that their parents gave him and Naoto was drugged.
- Yukina Sonogi of Night Raid 1931 has this kind of ability aside from telepathy, which fits perfectly for her role as Mission Control.
- Shiho of Psychic Squad is one of the setting's most powerful users of psychometry. Along with Touch Telepathy she can handle objects used by criminals and provide details about the crime and how the object was used. Her father, a chief of police, was taking advantage of this while Shiho was still in grade school.
- Psychometrer Eiji is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: misfit teen Eiji Asuma aids Fair Cop Ryoko Shima in her homicide investigations. His powers seem to grow over the course of the series, to the point where he's able to literally read the air for information.
- Corrupt cop and Psyer Usui from Psyren can perform Psychometry on anything he holds in his right hand. In the first chapter he was seen doing this to track Ageha.
- Sailor Moon: Mamoru has this as a power in the manga and Crystal, along with Healing Hands and an apparent Psychic Link with his soulmate Usagi. He does gain an actual attack in the Black Moon arc. His psychometry becomes more obvious starting in the BM arc; it was very subtle beforehand. He's also capable of transferring energy to other people. The removal of all his powers in the '90s anime led to an Adaptation Induced Plothole in the third season.
- Some people from the Tokyo Babylon second OVA have this power, much to the surprise of Subaru since it's stated to be very rare. These people are a young woman named Mirei, Mirei's own mother (who uses it in a Heroic Sacrifice to save her daughter), and a handsome bookworm named Miyazaki who's Mirei's love interest.
- In Tokyo ESP, Murasaki can read the past of objects by touching them. Later she starts using this ability on weapons to copy their past owners' fighting skills.
- Miho Karasuma from Witch Hunter Robin has this power, perceiving people's feelings and even past events through handling objects they've touched.
- Kaname Hagiri's sister in YuYu Hakusho got such powers when the Demon's Gate was opened. At the end of the Sensui saga she's seen mourning the death of a stray cat at the hands of a bunch of Japanese Delinquents, touches the kitty's corpse to retrieve its last memories, and then places her hand on her brother's forehead to give him said memories so he can locate the killers and punish them.
Comic Books
- In Psi-Force, Lindsay Falmon can perceive a person's bioelectric residue on things they've handled and receive images and perceptions of what the person is doing or has done while handling the object.
- Rachel from Rachel Rising develops this among several other magical talents. The most memorable example by far is when she touches the knife that the Fallen Angel Malus had given to Zoe. It shows the history of the knife from when it was Satan's sword that broke during his fall from grace, and how it has been wielded and reshaped by people throughout the ages. (In other words, used for things like Human Sacrifice, conquest, and murder by cultists, warlords, and serial killers.)
- Ragman can see people's deaths if he touches the clothes they were wearing when they died soon enough after the fact, as seen in Robin (1993).
- In Ultra Force, Ghoul is able to see the history of objects by touching them.
- X-Men:
- Longshot has this as a secondary, rarely seen power. At one point during his stint in Exiles, he tries using it on an alternate version of Galactus. The psychic backlash throws him across the room.
- Nathaniel Carver, a.k.a. Hindsight, has this as his mutant power. He often activates it by accident when he touches someone.
Fan Works
- Bird features this as a facet of Taylor's powers, which are a wide-ranging range of sensory abilities tied to proximity. Though she is not limited to touch — that's just when it's at its strongest and clearest.
- In Blood and Revolution, the human form of the earth god has psychometric powers. There aren't many demonstrations since he avoids touching people and things because of it, but once he touches the living chain weapon Shun, he has visions of Shun's 600 years of life and the wars he's been used in.
- Cardinal King: Mamoru has his psychometry powers like in the manga, though the fic makes it much more apparent that he has these powers during the Dark Kingdom arc (the manga wasn't clear in this respect until the next one). It'd be really hard to Gender Flip the first arc of the series otherwise if he didn't; he was infamously useless in the anime due to having no innate powers unlike the Sailor Guardians.
- Child of the Storm gives Maddie Pryor a.k.a. Rachel Grey this in lieu of her usual temporal sensitivity. It makes her able to interact with Mjolnir's developing sentience, and formerly, it made her an extremely effective hunter and tracker.
- Children of Remnant: One of Weiss's magical abilities lets her sense the emotions in objects. She first makes an excellent impression on Ruby when Weiss sees her weapon and asks "Who is that?" because she can sense the love Ruby has put into it.
