but I see nothing that convinces me that 'spiritual energies and/or phenomena' are anything more than linguistic twists in an attempt to come to terms with unusual manifestations of physical phenomena

Psychic and spiritual phenomena -- events that are so labeled, anyway -- tend to stand outside the normal model of space time based on what is essentially Newtonian space-time, and they can be very disconcerting to minds whose filters are predominantly based on that view and model. Some explanations base themselves on the "unfathomed complexity" proposition which argies that the details of the phsyical universe, EMF vibrations and quantum phenomena are so complex that the explanation for these phenomena will be eventually found as that complexity is plumbed.

The other argument for the same discrepancy is the "incomplete model" proposition which says that a model which includes only matter, energy, space and time is incomplete and that in order to explain the anomalies one has to posit an additional component to existence, usually referred to as "thought", "spiritual energy" "elan vital", or other names depending on the bias of the proposer.

Personally I think both things are true -- there is a lot to be unfolded and uncovered about the universe at a quantum level which will change how we look at things AND there is a major component which is spiritual rather than material in its nature and therefore has different qualities and laws than those which seem to govern particles and waves.

A