- The Desert Storm: Quinlan Vos, a young Jedi Padawan and one of young Obi-Wan Kenobi's friends, has this particular Force talent. This can be something of a mixed blessing, because it's not something he can turn off and sometimes leads him to learn things he would have been happier not knowing. Such as when he tries it on a spare lightsaber belonging to Ben Naasade, a talented but enigmatic Jedi Master with a mysterious but extremely troubled past... He doesn't take it well.
- Fate Revelation Online: Kirito and Argo discover that at higher levels [Structural Grasp] (which is normally treated as a weak appraise spell that is quickly passed over and ignored) will give information on the history of the object. This isn't randomly generated fluff, either—it is perfectly accurate information on everything that has ever happened to this specific object. That would require an exponential amount of data storage that constantly increases, orders of magnitude more than the rest of the game combined. That would be crazy enough on its own, and then there's the fact that only three people in the game can actually access this information. The truth, of course, is that magic is real and they are unknowingly casting a real spell to read the game object's history. When Argo pushes hard enough, she overhears a couple programmers talking when the object was first coded, which understandably freaks her out.
- In it feels more like a memory, Aaron Burr is a Seer with the power to see how people will die when he has skin-to-skin contact with them.
- In Juxtapose, this is the Quirk of Kensei Katsura. He has literal scanners on his palms that allow him to analyze every aspect of whatever he touches, from a person's physical status to a structure's blueprints. His friend Yamato Megumi can then read that information from his mind and pass it on to people who can do more with it, like Izuku or Momo.
- Aaron of Take a Stand: The Broken Mirror can obtain info about someone through physical contact. This is how he finds out that Robyn and Hannah are the Undying Scarlet and Bullet, respectively.
- Terran Moon
was a very short-lived and apparently now dead fan comic that had a similar premise to that of Cardinal King above: a gender-flipped retelling of the first arc with Mamoru and the Shitennou as the protagonists saving the world from Serenity's Four Guardian Goddesses with Usagi playing the role of Tuxedo Mask. Like Cardinal King, Mamoru retains his psychometry powers and even gets to use them in Act 1 when Artemis unexpectedly jumps into his arms and he gets a vision of Artemis' human form. In Act 3, he accidentally bumps into Usagi and gets a vision of Princess Serenity. In Act 5, Artemis gives Mamoru a tie tack that will channel his powers into a more "manageable form", specifically allow him to attack with them, but since that's the last strip, the audience doesn't know how this would've played out.
Films — Live-Action
- Constantine (2005): Father Hennessy can run his hands over printed newspaper stories and psychically detect which ones are significant. Constantine asks him to do this to get information he needs. Later on Hennessy tries to read the body of Angela Dodson's dead sister Isabel.
- This is one of Eric Draven's powers upon coming back from the dead in The Crow. He has the ability to pick up on memories related to his past by touching things related to said past — including ones that didn't originate with him, as seen with the scene with Gideon when he sees Shelly's final moments through the cop's eyes. He eventually develops the ability to transfer memories and the pain that comes with them by touch, which he uses to completely wreck Top Dollar in the final battle.
- In The Force Awakens, Rey experiences this when she touches Anakin Skywalker's lightsaber for the first time, giving her temporary Power Incontinence as she sees visions of the past.
- In Hellboy (2004), Abe Sapien is able to touch items to see its past, future, and potentially other information. If someone touches Abe while he touches the item, both Abe and the person he touches can see what he sees. He uses this power for surveillance and investigation throughout the movie. He is also able to see how sick Bruttenholm is.
- In the first Puppet Master, Carissa can read an object's past by touch. For some reason, most of what she picks up is sexual.
- In Push, this is the ability of 'Sniffs', shown as being used to track people.
- In Unbreakable, the hero has the ability to read evil intentions and/or actions in a person via physical contact, which he always thought was simply normal intuition and never really followed up on it. Elijah eventually confirms that his intuition was extremely accurate, to the point of describing the look and design of a concealed gun.
- In Vibes, Nick Deezy has this power. In one scene he even guides the other characters while holding an artifact in his hands. He also hates it when given a murder weapon to hold, for obvious reasons.
Literature
- The Amber House book series deals with the main character, Sarah Parson, who finds that being in the titular ancestorial house gives her the ability to 'see' the memories attached to antiques.
- In the Corine Solomon novels by Ann Aguirre, this is the eponymous heroine's occult power. Her mother was a powerful witch, but all Corine got was this lousy psychometry. This is an advantage when she runs an antique shop, but she leaves it at the beginning of the first book and is hurled into a world of crime and danger while coping with the memory of her mother's murder in a fire. Contact with crime-related objects she reads burns her hands painfully, over and over, so she avoids touching anything unless it's necessary to gain information. As the series goes on, though, she develops impressive occult superpowers with the help of a Fallen Angel.
- In the Deadly Curiosities novel and ebook series by Gail Z. Martin, protagonist Cassidy Kincaide is a psychometric, able to detect the history and magical properties of objects by touching them. She makes use of it in both her day job as an antiques dealer in Charleston, South Carolina, and her side business acquiring and neutralizing objects with dangerous qualities. It also lets her activate magical weapons by keying off memories of the item being used by its original wielder.
- In The Dead Zone and its TV adaptation, Johnny Smith sees visions of the past, present and/or future when he touches people or objects. He's largely unable to control this, leading to everything from unwanted press attention and losing a job he loves, to having to experience the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl from the killer's point of view. Eventually, his visions about Greg Stillson motivate him to try to assassinate Stillson before he can set off World War III.
- In the Dora Wilk Series, when Dora's powers are going slightly haywire at the beginning of the first book, she sometimes sees emotionally charged events from the past of people she touches.
- In the Gifts series by Jayne Ann Krentz, the plot is centered around a man who has the ability to read the history of old objects, strongest for The Renaissance. However, he runs the risk of being lost in the visions. Then he finds a woman with the ability to anchor him... well, the bond between them isn't just this particular aspect, so NSFW ensues.
- In the Jack Bishop novels, the titular character has these abilities as part of his larger ESP package. It doesn't exactly make his life any easier, especially when he's forced to use them in violent places wrecked by monsters.
- In "The Man Who Got Off the Ghost Train", Danny "Magic Fingers" Myles can psychically determine the history and nature of things by touching them.
- In the Maximum Ride series, Nudge has the power to read psychic imprints left on objects.
- In the Modesty Blaise novel I, Lucifer, Lucifer can psychically determine things about people from objects associated with them, such as a handwritten note or a hair clipping.
- Moon (1985): A psychic Serial Killer, in several corpses, hides a moonstone. On touching one, similarly psychic Jonathan Childes feels an abrupt tingling, and senses the killer's mind.
- Patternist:
- Some of the titular psychics can imbue memories into objects for other Patternists to "read" later. By Patternmaster, this is one of their means of keeping historic records.
- One Patternist in Mind of My Mind has an exceptionally strong talent for Psychometry and can "seal" the psychic impressions in an object so they aren't muddled by later use. She collects items with especially rare or interesting impressions; her pride and joy is a 6000-year-old clay bowl that carries clear memories of an ancient Nubian woman.
- Star Wars:
- In Dark Disciple, Quinlan Vos is a Kiffar Jedi Master with the ability to use Force psychometry in order to collect information on other beings via their clothing or other objects. It is considered a dangerous ability and use of it is discouraged by the Council, since its use on things like victims of violent deaths may cause the unprepared Jedi to experience powerful dark impulses. While Jedi very rarely have this power, about 1% of Kiffar naturally have it regardless of their Force sensitivity.
- Luke Skywalker also used this ability in Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor and The Courtship of Princess Leia.
- Warlock Series: In Forerunner Foray, Ziantha can access an item's psychic abilities, if any, by touching the object she wants to read/contact.
Live-Action TV
- This is how Phoebe's powers in Charmed (1998) work, at least in the beginning. She had to touch an object to see visions of the past and future.
- Zed's visions in Constantine (2014) are sometimes triggered by the contact of an object, such as the blood map left by Liv.
- The Dead Zone: When Johnny Smith touches the cigarette butts left behind by a serial killer, he begins to show the killer's mannerisms and speak in his voice. When he visits a site the killer stood waiting for a victim, he begins to see things from the killer's point of view, feeling his need to kill, and this continues right up through experiencing a rape and murder from the killer's point of view, leaving Johnny sobbing and crying that he's sorry, that he now knows what it's like to kill.
- Due South: The clairvoyant homeless man's powers appear to work this way in "Heaven and Earth". He gets visions of the missing girl after finding her necklace, and they intensify when someone later presses the necklace into his hand.
- Ghost Whisperer: Melinda can sometimes gain visions of the past by touching certain objects.
- Namtaan's power in The Gifted (2018). In her focus episode, she investigates the past of a former student by also wearing his clothes and retracing his steps to see through his eyes.
- The Greatest American Hero has this as one of the protagonist's powers. More precisely, he can see thoughts left in objects by people manipulating them. In one episode, touching a bomb gives him the location of a second one, because the criminal who built and placed it had been thinking of both.
- In Heroes, one of Sylar's victims had the ability to learn the history of an object by touching it.
- The Pretender: Angelo was one of Dr. Raines' early attempts at creating a Pretender but the treatments destroyed his mind. Instead of the usual Pretender abilities, it gave him the ability to pick up an object and know what the object's owner is doing right now.note
- Quantum Leap: Police Psychic Tamlyn Matsuda has this ability in the episode "Temptation Eyes." While she's able to consciously and unconsciously catch vibes about things through the air, Tamlyn's psychic abilities are boosted tremendously when she makes physical contact with a person or an object. This is how she's able to start seeing Sam as Sam, and how she learns the identity of Chinatown Strangler. She also has a vision of a woman's murder by holding a pillow that belonged to the woman.
- Pam Asbury in Rose Red has this power. What makes her version particularly interesting (and chilling) is that while handling or touching objects lets her pick up emotions and even hear things which were said by the people who interacted with them, she is also shown to sometimes subtly channel the person in question — when she touches the front door of the mansion and picks up the interaction between Bollinger and the ghost of Sukeena, she actually adopts Sukeena's diction and accent when speaking her words. The experience is also shown to be rather upsetting, since she ends up shedding tears during it, and afterward said she didn't like how it made her feel.
- This is one of Sapphire's abilities in Sapphire and Steel: she can use it to learn the histories of objects or people, most often how old they are (and sometimes how long they have left).
- An alien-of-the-week on Star Trek: Enterprise has this ability, which he uses on a piece of the Xindi weapon that attacked Earth several episodes earlier. It helps him guide Enterprise to the facility where the component was manufactured.
Multiple Media
- BIONICLE: The Mask of Psychometry, which allows its user to learn details about the past of an object by making physical contact with it. While the user can see something of an object's past, they have no real control over how much information they actually receive. This power cannot be used on more than one object at a time, nor does it work on living beings.
Roleplay
- One of Finn's powers from Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues allows him to see the history of an object or person by touching them. This works to such a degree that he can become an Instant Expert with any tool that he touches by reading the history of its operation.
- Aurics in We Are All Pokémon Trainers can use the residual Aura on objects to get memories or to find a target's Aura trail, though it doesn't work once enough time has passed.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- 2nd Edition: The Complete Psionics Handbook has the Clairsentience Science "Sensitivity to Psychic Impressions". A psionicist using it get a picture of significant events in the past for a specific location, thanks to the psychic residue left by strong emotions. "Object Reading" is another claisentient power, working as below.
- In Edition 3.5, Seers have access to a power called "Object Reading" that lets them touch an object and learn information about its previous owners. There's also a magic item called "gloves of object reading" that grants a similar ability.
- GURPS has a power simply titled "psychometry".
- Rifts and other Palladium Books games with Psychic Powers have a sensitive power called Object Read, also known as psychometry.
- People with postcognition in Rocket Age can read objects for past events with the most skilled able to read events up to a century ago.
- Vampire: The Requiem: Vampires who train the discipline of Auspex can gain this ability alongside other extrasensory powers; it lets them touch an object and sense who has used it, when, and for what purpose. One sourcebook notes that vampires with this power often collect objects that hold particularly interesting or poignant memories.
Video Games
- In The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble, the Past Formula works this way, combined with some form of Time Travel. The one time it's used, on a statue of a war hero, Woodruff is taken to a scene that simultaneously represents the war where the commander depicted fought, and the creation of the statue itself, both of which Woodruff can alter the course of.
- Caves of Qud has this as a mental mutant power. It allows the character to identify trinkets without fail; learn crafting recipes by examining items, rather than needing to find blueprints; and opening security doors without keys.
- The Chzo Mythos game Trilby's Notes gives the player character of Trilby this power to let him reconstruct the history of Chzo's actions by touching old items scattered around a hotel.
- Ishmahri, the keeper of the Moonshadow Land in Dragon Quest VIII possesses this ability. He states that clothing, furniture, the land, and sky have memories as well. He is able to recreate these memories by playing his harp.
- Eternal Darkness: Anyone who claims the Tome of Eternal Darkness is flooded with visions of previous (and future) bearers with very minimal context. In a truer example, while performing last rites for Anthony, Paul Luther has a vision of the circumstances which brought Anthony into the Cosmic Horror Story they have both come to inhabit.
- Common in the Fatal Frame series, and Maiden of Black Water makes it a gameplay mechanic via "Shadow Reading", whereby you can use items you collect to see where their previous owners have traveled.
- Rion in Galerians is permanently under the effects of a drug that grants him this power, along with telepathy. It functions as the game's Hint System — scan an important object and you see an image related to it. For example, scanning a locked door shows you an image of where its key is.
- In Lost Dimension, George's Gift is to read the history of an object. However, trying to use it on the Pillar fails, because it contains too much information for George to process. In game, George's special attacks let him analyze enemies or grow in power depending on how many times the target has been analyzed.
- Mass Effect 3 reveals that the Protheans have the ability to read the memory of things and living beings simply by touching them. Javik the last Prothean uses it to determine that the room he occupies on the Normandy was previously inhabited by a genetically engineered perfect krogan soldier. It is also implied that the asari's Touch Telepathy is a weaker variation of the same ability that the Protheans genetically engineered them to have, along with universal biotics.
- Talion from Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor perceives flashbacks of Celebrimbor's life whenever he touches one of his lost tools and items. This is usually followed by a Power-Up.
- Pathfinder: Kingmaker: The Storyteller is an incredibly old elf who ensconces himself in the PC's throne room at the start of chapter 2. He possesses an ability to draw stories out of artifacts you bring him, and will pay hefty bounties for your finds. He's also able to reforge several fragmented relics. He gets a storyline to himself in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous in which he starts reconstructing his own history from recovered pages of his ancient journals.
- In the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers series, the player character possesses a power called the "Dimensional Scream" that enables him or her to see visions of the past or future by touching objects, but it isn't something he/she has control over.
- Central to Return Of The Obra Dinn is the Memento Mortem, a supernatural pocket watch that allows you to touch a corpse or body part and see how that person died. You need to use it to piece together exactly what happened on board the titular Ghost Ship.
- In The Sinking City, Charles Reed can glimpse into the past of occult artifacts with his sixth sense to gain clues. Played with in that it isn’t entirely clear if he is always touching the items themselves.
- In Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Cal has a natural ability to feel Force echoes, learning details about an object or location by touching it. Cere notes that it's a pretty rare ability, even among Jedi. It backfires when he grabs the Second Sister's lightsaber, giving him a small Heroic BSoD and allowing her to escape.
- The ability returns in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. In fact, an entire section of the game (the part where you play as Cere) turns out to be Cal using his ability to view Cere's final moments after he comes across her corpse in the ruins of the Jedha archive.
Visual Novels
- Shirou Emiya of Fate/stay night has this as one of his only reliable spells (and the only useful one) prior to the start of the story. He also does it remotely and reflexively with weapons. Over the course of the story, we see just how useful this power is, as it's an integral part of his Reality Marble, which allows him to create a near-perfect copy of any weapon he's ever laid eyes on, and borrow the skills of the original wielder to boot.
- Akira from Spirit Hunter: NG possesses a specific form of it that's referred to as Bloodmetry; by touching blood and concentrating, he can see and hear a brief scene related to the blood's history. Using Bloodmetry is a gameplay mechanic alongside the regular investigation of objects.
Webcomics
- Zombie twins Mye and Hex of Charby the Vampirate have tactile postcognition which causes them to see things from other people's pasts when they have skin contact. Mannick can read the past of articles of clothing he's wearing, and delve into the mind of whomever the object belongs to if it's something they wear often enough gaining pieces of their personality.
- Charlene the witch from How to be a Werewolf has this ability and uses it to relate important backstory to the others after touching a coffee mug belonging to a key character
Web Original
- The SCP Foundation has a variation on this in the form of SCP-187, a woman with the ability to see everything as both as they are right now, and as they will be in the future. She cannot turn it off, and seeing soon-to-die people (of whom there are many at the Foundation) as walking corpses and her food as feces has caused severe psychological damage.
Western Animation
- This is one of Niko's primary abilities in Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers. She can get vague impressions of where an object has been or what's happened at a site without her badge, but when she uses the implant, the impressions become very exact and detailed.
- In Ben 10: Alien Force, Gwen frequently uses this power to track people using impressions their Life Energy left behind on their possessions.
- Phillip from Delta State can see flashbacks of events related to an object he is touching, sometimes without meaning to.
